Party: Phil Mison / An Evening With & Mixtape

Be rude not to write about this one… A whole night with Phil playing music for just over a fiver will be brilliant from the off. I’ll not say much more but recommend heavily and for more information you can go here.

While on the subject of Phil, Faith Fanzine asked Phil to do them a mix tape for the last issue and here it is. You can also listen to it here. Here’s the piece…

What other DJ can claim to have been resident at Cafe del Mar during its peak period of the ‘Chill out’ phenomenon, paving the way for all those festivals full of Guardian-reading, lentil-munching folk who went to school with David Cameron? Actually that’s not his fault as he is one fucking hell of a DJ with a deep knowledge and love of the music and a party. Phil didn’t choose this mixtape for you to play while you lay back and chill as your Cath Kidston, welly-wearing wife keeps Oliver and Lucinda out of the circus tent, but for you and your skanky pals to munch on a couple of little green fellas and a cold Union beer.

Pastor TL Barrett – Like a Ship (Light in the Attic)
An obscure gospel album recently re-issued on Light in the Attic. Made by Pastor Barrett in 1971 to attract people to his church in Chicago, I heard this and instantly loved it. I’m sure there are hundreds of amazing privately pressed gospel albums that I’ll never hear, but I’m just happy discovering this one.

Eloise Laws – Love Factory (Inferno)
Taken from the ‘Out on the Floor’ compilation by Neil Rushton, I first heard my friend’s older brother playing this when I was about 12. Everything from the cover artwork with a map of England showing mysterious places like the Twisted Wheel, Samanthas, and the Catacombs, to the incredible music made me rush out and buy a copy, even though I knew nothing about northern soul.

Jackie Lee – Darkest Days (Kent)
An emotional, raw, soulful track about a man going through a hard time. After ‘Out on the Floor’ I bought the first few Kent compilations. This is from number seven ‘Floorshakers’. I started venturing up to London and remember going to Grapevine Records in an indoor market off Carnaby Street. Seemed like a big adventure at the time, like going to another planet.

Ten City – Devotion (Atlantic)
The first time I went to Groove Records in about November ‘87 I bought this and Masters at Work ‘Alright Alright’. That started years of wandering West End record shops, if I didn’t go at least once a week I used to panic that I’d missed out on something. I bought anything that had Marshall Jefferson’s name on it, after Devotion came ‘Right Back to You’, it just blew me away.

William Onyeabor – Fantastic Man (Wilfims)
A friend went to New York a few years ago for a record fair, I gave him some money and in the pile he bought back was this. A Nigerian disco album from ‘79, the cover is knackered and the vinyl is pretty scratched, still sounds good when you play it out though.

West India Company – Ave Maria (London)
In about 2003/4 myself and my friend Oscar put on monthly Sunday afternoon parties at a bar in West Hampstead. One of our regular guests was DJ Gareth, ex Market Tavern / Love Muscle. I could have picked any one of his tracks, Melba Moore ‘Standing Right Here’, It’s Immaterial ‘Space’, Dennis Parker ‘Like an Eagle’, but Ave Maria was always played when it was most busy and people had had a few cocktails too many. Detroit Spinners ‘Ghetto Child’ always went down well too.

Teaspoon and the Waves- O Yeh Soweto (Sofrito)
A super rare track from their 1980 LP, re-issued by Sofrito. A kind of cover version of Back To My Roots (same music, different vocals), this sounded good the other week at Ross Allen’s Meltdown down the Social.

Gil Scott Heron – Angola Louisiana (Arista)
From his Secrets album, this is about the state prison in Louisiana, the largest in the US. It’s Gil imagining how grim it must be to be in there. Fond memories of hearing this at Chris’s afterhours in San Diego, a private club built in an office on the outskirts of San Diego. Thanks to Hugh for taking me there!

Eric Kupper – Planet K (Tribal)
Muzik magazine organised a tour of Portugal in 1995 with a few DJ’s from England, Portugal and the U.S. Elliot Eastwick played this on the first night at the Kremlin in Lisbon and it just sounded brilliant. The week ended with Tony Humphries playing in the courtyard of a castle and Phil Perry finding an unmanned bar with free beer (a highlight of the week).

Angelique Kidjo – Batonga (Club mix)
A record I used to play a lot at the beginning of my, fairly unintentional, DJ career. Reminds me of too many vodka jellys at the Milk Bar, freezing in the bar at the Ministry and playing it most nights in Ibiza as it’s pretty long and was good to put on and nip to the loo. Heard Mark 7 play it at Disco Bloodbath last year, still sounded good.

The Crow – Your Autumn of Tommorow (Inferno)
Couldn’t resist putting another one on from the Out on the Floor album. Was either this or the Carstairs ‘It Really Does Hurt Me Girl’ which still gives me goosebumps when i hear the intro. ‘Your Autumn of Tomorrow’ is a strange piece of psychedelic funk which, according to the sleeve notes, was massive at the Blackpool Mecca.

Maxx Mann – Bloody and Blue (Red Dog)
‘This is a hot, new album by a New York City artist Maxx Mann. The music is beyond new wave and punk. People who enjoy late hour dancing will certainly crowd the floor for more than one cut of this record’… or so says the press release from this 1982 oddball disco release.

Jorge Ben – Curumin Chama (Orio)
I always thought Brazil was the land of gentle bossa nova, cocktails and exotic women. I recently saw a documentary on the history of Brazilian music, in which quite a few musicians had to seek refuge in London in the 70’s as they were being persecuted by the government (which was a military dictatorship) for being too political and subversive. Fantastic track which is generally known as “that one with the dog on the cover”.

Shuggie Otis – Aht Uh Mu Head (Resolution)
Best known for Strawberry Letter 23, first heard this on a Blessed Blackness compilation. I used to do the warm up sometimes at Plastic People, when it was in Oxford Street and the decks were on washing machines. Harri was the resident, he was always there early, I used to stick this on and have a chat. Nice bloke, very good DJ.

Jon Lucien – Listen Love (Verve)
Was aware of this first from a Jazz Juice compilation, but it didn’t really make sense until I heard Dave Henley play it one sunny afternoon at a Boys Own party. I was lucky enough to see him live at Dingwalls before he sadly passed away.

Pat Metheny – Last Train Home (Geffen)
I’m a big Pat Metheny fan, could have picked quite a few of his tracks to put on here. From the letters from home album, I’ll always remember playing this and a friend walking up and saying ‘ whats this?.. sounds like the theme from crossroads’.

Marvin Gaye – Where Are We Going (Motown)
Originally on a bootleg 12, this was finally released on a best of CD, a great track that could have fitted nicely onto whats going on. Years ago i saw a documentary where he goes to Belgium to get away from it all and sort his life out. At one point he goes into a church and sings the lords prayer, im not religious but that really got to me. Thanks to Moonboots for playing me this.

Wim Mertens – The Scene (Les Disques du Crepsucule)
Don’t know much about Wim Mertens apart from his Belgian and his music was used in the ‘belly of an architect’. Some of his tracks are bit too avant garde for me, but he’s done some real gems too, would love to see him in concert. This track reminds me of Ibiza.

Thanks to Faith.

[Apiento]

Interview: Mike Allen / DJ, Presenter & Capital Radio Legend

I love the internet and its ability to move you around a topic. The other day via Facebook I saw a Groove Records rundown from the Mike Allen Capital Rap Show and then had a dig about and ended up finding an interview with the man himself courtesy of long time B-Boys the Essex Rockerz (check their Flickr page for graffiti goodness) via Charlie Dark’s Nike Run Dem Crew Twitter feed. That right there is the joys of the internet for me. Anyway, back on topic, here’s the interview with Mike Allen courtesy of Mark & Howard of the Essex Rockerz.

Mark/Howard: Well obviously firstly, thanks for doing this Mike. The first area we would like to talk about is, although we knew you from hip hop, you were quite a major player in the soul weekender/jazz funk scene?

MA: What happened, I joined Capital in 1975 and prior to doing that I’d been a professional disc jockey, in other words I’d relied on playing records for a living since 1970. So I had my own sound system, employees, road crew and stuff like that, so when I joined capital in 1975, they started getting excited about doing gigs. So I spoke to them and said “I can rent you the gear”, they said “that’ll be good”, so I started up a company called ‘MARS’ (Mike Allen Rental Services) which was based in Lotts Rd in Chelsea and we supplied Capital with all the audio and the outside lighting for their outside appearances. And then it grew and we took on bands like Robert Palmer and stuff like that, we actually did Gary Glitter… but we didn’t get paid so I don’t suppose that counts or was that tongue in the mouth (laughs).

We used to do loads of people, huge acts like The Commodores all their European stuff. So I was working in Capital from 1975 and around 1979/80 they said did I want to do lunchtimes (I was working nights) and I think I worked pretty much every shift in that station and then in 1984 I’d pretty much had enough because if two records came out and one was Rod Stewart and the other something different, Rod Stewart, being indicative of established white orientated rock, would be the one on the play list, and I desperately wanted to do something that would change the balance. I mean its alright being a ‘jock’ and doing little tricky things that impress other ‘jocks’, you know like getting the jingles to match one after the other or getting the records in the same key and you’d cue it and just take the front end out of a boring record so it would all just go ‘ba da da bang!’

You know it would be like a fuselage of shot across the studio and everyone goes “wow” with adulation. But six people know you’ve done it and the other million listeners don’t have a clue and are like “so what?” So I just thought I want to do something that’s good and then I got into listening to hip hop and of course I was listening, as a lot of people did then, to ‘best of ’ compilations like the ‘Electro’ series.

Mark/Howard: So this was at home?

MA: Well, I’ve worked 6/7 days a week for ever so no, this was in the office. So I’d have a desk like this (points to our similar environment) and Roger Scott used to sit there and I’d sit here and this was our little office and there’d be a record player and some cupboards and stuff and that was our little world. We were surrounded by vinyl…it was incredible. So anyway, I was getting really into this (music) because it had an energy and around 1984 stuff was very quiet, we were getting stuff like Aha and things like that, you know that was around. But it was all a bit too ‘synthy’, it didn’t have any grit.

Mark/Howard: It was too clean sounding?

MA: Yeah, and everyone had backcombed hair, but from the age of 11 I’d been playing the guitar, so I knew a bit about the construction of music and I think then somebody played me Double Dee and Steinski!

Mark/Howard: So that would of been the first cut you heard?

MA: Well it was around about that time, and I listened to it and I loved the construction of it… I really loved it. It was the first Double D and Steinski, so I thought this is good and I was doing the Friday and the Saturday night shift so I thought let me just try out a little bit and it was very, very different to the stuff that was around at that time.

Also it sounded very compressed because don’t forget we were talking about compilation albums, so I went down to Jean at Groove Records because Chris Palmer, he and his brother used to run Groove. Chris and I used to play in a band together, he used to play bass guitar and I used to play lead. So I knew his mother – ‘aunty Jean’ Anyway, I picked up some real stuff and that was the difference you see because the New York cuts, they cut the vinyl, you know pressed it so deep, the depth of the cut determined the amount of vibration you got from the stylus and when the stylus dropped in, if you had a really deep cut, you got loads of movement in the stylus and it sounded like a rocket going off. It was like giving a pre-amp boost to your amplifier, like you boosted the signal before you put it in. A New York cut was cut deep, an LA cut, stuff like Egyptian Lover wouldn’t of been cut as deep, until maybe when Dr Dre started and you started to get the records cut with the New York sound.

Mark/Howard: Do you think LA took from that New York sound?

