You might have heard of Andy Cato. There’s Groove Armada (of course). And before that, there was The Beat Foundation, as well as Journey Man DJ, Big C, The System, Seventh Sense and a whole bewildering array of others large and small. That’s some pedigree, chum.

He’s been a bit of a musical prodigy for a while. There were the forays into piano playing, spurred on by a trad-jazz lovin’ dad, the blues gigs to earn some cash. He plays the trombone, too, a beautiful and majestic instrument with the right amount of puff and embouchure. And, as a Barnsley lad, there’s only one place for a trombone player with chops and that’s a brass band, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, only one of the finest collection of horn players about. “The standard of musicianship was like nothing I’ve encountered since,” claims Andy. “Amazing.”

Inevitably, there was an intrusion of the rave variety that thwarted plans for brass domination. “I remember the occasional pretty vividly,” he recalls. “I went to Leeds one night and it was one of the first parties organised by Tony Hannon, who used to do Kaos and Soak. It was one of those epiphanies when you walk into a room [nods head] and go, “OK. Yeah, I’ll have some of that.” These feelings were cemented by his older cousin, Digs, partner to Whoosh and part of the Nottingham legends DiY sound system, who introduced him to a world of squat parties, military transport, lugging sound systems and, of course, exquisite taste in deep house.

It was a whirl of activity. There was the studio underneath the snooker club. The formation of the Beat Foundation, who signed a deal with Virgin, The tours up and down the byways and raveways of the UK. But fate intervened. Andy’s then girlfriend Jo (now wife), introduced him to Tom Findlay. That’s Groove Armada, that is. “We ended up in east London it was still a bit more of a ruin and we wound up doing warehouse parties with Tim ‘Love’ Lee.”

Their first album was recorded in a week in the Yorkshire Dales, after Tim had asked them to record a 12-inch to promote their parties. Zoe Ball championed ‘At The River’ and they began to fly. The rest is hysteria. There are echoes of those early freewheeling Groove Armada recordings in the DNA of Times & Places. “Some of the tunes on the album come from around that period and even before that, in idea form at least. I suppose it’s written in a similar way; it’s an uncomplicated, morning-after take on dance music.”

Like an elephant’s pregnancy, this album has been gestating for some time, almost 20 years in fact (the first is from 1993). “I was travelling back from a gig recently and I had an idea for a tune . I was just jotting it down and I thought, ‘I’ve been doing this for ages, I wonder where all the others are?’ So I went to find the remaining fragments and try and put them together. Everyone of these songs immediately takes me back to a place and a time where it all happened.”

Sorting through the corrupted discs, snapped four and eight-track tapes, the withered floppy discs and the plain missing, part of the process of creating the album has been the search and, in a few cases, restoration. “Most of them have not been touched,” explains Andy. “I’ve had to recreate one or two because they were on C-90s and even if you like the lo-fi aesthetic, it was just too much. But some of them were in great nick, like the one recorded at Abbey Road.”

This is a personal record of someone’s trip through the mortal maze of dance music. “I did it for me,” asserts Cato. “I was worried that anyone else might not have the same feelings when they heard the tracks, but I played it to some people and they seemed to get caught up in the journey as well.” It’s all in there somewhere. The squat raves. The Pepsi-sponsored stages. The DJ gigs in front of 100,000 people. Arriving at an LA gig in a Sopwith Camel. It’s a history of the past 20 years through the lens of one person. Enjoy the ride.