Clarkee — Richard Clark — wasn’t somebody who jumped onto Dreamscape once it had become massive. He was there before Dreamscape even existed. In the summer of 1988 Clarkee was in Tenerife with his mate Murray Beetson when they bumped into Craig Campbell, another Northampton lad who had been putting on ESP parties at the Roadmender. They got talking about parties, music and how ESP could become something bigger. That chance meeting sits right near the beginning of a story that would eventually lead to Dreamscape and The Sanctuary.

Back home, the parties moved on. By 1989 Castaways — soon known to ravers as Milwaukees — had become the place. Clarkee was one of the resident DJs alongside Dougal, Mastersafe and Swanee, with guests including Carl Cox, Grooverider and Jumping Jack Frost. It was small compared with what came later, low ceiling, stupidly loud Cerwin Vega system and absolutely rammed. Ravers were apparently queuing hours before the doors opened. This was Clarkee learning his trade while the rave scene itself was still being built around him.

Clarkee remembers his first public set as an outdoor party at Sywell Aerodrome in Northampton in mid-1989. He has also called 1989–93 his favourite period of raving. You can understand why. ESP grew out of Milwaukees, Dreamscape arrived and suddenly the crew that had been throwing local parties was involved in some of the biggest nights in the country.

Musically, Clarkee never liked being boxed in as neatly as people sometimes remember him. Ask whether he was a hardcore or techno DJ and his answer was basically: dance music. In the early years the boxes weren’t that tidy anyway. Hardcore, breakbeats, techno, acid and the darker European records were all crashing into each other, and Clarkee could move between them rather than pretending there was a wall down the middle.

As the 90s moved on, though, he became one of the names most strongly associated with the seriously hard end of the rave. While other rooms were moving deeper into jungle or towards happy hardcore, Clarkee pushed techno, hardcore techno and gabber. At Dreamscape and especially in the harder rooms at Helter Skelter, that sound had its own crowd — ravers who wanted it fast, brutal and relentless.

That is where the famous Clarkee sets really come alive. Dreamscape, Helter Skelter, Diehard and plenty more put his name on the flyer, and he took the sound outside Britain too, including dates in the USA and Australia. He later remembered Helter Skelter and Dreamscape among his favourite events, along with Diehard and the Mastervibes parties in Cornwall. This wasn’t somebody looking back at rave from the outside; he spent years right in the middle of it.

Area 51 Recordings gave the harder side of his taste somewhere to go on vinyl. Started in the mid-90s, the label pushed hardcore, gabber, hard techno and acid — exactly the sort of records Clarkee was hammering in the harder rooms. It meant he wasn’t only playing that sound at raves; he was helping put more of it into circulation.

And this is where the tapes matter. A Clarkee tape isn’t interesting just because his name is on the box. Put an early one next to a later Technodrome-era set and you can actually hear rave changing. The earlier recordings can bounce between breakbeat hardcore and techno; later sets get much harder as gabber and hardcore techno take over. His Dreamscape recordings are little snapshots of that change happening in real time.

Rave Archive UK’s Dreamscape 7 tape from The Sanctuary in November 1993 catches Clarkee right in the middle of that journey. By then Dreamscape was miles away from the little sweatbox at Milwaukees, but Clarkee had come all the way through with it. That’s the bit the old page missed: Clarkee wasn’t simply a DJ who played Dreamscape. He was part of the same Northampton rave story that helped Dreamscape happen in the first place.