Leo

With his first release on Tummy Touch mere moments away (the diablo-funk-groove melange that is The Magickal Childe), it seems appropriate to offer up some background on our most unusual Italian friend to date, Leo Young.
Stamped through with all the hallmarks of a spiral-eyed, baby-eating loonball, Leo's history is nothing if not colourful.

Kicking off his DJing career through the unlikely medium of catholic church radio stations in his native Italy, Leo Zagami (aka Leo Young) found himself under the spotlight as the youngest broadcast DJ in his country after playing his own show at the tender age of 13 back in 1983.

By '86 Leo had achieved national prominence through regular exposure on commercial networks countrywide, before taking up a residency in the once infamous London celeb haunt Legends in 1987 (apparently no less a figure than Mick Hucknall honed his party-hopping ginger wankster skills there by hitting on scared young girls with that awful beaming orange face of his).
The following year saw Leo reach the DMC national finals and shift further into the burgeoning rave scene that would consume him for the following decade. Recognised as the man responsible for organising Italy's first rave in Rome back in '89, L'Impero Dei Sensi was a three day non-stop extravaganza that galvanised Leo's subsequent musical activities.

Further parties lured Detroit originators Underground Resistance and Juan Atkins to Europe for the first time, while he also takes the credit for giving The Prodigy their first gig outside the UK.

By 1991, Leo had initiated the seminal Friday Uonna club in Rome - another first in his country, combining as it did art exhibitions with an eclectic stew of house, disco and Detroit techno sounds - before opening The Underground in the catacombs of Constantine.

Soon after, controversy blew up around Leo's reclaiming of a catholic church as the venue for his Sunday Morning Cosmic House events, which went on to run for six heady months before intervention of a non-divine nature led to the plug being pulled.

With some thirty records already released since 1987 on a brace of quality imprints from MBG to Tresor, and a DJing reputation built on countless world-wide performances and legendary 12 hour sets - perhaps most memorably at Berlin's Tresor, where Leo was a fixture between '95 and '96 - the man's contribution to dance music is significant to say the least.