YOU'D IMAGINE THAT the dream of any independent record store owner would be to one day see their name nestling among the alphabetically arranged CD racks. For Markee Substance - aka Mark Morrison - such fantasies became reality when his band, Kosheen, struck mainstream gold in 2001 with their debut album, Resist.
The only drawback - if you could call it that - was that when the band started to get so big, he had to shut his shop and turn it into a studio.
'Before Kosheen took off, we had three underground drum'n'bass labels and a record shop called Breakbeat Culture,' the Glaswegian says from his adopted home town, Bristol.
'We used to run our own club nights. We set up a magazine, Knowledge Magazine. But the whole business side of keeping it working became too much. It started to encroach on my music-writing time. I had to cut a lot of things off, but now I'm more focused.'
Kosheen really did take off, bringing drum'n'bass into the mainstream, while re-affirming Bristol's cultural cache as far as the British music scene was concerned. Morrison formed an unholy trinity with Darren Decoder (Bristol-born Darren Beales) and rowdy Welsh frontwoman Sian Evans, who lived in a tepee in the Welsh forest as an environmental protester for a few months before joining the band.
Kosheen enjoyed a series of hits during the summer of 2001, with their single Hide You even making it onto the soundtrack of a Playstation 2 game. The 2003 follow-up, the eclectic Kokopelli, was the inevitable difficult second album: stylistically brave, but ultimately not cohesive enough for the mainstream who had embraced the band previously.
And so the band plays its first gigs in Beijing and Shenzhen this week at a make-or-break juncture in their career. With a third album in production, they'll either win back everyone's attention or, if poorly received, slip further towards obscurity. Despite the band's keenly observed underground roots, there seems to be a hunger for mainstream success.