MA: Look, I’ve only got to tell you a joke, like get the meatballs out mother, there’s a fork in the road. its gone, your gonna give it to somebody else. A lot of guys for example would record and album over here, but then take the finished tapes over to NY so you’d get it cut in NY. We over here probably had a better overview of that American scene than any American, because we were getting stuff shipped over from all over America to the UK. That would not of been the case stateside because New Yorkers would have been fiercely NY and the same with LA. Texas as well was starting to produce a sound, I think around 1985 – a three man crew. I can’t remember their name? It was hard though, too hard, you couldn’t play it on the radio…

Mark/Howard: I’ll bet it was that group ‘The Future – Easy Mike inc’, they did a track called ‘Prelude Its Real’?

MA: (shrugging) 15 years ago… I can’t remember where I was last night! (big laughs) The trouble is you know, that there is so much information in front of you, and I can tell you how I put a show together, i.e. I had a turntable and I used to go through stuff…. da da da da… no ….da da da da… yes. I could hear it and remember the beat pattern and tell you exactly where the cut point is because all those shows that we recorded were all done on fixed speed turntables, they didn’t have vary speeds.

Mark/Howard: Ah yes that reminds me, on the phone you mentioned about this ruling by the radio authority banning the use of Technics in those days?

MA: Yes the radio authority didn’t consider the output signal of a vari-speed Technics up to their standard of broadcasting practice, which was total nonsense because I used to record the national show for Radio Luxembourg, and they used to use vari speed Technics with no problem at all. The capital stuff was all fixed speeds.

Mark/Howard: So what about those mixes then, I remember Froggy being quite prevalent on the show….

MA: Yes, he was really good…

Mark/Howard: And when you got those mixes, were they recorded outside of your studio at Capital?

MA: Well, if it was a Froggy mix or Simon Harris, yeah they would come with a piece of tape. “Hi mike…. Friday night, do you want to play this?” Yes, if they were good, and some of them were not, not talking about Froggy or Simon Harris but I mean quite a lot of people sent stuff in. When I started, people like Simon Harris might have been into hip hop but he wasn’t doing mixes and Froggy he was doing …. he used to … Oh I was telling you about the sound system at Capital, well the rival outfit to Capital in London was Radio London and Radio London with Chris Hill and Robbie Vincent, they used to do weekenders and they used to do the holiday camps. I only ever did one, somewhere in Lowestoft….

Mark/Howard: That would’ve been Caister?

MA: Yes that was it. They offered me an hour and I got too much money for it, oh God, and so those Caister Weekenders were largely Froggy’s sound system and not mine.

Mark/Howard: So do you think he was influenced by you doing the radio show?

MA: In the 1970’s early 1980’s there was a club in Down Street in Mayfair called ‘Gullivers’ and there was a band called Heatwave (above) who used to hang out there and the house DJ – Graham started to get into mixing. Remembering at that time DJ’ ing was a guy with 2 turntables, saying ‘Mr Steviiiieeeee Wondeeeeer’ and all that jazz.

So the concept of a jock not saying anything, you know doing running mixes with varispeed turntables and things like that, that was one of the clubs where it started and it was influenced a lot in the press by a guy called James Hamilton who was a librarian at Capital, but he also used to run James Hamilton discotheques. He was very public school, very grand you know “Oh hello Micheal”. Anyway, he used to do these discos and I used to do a lot of West End Hotels before I got into radio, all the Park Lane stuff all the time and we used to have a truck – a lorry – a seven toner with air brakes. I used to love that.

So anyway, James Hamilton brought his knowledge of doing mobile discos for society in the late 60’s early 70’s and was a big soul music & black music fan. He was writing about this for Sounds or maybe NME and then he was working going to see guys in other clubs and this whole mix thing grew in 1979 early 1980 where people didn’t speak and just played the tunes. Now what have we got? Fatboy Slim, probably the best example who doesn’t say a word apart from when he get’s the money and I bet he says ‘thank you soooo muuuch’. So anyway that set the platform for the hip hop mixes because peoples ears were set up for it so I thought what i’d do were 20 minute sweeps, you know like 3 x 20 minute sweeps. As a concept it was good because I mentioned earlier the ‘cartoon’ aspect of hip hop and I don’t think people truly understand, when you say cartoon, people think your saying its cheap, although I thought it very clever because cartoons are clever by nature, taking an idea and presenting it beautifully clearly. And it was comedic, that beat….

(Mike illustrates by beatboxing in his own style a beat…boo daa boo dooh baaaa boo daa boo dooh baaa…etc. The best example I can think of is “six minutes, six minutes, six minutes Doug E Fresh your on.”

Mark/Howard: Well that just blew up didn’t it big time?

MA: I’ve got a gold disc, no, silver disc of that for 250,000 sales, they must have sold over half a million on import. When it came out in the UK they said will you be playing it on your show and I said “Well I played it about six months ago.” But that has that cartoon quality which makes it so approachable and it was absolutely magical because to me, raised on rock and roll, I was thinking “oh this has got energy hasn’t it?” And those drum beats – I used to love it!

Mark/Howard: But again, the production on it was phenomenal wasn’t it? It was so heavy. We were going to clubs in the early 90’s and they were bringing that track back and it’d blow the jam, you know, you’d have all this new stuff and someone would put ‘The Show’ on and the younger kids would be going what the hell is this?

MA: Well, because it was cut for effect, we all were into that NY sound. It was very, very strong a lot of bottom end. He was a really nice guy Dougie, such a nice guy…

So that sort of sets up the scene for you, so you can see where we were getting into mixing we’d got way from voicing every link. So the concept of mixing with vari-speed turntables, although that wasn’t the case at Capital, that’s what resulted in that particular style of mine which was little drop ins and breakbeats, so you’d be coming off of one lets say 98bpm track and you wanted to get into a track that was 96bpm, there were ways, I mean, Froggy was very inventive, at one time at live gigs he used to lean his thumb against the turntable to slow it…to break it, so he could thumb in the track from the next turntable.

Mark/Howard: His reputation is sound, a lot of people rate him as one of the best mix DJ’s on the planet.

MA: Oh, he’s very, very good. I haven’t heard him recently (Froggy passed away after this interview was done), I mean we’re talking about 17 years ago, but he was very inventive and James Hamilton as well. Froggy, he was very kind to me because he always used to bring a mix around, not loads, because I don’t think he did a lot, but he’d bring something around and it was good …. always good, very clean, workmanlike, you know nothing naff or scruffy about it. It was good stuff.

Mark/Howard: As well then, we were talking on the phone about your own mixes for the show. I’ll always remember the James Brown Livin’ in America mix, so how healthy was your interest in producing stuff?

MA: Oh yeah, well those boys used to bring in a mix maybe once a month, but that wouldn’t been in the first 2 years. In the first two years, 1984 to 1986 I was on my own out there, a lot of people just couldn’t believe I was doing it. They were absolutely outraged at Capital – “What, does he know what he’s doing?” I mean when I was putting the show together on a Friday, you could imagine, there’d be all the FM rock boys and there’d be this noise come thundering out of this office, because you got to wind it up haven’t you? You can’t just let it sit. I subsequently learnt that the youth profile of the station was held up by my two shows.

Mark/Howard: Do you think that Capital were aware that this whole thing was going to ‘blow up’?

MA: No….no.

Mark/Howard: Or were you?

MA: I wasn’t doing it because I wanted it to be a success, I was involved with it because I liked playing with it, it was incredible and when Morgan Khan asked me to do a remix to Masquerade’s The Solution to the Problem’ we just got the back end of it, turned it up, just got clear tape and put that stuff on it with Ronald Reagan…did you ever hear it?

Mark/Howard: Oh yes!

MA: (laughing) Did you hear the bottom end on it? It was so bassy it was incredible. We didn’t do the vocal, we did the Def Dance Mix, me and a couple of guys, which was the B side.

Mark/Howard: They put that mix on Electro 13 which was the UK Fresh retrospective…

MA: There were guys using it to cut up with at Fresh…. They quite liked the fact that there was Margaret Thatcher, I mean now its a bit passe but it was alright at the time.

Mark/Howard: Talking of Thatcher, I remember a jingle that you used use with an impersonator of her “You are listening to….Mike Allen”

MA: Yeah, yeah…Nnnnoww, nnnooww.

Mark/Howard: Who sorted that?

MA: Bill Mitchell was the guy that did all the stuff for capital…(Deep voice) “all the hits and more …. 194.” Well, Bill Mitchell was a Canadian and he was a mate of one of my best friends, so when they got Bill to do the station idents at capital they did mine…. thank you very much.

The two guys that I asked to help me on The Solution to the Problem, were called Ed Stratton and Vlad, and they helped me in the studio, one worked as a tape operator and one worked the desk. We did it (the remix) in about 3 hours, the remix from the master tapes, it wasn’t a cut up it was a remix that was turned into a dance track, I mean ‘Solution to the Problem’ although being a really nice pop song – it didn’t do anything for me, so we added a really good drum pattern, and turned it into something completely different….and that bass drum, the bass end on it – was so hooligan because it was a bit Schoolly D, it was a bit splattery, it wasn’t clean you know?

Mark/Howard: So do you know how many people were listening to your show at that
time, did Capital ever monitor it?

MA: well, I think its a bit like a great magazine, you know they’d probably punch out about 50,000 copies and you’d read yours and then pass it onto someone else and so on. So you probably got 150,000/200,000 readers in effect. So most of the people that would listen to what I was doing on a Saturday would record it, which was why TDK wanted to sponsor the national show. I mean they approached me and said we found all these kids breakdancing in Tunbridge Wells….Tunbridge Wells! And they’d said to them “what are you doing” and they’d said they we’re listening to this hip hop show on the radio. And the TDK people had said, “what is it on now?” The kids had said “no…. we record it.” That was to the PR person at TDK and you know the next phone called they made … was to me.

Mark/Howard: And when was that?

MA: That was about ‘84 mid around ‘85, just before T-KID came over (the clip below has Mike interviewing T-KID on his trip to London).

Mark/Howard: OK, was that part of the promotion for the show?

MA: That’s a good question, but no it was a completely separate issue, but I think maybe it came off the back of the T-KID thing.

Mark/Howard: Oh right, because to me, when I heard about it, it was like TDK were promoting hip hop and the other elements of hip hop rather than just the music.

MA: Well that’s right, cos they wanted to get people to buy tape…

Mark/Howard: Even though its so called ‘illegal’ to tape radio shows?

MA: Oh yes, of course! And your not supposed to go out with girls either.

Mark/Howard: Well younger ones anyway.

MA: I don’t mind them in there thirties, but then to me that’s young!

Mark/Howard: So what about interviews, was it up to you to hunt these people down?

MA: Well I can categorically say that there was no support from anything in the UK, virtually everything on that show was imported and I paid for it.

Mark/Howard: So Capital weren’t interested whatsoever?

MA: The format, the content, the jingles, you know Vlad made the jingles, you know the Mike Allen theme, and I gave them their name in exchange for it, which was ‘Sonic Graffiti’.

Mark/Howard: Were you aware at that time of all the elements in hip hop?

MA: No it was unfolding. You look back on it and it’s very easy to see, like in a rear view mirror, but going through that time, we didn’t know where it was going one week to the next. I can remember Paul Oakenfold coming to see me when he was a promotions guy at CBS and saying “this album is brilliant”, so I said “well give us one then” and he said “well, I’ve only got a cassette”, I said “that’ll do” and it was Public Enemy!

