But these days Ben has reinvented himself: he’s an in demand DJ, a dance producer and owner of hot London house stable Buzzin' Fly, home to 2006 big hitters such as Darkmountaingroup's 'Lose Control' and Âme’s remix of Rodamaal's 'Insomnia'. Not a bad second wind indeed.

Ben has been surrounded by music all his life. His dad was a jazz musician who showed him the ropes early on, so nowadays as a DJ he’s one of those clever folk who mixes in key. "I grew up with a proper harmonic sensibility. I was very aware of how music was put together, the relationship of chords and scales and all that kind of stuff, " explains Ben. "But I didn't have any classical training. Everything I learnt was by ear from watching my dad and listening to music around in the house from as early as I can remember. So I also DJ in a musical way as well. I'm very into what I call harmonic mixing, which used to be the preserve of progressive DJs but actually it can be very useful in the hands of non-progressive DJs too."

As a DJ, Ben spins everything from deep house to warm techno with a sprinkle of Berlin minimalism. So is he a record obsessive? Not really. Want to get your mitts on that hard-to-find classic you heard him spin? Check the record bins at the charity shops and you never know what you might find. "I'm not a nerdy archivist at all, " says space-saving Ben. "I often take a box load down to Oxfam. Sometimes at Plastic People we'll do a kind of fundraiser and I'll take a bunch of records down and just have them on the table inside the door. People can take as many as they like as long as they chuck a bit of money in the bucket. I know a lot of DJs are completely retentive about it all, and keep everything, just in case. But I'm not like that really because it just gets me down. It gets a bit oppressive after a while. I've always thought if I give away a classic, I'll have such fun hunting it down again."

RA hit Ben Watt up at his studio where he was finishing off his first remix in yonkers. When we held him up for his ten favourite records, he was so enthusiastic, he gave us eleven. Perhaps it's no surprise that many of his picks are very musical and feature real instruments and vocals. "I think we've been through a phase of minimalism and reductivism and tried to drop down to the brutal acid b-line or the long, empty breakdown, " says Ben. "Personally, in the last few months I've been looking for few more vocals again and a bit more music. Everyone's playing the same music these days so I think there has to be a road out of it and I guess I've been looking for more musical tracks a little bit." This is the stuff you're not likely to find at Oxfam anytime soon:

Alexander Maier - Road of Injury [Buzzin' Fly]

Ben: "I actually first heard of this guy on a Redlight compilation from Paris. It was a really dark, after hours, ketamine-friendly minimal mix, but in the middle of it, there was this very long, quite melancholy track, which I was really attracted to and happened to be in the same key as 'Missing'. I spent about three months culminating my set with this sort of very sad, minimal, Germanic-sounding record. And I used to float Tracy's voice over the top of it, and it made a really great club moment. A lot of people used to come up to me and say, "What is that you're playing?" So then I tracked it down and found out the guy who'd made it was called Alexander Maier, although he'd recorded it under a pseudonym. I actually found him on MySpace and I said, "Do you want to do a track for us?" And he said, "I'd love to", so that's how we hooked up. The record on Buzzin' Fly is right in that sort of pocket where everyone seems to be at the moment, where people are mixing deep house and techno and trance. Some people find it a little trancey, and I guess for Buzzin' Fly it is slightly trancey. But it just seems to be what people are really digging on the dancefloor at the moment. There's a crossroad where we all are at the moment, where lots of people are meeting. I always think house music is at its most interesting when it's at its most communal because when a dancefloor is commmunal, it's a great place to be. When music is overlapping and being imaginative that's often when it's most interesting." MySpace: Alexander Maier - Road of Injury

Tracey Thorn - It's All True [Virgin]

Ben: "This a great record regardless of whether we've been together twenty-five years or not. I'm totally supportive of it. I'm just so pleased to see her back and singing so well. About three-quarters of the album's been produced by Ewan Pearson and then there's a handful of other tracks: Vector Lovers have done a track, Charles Webster's been involved, Cagedbaby and Darkmountaingroup. It's just a bunch of three and four minute songs, but all produced in a very modern way. It sounds lovely, great lyrics. And I love the remixes that have been done of 'It's All True' as well. There's a commercial mix by Kris Menace, Martin Buttrich has done a very groovy nine-minute dark autumnal melancholy one with a modern club vibe, which I'm playing a lot. Then there's a very very groovy done by these people called Escort from New York. They've only ever had one record out, but what they do, is take your track, and for the remix, they just re-perform it live. They took the vocal, and then they just played as a band. The remix is great. It sounds like a cross between Sade and Chic, so it's a very cool". MySpace: Tracey Thorn - It's All True

