Artist Profile
DJ Skillmaster
DJ Skillmaster (Martin Stack) started off as dancer with many TV appearances tucked
under his belt. Martin appeared regularly on the UK's urban dance program Solid
Soul as an in-house dancer, not forgetting the world disco dance championships which
he took part in representing his home town Nottingham for 5 years running.
Martin was interviewed for a televised program for Channel Four's "Now that's
what you call dance." In which he talked about his disco dancing days, there
will be another program to follow this summer for ITV in which he talks about the
competitions and the history of disco dance.
In between dancing and working the clubs, Martin also played the latest tunes on
Heatwave Radio which was a pirate station in Nottingham. This opened many doors
for his DJ skills and also earned him a good crowd following. When the station put
a promotion night on he would get the clubbers going with the latest dance tracks
from Reggae to R&B and Dance, always playing to the people. He likes all styles
of music; "If it makes me want to dance then I'll play it!"
He worked as a leading DJ at the legendary Hippo Nightclub in Nottingham, UK. The
next step was to move from the underground music scene to the more commercial side
of night life. Working in venues with a crowd capacity of 2,500 playing all styles
of dance music, as resident DJ of Ocean Nightclub, he introduced many
top dance acts on stage, working along side top recording artists like that of Ultra
Naté, Womack & Womack, world chart hitting CoCo with Tocas Miracle, to the Vengaboys,
Steps, Atomic Kitten, Berri with the anthem Sunshine After the Rain, Kelly Llorenna,
DJ Casper and his Cha Cha slide. The list goes on with many TV personalities from
the soaps, but the one he remembers the most of all was Martha Reeves. He was working
a Northern soul night and she was the headline for the evening. She said to Martin,
"I remember the day when I used to babysit Motown legend Stevie Wonder." We sat
down shared a meal and talked about the times how music history was made, other
artiste like Dean Parish joined in with the Flirtations what a night to remember.
In 1998, Martin joined forces with Pat Devlin and formed The Skillmasters. They had their
first track, Lie Down Girl, released through ZYX and ARS. This was a little commercial
reggae track that is still getting requests today when he plays the clubs.
With a passion for dance music, he set about remixing other peoples work. In August
1999 Queen of Disco Donna Summer hits the Billboard Hot Dance Music Chart
with I Will Go With You on Epic Records, and part of the package is the first DJ
Skillmaster remix.
His next venture was his club anthem Avalanche and a new DJ name, DJ Poverello. This
name was used for a harder dance project, and Avalanche was nearly
signed to David Grey's IHT label. The video was done and ready to fly, but the lads
Martin and Mark were not happy with the way the label was dealing with the project,
so the golden handshake did not happen. Avalanche is still an anthem, and the bouncy
house remix is now ready to fly.
This opened the door to other music projects and one of his all time life achievements
was to get his remixes on the worldwide DMC Commercial Collection. Many of his
remixes were released and his best to-date was the two trackers Michael Jackson
vs. Q–Tip track entitled Breath and Don't Stop. This became a massive underground bootleg
and is still played today.
With partner in crime Mark Gamble, they have produced many original dance tracks
which consist of many styles. DJ Skillmaster in a nutshell has been compared to
the likes of Fatboy Slim. There are no boundaries to what we can do; "Music is another
language and we want to speak to the whole world," he says. This means collaborations with
other artists and also working with top DJ music producers like that of Dany Wild.
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