Disconcerting to look at these lean, lanky youts who've become solid middle-aged men

(Navigator, when I met him, round at his workplace at the jewellers in Hatton Garden, as shown in this video - an anonymous redbrick building, I think we spoke in the stairwell so he could smoke, or some little side-room with a kettle and a couple of chairs - Navigator then was this skinny, scrawny boy. Now look at him).

Disconcerting also how documented the culture is now (docs, oral histories, retrospective pieces, amateur archivism) compared with the foggy blankness of minimal information  available when these things unfolded in real-time

These names - DJs, producers, MCs  - were completely mysterious figures. Known only as voices on pirates, names on flyers, or on 12 inches. Occasionally as a figure onstage shouting into a mic or cutting on up the decks

You knew virtually nothing about them  - unless you lived in the same neighbourhood as them, I suppose. But there was nothing out there, no data bank to draw on as a journalist

Going to interview some of them back in the day for EFlash  was disorienting enough in itself  - suddenly this mystery-figure is an actual human being.