Whether you remember him as Virgo, Hercules, On The House, Jungle Wonz, the producer for Ten City or simply Marshall Jefferson (website, discogs, facebook, myspace), he has been in the crates of DJs from the beginning. He now resides in the UK to keep up with his busy European DJ schedule and maintains the label USB Records with CeCe Rogers. From Acid House and Ten City to the real deal about "Video Clash" and taking mushrooms, Marshall tells his story...

Considered one of the pioneers of the House Music movement, do you find it difficult to out-do the early works that your name is synonymous with, like "Move Your Body", "Ride the Rhythm" and "The Jungle"?

Not musically, because I usually played all the instruments myself and still do. Most of the stuff I do now is way better than the stuff I did back then. It's just that nobody gets to hear it. There were five to twenty-five new dance records a week back when I started. Now there are 30,000+ dance releases a week to compete with, and my stuff gets lost in the haystack.

The life expectancy of a new release these days is often a couple of months at best. What do you feel is the best way to maintain the momentum of a new release without it getting lost in the shuffle?

The only way is to promote the music either on radio or MTV-style video. If you're not doing that, you're just wasting everyone else's time and cluttering up the market.

Assuming most independent labels these days probably don't have a budget that would allow them to do that, what else would you recommend? Unless you're a label like Defected or Ministry of Sound it seems that may not be feasible.

It is feasible if you put in the work and concentrate on that area. You don't always need money. The rappers did it and we can too. People forget that in the early 1980s, House and Rap were at the same level. Rap started concentrating on artists and videos and House stayed with singles and no artist development and got left WAY behind.

If a label tosses a single out there with seven remixes and no promotion, they're doing nothing for House Music. A remix is worthless. So you get the song played in a few extra markets... All the extra markets are dead too, because everyone's doing remixes in those genres as well. There are no promotional avenues left for dance music except radio and videos.

I know a guy that does 500,000 emails, MySpace and Facebook promotion, and hits every message board there is, yet he'll sell a maximum of twenty-five downloads a month. When you get two hundred promo links in your Facebook or MySpace inbox, do you listen to every single one? It bothers the hell out of me. I'm scared to give out my email because every time I do, that adds to the spam.

Do you have a different process in your method of making music comparing the mid-1980s to the current times, seeing how things have greatly changed?

No, I have basically the same way of doing things, same way of playing, same or similar keyboards. I just moved from a sequencer to a computer.