Froggy did not come into DJing like most people did. Before the record bags got serious, he was already obsessed with the machinery — building sound equipment, learning how systems behaved and working out how to make a room feel different simply by making it sound better.

That is what made Steven Howlett stand out once he became DJ Froggy. The decks, mixer, amps and tape machines were not separate bits of kit to him; they were one instrument. In the early ’70s, when plenty of club DJs were still dropping records one after another, Froggy was already chasing smoother flow, bigger sound and a more complete experience for the people on the floor.

His first regular DJ residency came at the Bird’s Nest in Romford in 1971. By the middle of the decade he had toured alongside live acts and radio personalities, but soul, disco and jazz-funk became the centre of his own musical identity.

Froggy was fascinated by sound reproduction. After hearing Emperor Rosko’s American-style system, he upgraded his own and worked with console designer Mat Mathias on equipment suited to the kind of DJ performance he wanted.

The real turning point came in 1979 when he travelled to New York and studied the city’s club culture close-up. At Paradise Garage he watched Larry Levan work records, effects and the room as one performance; at Studio 54 he heard the scale and clarity of a Richard Long system. Froggy came home with notes, drawings and a head full of ideas, borrowed heavily, rebuilt his rig and pushed his mixing far beyond the stop-start style still common in Britain.

That trip also sharpened his use of the decks themselves. Froggy embraced Technics 1200s early, bought duplicate copies for phasing and overlaps, and used reel-to-reel editing alongside the turntables. It sounds normal now because the culture caught up with him. In 1979 and 1980 it was still radical enough for other DJs to travel just to hear what he was doing at the Royalty.

For ravers, this is where the connection really lands. The DJ culture we knew in warehouses and on tape packs did not suddenly appear in 1988. Froggy and the specialist soul DJs had already spent years learning how to blend records, hold big rooms and make the sound system part of the night. Rave turned the pressure up, but a lot of the craft was already there.

From late 1978 Froggy held a weekly residency at the Royalty in Southgate, north London. The venue became one of the homes of the expanding jazz-funk and soul scene. These nights placed him among a network of DJs who were building a dance culture around imported American records before house music existed.

In 1978 Froggy installed his sound system at the National Soul Festival in Purley. In 1979 he joined the first Caister soul weekender, alongside the group of influential DJs commonly remembered as the Soul Mafia.

Caister had the ingredients ravers would recognise instantly years later: people travelling for the weekend, DJs becoming part of the identity of the event, a crowd living with the music for hours at a time and a sound system treated like something worth talking about on its own. Froggy fitted that world perfectly because he cared about the records and the machinery equally.

Within months of rebuilding the system after New York, the Soul Mafia were using it in front of crowds of more than 15,000 at Knebworth. Froggy also took his editing skills onto Radio 1, preparing mixes and shortened versions for Peter Powell’s programme. The same instincts kept repeating: improve the sound, tighten the transition, make the record hit harder, then work out how to carry that experience to a bigger audience.

And this is not one of those histories you have to take on trust. Put on the Royalty or Caister tapes and you can hear it happening. The records are slower than the rave sets that came later, but the obsession is familiar: keep the flow, control the room, make the system hit properly and make the next record arrive exactly when it should. Different era, same instinct.