I wasn't even a DJ at the time, I was just sitting and listening to it and enjoying the club atmosphere, and in the club Pete was in, it was around the time when the early speed garage stuff started trickling through. I was ripping him off, charging him ridiculous amounts of money to use the studio just to do house tunes. We first started work on a couple of house tracks. We got together with Pete Devereux, the other guy in the Artful Dodger, and started doing some clubby stuff, because he was a DJ in a local club.

It was ridiculous.'Ĭraig David has become UK garage's first superstar.Faced with a less than full booking diary, Hill and his collaborators began to throw around some ideas for dance tracks: 'Basically, we had so much free time in the studio when the students weren't around that we had plenty of time to experiment and write.

It was probably the worst business venture in the history of business ventures, setting up a recording studio and trying to make money out of it. We did all right - we had enough bookings to keep us afloat - but we got crippled by the fact that we had to go out and get huge bank loans to set it all up, which were there to the end. We had limited university experience - I did a music degree and his degree was in acoustics, but neither of us had any recording experience, we were bluffing our way through. We thought there must be loads of money in it, and we'd never done anything before. Me and my business partner Neil thought, when we left university, 'Wouldn't it be a great idea to set up a recording studio?' Er, no. Hill set up his studio when garage was still a twinkle in drum & bass's eye, and his original ambitions were modest: 'We were recording local rock bands and student bands for 10 pounds an hour. Remarkably, all of these were recorded on Mark's own humble setup, currently squatting in a spare soundproof room at a local radio station following the demise of his Southampton studio ('We were on a five‑year lease, and it wasn't renewed because they wanted to turn the building into luxury waterfront apartments,' he laughs). In all, Hill‑produced singles have sold an astounding 1.5 million copies since December, and Craig David's number one debut album Born To Do It sold 225,000 copies in its first week - very nearly outselling the rest of the top 10 put together. As one half of Artful Dodger, he's seen tracks like 'Re‑rewind' and 'Moving Too Fast' crash into the top 10, and as a producer, his work has underpinned the meteoric rise of singer Craig David.

A down‑to‑earth music graduate with no trace of attitude, he appears genuinely surprised at his commercial success in the vanguard of the exploding UK garage scene. In person, Mark Hill seems an unlikely candidate for the label of 'Britain's hottest dance producer'. Foremost among these is Mark Hill, who, as well as being one half of Artful Dodger, has also produced Craig David's hit singles and debut album Born To Do It. Since UK garage emerged from the underground last year, record companies have been scrambling to sign up the stars of the latest Big Thing.

Artful dodger