Up to this point, it was a little known fact that Dekkard was most interested in writing songs. Being a remixer and dance programmer for the UK's #1 DJ sort of hid that fact, so Dekkard showed everyone what he could do on Meltdown's epic "My Life Is In Your Hands," a big vocal tune which Sony S2 put out in the interests of making it a full album deal. Actually hitting the UK top 40, for some reason or another, the album never materialized for the project. Just chalk it up to another bad-luck deal -- something Dekkard was getting quite accustomed to by now.
Sick of cloudy weather, bad plumbing and even worse food, Dekkard decided to move his rig and himself back to America. With his friendship with Debo on the mends, he moved down to Florida where Debo had relocated into top jock Kimball Collins' house. Dekkard got along great with Collins, and decided to stay there. Besides Collins and Debo though, the main reason he really dug Orlando was because of a PA he did at the Firestone Nightclub there. "I got a huge reception there; it was like I was landing off a plane as Prince Charles or something. They loved me and knew all my records and everything. It was my first experience with fan-dom." With his popularity amongst the punters there as well as Dekkard and Collins hitting it off well, he felt quite at home. Kimball ended up doing three different tracks with Dekkard, one, the double a-side "Hardlife"/"Lushlife" and then the follow-up "Starlife" all of which came out on Collins' Positivibes label and were licensed to Multiply Records in the UK. Dekkard was more than happy with the results. "More than making great music, I learned a great deal from Kimball on how to run your own label." Something that Dekkard plans to do sometime in the future.
Now that Dekkard was living in America, 7PM decided that it would be a great idea to jerk him for money that he had earned on remixes for D:Ream, and a whole slew of Perfecto releases. "They were mad because I left the UK; that I would no longer be the broom-man for their 7PM artists. So they were like 'lets do what we want with Rich's money because he's not here anymore and there's nothing he can do about it.' I resented that. They knew what I wanted to do with my career. While [being the broom-man] is great to learn, it's not great if you really want to go somewhere." This parting with 7PM became even more messy when Dekkard had done a track with Rollo's sister Dido (whom he had introduced to 7PM) and was well on his way to finishing an album with her when 7PM successfully convinced Dido that Dekkard was the equivalent to Timothy McVeigh. Of course, none of this went down well with Dekkard, so instead of going out and killing someone, he just laid low in Florida and sat around by the pool saying 'fuck everyone!' quite a bit. This hiatus lasted about five months. "I needed a break from my damaged feelings from being ripped off," he remembers, but then one day it hit him.
