The Second Coming: Marquis Hawkes

Half eleven on a Friday night, and Mark Hawkins –better known these days as Marquis Hawkes – is playing some very, very weird sounds to a few confused early arrivals dotted around Room 1 of Fabric. His sharp features set with determination, his eyes narrowed as he tweaks the CDJs, he seems determined to go as deep as he possibly can, with a grindingly slow techno pulse and sounds that squirm, pulse and wriggle around one another. It’s a lot like doing unfamiliar psychedelics somewhere scary, and a far cry from the gloriously jacking house of his album ‘Social Housing’ and the deliriously infectious single ‘I’m So Glad’ featuring the house diva’s house diva, Jocelyn Brown.

But then Hawkins himself has a lot more to him than just Marquis Hawkes. He’s been making music for a long time, often in strange circumstances, never expecting the success he now has. Since his Hawkes EPs started emerging in 2012 – first on the Glasgow label Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, then on other connoisseurs’ favourites Clone, Aus, Crème Organisation and Fabric’s own Houndstooth imprint – he’s had props from the Skreams, Jackmasters and Eats Everythings of this world, and he’s making a comfortable living from his music. He’s never publicly spoken about his past before, but sitting in a South London pub a couple of days after the gig, over a couple of hours he details a life that joins some unexpected dots. Infinitely more bright-eyed and hyper-articulate than you’d expect from a 40-year-old whose life has been spent around traveller sites and “East German crystal meth raves”, he exudes a husky-voiced geezerish charm and the unfakeable optimism of someone who’s been given a second chance in life.

He grew up on the very edge of suburban London going into Essex – “I remember the M25 being built,” he says. His parents were “old heads – they’d seen Cream and Eric Clapton in some pub in Dagenham, they’d seen Pink Floyd when they were still underground”. Music was omnipresent, a vital part of life. His dad collected not only rock but reggae – thanks to his Jamaican colleagues on the telephone exchange who took him to blues dances – and freaky electronics like Delia Derbyshire’s notorious White Noise project and Stevie Wonder side-men Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. He even bought a copy of ‘Planet Rock’, then, baffled by his own purchase, gave it to his son, igniting a lifelong obsession with electro and hip hop, setting Mark in good stead when the kids at his school started breakdancing in the mid 80s.

Hawkins became obsessed with early house at the age of 13, but when the family moved to rural Suffolk just as rave was kicking off, he got disenchanted by “the wankers at school who didn’t give a toss about music” getting into it and jumped ship to hang out with goths and listen to punk and industrial. But that quickly led to traveller culture, and after flunking school he was swept along to Castlemorton and all the other free raves of the time. Next thing, Mark had bought a flatbed truck and was living on the road, mucking in with festivals and free parties. “The funny thing was, I went to one at Bury St Edmunds and all the idiots from school were there. They saw me, all dreadlocks and nose rings, realised I was with the guys who ran the party, and it felt like the tables had turned!”

Five years of madness on the road ensued. Hawkins got stuck into the traveller drug culture but never fell for the trance that dominated the scene, instead collecting dark Cologne techno, Chicago acid, and the funkier American house played by Midlands soundsystems like DiY. He learned to mix at a record shop in Carmarthen, played his first gig a week later in a tipi village in a valley, “dropping ‘Acid Tracks’ at 45rpm so it sounded like the Cologne tracks”. He survived by finding scrap metal with a friend – “cars that joyriders had crashed into quarries, usually,”– and ping-ponged from Wales to the Midlands to Portsmouth to London to Berlin to Poland and back, sofa-surfing after he’d abandoned his truck.

He fell heavily for the uncompromising mid-90s UK techno made by Cristian Vogel, Neil Landstrumm and co, and joined the Nottingham soundsystem BWTP (later Ugly Funk) “who were so fundamentalist about techno that if you played anything else you’d likely get a beer bottle to your head”. Then he started making tunes, “always on someone else’s gear, grabbing time when they were out at work or something”, releasing a slew of pounding tracks on the legendary DJAX-UP label, Vogel’s Mosquito and many others, and getting a following at mind-frying East German crystal meth raves. “I was a mess, though,” he says. “I couldn’t even run my own life until I was 28!”

His style of music was commercially eclipsed, though, by Jeff Mills-style loop techno, then minimal, and following fatherhood and relationship breakdowns he eventually left DJing behind and settled in Berlin, determined to survive in a normal job – as a general gopher, translator and artist liason in the club Suicide Circus – and make music just a hobby. It would have stayed that way too, if it wasn’t for his old friends from the Scottish techno scene setting up a label “for housey stuff” and asking for tracks. They went mad for his Nina Simone flip ‘Sealion Woman’ so he made some more to make an EP around it: “a bit of Omar S-inspired stuff, a bit of acid, just having fun really”. He’d made plenty of Relief Records-style house before, under his own name and as DH MH, to little interest, so he had no expectations beyond maybe shifting a couple of hundred 12”s. But when Dan and Kenny from DABJ picked a new alias for him, and his music was heard without all the techno baggage, things blew up insanely, the records selling in quantities he’d never imagined so that DJing suddenly became a viable career rather than just a hell-for-leather lifestyle choice.

It’s no wonder he thinks that “this is an amazing time for underground music, with the petty scene boundaries broken down”. As a house DJ he can indulge all his musical sides as he never could in the fiercely purist techno world. So it’s no wonder, either, that as his Fabric set picks up – steadily bringing the house and even disco elements to the fore, but always keeping the underlying trippiness that his festival crusty years imbued him with – a grin spreads slowly but inexorably across his battle-hardened face. By the third hour, the few curious onlookers have given way to a packed-in, gleeful crowd. Just like Hawkins’ musical career, his set took its own sweet time to get there, but it’s all the better for it.

Marquis Hawkes ‘Social Housing’ is out now on Houndstooth