Jon Carter - Biography

Biography

Carter began his musical career playing in bands when he was at Southampton University. Dropping out of his studies, he moved back to London and started to learn studio engineering, ending up working in the No U-Turn studios which at the time was involved in the nascent jungle scene of the early 1990s. During his spare time, Carter began making his own tracks, which caught the ear of Mark Jones, the founder of the Wall of Sound record label. Carter was eventually signed to Wall of Sound and released his first record "The Dollar" under the name Artery.

At around the same time, Carter was beginning to develop a reputation as one of the regular DJs at The Heavenly Social, a Sunday evening club in the Albany pub on Great Portland Street in central London. Alongside the other regular DJs The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and Richard Fearless of Death in Vegas, the night was instrumental in developing the form of electronic dance music that became known as big beat, with its mix of rock, indie and breakbeats as well as dance.

In 1995 Carter left Wall of Sound and signed with Heavenly Records to produce dub and dancehall-influenced dance music under the name of Monkey Mafia. The project developed into a full band playing live shows, and an album, Shoot the Boss, appeared in 1998. By now he was also in demand to produce mix albums and remix songs by bands as diverse as U2, Manic Street Preachers and The Beach Boys. By the end of the 1990s he had secured DJ residencies at several nightclubs in the UK and was regularly playing sets abroad.

In 1999 Carter moved back to Wall of Sound and its new subsidiary Nu Camp to release "Women Beat Their Men", a house record under the new pseudonym of Junior Cartier. In 2003 he and fellow DJ Tim Sheridan formed a short-lived record company, Saville Row, and released a few singles on the label.

A severe bout of tinnitus curtailed his DJing activity and brought a halt to his record productions for a couple of years, but by 2008 Carter had returned, first with another one-off collaboration with Tim Sheridan, and then "The Rabbit" with Stretch Silvester of Stretch & Vern, the first single in a planned series of collaborations with other DJs under the name Gentleman's Agreement. He has also teamed up with Liverpool-born, New York-based DJ Alex Blanco under the name Roosevelt High. In 2009 he became a member of the Rizla Invisible Players, an ever-changing collective of musicians and artists. Alongside Carter, the 2009 line-up included Jazzie B, Micachu, Gruff Rhys and David Shrigley and performed at a number of festivals across the UK that year, including RockNess, Lovebox, The Big Chill and Bestival.