Mark/Howard: And the rest is history!

MA: Yeah, but I mean that’s how huge tracks arrived, on little scaby cassettes. I remember going to Lyor Cohen’s wedding and the whole Def Jam posse went down to the Dominican Republic and we were staying in this hotel, and everyone was there. Public Enemy was playing out of speakers hung from a hotel balcony, and this was a brand new hotel, never been open till that day and everybody was there… you know Beastie Boys and the whole New York Posse…what a fuck off event that was. Public Enemy were playing their second album out over the pool you know, and LL came out of his room about once a day and went back in with his young friend. But they had the biggest throwdown you’ve ever seen.Run DMC the whole lot; the night after the wedding. Anybody who was anybody on the East Coast was there.

Mark/Howard: Lets now touch on you own style of, because to me you were, in the nicest possible way, so uncool you were cool. I mean we all remember that flowery shirt you wore on ‘Electro Rock’.

MA: Oh yeah.

Mark/Howard: Or a yellow suit for UK Fresh, more like Miami Vice.

MA: Actually it was blue, I changed, I had a dark blue brocade one with a peach vest. This was 1986, it was Don Johnson time – Crockett and Tubbs. I had a light blue suit on in the evening.

Mark/Howard: But the guys you met up with, like the rap guys, would they be sort of “What’s Mike wearing?” Because if you met Run DMC, they’d be about Adidas and ‘goose down’ jackets.

MA: Yes

Mark/Howard: I mean the first time I went to NY, I had to have a goose down jacket, you know, I had to find De Lancey St and I had to have a goose down jacket. So I thought maybe that would influence you? Or was it because you were a little bit older?

MA:Years ago, I had my first bank account when I was nine, I mean I wasn’t necessarily rich, but I knew the style that I liked. I still get my shirts in Jermyn St and my 9oz wool suits, you know, I know what I like. I still wore baseball jackets and lace front trousers but I was conscious of the fact that I was in my late thirties and those guys were doing what they do and I didn’t want to imitate them because I was presenting the music and what I wore or did, well that was my style. This whole business of disappearing into the background you know wearing black trousers and a black shirt, you know can’t be seen – man of mystery, I think is all bollocks. “Yeah I wanna’ be seen, I did this.’

At this point in the interview, its time to get a few goodies out to see if Mike remembers some of those cuts. He is handed an original of ‘It’s Yours’ T La Rock & Jazzy Jay, but hey all you collectors who’ve think they’ve got the original on a maroon Def Jam label, think again, try finding it on the ‘Partytime’ label. An original ‘Johhny the Fox’ Tricky T seems to do it for Mike as does a scarce ‘Hard To The Body’ Point Blank M.C’s in which we remind Mike that he gets a name check in the track.

Mike enthuses about the Duke Bootee style of production used on that and more obviously the Word of Mouth records. Indeed he attributes the Duke Bootee sound as the archetypal New York cut sound of those mid-eighties. Among other records brought out include ‘Power Drill’ Goon Squad, ‘One Way Love’ TKA Crew, ‘You Don’t Really Wanna Battle’ Cutmaster DC and the monumental ‘My Hands Are Quicker Than The Eye’ Byron Davis and the Fresh Crew.

Mark/Howard:: Are there any others that you remember from those times?

MA: I always thought Mantronix were very good value for money, especially from a fan’s point of view and the fact that he (Mantronik) produced good stuff and it was always fresh. I mean for a lot of these guys it was tough, because they’d have been listening to other people and all of sudden they get a record deal and probably had about three or four good ideas in their head and then they’re expected to do an album, you know “oh Christ! What are we going to do?”. So by the time you’ve done the remixes, the black car mix, the white car mix…..then that should fill it. So it was very tough, you see I could go on air once, twice a week and play stuff, but I wasn’t actually in a stones throw of the people, but those guys would do stuff and it had to be good otherwise they just get booed off. It was a tough gig to get that right. I can’t think of much else that in those times was so far in front of anything else, I think Duke Bootee’s stuff was good; most of his crews were out of New Jersey.

Mark/Howard: Well that leads us onto the one thing that every nostalgia head will talk about and that is the infamous Word of Mouth Crew session on the Friday night before UK FRESH. Are your memories pretty good of that?

MA: Yes, I mean they just turned up and said they’d like to do something. I think we had studio 4 which was a major music studio at capital at the time, so Ed set it up because he was the recording engineer and recorded it. He was in there to play the commercials because at the time the DJ didn’t play the commercials because DJ’s were some lesser species, you know tainted. So anyway, Ed got the levels and we’re like “you ready to go boys?” And away they went and it just ran live.

Mark/Howard: So where would you be sitting?

MA: So o.k, I’d be sitting here (gestures) and you’d have the window into the master control room studio B at Capital, studio over there, window into master control room and then on the right, studio 4, major music studio. So Ed just gave me all the commercials and said “you play ‘em, I’m going off to fix this”. So I was like, playing the commercials, cueing the mixes and talking at the same time, fortunately there wasn’t a broom in the studio otherwise I might of had another little jobby. And we just did it, live, and it was so slick, so absolutely excellent, so much energy – incredible!

Mark/Howard: At that time, he (Cheese – above) was seen as the best scratch mix DJ?

MA: Yeah, yeah – incredible.

Mark/Howard: And of course you had the other one Jazzy Jeff (& Fresh Prince)?

MA: Yes, I had them both on the program a couple of times and they were good, they were good, very, very good.

Mark/Howard: DJ Cheese though, was seen as the the street DJ?

MA: Yeah, he was a gun fighter wasn’t he?

Mark/Howard: And then Jeff who was the cleaner cut?

MA: Suburban, you know, out somewhere in the Hamptons type.

Mark/Howard: Yes, and you’d never really class them (Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince) as hardcore hip hop.

MA: I know exactly what you mean.

Mark/Howard: But saying that, look at show Jeff did in Madison Square Garden in 1986 where he did the ‘transformer’ scratch and the whole of the crowd went bonkers! They might have been ‘party rap’ but as a DJ he was top of his game in my eyes….

MA: I saw him do it at the Albert Hall, I mean stunning, soooo slick. But there was a funkiness about Cheese that Jeff didn’t have… it was something funky and I suppose it’s like comparing Jimi Hendrix with Eric Clapton, you know Jimi Hendrix would play just 3 notes and you’d go “Oh Yeah!” that’ll be the three won’t it? and then Eric Clapton would do it and you’d go “Yes…very nice”. And that was that quality that Cheese had, just that side of dangerous.

Mark/Howard: At UK FRESH they did two shows didn’t they?

MA: Yes that’s right, not many acts did two shows.

Mark/Howard: And that was the one thing that I thought was great, because Mark, being slightly younger than myself, had to go to the day show, and I went to the evening show and it was only when we both came back that we were able to talk about it… and then I told him about Mantronix ‘cos they only did one show.

MA: Yes they only did one show, closing show two.

Mark/Howard: I remember you saying that because the Mantronix set was so hot, Wembley were charging you for every minute that set ran over?

MA: Oh yeah, because we had a penalty clause so that for every minute after 11pm we were getting charged and we would have to pay and Mantronix were rolling over and I’d said to (Kurtis) Mantronik before he went on, look don’t go over 11 O’clock whatever you do as we really can’t afford it. And he was going on and going on and I’m standing at the side of the stage with Morgan (Khan) hollering “finish – finish up” (big laughs) and of course the crowds going mad. Bloody hell! Whilst all this is going on, you’ve got the tills at Wembley Arena going “kerching, kerching… thank you very much.”

Mark/Howard: So when the time came for you to move to LBC, were you aware that something had ended, maybe that golden era?

MA: Well I was still doing National Fresh so that didn’t finish till 1987 and I moved
to LBC in September 1987, so at that point there was still another year to go at least and I was doing this thing on Sunday afternoons called ‘Street Talk’ which was about the music, but having a slightly broader palette because we were talking about collectable old soul and we were doing mixes and talking to people like Coldcut and things like that. It was, strangely, at the very front end of people mixing at home and creating their own stuff. We’d have guys that would do the 12 week course on how to master the art of sampling… And you had that guy from ‘the Prodigy’ who won the mix competition. So it was good, and I think it was very much of its time, but then I think that capital got a bit annoyed that we were doing it because in their eyes LBC should have been a speech station only and because I’d said to them “I’m walking”. So LBC – I only did that for six months.

Mark/Howard: So then, its quite interesting what you’ve always maintained that you didn’t leave hip hop, it left you?

MA: Oh absolutely, it just walked away from me, I mean I was doing capital and the national show and then LBC in which there really was a lot of information in that show. It’d take a day of studio production before that show went out, and remember everything was over beats.

Mark/Howard: So maybe that’s why that change came about as Mike Allen, that person in hip hop at a certain time, but because it became more about conversation and explaining….

MA: I can see why you’d say that, but I’d signed to do five speech shows a week – Monday to Friday with LBC and one contemporary music show, but I think it really had just come to an end. You know its like relationships – you just look around one day and think I don’t want to do this anymore; or they look around to you and say it. It just wasn’t there for me anymore and it wasn’t my plan to walk away, it’s just that areas to do it went and strangely, this probably sounds very flashy and I don’t mean it too, but I thought I’ll finish doing live gigs at Wembley on the 6th June 1986 and that’ll be it – no more. So yeah, that’s what happened, it wasn’t anybody blowing me out the water or anything like that.

Mark/Howard: So did it take a period of time for the phone calls regarding hip hop to die out etc?

MA: Yes, but it moved on so quickly, you know, a river has very little loyalty does it? It comes down, touches the bank here and there and then its gone, and that’s the way with music – if your not there to give it a platform, it moves on, thank you, gone.

Mark/Howard: That’s quite true, when you think about it, as I said, there was nobody else doing it…so if it wasn’t for you, the like of Mark and myself and thousands of other kids would never have heard this music.

MA: That’s really nice to hear, but don’t forget that I had a great time and that was the great thing about it – that we didn’t know where we were going with it – we were making it up as we went along and it gave me an insight for what it must have felt like for people like the Beatles because they were making it up as they went along, they didn’t know what they were doing, everyone assumed they did, they were going “what if we play this chord after that? Oh that’s sounds good.”

So I can understand how stuff happens because that whole era was such an eye opener for me because you like to think that somebody somewhere has got the master plan and reality they haven’t. It was terrific, had a great time doing it. I enjoyed it although I didn’t do it for the money – I never made a great deal out of it, but I got so much enjoyment out of it.

Mark/Howard: What about now? It seems your not really aware of the reverence by a lot of those kids (now adults) from that era, and infact, I haven’t met one old schooler who doesn’t smile and profess and certain degree of respect for ‘The Boss in London’- Mike Allen.’

MA: Some people have called me from time to time, you know asking for copies of the shows and if I want to sell them? The answer to that is no. I haven’t got a single radio show I did. And that’s all really, you see I’ve not gone back there – I just did it and now it’s in somebody else’s hands now. I carried the torch for a while and said after “there you go – its yours now.”

Mark/Howard: I think that’s an interesting point, the fact that you haven’t come back to talk about it. We’ve never seen you in magazines etc. Everyone asks “where did Mike Allen go?”

MA: The strange thing was, I was still on the radio all the time, just turn the dial and I’d be there: “hello”. You see stuff changes and that’s one of the sad things about people that cannot accept change, they get old before their time and that’s why young people move forward, or younger thinking people, because their prepared to accept change, you know, if something alters – fine, they go with it. When you start to be intransigent and say “oh no this has to be this way” well that’s wrong, otherwise if we’d have been intransigent then we’d have never had hip hop. You’ve got to open that door and let it in, because if you don’t, it’ll push you out the way.

