Not many people can lay claim to having invented a new musical instrument. But one man who's performing in Hong Kong later this month can - while another man, playing here a week later, has arguably expanded the possibilities of that instrument more than anyone else. They are, respectively, Grandmaster Flash and DJ Qbert, and their instrument is the turntable.
Of course, neither of them actually invented the turntable, but they helped transform it from something that just played records into something that produced new sounds when put in the hands of skilled performers who were as much musicians as they were DJs. Every time you hear two songs being manipulated, mixed and mangled together in a new and intriguing way, every time you hear the distinctive sound of a record being scratched, it's Flash, in particular, that you have to thank.
Along with other seminal figures such as Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, Flash was the inventor in 1970s New York of techniques such as scratching, beat juggling and punch phasing - the rhythmical stabs of sound that characterise so many hip hop recordings. As such, you could say he's had the biggest influence on modern music, making possible all of hip hop and many of the techniques that characterise much dance music, which would at the least have developed differently without him. In 2007, Flash became the first hip hop artist inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Born Joseph Saddler in Bridgetown, Barbados - his uncle was world featherweight boxing champion Sandy Saddler - Flash appears to have been destined for a career behind the decks from an early age. He obsessively played his father's massive collection of Caribbean and American music, and was also fascinated by electronics. 'I grew up around music,' he says, 'and when I was a toddler, I always took apart everything that was plugged into a wall: my sister's hairdryer, my father's stereo, whatever. I was public enemy number one in the house. I took it all apart, and what I really wanted to do was put it all back together, but I couldn't at first. I got my ass kicked several times, but I kept going back.'
It was this combination of musical devotion and knob-twiddling prowess that characterised his early DJing career. Unable to get the sounds he wanted, he created new ways to make them happen, using the turntable as his instrument. 'What inspired me was my frustration,' he says. 'To my amazement, when I heard a record played, the best bits of the music were when the least number of band members were playing - I noticed that this was when the audience were energised.
'Sometimes it was 10 seconds, sometimes it was 30 seconds, but it wasn't long. That made me kind of angry. It took me my teenage years to learn how to percussively expand that part [using two copies of the record on two turntables], so that 10 seconds became 10 minutes. I had to understand what torque was, I had to understand how turntables worked, I had to come up with some system to do this. There was no blueprint. It was just a long, drawn-out experiment of my own.'