M. Craft - You Are The Music (Trevor Jackson Remix) [White Label]

Ben: "I don't know whether this came out officially or not. I've got a white label of it that I picked up in Phonica a few weeks ago. It's incredibly simple. There's hardly any instrumentation on it. It's just a little funky guitar, live drums, a bassline and a very beautiful vocal with a very immediate lyric. I ended my set at Plastic People with it last week, and everyone came up thinking it was a classic from way back. I wrote to Trevor and said it had had an amazing reaction. He said, "It's funny. You spend months on remixes for some people and tear your hair out. And then you knock one out in a few hours," which he did with this, "and it's the one that everybody loves."

Cortney Tidwell - Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ewan Pearson Remix) [Ever]

Ben: "Cortney is this amazing singer from Nashville who's been discovered by this friend of mine Wyndham at Ever Records, which is a tiny little UK label. She's like an amazing cross between Bjork and Joanna Newsom, but really unique. She writes these really beautiful, oblique songs. I saw her play at the Luminaire recently, and she's really an inspiration to watch. She sings most of her set at the front of the stage with guitar, but then for the encore, she goes behind the drum kit, and she plays drums with one hand and an omnichord with the other, and sings at the same time. This is a remix by Ewan Pearson off her last album and it's absolutely gorgeous. I defy anyone not to like it. It's a really beautiful piece of music, and you can play it in a club as well."

Scott Grooves - Around Midnight [Unknown]

Ben: "Scott sent this to me and I was so into it, I tried to sign it off him. I think he came really close to folding his label, and signing it to me. But then he said, 'No, no, no. I'm committed. I'm going to put it out, but I'm really flattered you like it'. It's lovely. It's got a really gorgeous, acoustic piano loop in it. There's so many minimal bleeps going on at the moment, but this has a really lovely, authentic sort of piano, which is the hook of it. It has that sort of deep flavour that we were talking about, that mixes a bit of techno and a bit of Detroit and a bit of house. It's a really good track and I think people have been responding to the fact that there's something a bit different about hearing a piano again. But that's music for you. It goes in phases."

Scott Grooves - Around Midnight

Black Joy - Untitled (Stefan Goldmann Mix) [Freerange]

Ben: "This is an old retro track that Jamie Odell's got the rights to do some mixes on. I think Kerri Chandler has done a mix, and there's also a couple of new ones that he's just had done. One's been done by Stefan Goldmann, which is amazing and I really like. There's a really good Solid Groove remix as well. But the Stefan Goldmann remix is the one I'm really into. Again, it's got that Innervisions, kind of Dixon stamp on it. But he's done some really nice production tweaks where he completely detunes the track at some points and sucks you right down onto the floor for a minute. And everyone's sort of going, 'Oh my god. Where's this going?' And then like an elastic band, he just sort of pings it back and then everyone just starts bouncing off the floor again. It's really clever stuff. So it's very modern, but there's a couple of fresh touches in there too, so that gets a stamp of approval from me, without a doubt.”

Justin Martin - The Sad Piano (Jimpster Remix) [Buzzin' Fly]

