About Me

Oi! Oi! Oi! I am Andy Deegan aka Kaos A.D. I am a music obsessive, internationally renowned punk/metal D.J. and higher education planner/business intelligence specialist.

Music Obsessive

I was late to discover music. This can be blamed on three people. My Mum with her twee Irish folk (Daniel O'Donnell, Margo etc.), my Dad's love of country & western, particularly Johnny Cash, who I didn't appreciate at the time, and my older sister and her abhorrent taste for 80's pop.

I must have been about 13 when my dad handed me a tape he had found. What was important about this tape was that it had Iron Maiden's "Running Free". This introduced me to the power of a massive Marshall amp with overdrive set to 11 as Marty McFly would insist.

Luckily for me my discovery of hard rock/metal coincided with the release of the first album where I wore out the vinyl, Guns 'N Roses Appetite for Destruction. From the gateway high of that album I inevitably went on to discover heavier and heavier music from Sabbath to thrash, speed metal, death metal and grindcore.

Almost by accident my love for metal led me into punk. Whilst stuck at home in plaster after bursting a blood vessel in my knee at school a couple of my friends rallied round and lent me videos and records. I'm sure the night terrors I experienced had nothing to do with seeing Misery while incapacitated (no really thanks Bones). Apart from terrifying films I was also lent In God We Trust Inc.. and Skateboard Party by Dead Kennedys. Although I didn't realise at the time that I had been introduced to hardcore punk I would rediscover Jello and East Bay Ray which led me to '77 punk, American hardcore, D-beat and crust. This would eventually lead me to the second wave of punk and the whole EpiFat sound along with Oi and streetpunk.

Alongside my love for punk and metal, I have loved hip-hop since my early teens. The first album I ever bought was Rap Trax which had such rap legends as Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim and Run DMC. Discovering hip-hop opened up a totally different world of music than I'd heard before and helped to expand my tastes into funk, soul, blues, afrobeat and EDM.

When I went to uni in Guildford in the late 90s I became a member of it's finest music society, No Wave. Through that not only did I meet a group of fellow music obsessives, many of whom I'm still friends with over 2 decades later, but also got to DJ to a packed room on a regular basis. Through this I got to warm up the crowd for artists including the Lightning Seeds, Toploader, Mel C (of Spice Girls Fame) and The Supernaturals. In addition to this I got to host a weekly radio show, Strictly Hardcore, on GU2 with the living legend that is Tiger M. I still do the occasional set, mainly for house parties but if you want to hire me then drop me a message.

Psychology

My academic career has probably been best described by Chumbawumba. I failed a lot of my GCSE's, re-sat some and got into A-Levels that weren't suited to me which I failed on a spectacular level. That would have been the end of the story if it had not been for my friend Roisin who insisted I meet her at Kingsway College the morning after a night at the Electric Ballroom. It was the Sliding Doors moment of my life. If I had not followed through on that promise I would not have gone to University, moved to Scotland and by consequence met the love of my life, Jan.

I studied sociology and politics which I had done at GCSE at school. However, it was Psychology that was the subject that truly drew me in. Like most psychology students I didn't really know what it was but i was soon hooked. The basics (Freud, Pavlov, Skinner) just made me want to learn more. While I really enjoyed the social and cognitive psychology it was when we got to abnormal psychology that I really got passionate. This continued to when I studied a BSc Psychology at the University of Surrey. As part of my degree I was lucky enough to spend a year on a project looking at the beliefs that people have when experiencing verbal auditory hallucinations (aka hearing voices) in psychosis. There were times in that year that I was scared for my safety (especially when a social worker was killed my a potential patient in the study) and equally heart-breaking hearing the stories of struggles lasting decades that some people had survived.

During my year in Tooting, I became an avid reader of the research around psychosis and verbal auditory hallucinations including neurological, social psychology and cognitive behavioural theories. This helped to inform my dissertation on how social cognition (primarily the locus of control and adoption of the just world hypothesis) creates beliefs about voices. This was influenced by.............

When I graduated I wanted to become a clinical psychologist. However, despite applying for over 50 unpaid trainee psychologist posts I was never offered a position. In retrospect that may have been for the best as the role of a clinical psychologist is an unforgiving one. Despite that I still have an active interest in research into psychosis and hope to one day get around to putting down on paper a meta-analysis of the evidence.

Entering The Dataverse

After realising that my hope to become a clinical psychologist wouldn't come to fruition I needed a Plan B. I knew that I wanted to work in the public sector and in a health-related field. Thankfully I landed a job at the Commission for Health Improvement (now the Care Quality Commission) . The irony of my post was that it revolved around data analysis which was the one part of my degree that I despised.