Jeremy Healy had already experienced pop success before most of the country had heard an acid-house record. In the early 1980s he was part of Haysi Fantayzee, so television, labels, image-making and the strange machinery of the music business weren’t mysteries to him. But underneath all that colour he was getting pulled harder towards hip hop, records and clubs.

By the middle of the decade Healy was deeply involved in hip hop and DJing. A trip to New York took him into Danceteria, where music didn’t have to sit politely in one corner while fashion and art sat somewhere else. It could all be one messy night out. Back in London, Circus gave him somewhere to turn that attitude into a DJ identity before acid house came along and changed the scale of everything.

Then came Shoom. Healy’s own story puts him there with Boy George at Danny and Jenny Rampling’s club in 1987, before Ibiza pulled them even further into the new house world. This was the period when all sorts of people who would previously have been kept in separate London scenes suddenly found themselves sweating together to the same records. Healy fitted that beautifully because he’d never been especially interested in behaving like one tribe at a time.

Healy and Boy George went on to launch More Protein. Pop, club and fashion communities could all end up around the same records. It suited the moment: acid house was already full of homemade graphics, slogans, smileys, strange clothes and jokes that only made complete sense at five in the morning.

E-Zee Possee caught that mood perfectly. Everything Starts With An E came out of the language and cheek of acid-house culture and then escaped into the charts. It was playful, obvious and slightly outrageous — which, to be fair, describes quite a lot of 1989.

Healy also worked across production and remix culture, including material connected to Boy George and other pop artists. His strength was not anonymity. He embraced the idea of the DJ as a visible personality at precisely the moment British club culture was moving from secret membership clubs and warehouses toward magazines, superclubs and celebrity bookings.

By the mid-1990s Healy was one of Britain’s best-known house DJs, and you didn’t need to stare at the flyer for long to work out what sort of night it was going to be. The Rave Archive copy of Mixmag Live! Volume 14 with Brandon Block — The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party — documents the exuberant side of 1990s house: vocals, hands-in-the-air records, humour and two DJs whose visible personalities were part of the performance.

The DJ career expanded through major clubs, Ibiza and international bookings, but Healy’s interests kept moving outside conventional nightlife. He became increasingly involved in fashion sound design, creating music and musical direction for runway shows and major fashion houses. His own Mixcloud archive includes work for Dior and L.A.M.B., preserving a parallel career where the DJ skill becomes narrative design for a completely different kind of room.

That fashion connection is not as separate from rave as it first looks. Healy’s career had always treated image, music and performance as one environment, from Haysi Fantayzee through Circus, More Protein and the flamboyant superstar-DJ years. Catwalk work simply moved the same instinct into another industry.

His later archive mixes also show how broad the musical identity remains. House sits beside disco, mash-ups, pop, classics and fashion edits because Healy never built his reputation around strict genre purity. The personality is in the joins.

That’s why Healy makes sense in Rave Archive. His story runs through bits of music history people often file in completely different drawers: early-80s pop, hip hop, Shoom and acid house, huge 90s club bookings and fashion. He never seemed particularly bothered by the drawer labels. If the records, people and atmosphere worked together, that was the point.