The Night Jam & Spoon Changed Everything: My Route into Trance

Some records become part of your life before you realise quite how much they’ve changed it. For me, Jam & Spoon’s “Right in the Night” was one of those records. Hearing it was the moment I discovered trance, and found a direction that would shape the years that followed.

This isn’t a story with a neat date stamped on it or a perfectly staged scene. I’m not going to invent the club, the room or what I was wearing. What matters is the record, the feeling it sparked, and what came next.

Before trance, there was Belvedere

I grew up in Belvedere, South East London, raised by a young single mother and strongly supported by my Nan. My early world included electronic music and dance club culture, and my original roots run through hardcore, house, hard trance and hard house.

Jean-Michel Jarre was an important influence. His music showed me how much could be done with electronic sounds: how they could create atmosphere, emotion and a sense of somewhere beyond the everyday. Club culture offered another kind of education. It connected music with people, energy and a shared experience.

And there was Tony de Vit. He became a key figure for me, part of the story of the music and the world I was drawn towards. Those influences weren’t a tidy career plan. They were the things I kept returning to, long before I could have explained where they might lead.

Life didn’t follow a straight line. I had a short career in the Army, which ended in medical discharge. That chapter came to an end, and I had to work out what direction to take next. Sometimes a change of course arrives with a grand announcement. Sometimes it starts with hearing a tune that makes something click.

The tune that opened the door

That tune was “Right in the Night” by Jam & Spoon.

I didn’t simply hear a track I liked. I heard something that made sense to me in a new way. Trance became more than another sound in the mix: it was a place I could imagine stepping into, a direction I wanted to follow. The record gave shape to a feeling that had been building through my love of electronic music and club culture.

That’s the thing about the records that matter most. They don’t have to explain themselves. You don’t need to know what every sound is doing or have a music degree tucked in your back pocket. You feel the connection first. The analysis can catch up later, if it can be bothered.

For me, “Right in the Night” was a turning point. It helped me find my way into trance and gave me a clearer sense of what I wanted to do with music. Looking back, it’s easy to draw a line from hearing that track to the career that followed. At the time, of course, life doesn’t hand you a map with the important bits highlighted. You take the next step, then the next one.

Finding my place in the scene

Once I had found that direction, the music took me into clubs and venues where I could build a life as a DJ. Over time, that meant residencies and bookings at places including Sanctuary, Fevah, The Matrix, Fabric, Turnmills, Ministry of Sound and Trade.

Those names matter to me because they mark different parts of a journey built around music and the people who came out to hear it. A venue isn’t just a name on a flyer. It’s a place where the music meets a crowd, and where a DJ gets to share what they care about with people who have turned up for the night.

That connection also travelled well beyond the UK. I went on tours across Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Russia, Argentina and the USA. Each place was a new audience and a new setting, but the thread running through it all was dance music: the thing that had first pulled me towards trance.

I’m proud of those chapters, but I don’t think of them as separate from the beginning. The kid from Belvedere who was drawn to Jarre, club culture and Tony de Vit is still in the story. So is the person who heard Jam & Spoon and felt a direction taking shape.

From listener to remixer

The story came full circle when I went on to produce remixes, including a remix of “Right in the Night” itself.

There’s something quite special about returning to a record that helped point you towards a whole musical world. You approach it with the respect due to a track that means something to you, while also bringing your own perspective to it. You can’t go back and hear it as the person you were the first time round. You’ve lived, learned and made music of your own in the meantime.

I won’t pretend that making a remix means the original suddenly belongs to you. It doesn’t. But being trusted with a track that mattered so much to my own route into trance was a real full-circle moment. The record that helped set me on my way became a record I could work on as a producer.

That’s one of the reasons music continues to surprise me. A tune can be part of your past, a reference point in your present and a new creative challenge all at once. Not bad for a record that first grabbed my attention simply by sounding right to me.

Why that moment still matters

In my earlier post, Classic Trance Music: The Sound, the Scene and Why It Still Matters, I wrote about how trance connects its sound with the energy of a dancefloor. This is the personal side of that same idea. Sometimes a record doesn’t just remind you of a scene; it helps you find your place in it.

For longtime clubbers, “Right in the Night” may bring back their own memories, their own firsts, or a particular moment when a track seemed to land exactly where it should. For anyone discovering trance now, my hope is that you can hear what the music meant to me without needing to have been there at the time. You don’t need the same memories to find your own connection.

And if you’re at a point where you’re not sure what comes next, I suppose there’s a small lesson in my story: inspiration doesn’t always arrive in the form you expect. Mine arrived through a piece of music that helped me see a direction. It didn’t do the work for me, but it gave me something worth following.

I still carry that moment with me. Not as a claim that one song explains an entire career, but as a reminder of how it began: I heard “Right in the Night”, discovered trance, and found a path I wanted to take.

Explore the NICHOLSON music catalogue, read more about my story, or get in touch through the bookings page. And if you have a tune that changed your direction, I’d love to know what it was.