Mark/Howard: I think this is the problem that we’ve found now, that because all the history has been made, documented and ‘approved’ by all the self appointed style councils – stuff seems to be stunted and regressive.

MA: Definitely.

Mark/Howard: To becoming an almost ‘closed’ culture, you know if your not in a certain clique, ‘representing’ a certain way.

MA: But I think its true to say that music in the 1980’s started to change on radio, it fragmented, I suppose really you were starting to see the pirate stations grow and then in the 1990’s you got stations like Kiss and Xfm and suddenly everyone’s playing a version – a facet of something, whereas back in 1983 to 1986 – Capital were playing everything at different times of the day. So if they weren’t playing what you wanted, you’d wait until that particular show came on. But now, you don’t do that, you want to hear it yesterday, so you put on Xfm etc. I mean the other day, I was driving along on a beautiful sunny day, roof down and they (Xfm) played The Stone Roses ‘I am the Resurrection’…. great.

Mark/Howard: Were you aware of the Bridge Wars conflict at the time? Were you aware of the connotations of that?

MA: What the violence?

Mark/Howard: Yeah, that something could happen here where you’ve got open warfare on 2 rappers dissing each other….

MA: Do you know, I think sometimes, especially in recent times you see situations where they’ve been set up, you know, were they really dissing each other? If they’d have been good to each other, nobody would’ve followed it. So maybe their management team got together and said “let’s have a terrible argument, that’ll be really good – why not do that”. It works a lot in radio, you know – one DJ will say “I was listening to the so and so show…what a load or rubbish”. So what I’m trying to say is that I don’t believe all these things are as innocent as people would have us believe or as clear cut, let’s put it that way. I was interested in the music, what they did in-between didn’t touch me.

Mark/Howard: I think that whole era changed when you dropped the first PE album, before that, for my money, it was about scratching and beats essentially

MA: I think I know why your saying that, because it was making a statement wasn’t it?

Mark/Howard: ….and then this album (‘Yo! Bum Rush The Show’) came along, and the music was phenomenal, but then, suddenly the party was over in hip hop, there was now a consciousness that needed to be addressed?

MA: Well that’s why I said to you earlier on about the politics, to me there was always the politics in it, because even with the Roxanne stuff, they were party things, but they were a direct reflection of what kids were doing in a playground – you know, the kid that’ll be the most successful in the boys playground is the one with the heaviest fists and in the girls playground the girl with the sharpest tongue. So the Roxanne stuff was a direct reflection of what had happened to us wherever we lived. We knew that, we listened to it, we thought “I understand this.” So the business with the guns, I suppose was inevitable.

I mean were talking about the majority of people in those places like the Bronx that really didn’t have a great chance to improve their life, so a lot of the time, dealing drugs was the only option etc etc.. I’m not making excuses, but one can be aware that this is the way it probably was. I was very glad I didn’t live there. That’s why I said to you earlier on, the UK’s pretty alright.

Mark/Howard: One of the things that has always plagued me if you like, is the fact that I always felt like a bit of fake because I was into this ‘ghetto’ culture. I would go out and ‘drop a hard-core piece’ in the day listening to Schoolly D and then that same evening could switch off and go to a swanky restaurant in surburbia with my girlfriend, listening to some Depeche Mode in the car. So how did you see it? Was it pure enthusiasm for the music and the other social issues didn’t matter?

MA: Well there’s never been a comedian as far as I can see in the history of the UK that hasn’t come from the working classes. There hasn’t been a rock and roller that you wouldn’t call a working class kid, even back to Cliff Richard. Even now in Jamaica, around Kingston, there’s people living in packing cases, and their only hope of getting out is to do deals with drugs or to learn to play an instrument or sing. Its their only way out and the only way is up. That probably sounds a bit of a cliche, but it happens to be true and that’s the sad thing. So I was hoping to put all of that up in the music, but not make a big thing about it, rather just put it there and if you see it you see it and if you didn’t, well that’s ok because you wouldn’t of heard it if I had told you.

Mark/Howard: Well I think that’s interesting because at that time all I could see were the cuts and scratches and Chrome Angelz (above) pieces, and it wasn’t until after PE (Public Enemy) that I started to realise this thing maybe existed on a deeper level rather that just for enjoyment.

MA: But not every record had a message in it, but it did start to harden up and it wasn’t an area of society that was widely represented so that’s why stuff that I was doing was considered so important because you couldn’t get it that way anywhere else as nowhere else could afford to fund that much vinyl for a radio show. It took most of what I used to earn, because I wasn’t getting them for a pound each, I had to pay the going rate plus the cost for the runners to pick them up from the airports. But that’s what it cost to be in front. The same with motorcars, if you race motorcars it costs money. I used to race them you know?

Mark/Howard: If money wasn’t an option then, what would be that car for you?

MA: I don’t know, I really don’t know…..

Mark/Howard: You wouldn’t race Ferraris then or Maseraattis?

MA: No, I don’t dislike Ferrari’s, but a friend of mine bought one from and picked it up in Chigwell and by the time he got to Heathrow he’d burnt the clutch out, and it was a new clutch. Ferraris you see, when they’re good they’re great, but they’re a bit like a ‘skittish’ horse

Mark/Howard: Just like an Italian women

MA: Yes, you have to ask yourself, “is it really worth it?” So I think the tuffest car is a 911, I don’t know if its the most beautiful, but certainly the tuffest. Because you can go shopping in it or you can tear it up in it. The next few minutes are taken up with recollections about driving at 140mph down the M11 in a ‘french racing blue’ Carrera and the ‘blow back’ from it when you have to slow down to 90mph quickly after spotting the local constabulary by the roadside. Now that is what I call ‘Wild style’.

Mark/Howard: If you had to put together a top 10 or even top 5 from that era, could you drop a few names in the hat?

MA: I suppose, Word of Mouth Crew, in no particular order, I think Public Enemy, I think some Mantronix (above from the UK Fresh program) because he brought something special to it.

Mark/Howard: He was ahead of his time, and that was the problem in that I don’t think he was appreciated enough by a lot of people. I mean, Music Madness when they dropped that everyone turned their back on it and I was like “no” this is electronic hip hop, this is the extension from Hard-core Hip Hop but everyone was like, we want James Brown samples.

MA: Well that’s actually pretty true of the radio stations in that they were saying they didn’t know where to go with it, it was surprising them all the time, so of course some people just resisted change.

Mark/Howard: What about the ‘Juice Crew’ and that Marly Marl sound, did you get into that?

MA: Yeah, well he used to work for WBLS and he was their cut up man and WBLS weren’t really a great deal of use to us, because we were on say about 8pm and they being five hours preceding us, they were still playing soft soul and remember that WBLS wasn’t all hip hop, it was a black music station so it’d be the soft easy listening stuff in the afternoon and they’d get in to ‘rearranging the dust’ a bit later on that night.

Mark/Howard: Its just to me, one my all time favourite tracks was ‘The Bridge’.

MA: Oh yes, a great track.

Mark/Howard: It just had such a raw edge, you know impact, it just had all the bits you could imagine going to a hip hop jam in New York. It mostly wasn’t because I never did get that chance…

MA: Well there was a lot of danger in the air at those sort of things. Your absolutely right in that to put a definitive top five together is so hard, but if I were doing a list, then I would include the ‘The Bridge’. What you have to remember is that the industry at that time was so small, you know for certain tracks I’d play, like Tragedy by the Super Kids – there might have only been about three or four 12’s knocking about. Again a lot of the stuff, they might just knock out about 50 to 100 pressings, hardly any at all, and they would sell them at the gigs, “we’ve got a gig at so and so, so we’ll take 200 records”.

Mark/Howard: So some of those guys that you got to know who got onto the bigger labels like Def Jam, did it change them? To me when the Raising Hell Tour came to England that changed my perception of hip hop.

MA: Well I think Rick Rubin got hold of them and shook ‘em up a bit and as well I think there was a pride amongst them that they were with a dedicated label like Def Jam. Plus the fact that the Raising Hell Tour was a label tour and a label tour was good because it could include 2 or 3 bands that weren’t necessarily on the same label, but under the same management. And there would be that camaraderie which, whereas, if you got that same amount of people on the tour but it was a disparate situation, i.e. bands on different labels with different management, then as a whole they probably wouldn’t be hanging.

Mark/Howard: Did you get to go to a lot of concerts?

MA: No, because most of those concerts that were in and around London were done on a Saturday night, and we were recording then. But I used to see the guys, you know, we’d meet up in the daytime. People like Cool J, a very nice guy and Chuck D, who I think is about 42/43 now, but he was quite a profound guy, not frivolous but in fact quite a serious man. You could talk to him about some serious things. Did I tell you I lent him my headphones?

Mark/Howard: Go on…

MA: Well that wedding I mentioned earlier, we had to fly down from New York to the Dominican Republic and his headphones packed up and he said “Can I borrow your headphones man?” I was like “Can I listen to your album?”

Mark/Howard: And he’s like “you won’t play it on the radio will you?” and that next Friday night your like “Hi troops, guess what I’ve got for you tonight?”

Big laughs all around…

Mark/Howard: What would you say was the most exciting time? When you had say a tape in your pocket?

MA: I always used to feel very excited when Icame back from Tom Silvermann because he always gave you something that was good, not just one thing, but about 3 or 4 things that were really, really good. I suppose it depended on the trips, but I had a lot of respect for Tom because not only was he looking out for his artists but he had a preparedness to embrace their thinking. He wasn’t fixed in his thoughts, he would listen and he was flexible… He was a good thinker. Yes I liked him, I thought he was a very good man.

Mark/Howard: Do you still keep in contact with him?

MA: No, but I’m sure if I phoned him out of the blue and said “Hi, I’m back into it” he’d be like “OK that’s cool”. But you know, I think I’ve done it as far as all that’s concerned. As I said to you earlier, I’d carried the flame and handed it on.

Mark/Howard: Did you dig graffiti art?

MA: Yes, I thought the graffiti was exciting, but I thought ‘tagging’ was a pain in the arse and I’ve said it on the radio so many times, you know it’s like a dog pissing on a territory, you know, so what! I couldn’t see the point – so you travel all the way up the Northern Line, really, alone? So what. Although we did that TDK tour around the country, so we really did try to cram as much stuff in as possible, so that everybody felt they were being represented. I felt that the ‘sonic graffiti’ was the music and that the visual graffiti, the two went hand in hand with it… even though I did wear a flowery shirt in Electro Rock.

Mark/Howard: You got respect for that. You were you.

MA: Well that was me, I did what I had to do and with that same attitude, if I’d have been following the crowd, no doubt I’d have been playing the Eagles and Jackson Brown. I thought that there had to be a bit more to life and I loved the description in Sounds magazine that described me at UK Fresh as the ‘Bob Holness of Rap’. (big laughs) If the crowd were doing something, then I wanted to be doing something else.

Mark/Howard: I think the crew that everybody associated you with graff wise had to be The Chrome Angelz? You were broadcasting the tuffest beats and TCA were untouchable on the graff front.

MA: Yeah, they used to use quite a lot of white. I seem to remember them reminding me a little bit of Toulouse Lautrec and the last three or four things he did. He was really focusing on light and playing with it, almost liberally with his use of light. And I remember thinking that when I saw some throw-ups by The Chrome Angelz that they too were very clever in the way that they used white; to make something shimmer and make it go ‘Bing!’

