It was the summer of 2000, and I was in the middle of a messy breakup with the possessive and unstable girl who I had been with since 16, when I first met Deonne. The Hatfield rail disaster had just happened and the ex-girlfriend was staying with her family in Welham Green, and the rail line was closed for investigation. I had seen my daughter for the first time in months; she was always used as a weapon for my compliance within the relationship. On the Sunday afternoon I had to take her home to her mother at Welham Green Station. Deonne was driving the rail replacement bus, and as I was also a bus driver I chatted with her for a while and rode to Potters Bar.
I didn’t see her again until the January of 2002 when we both began working for Trustline buses in South Mimms. She and I were the only ones in our age range and we both hung out together at work. I was sleeping on the floor at my parents' factory, and had setup my Soundcraft 16-8-2 exactly like the Soundcraft desk that I would one day be “learning” about signal flow at Alchemea, but that was a long way off at that time. I had an Alesis ADAT XT and JL Cooper DataSync2 with my Windows 95 P3 system using the Cubase entry-level system for MIDI programming, syncing with audio via the MIDI DIN and the serial cables.
Deonne would pop in to see what I was working on and then we would ride to work together and drive the buses for the schools we worked on. At night she would drop me off at the factory and leave; I would spend the night studying and learning how to record the songs I would write in my head. I kept working with the tones from my Soundblaster AWE32 and Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard and my guitar. After the split with my ex, and my brother burgling the flat we shared, I had only the new acoustic guitar from late 2001.
I wrote and recorded "One Kiss," which was meant to be a UK Garage two-step song originally. The Oliver Cheetham “I like to party” sample in Room 5's track was blowing up on the radio, and Deonne kept saying that garage was dead, trying to push me to make a house/disco track like "Starlight" or "The Lady (Boy Is Mine)." So I created the first CD burn in early 2003, which Deonne loved and decided to play on her radio show, on Chillin FM 102.
I listened that weekend and she never played it. She said again that she was going to play it “this weekend,” but I was going to be working all weekend so I could not listen. My friend Karen stayed with me for the weekend and stayed in to tape the show for me. I returned home and asked Karen, “Did she play it?” She looked grim. I asked what was up, she said, “just listen.”
Deonne (“Miss Crazy D”) starts the song and yep, it’s me. After a short while, her voice cuts in sounding excited. She says, “thanks for all your calls, the phones are blowing up right now!” A few moments later she again thanks the listeners, and the phones and text sounds can be heard in the background. She announces over the air:
“I MADE THIS!!!”
I couldn't believe it. The audacity of her taking credit for my work was staggering.
The following week she drags me down to the radio station to perform it live on air. During the performance the door busted open and the other station guys came in and apologised: “we thought you were bullshitting and playing the CD.” When I was done singing along to my instrumental CD, the rest of the place was full up, and everyone was buzzing about a real singer that sounds exactly like the CD.
A little while after that, D kept telling me that Jez Welham from Kiss FM wanted to produce me on a high-end studio remake of that song. When I wrote it, I had the idea it would be good for Kiss FM 100—"one kiss" and all that.
She had been calling in to the Bam Bam breakfast show and chatting over the air, when she decided to provoke Jez with inappropriate comments. Unsurprisingly, he never took her calls ever again. It was a complete disaster for my potential career path.