“He was very gangly and geeky,” recalled Pickering – who had a major musical career of his own with M People and as a DJ, which is recounted in his new book Manchester Must Dance.<\/p>\n
“He looked nothing like he does now – he just looked like a normal kid from Scotland or the north of England.”<\/p>\n
However, he said he recognised something in Harris that would work for his label.<\/p>\n
“Adam always knew what he wanted to do, always, and I used to look for that in an artist,” he said.<\/p>\n
“You get artists who sometimes may be talented, but they don’t really have an idea of what they want to be and that’s a bit of a battle.<\/p>\n
“He didn’t know he wanted to be the world’s number one DJ – you know what I mean – but he had belief in the music that he was making and he was obviously a very talented songwriter.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“He was very gangly and geeky,” recalled Pickering – who had a major musical career of his own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":561480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-561479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}