Mark/Howard: I think that was the essence though of that era, that someone so unthreatening like yourself was playing the most cutting edge music anywhere and you’d come out with phrases like “forgive me, I’m just a latent window dresser” or “graffiti so dangerous, it’ll frighten the gas man”.

MA: Did I say that? (laughing)

Mark/Howard: Yeah, and I’d think “what the f@ck?” as I was doing my hard-core wild style sketch for the back wall of Argos the next night. I’d wonder what that piece was like you were describing on the radio that someone had sent into you?

MA: Oh yes, we had all that stuff sent in – brilliant stuff. There was some stuff that was quite small, but it was immaculate… Absolutely fantastic. Its a shame it wasn’t TV as you could of seen the stuff we had, so much of it. And I did all that myself as I didn’t have a secretary, you know parcel it all up to send back to people and I though to myself, next time I have a good idea, keep your mouth shut Mike! So that show, I used to do it all … make the coffee….

Mark/Howard: Well it came across to us, that the set up you had was massive? Like with the backing from Capital?

MA: But they didn’t do anything, they didn’t understand it; as far as they were concerned it was like “what’s this?” I mean they weren’t awful about it, but when we got Wembley organised, they really wanted to know and they wanted in on it.

Mark/Howard: So to wrap up then, I think that’s something quite special in that you’d done it and if you were there, you were there, and not a willingness to come back like some people do, again and again.

MA: Oh yeah, you mean do a return gig in the back room of the ‘Rifle & Hounds’? No all that would be a bit sad. No I did it, it was good, had a great time, thank you very much. It’s not bad for a gig is it? To finish at Wembley with your own rig?

Many thanks to Mark & Howard from the Essex Rockerz.

[Apiento]

Interview: Dog Eat Dog

Soody Sisco, Martha Fiskin and Linda Pitt made up the core of Dog Eat Dog, an early 80s punk funk band out of NYC who were sassy, smart and fun. Think along the lines of Liquid Liquid or ESG and you are on the right lines. Claremont 56 have been lucky enough to get their hands on unreleased recordings from the band consisting of live tracks and studio sessions which will be released mid-March in a lovely Keith Haring sleeve. As massive fans of that era in New York we asked the band if we could interview them and talk about those times and they kindly said yes…

Photography: Paula Court

So who met who first? Where were you living? Were you at college when you met? What were you studying?

Soody: Linda and I went to High School together in Piscataway, New Jersey. We met working on a school publication. I went to college with Martha. A friend introduced me to David Wald and then David brought in Kevin.

Linda: Soody and I met up during High School. We met up again in our last year of college, there we met Martha. I studied art.

Martha: I met Soody and Linda at college in New Jersey. I studied art: studio and history.

What initially made you think ‘ok. lets form a band?’ Were you inspired by other people out there. Who was that?

Soody: We lived in the East Village, NYC in 1980. All of our friends were in bands.

Linda: After college Soody and I were briefly roommates in Brooklyn. I remember watching the Miss America pageant on TV. There was a sax in the apartment, I picked it up, I made sound… If Talking Heads (art students), The Ramones and our friends Liquid Idiot could all form bands, so could we.

Martha: It was an exciting time. You could pick up an instrument and start a band.

What clubs were you initially going into?

Soody: Tier 3, Max’s Kansas City (where Linda worked), Mudd Club and CBGB.

Linda: I worked at Max’s Kansas City pre-band. CBGB’s was around the corner from home.

Martha: Club 57, CBGB, Tier 3, Max’s, Mudd Club, Hurrah’s and The Roxy. We walked to all these places. New York did seem smaller in those days.

Were you part of that whole Mudd Club scene, hanging out there or just playing gigs?

Soody: A bit of both.

Linda: We went to the Mudd Club a lot but never felt part of the scene.

Martha: I was in a group art show there.

I guess you were quite involved in that art scene that ran alongside the music scene at that time? If so how? Did you see those two scenes as linked?

Soody: Yes, Linda and I were hanging posters that we collaborated on.

Linda: Definitely linked. Take Club 57, a small venue on St Marks Place in the EV, art, performance, music, movies, a showcase for everyone. Al Diaz our percussionist did the SAMO graffiti with Basquiat. Soody and I made art flyers that we wheat pasted around the neighborhood (see above). By chance the guy with the guitar is Richard Hell. We all did our own personnel art as well.

Martha: We all made stuff; various media.

Seems a lot of people involved in the music scene came from an art background and then did the music thing as an outlet for their creative sides. Was this the way it was for you?

Soody: Yes.

Linda: Yessssss.

Martha: Absolutely.

What were your favourite places to play at that time?

Linda: CB’s had the best sound and the infamous dressing room. We once played at 4am in a basement on Chrystie Street that turned out to be a Chinese gambling parlor.

So you played at CBGB’s. Was that another hang out? 

Soody: Yes, it was in our neighborhood.

Linda: Went there a lot. I loved the matinees.

Martha: Sure. What a sound system!

So the music – it seems to have a very funky edge. The congas and the percussion have that Latin thing going on. What were you influenced by? Or was it just a New York thing to have that Latin sound as you grew up surrounded by it?

Soody: It was a popular sound at the time and our early percussionist, Al Diaz, is Hispanic.

Linda: Don’t be fooled by the cow bell.

Martha: Love love love drums. Latin, African, dub…

How do you fit in with the other No Wave bands? Were you having out with ESG, Liquid Liquid etc or did you feel aside from them?

Soody: We were friends with Liquid Liquid.

Linda: Liquid Liquid are our friends. I only met ESG once but they seem incredibly nice. We were part of the noise NY and Naive Rhythm scene so I always felt we were all in the same boat.

Martha: Totally in with Liquid Liquid and Konk.

Who were you favourite bands to go and see back then and why?

Soody: Hmmm, there were a lot. Of the local bands we would go see our friends a lot. I loved DNA.

Linda: The Ramones were always fun, and any band that was recommended that I knew nothing about. There were a lot of new bands and most music at the time was fun.

Martha: Fela, DNA, some big soul shows, all our friends.

I like the review I saw from the Soho News that says ‘the melodies are carried by a very amateurish saxophone player’. Surely that was the whole point – to play like you couldn’t? You know deconstructing your abilities and almost looking at it in a different way… Was that something you were about?

Soody: We couldn’t play!

Linda: I believe the words are self taught. We played out shortly after we started playing our instruments.

Martha: We were inspired neophytes.

The music really benefits from having that raw, captured live thing. Well some of it was obviously recorded live, but when in the studio was it a live run through or did you try and record separately.

Soody: Everything is recorded live, either in studio or performance.

Linda: I remember late nights hardly able to stay awake.

Martha: Down and dirty, low-budget and raw. In a good way.

How come you never got signed to Sire, Ze or one of the other labels picking up bands at that time? I presume that scene was picked over pretty heavily…

Soody: We just didn’t get an offer in the short period we were around.

Linda: We almost got signed to 99 records.

Martha: It would have been 99 if anyone signed us. Maybe Rough Trade or ROIR.

Boring question but how did you hook up with Keith Haring for the Dog Eat Dog piece he did. Were you mates with him?

Soody: Keith Haring was a downtown artist and easy enough to run into. We just asked him if he would do a poster because the dog was one of his favorite motifs. He was very sweet and said he would do it and made an extra for us to add future dates to.

Linda: He was part of the Club 57 scene. I think he went to school with Julie who was working with Martha at the time.

Martha: Keith was a friend from the neighborhood. His work was everywhere.

Going back to the clubs – where else were you hanging out? Were DJs important to you as people or did you more enjoy the art/punk/live scene. What about Paradise Garage, Funhouse etc…

Soody: I don’t think DJs were the entity they are today back then.

Linda: I like music live and went to places we could get in for free which was most. Peppermint Lounge, Danceteria (where I caught Madonna’s first show), loved the dancing boys, Irving Plaza, Tramps, jazz clubs names long forgotten. There was The Empire of Soul Club, Warren and the Empress spun B sides of soul 45′s at various venues.

Martha: The Empire State Soul Club was great!

Were you into hip-hop? Before it went head long down that drum machine beat route it seems the scene you were in (Fab 5 Freddy, Futura etc) was very hip-hop. I think your music is pretty B-boy…

Soody: We loved the rap scene and frequented the Roxy Roller Rink in Chelsea for rap/breakdance shows.

Linda: B-boy, I like it. Loved the early scene. Roxy was our place to go.

Martha: Checking out rap and hip hop at Roxy. Thanks for the comparison.

At the time did you look at the success of some bands around you and think about making your music slightly more commercial or were you not interested in that?

Soody: We would have loved some success.

Linda: Commercial, never wanted that as an option.

Martha: We enjoyed our artistic freedom then, but a wider audience is always great.

What happened with the band in the end? Do you still play together? Is it more of a historical thing or do you have plans to go play in the studio again?

Soody: Oy Vey, play again? We discussed the possibility, but would need to REALLY dust ourselves off!

Linda: Historical, well you never know…

Martha: No plans, but you never know…

What do you all do now?

Soody: I am a museum curator and textile designer.

Linda: Photo retoucher to the stars! That means publishing.

Martha: I work in the film business.

What music do you listen to these days?

Soody: A lot of 70s glitter and 80s punk, always The Ramones, actually too much to list!

Linda: Lots of radio, WFMU and WWOZ, still can’t get enough of Neil Young.

Martha: The Clash, LCD Soundsystem, Spiritualized, Greg Dulli’s various bands and more.

Cheers guys.

Thanks for the interview!

Dog Eat Dog is out mid-March on Claremont 56. You can order it here.

Interview: Trevor Jackson

Right, here’s the next of our pretty irregular Test Pressing interviews – this time with Trevor Jackson of Underdog/Output fame. Trevor has long been known for his music but is also a hugely respected graphic designer so we decided to use the sleeves discussed to illustrate the interview. It’s good to interview someone whose not scared of being forthright and having strong opinions.

I was first made aware of Trevor through his work as the Underdog – firstly with The Brotherhood and then in turn with mixes for Massive Attack amongst others. From there it was a short step (through tough times by the sound of it) to starting East-London based Output recordings with releases from LCD Soundsystem and Kieran Hebden’s Four Tet.

Right let’s kick off with the basics. Where are you from originally?

I’m from Edgeware, North West London.

What was it like? What was the first scene you got into?

When I was 12, or 13, Edgware was mainly a Jewish area, there was a whole scene almost like the Jewish version of casuals called Becks, all these kids that would wear Fiorucci and Kickers and hang out at Edgware station. It was a big thing at the time, hanging out there or at Golders Green, or Hampstead, a place called the Coffee Cup. It’s still there. There’d be 200 kids on the street, standing around posing. That was kind of what most of the kids did but I wasn’t really interested in that. These were people whose older brothers were all estate agents and jewellers, typical Jewish suburbia things. I fortunately managed to meet more alternative, interesting people and was able to broaden my social scene. One of my favourites place was Patsy’s Parlour and I used to hang out there all the time. It was a small video arcade and ice-cream parlour full of all different sorts of people.

Growing up my older brother used to listen to Stevie Wonder and jazz-funk, his mate used to manage Light Of The World, my sister was into Joy Division and Ultravox. I was obsessed with taping any music program on TV. Top of The Pops, The Tube, I’d sit there every day recording and force my mother to tape things when I was out. I’ve still got hundreds of VHS tapes somewhere. I’d also listen religiously to Westwood on LWR and also Mastermind on Invicta. I also started to read The Face, Blitz and i-D and become more interested in club and music sub-cultures.

