How Frankie Knuckles Saved the Life of a Boy from the London Suburbs

I don't remember the first time I heard Frankie Knuckles' music but I know I was too young to understand anything about the world. I'd never kissed a girl, taken a drug, touched a drop of alcohol or been to a party that I hadn't left in my mum's car. I didn't know what the Paradise Garage was, I didn't know where Detroit or Chicago were, I didn't even know the difference between house and techno yet. All that came later – but om the start, from very early on, I knew that I had to know about Frankie Knuckles

 WEDDING RECEPTION – AGE 11ckles.

t's the mid-90s and I'm at a wedding reception somewhere in the Home Counties. I'm staring at the small, ragged clusters of adults who've gathered in the church hall to dance and drink their way into the evening; people I'm supposed to be related to and their pissed mates. Wedding receptions haven't changed much in the last 17 years, they're still the perfect excuse for adults to get remorselessly drunk and at this age, these adults mesmerise me. They don't seem old, just older, envoys from a world that is being purposefully kept from me. A secret world of stubble, shouting, clothes that fit properly and not being embarrassed around girls. And they're all stood round, getting absolutely fucking carted to Candi Staton wailing over the top of "Your Love" by Frankie Knuckles.

In a premonitory sign of what's to come for me in the social arena, I've had far too much Coke, and am chasing a half-cousin around the hall, attempting to scythe him down by his shins. He runs towards a herd of old people from the other side of the family but veers at the last minute, sending me careering into their table. Small plastic cups full of gin and mixer and chicken legs fly everywhere.

Later, I'd come to appreciate the subtleties of Knuckles' '87 production of this track. But the formative version for me will always be the one I heard at that wedding party, enshrined in my mind alongside "Show Me Love", "Let Me Be Your Fantasy" and "Dreamer". I buy Now That's What I Call Music! 36 and sit rewinding the tape in my bedroom all summer, to drown out the squeals of the other kids on my street as the sun sets over the A404(M) just yards from my bedroom window.

The track's serpentine synth pattern spools from my shitty AIWA hi-fi; it sounds like a couple of those DNA strands except made out of gold. It lets me know that one day I'll be a part of that world I couldn't understand at the wedding party. That one day I'll be a loud narcissist with emotional problems whose breath stinks of booze and cigarettes, too. And I know in my gut that I can't fucking wait.we are. We wear checked Ben Sherman shirts, crap jeans and knock-off sports jackets by "Pierre Cardin". The gel in our hair makes us look like the shags caught up in the Sea Empress oil spill. Still, 9/11 hasn't happened yet. That's pretty fucking good. And again, it's not really our place to understand the world just yet. I go round sneaking up on girls and kicking them in the arse because I think that it will endear them to me. Perhaps it's a sign of a more innocent, pre-white phosphorus age, but honestly, it seems to do the trick.

The soundtrack to this evening's banging rave-up is mostly older brothers playing trance and happy hardcore over the community centre's ailing soundsystem. None of the mums and lonely bachelorettes who've volunteered to look after us seem able to make sense of what they're overseeing and in truth it's a weird situation, a bunch of boy racers in MA1s blasting Hixxy at some kids running around, kicking each other up the arse and eating Whams.

But there's an older guy here too, a regular at the centre who no one seems to know but is generally understood to be from "the church". In a rare lull from the relentless 180BPM exhortations for us to "build castles in the sky" and "see bluebirds flying over the mountains again" something magical and weird drops. At first it sounds like the pink summer sky above the A404(M) sighing, and then the bass kicks and somewhere in my brain there's recognition happening: This is house, I know it is, because it sounds assertive and timid and like the future I will one day inhabit all at the same time.

And then come the whistles.

The floor's made of polished wood and now everyone's sliding towards each other on their knees, knocking over the orange plastic chairs and ending up clasped together in awkward fraternal embraces beneath the folded up ping-pong tables. I'll later realise that this is a moment of universal import on a par with the first time Mike Pickering made sweat drip from the ceiling of the Hacienda, or that night the London acid crowd dropped E at Heaven. There'll be no more shin-scything tonight, Cox Green. From here on in, all we have is love. 

THE "DRESSING LIKE A DICKHEAD" THING AKA NEW RAVE – AGE 21

The thing about Frankie Knuckles' music is that it follows you. I left home, followed the motorway to London and he found me again.

