This week’s selection involves a producer who is sadly no longer with us. His tunes excited me back in the mid-1990s and I honestly believe he would have become a big star. I’m talking about Wildchild, real name Roger McKenzie.

The Southampton based producer turned his hand to house music around 1992 and was a fan of skippy drum programming, cheeky samples and the occasional big bassline. He’s probably most well known for “Renegade Master”, which came out in 1995 and saw a big beat version by Norman Cook three years later.

McKenzie never saw how popular his record would become. On 25th November 1995, he died from what turned out to be an undiagnosed heart condition. He was just 24 years old. His girlfriend Donna Snell was pregnant at the time and gave birth to his child, Noir, in April 1996.

Aside from the sample-heavy Wildtrax LPs he put out on Loaded Records, he dabbled occasionally in remixes. And towards the end of his life, he was starting to get requests from more mainstream labels. Such as this one for East 17. The original song was typical boyband fare of the time – so what did McKenzie do with it?

He somehow turned it into this…

And even the vocal mix he did is pretty decent too…