I was fortunate to meet a guy slightly older than me called Simon Cass whom I became really friendly with. He was really into New Order, Hi-NRG and industrial music and from the age of about 13or 14 I started going to gigs and the Camden Palace all the time. I used to go nearly every night. The first proper club I remember going to was The Embassy though.

Was that early hip-hop and electro at that time?

Well it sounds like a cliché but my first single that I bought was Giorgio Moroder ‘The Chase’ on 7”. I was really into science fiction at the time so I suppose the logical thing at the time was to listen to electronic music as it shared a similar aesthetic.

The future?

Yeah it was kind of the future. I’ve talked about it many times but the first gig I went to was the Human League for the Dare tour and it a huge effect on me. Adrian Wright was doing the visuals and they had Doctor Who, Captain Scarlet, Fellini movies on multiple screens and it blew my mind, so from a very early age I had a strong interest in visuals. The Dare album had such a strong cover and the band were really into 2000 AD and Judge Dredd which I also loved, so I was kind of linking all this audio visual stuff together. I was stuck in this suburban place dreaming of other more exciting places, New York to me was my mecca. I’d listen to Colin Favor on Kiss playing NYC Kiss FM mastermixes by Red Alert and the Latin Rascals, I’d hear about all these amazing clubs and I started to hear a relationship between the European electronic music I was into and a new American version that was even more exciting.

Where were you going out back then?

I’m trying to think back to where we were going. My older friends all used to go to White Trash and places like that, but I used to go to the Camden Palace, Batcave, Xenon, and Busbys on a Sunday which was more of a north London Jewish social thing where they played disco and jazz funk… London club culture was very small then. I used to go out every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday that I could.

Was that where the early interest in graphics came from?

I was really into this magazine called Escape. There was a group called The Battle Of The Eyes. It was Savage Pencil, Chris Long, and Ian Wright and Andy (Dog) Johnson – all anarchic British comic book artists, Ian Wright and Chris Long used to draw for the NME. Andy Johnson did covers for his brother Matt Johnson’s band The The. Chris Long’s stuff was really incredible, very graphic and unique. All his characters were club kids, the sort of people I’d meet when I was out. I was really into that. It was more kind of comic book but it was well designed. I started to become very interested in the visual representation of music and the relationship between the two, covers, videos, every aspect. It’s funny. I was in my storage last week and I found this bag and I’d found I’d cut out hundreds of music ads from magazines. I can really see where some of my influences had come from. I mean there were obvious things like all the ZTT adverts, which really were amazing, but also loads of stuff random I just cut out. So there was Escape, this small little comic book, and probably Neville Brody’s amazing work on The Face that got me into wanting to either be a comic book artist or a graphic designer.

What else were you up to at that time?

I was also working in a record shop at that time from the age of 13 or 14 for five or six years. I ended up being manager on a Sunday. Richard Russell (now Managing Director of XL Recordings) used to work for me and I used to take great pleasure in telling him to go and put the grills up on the windows at the end of the day.

What was it called?

Loppylugs. It was pretty famous for the area – in Edgware – two minutes from my house.

Did you study graphic design at college?

Yeah I eventually knew I wanted to work in music and design record sleeves, so I studied at Barnet College and I ended up there for four years. I got a diploma in general art and design, then a higher diploma in graphic design. And through it all I was still going out all the time.

Where did you first agency Bite It! come from?

I left college and started working for a company called the Kunst Art Company based in Clerkenwell. They used to do a bit of music work as well as film posters and it was really exciting. this was all pre-computers, working with photo-mechanical transfer machines, photocopiers, Tipex and rotring pens. I started to meet loads of interesting and influential people going out in the evenings. I was confident and slightly precocious, living at home with my parents so I didn’t need any money and could afford to do commissions for little or no money. Whilst I was working for Martin Huxford, doing posters for things like Belly Of An Architect by Peter Greenaway and some other cool things, I started to get my own work in. I’d hear on the grapevine that people were putting records out and when I heard Mark Moore (S’Express) was putting out a record I simply spoke to him at the WAG where I used to go regularly and said ‘I hear you’re doing a record. I want to do the cover’. He told me to bring my portfolio in the next night to show him, I went along with my portfolio, sat down in the corner and showed him my college work and he was like ‘yeah great’ and that was one of the first commissioned jobs I did.

So where does Champion come into it?

After I did S’Express, I was also doing stuff I wasn’t so into; Steve Walsh the Gypsy Kings and some really dodgy things, as I started getting more of my own work in. Martin from Kunst was like ‘Trevor you might as well get on with doing your own stuff’ so I ended up sharing the studio with him paying rent, mainly doing my own work but also helping him out when he needed it. I think it was through working at the record shop that I notice Champion were putting out all these great records. They were connected to these importers in the premises next door, called Record Importers or something, they could cherry-pick the best records as soon as they entered the country and license them. I noticed none of the record had picture sleeves, they were all in that Champion green house bag, so I went to see Mel Medalie, who was a proper character, a crazy South African guy, and I said ‘I’ll do sleeves for you for free and if you like them give me more work’ and one of the first things I did was a cover version of ‘Set It Off’ by the Bunker Crew and he liked it. So he was putting out four or five records a week and I was doing the sleeves cheap but he was giving me shit loads of work so that kept me going for ages. I was doing ‘Break 4 Love’, Todd Terry, Frankie Bones, Pal Joey records… brilliant records.

All those Todd Terry sleeves are quite distinctive with that ‘bit’ design…

You know at the time, for record sleeve designers, there were only a few big people. You had Peter Saville, Vaughn Oliver , Neville Brody and Malcom Garrett at Assorted Images whom I all really respected but you also had Stylo Rouge and all these boring mainstream companies, and for a record sleeves, alot of the time they’d just take a photo, lay some type on it and get paid a fortune. I was like ‘fuck that, that’s just lazy’ and wanted to do something different. Also, computers had just started being integrated into bigger studios, so you had Paintbox and these programs that cost thousands of pounds, and I couldn’t afford that so those early sleeves were a reaction to those big companies. I used to love playing video games on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 and to me it suited the music. It was like 8-bit music. You know, Todd Terry is making these records on pretty low-res samplers so it seemed an obvious thing to do. That was like late ’80s early ’90s. I still had that comic book mentality. The sleeves had a mini-story to them, almost like a two panel comic strip related to things that were going on at the time in rave culture.

What do you think when you see those sleeves now?

They’re innocent. There’s a naivety and I’m proud, you know…

So house was really kicking off in the late 80s, were you still into hip-hop then?

Sure, there was still lots of great hip hop around as well as mutations of it like hip house, the scenes were still connected and as hip hop got faster the two scenes became connected. Clubs like Delirium started to play house as a reaction against the more violent side of hip hop but I still loved both genres. I related to it work-wise as I started working for Gee Street Records. I was going to fashion clubs and parties that still mainly played funk, hip hop and electro stuff as well as all the amazing early London warehouse parties, but I also started going to acid house clubs, Clink Street etc. There were certain points when they crossed over. My favourite london club was a place called Astral Flight at The Embassy. A guy called DJ Wolf played there and he was mind-blowing. Him, Colin Favor and Eddie Richards were the DJs doing it for me then. People talk about Paradise Garage and that was my Paradise Garage. Hearing New Order’s Your Silent Face over that soundsystem… They had this huge rectangular lighting rig that would descend over the dancefloor and this big inflatable couple swinging from the roof fucking. I’d listen to Colin Favor and Eddie Richards on Kiss, then I’d hear them play at the club, and the next day go to the Record And Tape Exchange in Camden and find all the records I’d heard. In the NME they used to do a little chart and I’d be able to discover all the records I didn’t know.

Who was DJ Wolf and why was he so good?

The club from what I remember, was a posh Mayfair venue full of a weird mix of rich socialites, cute girls and art students but he used to look like a goth, with high spiky blonde hair playing from a booth high up overlooking the floor. He used to go from like Bauhaus to Kraftwerk, then to ACR. He was the first British DJ I heard doing that really well. He was really really on point – and he’d play funk as well. It’d be interesting to see a playlist from him. I was too young to go the Blitz and stuff like that so that for me was a really seminal club. It was a really fucking good time.

Did you do the Jungle Brothers sleeve for Gee Street?

I did Royal House ‘Can You Party’ and then I did Jungle Brothers ‘I’ll House You’, basically the same record with a rap on it. I did the sleeve for that and ‘Black Is Black’. I was lucky you know. I was doing that and also working for Network Records. All those bio rhythm sleeves. Neil Macey was working for Network and I remember when that classic Virgin Ten Techno compilation came out and I seem to remember meeting Neil Rushton (the head of Network) at a London launch party or something.

So when was Bite It! as a label born? That was your first venture into music right?

Yeah. I was doing Bite It! as a design thing only. There was a Street Sounds remix competition and I hadn’t really made any music before but I’d bought a four-track and had a little sampling device for the Commodore 64 computer where you could sample for a few seconds with a very basic sequencer, and I made a remix on that. I was making beat-based music only. ‘Beatbox’ by Art Of Noise had a huge influence on me. I was obsessed by Arthur Baker, Trevor Horn and Adrian Sherwood. On-U Sound was a big inspiration. The first On-U dub stuff I wasn’t so into, but when Adrian Sherwood started working with Doug Wimbish, Skip McDonald and Keith Le Blanc (the ex-Sugarhill Gang Band) as well as DJ Cheese I became hooked, hearing that Fats Comet track “DJ’s Dream’’. It was fucking crazy. You know I most probably heard it at Astral Flight with DJ Wolf playing it. So, my initial records were not melodic at all just rhythm and noise.

Then I met this rap crew who lived round the corner from me called the brotherhood and I started working with them. I started Bite It! purely to put out this track ‘Descendants Of The Holocaust’ which was a reaction against stereotypical Jewish suburban life as well as needing to voice a subject we felt that was important to be heard. We’d experienced our own forms of racism and were just as angry as we were excited by the platform of hip hop.

Was that when you first went into the studio properly?

Yes, we went to this small studio called Monroe Studios in Barnet. I used to work with this guy called Roger Benou, he ended up engineering most of my Underdog mixes. We did the first Brotherhood stuff there on an Akai 950 sampler and an Atari ST. It was interesting because that studio became a real haven for loads of underground British music when it moved to Holloway Road. A lot of important Drum ‘n’ Bass producers started out there. Lucky Spin records was next door. DJ Crystal who was the original Brotherhood DJ, Ed Rush, Adam F, DJ Trace all those guys, I used to hear Amen being cut up in a million different ways 24/7 through the walls, everyone at the time worked there. It was a really important creative hub. When I was working as Underdog I was doing all my remixes down there.

The sleeves for The Brotherhood seemed to kick against what was going on in UK hip-hop at that time…

What had happened was, I had this parallel life. With the design I’d gone from Gee Street, Network and Champion then I started working for Pulse-8 doing terrible Euro pop music sleeves. I was making a lot of money but I was hating it. It was soul-destroying especially after designing records that had such integrity. At that point I made a conscious decision to stop designing and start my own label. That’s why I started Bite It! and it had a very strong visual aesthetic.

