Without Grandmaster Flash, aka Joseph Sadler, we'd probably all be swinging our plastic flares to fifth-generation glam rock. Born in Barbados and raised in the Bronx, Joseph was weaned on the mid-70s block parties of early heroes Cool Herc and Peter DJ Jones.

Locking himself away for a year, the teenagers honed their DJ skills, finding a way to mix break beats together without jumping a beat, and mastering the art of spinning the same record on two turntables and cutting them together to prolong the funkiest break on a track.

The speed of his skills earned him the epithet 'Flash'. Uniting with the best rappers of the era, Flash formed Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, releasing hip-hop's breakthrough record Super Rappin in 1976. Grandmaster on the Wheels of Steel, the first record to use samples, followed and the next release, The Message broke hip-hop internationally.

Flash you've been there from the beginning and virtually invented hip-hop DJing as an art form - do you remember the reaction at your first gig?
Well, it was a disaster. After I came up with the turntable art form that I called cutting after I came up with this art form I decided to go into a park and try it. And I said to myself if I play the climactic part of ten records and I cut them back-to-back and I should have this block party audience losing their minds.

And what happened was the exact opposite. They just stood there and it was so quiet you could drop a pin. And I went home and I cried for a week. That was pretty disastrous, taking all of my teenage years and throwing them out of the window. Normal kids in their teens want to go and date girls and do mischievous things, your hormones are jumping around, but I stayed in my bedroom in search of something.

But I had two very special people who helped to take my style to the next level. Thank God for my first MC Cowboy and my first student Grand Wizard Theodore, and to go out after creating this art form and finding everyone jamming to it - that too was pretty scary.

How did the Ministry of Sound gig go?
Well, put it this way, I have been making calls to that club for the past nine years. They turned me down… Flash didn't fit their ideas. There were two clubs I'd always wanted to play, The Autobahn Ballroom in Manhattan and The Ministry of Sound, because I'd heard so much about that club. Now I've knocked that one over and as I was leaving the manager said 'When can I get you back?'

You're playing hard-to-get now?
Yeah, I said 'Make the phone call, we'll see'… Haha!

How does the UK response to your music generally compare to the response in the US?
I think that people here are a little more open-minded to difference. As opposed to just like, we came here to hear music red. They want to hear a little bit of green and some yellow. In America it's just the pink club and the blue club. It's that way with the radio also. Which is kinda sad. With you guys here, I'll listen to the radio here and it's like Jah Rule and then right after that I hear People Under the Stairs and then Groove Armada, I'm like wow. I find it quite amazing and it's all happening on one radio station, it's cool, I'm in love with that.

You played to the Queen and Tony Blair at the Commonwealth Games, how do you reckon they took you?
I don't know. When I first got offered to do it I'm like 'Wait a minute, what!' - I thought that I'd get maybe a couple of seconds on the air, or a couple of seconds playing in a stadium or whatever. But when I was asked to be the host and the DJ I was so honoured.

I had to go into the studio the night before and produce 12 tracks because the tracks that I wanted to DJ we couldn't clear in time. I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you're recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song.

It was quite a scramble, getting the artists together, finding a studio, staying up until the crack of dawn then rushing to master it, over to a pressing plant to put it to vinyl. I had to rush from Liverpool to Manchester, rehearse for ten minutes… it was just so down to the wire. But it turned out really well.

Well, I hope the Queen liked you…
Yeah, I hope she rocked wid me…

Did he have any dressing tips for contemporary would-be DJ superstars?
When I was an artist with the group everything was tailor-made, so it was my statement at that time. But watch the hairstyles. Probably the only thing that I regret wearing was Jheri curls.

Tight curls on the head, no?
Yeah, everything else was fine with me cos it was like clothes that got tailored, and of course the majority of my garb was leather - I picked the design, I picked everything, I was pretty happy with it, but the hairstyle… eeesh!

Grandmaster Flash is performing live at Scala on 10th February 2011. For more information and to purchase tickets, please follow the link below.

Grandmaster Flash Tickets