Biography of Rob Tissera
The headphones turned into a microphone
With the helicopter over the roof and police dogs at the doors, Rob Tissera plugged his headphones into the mixer and asked thousands of ravers to defend Love Decade, the illegal warehouse rave in Leeds. That night in 1990 resulted in 836 arrests—one of the biggest raids in British history—and three months in jail for incitement to riot. The episode, far from keeping him off the dance floor, left him as the visible face of the acid house scene in the north of England, which he had embraced after a trip to The Haçienda in 1989, when he left Milton Keynes for the raves in Blackburn.
Kick Up the Volume, Quake and British hard house
Since 1988, he has worked in British house as a DJ and producer. In 1996, Kick Up the Volume, on XL Recordings, reached No. 84 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 5 on the dance chart, with support from Carl Cox, Pete Tong, and Judge Jules. As Quake, together with Ian Bland, he signed The Day Will Come (FFRR, 1998), a No. 53 single and compilation classic, and Mantra the following year; the duo also signed tracks for the Human Traffic soundtrack. He released music as Circle City on Warp and as Bobby Tee, and kept the pulse on the charts with Burning (2002), Stay (2004, No. 61), and Feel the Drums (2005). Hard house and hard trance led him to labels such as Tidy, Nukleuz, Y2K, and Masif, and to remix or cover tracks by Faithless, BK, or Armin van Buuren.
Kissdafunk, Essential Mix and the old school circuit
In Leeds, he co-founded Kissdafunk, a night that grew to become a brand and whose compilation reached No. 56 on the official compilation charts in 2007; GoodGreef Album 2 had reached No. 77 in 2004. On March 14, 2004, he signed a two-hour Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1. He has played at Creamfields, Global Gathering, Homelands, Tidy Weekenders, Sundissential, Gatecrasher, and Cream, and in Ibiza at Pacha, Amnesia, Space, Privilege, and Eden, with repeated tours through Australia and New Zealand. Today, he alternates the Tidy circuit with old school dates for Clockwork Orange, Raindance, Retro, and Bowlers, publishes mixes on SoundCloud and Mixcloud, maintains a slot on Centreforce 88.3, and in 2023, he condensed more than three decades in the booth into the book The Smiler: A DJ's Life.