The reason I wanted to do something graphically strong was that you had Music Of Life and Cold Sweat (UK hip-hop labels) but they appeared second-rate compared to American product. I wanted to make records that sounded as good as American records and looked as good. If not better. Hip-hop visually had already started to be a cliché with the girls, guns and cars and stuff so I wanted to go against that. I was also really conscious to sample from very different kind of records. Not only did they have to sound and look right, the sources had to be different. European jazz-rock, Soft Machine, ECM, it was all about different sample sounds to what was going on at the time. That was part of the ethos of the label.

I remember buying a 12” with a sample saying ‘I might smoke a spliff but I won’t sniff’ that I’d heard on the radio. What are you proud of from that time?

A record called ‘100% Proof’ I sampled this tune by Julian Priester called “Love Love’ on ECM that was originally in 3/4…and I flipped it into 4/4 and I did this tripped-out bonus beat with flutes and tripped out shit, they sold it in Honest Jon’s where James Lavelle had started working before he set up Mo Wax. And he was like ‘What is this???’. He loved it and we started a good friendship.

Did you know the Bristol lot as well?

I was good friends with Mushroom (Massive Attack). When the Brotherhood EP came out it started to get played a lot and Richard Russell who was working at XL, asked me to do an underdog remix for House Of Pain’s ‘Top Of The Morning To Ya’. It went Top Ten on the back of my mix and my remix career as Underdog started to take off along with having the label. Mark Picken, who was managing Massive Attack liked the mixes and eventually started looking after me. I went on a European tour with Massive Attack and DJed at after parties along with Mushroom and G.

Massive Attack kind of changed when Mushroom dropped out…

For sure. I have a hell of a lot of respect for 3D and G but it’s now a very different band. ‘Blue Lines’ in still one of my favourite records of all time. I mean Mushroom wasn’t an easy character, He was always the younger one during the Wild Bunch days, so I suppose he always got treated like a kid in the band but he was hugely talented, made all the best beats as far as I’m concerned and contributed loads of great ideas. I went to Mushroom’s studio and he was like a proper audio freak had amazing gear. I don’t know what’s happened to him, I liked him a lot. I’ve been trying to get in touch with him again for years.

So where else did your influences come from?

Mainly clubs. The whole warehouse thing was massively influential on me. Shake N Fingerpop, Family Funktion, those parties. Norman Jay, Judge Jules. You know he actually used to be a good DJ. Then you had Soul II Soul and all those guys and the Mutoid Waste parties as well. It was an amazing time. That whole period of club culture hasn’t really been documented enough but it was hugely influential to a lot of people. I also used to throw parties with Tony Nwatchuku (from Attica Blues) in Oxford at a place called the Caribbean club back in ’87 ’88. We’d play hip hop, Smith & Mighty, early Todd Terry things, that really was the start of everything for me career wise.

So you had all that going on and then the Soho set with The Wag and stuff…

Yeah you had all that and then Dodo’s, Dial 9, Delirium, there was so much going on, The RAW club in the basement of the YMCA in Tottenham Court Rd was perhaps the best club in London for me after the Embassy, Saturday night with Dave Dorrel and CJ Mackintosh was incredible. But I really remember going to some amazing parties along the Thames. I remember vividly the first time I heard house music at a Shake N Fingerpop/Family Funktion party, one of the DJs was cutting up, a mix I stole for years afterwards, ‘Peter Piper’ Run DMC with Fun Boy Three ‘Faith And Hope And Charity’. I went upstairs and there was a Mike Tyson fight being shown on a big video screen and they were playing Farley Jackmaster Funk ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ and I was like ‘what the fuck is this record?’ There were things like Cultural Vibe ‘Ma Foom Bey’ always being played but that was a proper house record I think I heard.

What made it a proper house record?

It sounded different. I was used to uptempo HI-NRG but that record… It was probably about Darryl Pandy’s vocal, I didn’t go down so well. The floor was empty but I was enchanted, the atmosphere was great. To this day I’m most comfortable in a dark, dirty basement. I’m not into Funktion One soundsytem clarity and air con. I like reggae sound systems smoke and sweat.

Going back to the label – who signed The Brotherhood at Virgin?

We got signed by Simon Gavin and Steve Brown, who went on to form Science, and then we spent a long time making The Brotherhood album. There was no-one in British hip-hop at the time making quality cross-over music with a strong concept, we had one. The band was mixed-race. It was a black guy, a Jewish guy and a mixed-race guy and musically I was sampling 90% English and European jazz rock and we got the English artist Dave McKean who’d done artwork for BATMAN at DC Comics to design the sleeve. I was really happy with the thing as a whole. It joined the dots in many ways. The cover looked very different from anything else at the time, the whole project ended up being very well received.

How do you get from Bite It! to starting Output?

There was quite a gap between the two. I was being managed by Marts Andrups he also looked after Roger Sanchez and Kenny Dope. Marts tragically suddenly passed away, he was a very close friend as well as work collegue and that had a very big effect on me. I was young. I was in my late 20′s and it totally threw me. Up to that point I felt indestructible and I’d never had anything like that happen to me.

Marts was a real character. I’d met him in Honest Jons with James Lavelle and when I met him I thought he was a stuck-up wanker. He was opinionated, totally full of himself and never agreed with me about anything but he had the coolest shit, everything you wanted, sneakers, art, records, he was completely on-point, and when I got to meet him properly we got on like a house on fire, we became great friends and he started to manage me. But then he passed away. I ended up falling out with The Brotherhood and things went sour. They pushed me out of the band and off of the label, after what had happened to Marts I just thought ‘fuck this, I don’t want to do this anymore’ and I got out of it. I don’t really know what I did for a year. I needed to find some new inspiration and I started going back to my records and I realised I was deeply into just weird weird records. I used to go to Soul Jazz and Mr Bongo and buy strange European jazz records, travel the world buying crazy things to sample and play. And It made me realise I wanted to get well away from hip hop and the way it was becoming so narrow-minded, and release music I over regardless of genre and most importantly who else would like it.

Was Mo Wax influential in the move from Bite It! to Output? You look at it as a label and they are releasing tracks by Carl Craig, Richie Hawtin, stuff like that…

James (Lavelle) is a genius, but a victim of his own success. He was on it. People don’t give him enough respect. I grew up with eclecticism, and he took that aesthetic which was missing at the time and brought it to a new label and an amazing mix of stuff. Then they had the club at The Blue Note, Dusted, and I remember DJing with me, Weatherall, Carl Craig, going to see the craziest mix of people, it was a brilliant time. He did a lot of stuff. Maybe the downfall of the label and with regards to Output, I saw that James ended up becoming bigger than most the artists. He was the label and I think that possibly created resentment and it put to much of the spotlight on him, the minute I started Output I didn’t want it to be mainly about me. I was happy for people to know it was my label but I wanted the focus on the artists. They were the most important things. The label was just a conduit for the artists.

What were the first releases on Output?

They were just some bits that I had kicking about. Remixes that got rejected and stuff. The early stuff was very beat-based. I don’t really remember what the first release was but I released three ten inches which were beat excursions…

Now I remember what I did in my time in between Bite It! and Output. I ended up hooking up with this band the Emperors New Clothes who were on Acid Jazz records. They were fucking great. They were like Sun Ra meets ESG meets King Tubby. They were amazing. I got deeply into them and hung out with them all the time and got friendly with Luke Hannam the bass player, then Acid Jazz asked me to produce their album after doing some remixes for the band. We spent perhaps a year making the record, I’d gone from working with only samples to learning how to record live instruments and working with real musicians, it was a crazy time of experimentation and pushing boundaries, it was about as un-acid jazz as it could possibly be, totally out there music, perhaps one of the best things I’d ever done. but we finished the record Eddie Pillar (Acid Jazz owner) refused to pay me. Eddie was notoriously hardcore as was his partner at the time Dave Robinson who used to run Stiff rRcords, I may have been a dick about it but I refused to be fucked over. I told him to go fuck himself and unfortunately I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done. So I ended up putting out an Emperor’s New Clothes record on Output, maybe third or fourth release, and then the band broke up and Luke started to form Gramme with Leo (Taylor) the drummer.

I didn’t realize Luke and Leo were in Emperors New Clothes…

I remember the turning point. We were doing this track that was like the precursor to Playgroup’s ‘Make It Happen’ Leo was playing the drums in a free jazz style, Luke was rolling with a brilliant uptempo wobble style baseline. and it just didn’t sound right, I was trying to explain to leo to play simpler in a more primal almost moronic style and he didn’t understand, I pulled out Metal Box and said ‘listen to this. He totally got it and I think that was the moment Gramme was initially formed. This new direction caused a split in the band and they eventually broke up Gramme formed perhaps a year later? I kept in contact with Luke, he played on many of my later Underdog remixes and also introduced me to Kieran Hebden whom he met at Rough Trade one day. I’d never have signed Four Tet had it not been for Luke.

Was it Fridge (early group featuring Kieran Hebden) at that point?

Yeah Fridge. Fridge was him, Sam and Adem. They recorded in their bedroom. And I listened to their records and went to see them play together at home and they sounded like Can or Faust or something. They sounded amazing.

Was that when the label found it’s identity?

I was really fortunate as I’d signed a P&D deal with RTM Distribution. And I could spend some money on packaging. I could do what I wanted. I was sick of doing all these crap sleeves. All my influences started to make sense. All the experimental music I loved, the fusion of things, genreless sounds, I finally had my outlet I’d always wanted. And there weren’t any labels in the UK doing what I was dong. I felt like all my artists were rejects. We were outcasts and I enjoyed that. I’d always felt like an outcast myself.

Was the label in East London at that point? There wasn’t much going on in Shoreditch at that time…

All you had was The Blue Note. And that was it. For me it felt like a second home as I’d worked in Clerkenwell for so long. I was lucky. To dispel any myth, I don’t have rich parents, I was earning money as a teenager when I first started working living with my mum, so I was saving money, and I could fortunately afford to buy a flat when I was quite young. This was the only place I could buy a nice space in East London. Best financial decision I made and I was fucking lucky and the area blew up.

I suppose there was you and Nuphonic over here…

There was also Tummy Touch. It was them, Nuphonic and myself. Tummy Touch were here before me.

What records were you buying at the time?

I was really into post rock, Tortoise and things like that. I used to have a great relationship with Darryl at the Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden and I’d buy fantastic records from him. I loved that place, and also Atlas Records with Pete Herbert and Mark Kirby behind the counter, They got me into Basic Channel and stuff like that. You know I’d done the early techno with Network but when those Basic Channel records came out they made sense to me. Hip-hop had got a bit boring and I was playing more experimental music – Kompact, Thomas Brinkmann, stuff like that was coming out, restored my faith in club music, that I thought had become incredibly boring.

So back to the label, you had a pretty good track record for discovering bands…

It was more being involved with things. I didn’t discover them. Perhaps I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.

Do you wish you’d locked down some of the deals with the likes of Four Tet and LCD Soundsystem?

I have never been a good businessman. I’ve never done things for money. Money doesn’t interest me. I never ran the label as a business, I just loved this music and I wanted it to be heard. Also, at the same time I was conscious of my limited capabilities as a label so I felt i didn’t have the right to sign a band to the label and lock then down to anything, it would have been dishonest to do that. Also, I heard stories about how Daniel Miller had never actually signed Depeche Mode so I was like ‘fuck it, why should I sign anyone’ and I also worked with the bands as friends which perhaps was very naive but that’s how I did it. Thing was, it also protected me in a way because the bands expectations of me couldn’t be unreasonable. I didn’t have anything in the contract I had to achieve. All I promised the bands were that I would get there records in the shops, radio and club play and press, the rest who knows? You know I had been running the label by myself, apart from a false start at with a deal with Virgin through Source Records that didn’t work out, and Rob (Sandercombe, label manager at Output) had come in and he was a life saver. He was magic. Just what I needed. Well organised and knew how to work with people so he came along at the right time.

