John ’00’ Fleming
A teenage South Coast resident before trance was a job description — Fleming followed the hypnotic four-to-the-floor branch out of early rave and kept following it long after the industry turned “trance” into something much narrower.
Fifteen years old, already behind the decks
Fleming’s story belongs much earlier in rave history than the late-90s trance boom that made his name familiar to a wider crowd.
John Fleming’s route into DJing started at school. He was the kid buying records while everyone else was doing something more normal at lunchtime, then taking them back to the music room to play. When the headmaster needed somebody for an under-18 dance, Fleming got the job. He was around fifteen, and the booking led into a local residency rather than disappearing as a school-night novelty.
The South Coast mattered. Fleming became associated with Sterns in Worthing and the wider club circuit at a time when DJs were still expected to work the room rather than arrive with a global brand. Accounts of those years place him on bills with Carl Cox, Fabio and Grooverider as the music moved from electro, house and imported club records toward acid house and rave.
That early chronology explains a lot about his later stubbornness over genre. Fleming was there before “trance” had settled into a commercial formula. He has said he was collecting music from 1985 and became drawn to the four-to-the-floor material emerging around 1990/91 while much of UK hardcore was racing into breakbeats. What later became Goa, progressive trance and psytrance felt to him like a continuation of the same hypnotic dancefloor instinct.
For ravers living through that fork, nobody stood at the door handing out permanent genre cards. One room might be speeding towards hardcore while another followed deeper techno and trance records, and plenty of people moved between them. Fleming simply kept chasing the side that locked into repetition and hypnosis. Years later the industry would rename that territory several times around him.
The “00” arrived as a piece of old-school DJ branding, a play on his surname and Ian Fleming’s 007. It stuck because the career around it kept moving. Rave and club bookings expanded, with later biographies placing him across Fantazia, Raindance and Ibiza during the formative period.
Then the story stopped. At around twenty, Fleming was diagnosed with lung cancer despite being a non-smoker and competitive kickboxer. The illness removed him from a career that was starting to build momentum. Surgery and treatment saved his life, but the interruption was severe enough that returning to the same scene was not automatic.
His own recollections make the aftermath important rather than incidental. Surviving cancer sharpened the decision to make music the job rather than the hobby he might sensibly abandon. Time in Florida brought him back toward clubs; returning to Britain meant rebuilding contacts and reputation almost from scratch.
That second career developed differently from the first. Fleming leaned harder into the deep, psychedelic end of four-to-the-floor music at the exact moment British clubland was becoming increasingly brand-led. The mainstream trance boom of the late 1990s gave him a bigger platform, but he rarely sounded comfortable with the idea that trance should be reduced to a breakdown, a huge vocal and a drum roll.
His 1999 Licensed To Thrill mix and the 2000 BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix catch that tension. There are recognisable trance records, but the flow is darker, longer and less eager to arrive at the obvious payoff. The set is built to pull the room along rather than deliver a new “moment” every few minutes.
Global Trance Grooves turned that philosophy into radio. Month after month Fleming used the show to argue, practically rather than theoretically, that trance could still mean progressive movement, psychedelic repetition, techno pressure and records that took time to reveal themselves.
JOOF Recordings then gave the same idea an independent label home. As the wider dance industry moved through EDM booms, festival drops and shorter attention spans, Fleming kept the label focused on long-form electronic music. The point was not retro purity. It was protecting room for music that needed more than three minutes to work.
Extended sets became another signature. Four, six and eight-hour sessions allowed him to start deep, move through progressive territory, harden into trance or techno and finish somewhere far from the first record. In magazine terms, these are journey sets in the old sense: not a string of headline tunes, but a night with an argument running through it.
Fleming’s history therefore joins two generations that are too often written separately. He belongs to the first UK rave wave, but he also helped keep the older psychedelic/progressive meaning of trance alive after trance became one of the biggest commercial dance sounds in the country.
Rave first, trance before the formula
Sterns & the first circuit
A teenage residency puts Fleming inside the working club culture from which the rave generation emerges.
Illness & return
Cancer stops the career just as it gathers pace; recovery turns music into a deliberate life choice rather than a sideline.
Deep trance
Essential Mixes, compilations and international club work establish a trance identity that stays darker than the pop edge of the genre.
Protect the long journey
Radio, label work and marathon sets keep progressive and psychedelic electronic music moving outside short-form trends. In 2026 Fleming released The Lost Tribe after six years of work, describing the album as a journey intended to be heard from start to finish, while JOOF Editions and an international touring diary kept the same long-form philosophy active in clubs and festivals.
Fleming in frame
Only the Rave Archive UK photograph of John ’00’ Fleming with Nick Warren is used here. The 007 / Double O images once attached to this profile belong to a different artist and have been removed.
1999 into the JOOF sound
John ’00’ Fleming on film
A full artist-owned festival film showing Fleming’s long-form progressive and psychedelic approach in a modern live setting.
He remembers trance before it became shorthand
Fleming’s value is partly memory. He was already DJing while the UK scene was still deciding what rave sounded like, so his idea of trance reaches back beyond the late-90s commercial boom.
That is why the long sets and JOOF catalogue matter: they preserve a version of electronic dance music where patience, hypnosis and movement across styles are more important than the next obvious peak.