New rave is bullshit, obviously. Like every guitar scene London has spawned in my lifetime, it is essentially a collection of hipster barmen cowering in the shadow of one decent band. But it has ideas – it has Ballard, Toffler, Pynchon and other stuff I'm not overly familiar with at the time – and, even more importantly, it plots a musical course for its followers that doesn't lead back to the same early Stones records. new rave leads me to The KLF, ESG, KDJ, R&S and UR. And, quite obviously, it also leads many people to a fuck ton of MDMA.

But not every night on ecstasy runs according to plan. Yes, I have heard about the times you take it near rivers with a bunch of strangers and it feels as though a hand has emerged from a trapdoor in the sky to squeeze the joy out of you like juice from oranges. But then there are the nights in disused factories in Limehouse where your girlfriend's being a bitch 'cos the magic's gone and without that magic, it's tougher to tolerate the insecurities of a man with purple shoes and a face like Picasso's self-portrait. Especially when she only came to Limehouse to see Shitdisco.

No one dies but the taxi ride home isn't a fun one. The only saving grace is this track, bleeding from the speakers in the backseat like a penance, Robert Owens' voice offering an apology more eloquent than any I could ever come up with. The understated snare starts to sync up with the passage of the shadows of the street lights through the cab's interior and as the bars of darkness scan my girlfriend's wet face, I know that the track will stay with me long after she's gone. In a weird way, it makes me feel pretty good about life. For about three hours.

Tear after tear, over here, over here. Still, at this stage in proceedings, you take your mercy where you can find it.

A WHOLE SUBURB'S WORTH OF HOUSE PARTIES – AGE 23 - 27

In a stroke of luck, someone has the audacity to allow me and four of my best friends to move into a cottage inside a nature reserve in North London. In the back garden, there is a lake. There are no other houses close enough that you could hit them with a stone. It turns out these three conditions are all you need to create the best two years of your life.

There's decks and two blown speakers in the living room and a French rubber dinghy in the garden, and it seems like every day that strangers are waking up inside and outside the house as I make breakfast at lunchtime and clear away their cans. The music Frankie Knuckles created isn't just something that lurks at the peripheries of my life any more, it's there constantly; throbbing through the bedroom floor in the mornings, from laptops in each of the five bedrooms, soundtracking wired midnight glides across the lake past ducks and other birds that have never been disturbed enough to care. Years ago, the Met had to dredge the lake because the IRA had hidden sealed crates of dynamite in it. We have Ron Trent, "Happy House", and over the summer of the 2010 World Cup I wear the same shorts every day for five months because it makes me feel like I'm on holiday.

I make a lot of new friends but eventually things start to get a bit ragged around the edges. As the area starts to be gentrified around us, we know that the residents of the monolithic new tower blocks won't put up with us for long.

Shockingly, even when we're booted out of the house, I don't learn any lessons. I continue to act like a sad, pathetic child. But I do, occasionally, have a good time, and when I do it is usually because of music. Music like "Baby Rides for Love", a track that regularly descends upon me when I'm feeling lost at parties in the houses of strangers, or in bars surrounded by people I loathe. I find solace in eight-hour House, Live and Rinse FM marathons, not keeping tabs on the names of the tracks or the people who made them because the fleeting feeling's all I'm after – the same sense of suddenly being hit by something rare and sublime that I felt back in the youth club and the wedding reception hall. The less I understand, the more thrilling the music is to me.

I'm now a fully paid-up member of the world I caught a glimpse of as an 11-year-old, and for better or worse, it's house music's that's led me there.

NOW

I wake up on April Fool's Day in North London. It's sunny outside and I'm a lot happier now but people on Twitter reckon Frankie Knuckles has died and they don't seem to be joking. I've never really thought about it before but I realise that he's someone whose music's been there ever since I started to create an idea in my head of what adult life could mean to me. I've loved other bands and producers much more than Frankie Knuckles since I was 11 years old but there's no one else whose music's followed me through life quite like his has. There are other people in the world who'll miss Frankie Knuckles much, much more than me, and there are tributes to him already written that display an infinitely greater understanding of his life and the music he created than this one does.

But he mapped my concept of the night out and the routes I've taken through them have, to a large extent, been guided by him. And as a suburban boy who grew up four thousand miles from Chicago, and as someone who never met Frankie Knuckles, I just wanted to thank him for that.

KEV KHARAS/VICE  follow @twitter  see more from Knuckles on ct23