Ben: "We've got our twenty-fifth release coming up for Buzzin' Fly, which although is a small milestone, still feels like quite a good one so we thought we'd do something special. So we decided to do an EP called 'We are Silver'. We're going to have silver, foil blocked artwork on the front cover, and I thought I'd bung together some really interesting things on an EP and have a bit of fun with it. The first thing we got was Dennis Ferrer and Steve Martinez, who's this young eighteen-year-old prodigy, kind of New York DJ, who's just coming up with his brother. The Martinez Brothers are taking New York by storm at the moment. One's eighteen and one's sixteen - they're like kids. They're like Masters at Work twenty-five years ago. Well, maybe not that long ago. Sorry Louie! Maybe more like twenty years ago. Dennis and Stevie went in the studio and completely messed around with Justin Martin's remix of my old track 'Lone Cat', which was the very first track we put out. And they've created this amazing, sort of hybrid rerub/reedit where they've taken Justin Martin's remix of my track and they've added even more elements. It's just wonderful so I'm going to put that on the EP. Then I said to Jamie Odell [Jimpster], 'We need something else. Why don't we just pull another blast from the past from the label and you have a go at that? What about 'The Sad Piano'?'. He said, 'Yeah, great', because I think he was confronting the sort of haunting image of his new Jimpster EP, which was the last thing he wanted to do. I think he was staring at the computer thinking, 'I don't want to start this'. So when I said, 'Do you want to do a remix for Buzzin' Fly?' and he said, "Yeah! Anything! Anything to stop me having to do my own EP!" So in about four of five days we had it back. So that's going to go on it and I'll probably think of something else as well."

Au Revoir Simone - The Bird of Music [Moshi Moshi]

Ben: "These are three girls from Brooklyn with synths and drum machines, and this is their second album. The first one came out about eighteen months ago and was one of my favourite albums. It's just the perfect music to play when you're driving home from the club. They write brilliant lyrics and they all sing together. It's really understated. It reminds me of early eighties bands like Young Marble Giants or Stereolab, a sort of primitive electronicism with really beautiful little vocal songs over the top. You can almost imagine it's the sort of thing Sofia Coppola plays at breakfast. [RA tells Ben Copolla has a music compilation coming out called 'My Favourite Songs'] Well, It MUST be the opening track on that." MySpace: Au Revoir Simone

Will Saul - Pause (Isolée Remix) [Simple]

Ben: "I'm really into this. I just picked up on it recently. I think Isolée is such an important figure. I was talking to Ewan Pearson about him the other day, and he was talking about Âme, and the way they've become the name to drop over a year. But in fact, if you go back and listen to stuff like 'Beau Mot Plage', which was 1999 for chrissakes, seven years ago, there is so much of Âme in that sound. And I do think he was a real European pioneer. But he's not a name that gets dropped a lot, and I do think he needs a bit of approbation and people really needs doff their caps a little bit. Ewan definitely thinks he's very influential on that whole sound." MySpace: Will Saul - Pause (Isolée Remix)

John Tejada - Sucre [Palette]

Ben: "This has got a little female vocal in it saying "Eat sugar" in French. It's great. I love John Tejada. There's that sort of clean, sort of serene beauty to it all, but it's always so funky. And there is always something for the nerdy producer. There is some kind of twist, like he's found some new plug-in or he's bought some piece of an ancient German synthesizer from a car boot sale or something, and re-tweaked it and he's stuck it in his latest track. His tracks always sound different to anyone else’s. When I asked him to do a mix for Buzzin' Fly last year, he said he was dead busy, and he was recording his album, and he didn't have time. Then 48 hours later he emailed me back and said, 'Ben. I've just found this new sound, and I really want to try it on your track so I'm going to do the mix for you.' I really liked the way he wasn't prepared to start until he had an idea. And then when he had one, he was up and running. So hats off to him. He's a really nice guy too, very sweet guy."

The Green Men - Blink [Buzzin' Fly]

Ben: "Just in case you need one more, we've just signed a track by the Green Men, who are actually Sasse and Nick Chacona, who's now living in Berlin. He's a friend of Sasse and they've done this track, and it's fab. It's eleven minutes long and it's a very sort of trippy dubby disco ride where the bassline doesn't come in until about three minutes in. Once I got a hold of it, I opened every single set I played in December with it. It just completely sort of resets the crowd. You know sometimes when you want to get away from what's been going before? Well this like “zeroes the desk” as they say in the studio. Everyone just focuses in on the groove, then finally the bassline drops in and everyone is just grooving on a whole new kind of vibe. It's a really great track to tee off a set. They've just done the master of it and sent it over, and it sounds amazing. Then there's going to be a dub on the B-side by a friend of theirs called (pauses dramatically) Wolfgang de la Vasquez. I don't know who he is, but he sounds like he's giving Ricardo Villalobos a run for his money!"

Ben Watt plays the Buzzin' Fly Winter Party at The End in London this Friday, January 19, 2007.