Dave Lee

Mike and Dave recorded the acid house songs "1666" and "Get Acidic" together without Mark, and continued the same partnership using other aliases, notably Masters of the Universe, Mystique, Kikkit and The Shy Boys.

David Russell Lee (born 18 June 1964) is an English DJ and house music producer, formerly known by the stage name Joey Negro, which he retired in July 2020 following the George Floyd protests.

He has released music under a variety of pseudonyms, including Jakatta, Doug Willis, Raven Maize, and Sessomatto, as well as being part of the Sunburst Band.

Lee has scored a number of top 40 hits, among them "American Dream", "So Lonely" and "My Vision", all under the name Jakatta.

Lee was born on the Isle of Wight, but raised in Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex.

His mother is the novelist Maureen Lee.

Dave Lee's interest in dance music began with collecting disco, soul and funk records in the late 1970s.

In 1986, he got his first job in the industry, working at the short-lived store Smithers & Leigh.

He moved over to Rough Trade, who were then setting up a dance division, Demix, and were looking for someone to run it.

Within a short period of time, Demix was handling hits for Bomb the Bass, MARRS and Beatmasters.

Less than a year later, Lee, in partnership with Rough Trade, set up his own label, Republic Records, which became known both for the series of compilation albums, The Garage Sound of Deepest New York, as Well Lee's own early forays into studio production.

By the end of 1987, Lee began working in a Clacton-on-Sea studio with former schoolfriend Mike Cheal (real name Emmanuel Cheal) and another Smithers & Leigh employee, DJ Mark Ryder.

The trio were responsible for the first release on Republic, under the name M-D-Emm: "Get Busy (It's Partytime!)".

Two further M-D-Emm singles were released on Republic.

In 1989, Dave Lee, Mike Cheal and Mark Ryder broke through the underground with a club hit under the assumed name Raven Maize, which made use of disco samples, something Lee has returned to repeatedly over the course of his career.

In 1990, Lee's most enduring pseudonym made its debut, when he released Joey Negro's first single via New York indie house music label Nu Groove, with his new name a homage to Pal Joey and J. Walter Negro.

After the single's success, Lee went totally solo allowing him the total freedom to explore his own musical direction.

When the single "Do It, Believe It" was released in the UK, it was also the debut release on his own self-financed label Z Records, which remains his primary outlet.

Around the same time, Lee met keyboard player Andrew 'Doc' Livingstone when he sent in a demo to Republic Records.

Shortly after, the pair decamped to Unit 3 Studios in Chalk Farm.

By the end of the 1990s, Z had released around 40 singles, the overwhelming majority coming from Lee's own studio; but over the past decade, the label has featured more outside producers and remixers, including Dennis Ferrer, Henrik Schwarz, Ame and Motor City Drum Ensemble, as well as providing an outlet for Lee's esoteric compilation series.

Z Records has now passed 200 releases.

In 1991, Rough Trade Records went into liquidation and with it, Lee's job.

The slack was taken up by increasingly large amounts of studio commissions as his work as a remixer grew.

In 1993, Lee was approached by boy band Take That's label with a view to working together.

Although the Dan Hartman song "Relight My Fire" had never been a hit in the UK, it had become a popular club track in the house music scene, so at Lee's suggestion they covered it, with Lulu taking the cameo role that Loleatta Holloway had performed on the original.

It became the boy band's second number one in the UK.

The same year saw the release of the Joey Negro album Universe of Love, featuring Gwen Guthrie and the Trammps.

Its title track, with live instrumentation, prefigured much of the work he went on to do with the Sunburst Band.

Lee's stock as a remixer continued to rise throughout the '90s, providing remixes for Diana Ross, M People and Pet Shop Boys, as well as racking up further aliases (Z Factor, Doug Willis, Akabu, Sessomatto and Agora).

In 1997, Lee met Taka Boom, Chaka Khan's sister, when she relocated to the UK, and the pair collaborated on "Surrender" and "Can't Get High Without U".

The same year, the Sunburst Band released their debut EP, Sunburn, which included "Garden of Love", one of the band's most successful songs.

Lee opted to gather many of the session musicians he worked with over the years – among them Michele Chiavarini, Viv Hope-Scott, Jessica Lauren and Tony Remy – who recorded the first album, Here Comes the Sunburst Band.

It was a conscious departure from electronic music and, as Lee admitted in an interview, it was his commercial successes elsewhere that provided the finances to make such a move.

Lee's first brush with the higher echelons of the top 40 came in 1999 when TV series Ibiza Uncovered used a portion of Z Factor's "Gotta Keep Pushin'" as its theme.

The follow-up, 2005's Until the End of Time, introduced two new vocal collaborators, disco stylist Linda Clifford and former Chic frontwoman Norma Jean Wright, as well as Taka Boom, and received critical plaudits: a remix of "Every Day", "Everydub", was included on Heston Blumenthal's Desert Island Discs.

On the third album, Moving with the Shakers, Lee brought Leroy Burgess and Diane Charlemagne (vocalist on Goldie's hit "Inner City Life") into his ever-evolving band.

Lee's deep house project Akabu, which has been remixed by Deetron, Spiritcatcher and Lovebirds, also won plaudits from industry veterans such as Carl Craig when the album was released in 2010.

The most recent album, The Secret Life of Us, was released in 2012.

All four albums were released on Lee's own Z Records imprint, which has been the outlet for the majority of his work since the collapse of Republic Records.