Born in Hackney in 1959 to Jamaican parents, Paul Anderson came into music through sound-system culture. He later described himself as a “sound boy”: helping string up systems, lifting speaker boxes, packing down at the end of the night and learning from reggae sounds before he became the person behind the decks.

A family sound was converted from reggae toward soul and became known as Troublefunk, the source of the stage name that stayed with him for life. That grounding mattered. Anderson understood that a DJ was not separate from the system, the room or the dancers.

In the late 1970s he became associated with Soho’s Crackers, one of the key London clubs for Black dance music. His reputation grew through places including Spats, the Embassy, Global Village and the Electric Ballroom. Dancers and younger DJs remember the combination of records and physical performance: boogie, funk, soul and later electro delivered by somebody who understood movement as well as mixing.

By the mid-1980s Anderson was bringing his “Trouble Funk” sound into London’s warehouse scene. In 1985 he became one of the early DJs on Kiss FM, when the station was still a pirate. That placed him inside another crucial bridge to rave culture: independent radio carrying specialist dance music across London without waiting for the mainstream to approve it.

When Kiss became legal in 1990, Anderson’s Saturday-night Advanced Dance / Trouble’s Original Mix Show became a pre-club institution. House, garage, funk and soul moved through the programme with the same breadth that had defined his club sets. His mixing technique and programming influenced listeners who would become DJs themselves.

By the time acid house broke out of the clubs and into the big rave circuit, Trouble was already there with years of dancefloor education behind him. He played landmark events including Sunrise and Biology, bringing a Black London club lineage into spaces that are too often remembered as though rave culture arrived from nowhere in 1988.

That is part of what made his sets different. He could move with the new music without throwing away what came before it. Anderson later spoke about the importance of the original US garage sound and how easily that strand gets lost when dance history is reduced to a few fashionable genres. For ravers listening on Kiss with a blank cassette ready, the lesson was already in the mix: new records made more sense when the DJ knew the road that led to them.

Anderson’s reach extended into production and remixing, and through club nights such as Trouble’s House. Later he returned to radio with Mi-Soul and remained active through soulful-house nights, weekenders and festival appearances.

His influence is difficult to reduce to one genre because his career joined eras that are often separated in hindsight. The through-line was the dancefloor: sound-system discipline, deep record knowledge, technical mixing and a commitment to music that moved people.

Paul “Trouble” Anderson died on 2 December 2018, aged 59. Tributes from Norman Jay, Trevor Nelson, Gordon Mac, Jumpin Jack Frost and many others described not only a great DJ but a mentor and reference point for London’s dance community.