Steven James Pratt a.k.a Fly Agaric 23 (Steve Fly) Biography
March 7, 2013 by Mark Badger
Born April 15th 1976 in Wordsley, England, and grew up as a competitive swimmer into his teens when he came across Jazz music, speed Metal, hip-hop, drum and bass, and playing drums in a school band. This led to Steven developing his drumming and DJ skills over the next 20 years.
Steve Fly’s first ‘live’ gig was drumming with ‘Surgery’ at Thorns School in 1991, and went on to play with local Stourbridge garage punk band ‘Indigo Jane’ at such venues as J.B’s Dudley, The ‘Source’, ‘The Mitre’ in Stourbridge, and support for Babylon Zoo and Fret Blanket in Kidderminster.
In 1993 Steven briefly played with Kinver based band ‘Taxi’ and recorded and album together and supported vocalist ‘Sam Brown’ at the Robin Hood R n’B club. In 1994 Steve played drums for a short time with the Birmingham based ‘live’ drum & bass band ‘Plutonik’, featuring vocalist Chrissy Van Dyke.
In 1994 fly bought his first pair of turntables, and was instantly attracted to scratching and spinning vinyl, and began buying and playing a mixture of old Jazz, new electronica, drum & bass, break-beats and other soul/funk/jazz oddities. This led to him playing records with local DJ crew’s ‘Lowlife’ and ‘Lifted’ (94-2001) and by 1998 starting a successful ‘soul/jazz/funk/breaks’ night in and around Stourbridge called ‘Pass the peas’. Other gigs included dj slots with Craig Fields and the ‘Nazareth’ DJ crew, and gigs at the Q-club Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Wales, and the Glastonbury festival 2000.
In 1998 Fly Agaric was billed with Fuzz Townsend on the bill for Graffiti Bastards 2, an art and music exhibition featuring and produced by CHU. This collaboration led to fly travelling up to York, and Finsbury Park studio’s to record a ‘live’ drum track for the first full album from UK left-field hip-hop crew New Flesh. (Part2, Toastie Taylor, Juice Aleem, DJ Weston) The resulting track ‘Quantum Mechanix’ turned out to be fly’s first release, launched in 1999 on Big Dada Records 0013, and stands as a testament to alternative UK hip hop at the turn of the millennium.