It nearly killed them. Hill smiles, but is not joking when he says "I'm just happy we got through it with all our limbs". The pair had assumed that the mainstream would operate in the same ad-hoc, mates-in-it-together way that kept the underground just about functional, but the industry had other ideas. So, while they went about signing different tracks to different labels, and took every booking going - to the point they were often doing eight sets a week around the party towns on the Mediterranean from Ibiza to Ayia Napa - they found themselves royally ripped off left, right and centre.
They say that they lost all the publishing money for their infernally catchy hit Moving Too Fast – 4m streams on Spotify – because they lost the printout of a fax from the Italian company that owned the rights, promising them a percentage. Likewise, the duo's 12-inch singles would sell in the tens of thousands, but they suspected certain pressing plants or labels might only account for a third of what they produced and sold, again doing the pair out of royalties (it is an open secret on the UK garage scene that such shady practices were commonplace for successful releases). By the time they both reached burn-out point early in 2001, they were so frazzled that they ended up signing away the name "for peanuts". But they were not alone: UK garage, which for a precious couple of years promised to create an entirely new blueprint for British pop, collapsed in on itself among similar mismanagement and dodginess, while the young kids on the scene took it back underground into grime and dubstep.
