The video keeps getting removed from YouTube, but whenever it does, someone else uploads it again: jerky cameraphone footage of a man in a homemade T-shirt that reads Jesus Loves UK Garage, DJing at an Essex club in 2003. The crowd in Romford are going insane – the man is Todd Edwards, an American house producer whose rough-edged production style had exerted so much influence on the UK garage scene that he had become known as Todd the God – but the object of their worship looks, as he puts it now, “scared to death”: the smile on his face is weirdly fixed and unmoving, in a way that suggests not enjoyment, but terror.
He had, he explains today, never really DJ’d in a club before, certainly not in front of 1,500 people. Edwards had previously declined all entreaties to come to the UK, despite the fact that his music was vastly better known and more successful here than back home. Moreover, he had almost no idea what a UK garage club was like. His experience of clubbing had largely involved hanging around the booth at New York’s Sound Factory Bar, hoping that the resident DJ Little Louie Vega would play one of his tracks; a visit to Zanzibar, the Newark club where Tony Humphries had pioneered the original, gospel-influenced, American garage sound, had ended in disaster when Edwards’ car had been towed away.
“The American DJ was kind of cool, calm, collected, it was like this sombre thing,” he says on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “I mean, I didn’t know what a rewind was. I didn’t know they had MCs chanting and getting the crowd riled up and stuff. The communication between the audience and the DJ was like nothing I’d seen before. Which gave me a new admiration for what DJing was in the first place.”
He was, he concedes, a very unlikely figure for hero-worship, who had helped to kickstart a musical revolution in Britain – UK garage crossed over and spawned numerous Top Five hits – entirely by accident. Edwards had only started making house tracks in the early 90s under the wild misapprehension that it “seemed easy enough, a lot simpler than pop music”. Inspiration struck while at the gym in the improbable form of an Enya album. “I needed a break from house and disco, so I was listening to something new age, and I was like: she uses her voice for instruments, she’s harmonising and her voice is blending in the background, it’s like you can barely make out what she’s singing – that’s a cool concept. What if I start sampling up the vocals as the instruments as well?”
The signature Todd Edwards production style was born – four-to-the-floor beats with a noticeable swing; vocal samples cut up into tiny fragments and reassembled into what the writer Simon Reynolds memorably called “blissful hiccups”.
A devout Christian, Edwards sometimes slipped “kind of subliminal messages” about his faith into the hypnotic patchwork of sound. “They were there if you wanted them, but I made sure the music was funky. It wasn’t like bad Christian rock where the focus was on the message and the music is sub-par.” His records performed adequately in the New York clubs, but for some reason had more impact abroad. Parisian producer Ludovic Navarre – better known as St Germain – name-checked him on a track, and asked him to remix his single Alabama Blues. Then Daft Punk listed him among their roll-call of influences on their 1997 track Teachers.
His friend and fellow DJ David Camacho returned from Europe with the improbable news that Edwards was “big in England”, particularly on a scene that had sprung up in the house rooms at drum’n’bass raves and at a succession of after-hours parties in London pubs, where DJs had taken to playing American house tracks pitched up to 130bpm: the wordless vocals of Edwards’ dub mixes worked because they didn’t sound cartoonish at that speed. “Then Mike Weiss from [New York’s] Nervous Records was like: there’s this whole thing there called the Sunday Scene, it’s absolutely surrounding your music, you could clean up if you go DJ there. That was when I really realised there was something going on.”
But Edwards didn’t go. “I wish I had been strong enough and in a better place to take advantage of it, but I was a mess in my 20s, dealing with depression and insecurity, social issues. I was insecure, stage-fright-based, vulnerable. It’s funny, because I’m a very talkative person and I’ll talk to anyone now, but back then … I was going through so much. So here I am being successful and I couldn’t really fully enjoy it. It’s nothing to pity – this is sometimes how it works.”
In a sense, his steadfast non-appearance as UK garage exploded worked in his favour, developing such an aura of mystery around him that, as he once noted, “a lot of people thought I was a black English guy”. And there were other opportunities: Daft Punk asked him to collaborate on their vastly successful second album, Discovery; he ended up co-writing and singing “like the guy from Foreigner” on Face to Face, a fantastic melding of Edwards’ signature style with the duo’s glossy machine disco.
Equally, it was undoubtedly a missed opportunity: you couldn’t tell from the video of his first DJ appearance, but by the time Edwards steeled himself enough to come to Britain, UK garage’s popularity was waning. Three years after he received a hero’s welcome in Romford, Edwards had quit music entirely, broke and plagued by depression. When Daft Punk contacted him, asking if he wanted to come to their epochal live performance at Coachella, he was too miserable to return their call.
“It was almost like the yin and yang scene in a movie – like you see them doing well and here I am, bottoming out and embarrassed, no energy to do this. There was no money coming in; I had a house for a little while and I ended up selling that. It was like I was going backwards. You feel frustrated – it’s emasculating to a certain extent. I had to move back into my parents’ place. I was getting bad advice from counselling – so many negative things. I did two years doing customer service at a phone company, Verizon, answering calls, pretty much in tears every day. I was making bank for a customer service job, but after two years, I couldn’t stand it.”
The road back into music was not easy – “what I would say overall about taking any breaks from this industry is: don’t,” he says – although there were some striking highlights along the way. He sent an email to Thomas Bangalter, congratulating him on Daft Punk’s soundtrack to Tron: Legacy; Bangalter responded by asking Edwards to work with them again. “He said: ‘You were one of our favourites to work with, but we lost touch with you.’ I’m like, well, you could have just emailed me, and he goes: ‘No, we felt it would be better to make the Tron soundtrack to get your attention.’” Their next work together was on Random Access Memories; when it won album of the year at the Grammys, Edwards was onstage, beaming in a tuxedo alongside Pharrell Williams, Giorgio Moroder and Nile Rodgers.
A platinum disc for the album is visible on the wall behind him alongside a crucifix. He never felt his religion conflicted with the hedonistic world of clubbing, he says – “To me, the club was the church” – although recently, he’s been having a crisis of faith. “Me and God are seeing other people right now, that’s what I say,” he says. “I just try to practise the good things from Christianity … it’s bittersweet when people come up to you and are like: ‘I became a Christian because of you’ or ‘I love the godliness in your music.’ I feel guilty, almost like I have to confess: sorry, I’m struggling with it.”
But everything else appears to be going extremely well. There is a “very personal, very intense” documentary in the works, centring around his lost 2006 album Odyssey, a Discovery-inspired exploration of Christianity that, among its other delights, featured Edwards inhaling helium in a bid to sound like Björk. A new deal with Defected Records has resulted not just in a best-of collection, but also in his classic productions appearing on streaming services for the first time. A quarter of a century on, Saved My Life and his remixes of Moloko, St Germain and Sound of One still sound remarkably fresh, perhaps because UK garage has returned to the pop spotlight – you can hear its DNA everywhere from AJ Tracey to Disclosure – but more likely because Edwards hit on a genuinely unique sound in the early 90s, and uniqueness tends not to date.
He talks excitedly about his upcoming DJ gigs, the warm response afforded his recent single The Chant, about setting up his own record label, the “30 or so” tracks he has ready to go, and the photograph of his pet rabbit that recently appeared in a dance music magazine. He seems in high spirits, and not without good reason. “I’ve ridden the wave of the storm,” he says. “And I’m still here.”
Todd Edwards’ discography is out now on Defected Records. He plays Jazz Cafe, London, 3 September, and Warehouse Project, Manchester, 15 October.
