Guru Josh / Paul Walden
A white-label idea made for a warehouse party became one of 1990’s unmistakable signals that rave culture had broken through the walls and into the wider world.
From pub gigs to one of rave’s defining crossover records
Guru Josh belongs to that mad moment when rave stopped being something you had to know about and started barging its way onto radio, television and the charts. Infinity was one of those records that made the outside world realise this new dance culture was not staying underground for long.
Paul Walden was born in Jersey in 1964. He initially studied dentistry, but music pulled him elsewhere. After an early period playing in Jersey and time in the United States, he returned to London and formed the rock band Joshua Cries Wolf while also helping run a music-booking agency.
By the late 1980s, the world around him had changed. House music, acid house and the culture around warehouse parties were transforming British nightlife. Walden abandoned the rock-band direction and rebuilt himself as Guru Josh.
Infinity came straight out of that world. A mate running a warehouse party called Infinity asked him for a track, and Paul answered with the sort of record that sounded half-rave anthem, half-inside joke. The sax hook from Mad Mick did the rest. Five hundred white labels went out to DJs and suddenly the tune had a life of its own.
The big early push came from Mike Pickering at the Haçienda. Once Infinity started doing damage in Manchester, the word spread fast. BMG came in, the tune hit No. 5 in the UK in 1990 and then went even bigger across Europe. One minute it was a rave-floor oddity; the next everybody knew that sax line.
Its importance was not that it represented every strand of rave. It did not. But it captured one very visible point where the language, energy and imagery of Britain’s new dance culture crossed into pop without completely losing its oddness: keyboards, saxophone, rave slogans and a performer who looked as though the old rules no longer applied.
The follow-up Whose Law (Is It Anyway?) reached the UK Top 30. Walden then moved increasingly toward digital imagery, multimedia and computer graphics. Under the name Dr Devious, he created Cyberdream and the Dance in Cyberspace projects in the early 1990s.
That visual work deserves a place in the story too. At a time when underground electronic music rarely received ambitious videos, Walden invested heavily in digital production and built psychedelic computer-generated worlds around dance music. Cyberdream became a favourite of John Peel and was seen on MTV’s Party Zone.
In 2007 he formed the Guru Josh Project with Anders Nyman and Darren Bailie. The Klaas remix of Infinity became a major European hit again in 2008, giving a track born in the first rave era an extraordinary second life almost two decades later.
Guru Josh died in Ibiza on 28 December 2015, aged 51. Whatever debates surrounded his later career, Infinity remains part of the sound of the period when rave stopped being something the wider culture could ignore.
One record, then a much stranger path
House replaces rock
Walden turns away from his rock-band background as warehouse parties and acid house reshape the London scene around him.
Infinity
A warehouse-party commission becomes a white label, then a Haçienda favourite and finally a UK Top 5 rave crossover hit.
Dr Devious
Cyberdream and Dance in Cyberspace join early digital graphics to electronic music years before this kind of audiovisual presentation became routine.
The second life
Infinity returns as a major European hit through the Guru Josh Project, connecting two generations of dance audiences.
Guru Josh through the years
From the original rave-era breakthrough to his later return to DJing, these photographs sit alongside the music and the story rather than turning the page into a nostalgia snapshot.
Guru Josh performing live.
Guru Josh.
Guru Josh DJing.Guru Josh in his own words
A surviving period broadcast catches Paul Walden talking about Infinity while the record was breaking through in early 1990.
The Guru Josh segment runs from roughly 1:04:23 to 1:07:35 inside this surviving late-1989/early-1990 broadcast cassette compilation.
From Infinity to cyberspace
These are proper moving-video pieces: the original hit, its follow-up and the stranger Dr Devious visual world that followed once Paul Walden started pushing harder into computer graphics.
The original-era video for the record that jumped from warehouse culture and Haçienda support into the UK Top 5.
The follow-up catches the same oddball mix of dance production, saxophone and rave-era theatre that made Guru Josh so instantly recognisable.
Walden pushing beyond the hit-single lane into the psychedelic computer-generated world that fascinated him through the early ’90s.
A rave record that escaped the rave
Infinity is one of those records that tells you how fast everything was moving. It began as a small-run tune for a warehouse party and ended up lodged in the memory of anybody who lived through 1990. That leap from white label to mass culture is part of the story of rave itself.
And Paul did not just keep trying to remake the same hit. He went off into digital visuals, computer graphics and the strange Dr Devious world instead. That restless streak is worth remembering alongside the anthem — one huge tune, then a willingness to wander somewhere much weirder.
Keep following the story
Further reading
1990s — time for the Guru.
A warehouse-party record became one of the most recognisable crossover signals of Britain’s first rave era.
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