So what happened then?

You know, when people started to really like the records was when it fucked up. No-one taught me how to run a record label and I can hand on my heart say I never drew a wage as I was doing other things, DJing, remixing and designing. I never ran the label as a business and in turn many of the bands didn’t make money, though i’d like to think most of them did well out of it in other ways. I don’t regret it at all. Unfortunately by the time a well organised structure of the label needed to be in place it was too late and we couldn’t go back. It was started in a totally relaxed casual way but the success totally took me by surprise and i was too busy trying to run the day to day business to be able to stop things and make anytime to set it up properly, that messed up everything.

It sounds like most of the bands just turned up?

It wasn’t really that, i listened to many hundreds of demos but most of the artists I released had been ignored or rejected, people just weren’t interested in them, and for me I have a strong attraction to things that other people don’t like, as well as naivety in recording. I love early demos – the initial essence of an artist.

When did Playgroup come into the picture?

Playgroup came along in about 1999. 99% of the things I do are reactionary I create things because I get fucked off with what I see or hear around me, or I think somethings missing and someone needs to do something about it. Playgroup started because I was bored of what I was hearing in dance music. I was listening to all these records through working with Gramme and I was realising that no one was making live dance music anymore that wasn’t dumb or super commercial. All the production on records at that time were super complicated; Aphex, Squarepusher, Timbaland, Rodney Jerkins… I wanted to make a simple record. I’d been doing loads of dark complex stuff and I wanted to make a credible, fun and sexy record.

My main drive was, I was 30 years old, I was sick and tired of the ’80s not getting the respect it deserved. People always used to take the piss out of it, which has obviously changed now, and I strongly felt there was massive influence in the music I was hearing around me, but it seemed people were in denial and and that whole period of time needed to be showcased in the right way. Edwyn Collins, Dennis Bovell, Paul Haig, Shinehead, Scritti Politti, I wanted to get all my influences in there and mix it up with new people. I wanted to make an album that sounded like your best friend’s house party not a commercial super club. At the end of the day, I just wanted that ’80s era to be respected. I was fortunate to work with some really great people on that record.

The ’50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ – it’s a good one. How did that come about?

At the end of the night I always used to play ‘Mama Used To Say’ or ‘Billie Jean’ by Shinehead as well as Paul Simon’s original, I remember I was DJing at the Massive Attack end of tour party in Paris in the tiny backroom of this club and I played the original of ’50 Ways…’ as the last record and the guys from Air came up to ask what it was. I was shocked they didn’t know it, that moment stuck in my head, it all kind of linked together and it made sense to cover that record.

Is there a new Playgroup album coming at some point?

I’ve probably made about four albums since that one came out but I’ve never felt like releasing them. The longer it takes the more cautious I am about putting stuff out. The reason I want to release music is questionable now. If I’m frank about it there are so many people making great music now. I only want to make records with a purpose and records that don’t sound like other people. I’ve always made music inspired by other people and I don’t want to do that anymore. I can’t make a space disco record better than Lindstrom so why bother. There’s no point. I still have that hip-hop competitiveness at the end of the day.

So closing off that whole Output era – what would you have done differently?

I would have had a good accountant that didn’t rip me off, I wouldn’t have employed a ‘so-called’ business advisor who would end up making things even worse and I probably would have had a business partner or someone that had some experience from day one. But I don’t know if anyone would have seen the potential in it anyway, my initial plan was quite reactionary and destructive, not having a business objective apart from breaking even. Who really would have known that Four Tet would be as popular as he is now? I initially didn’t expect any of the artists I worked with to sell more than 1,000 records, to be honest I would have been quite happy with 200. I’m suppose a snob. A subversive snob. I like the idea of keeping things limited, unique, selective and special.

You’ve always designed record sleeves – what do you make of sleeve design at the moment?

I think it’s interesting now that the whole digital thing has almost gone back on itself. People are slowly reacting against it, Look at Stones Throw, they are releasing limited beautiful screen-printed records using Hennessey in the ink for Madlib, Will bankheads cassette label, people are doing really interesting stuff. So I’m still inspired by things I see around me, whatever format they might be.

Would you buy a record just for it’s sleeve?

I have done, and made many mistakes doing so, especially on crate digging excursions without a soundburger or record deck to hand! But my life has changed over the last two years. I’ve cut down on consuming and purchasing things I don’t need as I had too much of everything. I don’t want to be cynical but having lived through so many things it is rare to see or hear new things that truly excite me anymore, and right now I only want to experience powerful new things I haven’t felt before, or live with essential things that are timeless.

So looking at your design – if you had to pick a favourite sleeve what would it be?

I find it really hard musically and visually to have an opinion on my own work. Maybe the Soulwax sleeve and some of the Bite It! sleeves. I still like them.

You seem to DJ a lot in Berlin – what’s so good about it?

In Berlin you can play in most clubs the people will look really normal, but you play the weird records and they go off. You play them in London and they leave the dancefloor. And there is something about that essence of Berlin that is still super exciting to me, people seem open minded and free in many ways. Maybe that’s what is missing in London at the moment. I made a real conscious decision to stop playing big gigs at the moment. I’ve seen many of my contemporaries play bad music simply for money. There are to many people that will compromise their beliefs to earn a living and I don’t want that. If I’m honest I don’t like being in the limelight, never have, I don’t want to play anthems and do things that people want me or expect me to do. The Playgroup thing mucked up so many aspects of my life as it put me in the spotlight, made me feel uncomfortable, messed up relationships and even my health. When you put out a record and start playing the promotional game you get pushed into a world that changes everything. I don’t want that attention nor care about what anyone thinks about who I am or what I do, as long as I’m proud of what I do I’m content. Now I’m much happier playing for 2-300 people where I know I am going to have a good time than a big gig which might pay me well but I leave the booth feeling like I should of stayed at home and question why I bothered in the first place. big gigs can be great with the right promoter, line up and crowd but it’s almost impossible to play records that have any detail, sensitivity or depth, which is what I appreciate most. Berlin to me is good but it’s not necessarily the epicenter. One of my favourite gigs has been this small town Asturias in northern Spain, I played a little club for 200 crazy people for 7 hours. Fucking amazing.

So rounding up – you’ve been quoted as saying you share ‘an equal love of low brow and high brow culture’. How does that manifest itself?

It manifests itself as I am often full of contradictions, but I like what I like, not what people tell me I should, And I am opinionated in the process. People seem scared of strong opinions these days. I respect people that are passionate and have genuine reasons behind why they do things even if I don’t agree with them. For instance with movies I love Enter The Void and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Cannes winner 2010) as much as I appreciate Hollywood blockbusters like Armageddon and Bad Boys 2. I don’t have any preconceived ideas of what I should and shouldn’t like and how I need to fit in in anyway. I’ve never wanted to be part of anything.

I respect individuality and innovation in all forms and refuse to be pressurised to think or conform in anyway that I don’t feel totally comfortable. People have been too lackadaisical recently, this country has been putting up with so much shit recently, we’ve been continually lied to and deceived, people say nothing and accept that’s the way things are or simply ignore what’s happening. I think now what’s going on with the student riots is really exciting. I got hairs on the back of my neck when I saw students revolting. That’s what this country needs. That can only be a good thing for culture as a whole

Finally, if you could go back to any club in time where would you go?

I would go to the Funhouse as shown in that New Order video. That’s the weirdest thing for me. Arthur Baker is a friend now but I considered that guy a god at one point. Everything he was involved in. Him, John Robie, Latin Rascals, you know… he was amazing. What I would do to go back to the Funhouse where JellyBean Benitez puts on that Reel to Reel tape of ‘Confusion’ and the lights go, and the B-Boys and girls start dancing, that’s where I’d want to be. I know the Paradise Garage was the one for a lot of people, but for me it’s definitely the Funhouse.

Trevor-Jackson.com

[Apiento]

Mix/Interview: Gala Drop

One of our favourite records of the year was the Gala Drop 12″ on Golf Channel so we got in touch with Nelson Gomes (below) of Gala Drop to ask for a mix and also a few quick questions on the band and what it’s all about. The mix shows their eclectic tastes are and the interview hopefully explains more on the band and where they are going in 2011.

Picture by Marta Pina

Who is Gala Drop?

Me, Afonso, Guilherme and Tiago.

Where are you based?

Lisbon.

How did you guys meet?

We all met in different periods in time (between 2003-2005) at a place called ZDB where i used to be the music programmer.

What do you each bring to the party?

Electronics, guitar, percussion and drums.

How did the hook up with Golf Channel come about?

Tiago met Phil a few years ago in New York and gave him a copy of our first record at the time. Phil loved the record and suggest that would be great do something with us in the future.

Have you been to one of their parties in NYC yet? It’s on our list of things to do…

We played at the party in September. was pretty amazing. I was pretty impressed with the fact that the crowd instead of being facing the band, they were raving like crazy as they do in dance clubs.

What’s the long term goal for Gala Drop?

Do good music, record music, play a lot of shows and have fun.

We heard you play live? What does the show consist of?

Yes, we do. Imagine a rock band playing dance music.

What’s the scene like where you are?

Amazing. It’s happening a lot of great music in such a different scales of genres.

Your mix for us is pretty eclectic – how do your different tastes filter in to the music?

I wouldn’t say they got filtered, but that they help you clarifying you more in a way of what you wanna do and/or don’t. I think the music you love became to be part of what you are. The music we do is a reaction to who we are.

What was the scene you grew up on?

I grew in a small factory town called Barreiro in the other side of Lisbon. Was pretty raw there, but i can’t complain. At the time, was happening there a lot of different things: good dance music in the clubs, a few rock shows, good African clubs, good music in the bars, a lot of loud African music in the streets of my neighborhood….good times.

Finally, tell us what you are up to so people can get involved…

We are focused right now in doing new songs for the next record, the idea is be in the studio in February 2011 and we are working in a North European tour that will take place in April.

Cheers Nelson.

Welcome.

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[Apiento]

Interview: DJ Harvey

Our friends in Australia, The Blackmail, got in touch to see if we wanted to run an interview that they had just done with Harvey for their site. We of course said yes. To be honest I don’t quite understand the cult that is developing around the man but you have to say he’s got it right – the parties, the space in Hawaii and living the happy life. On top of that he seems totally genuine and speaks total sense. So over to Mr Michael Kucyk of The Blackmail and on with the program…

Text: Michael Kucyk Images: Harvey Bassett

Spanning many scenes and sounds, Harvey Bassett has been unconsciously carving his global cult notoriety for almost 25 years. As a DJ, Harvey is like no other. His infectiously positive personality seeps into his eclectic sets that aren’t limited to meaningless genrefication and often journey for six hours. Harvey will play whatever he feels, how he feels, and will never spin a lyric out of context. Inspired by his encounters with Larry Levan, he started the lewd label Black Cock with fellow Englishman Gerry Rooney and released legendary reel-to-reel edits which became heavily sought after and widely bootlegged. With a long list of credits as remixer, producer and session player, he has been involved in recording outfits Map Of Africa and Food of the Gods, as well as his recent solo project Locussolus. After overstaying his Visa, Harvey has spent the last 10 years bouncing between Honolulu, Los Angeles and New York. A newly acquired green card finally allows him to visit Australia for the first time.

Michael Kucyk: Are you enjoying the freedom of having a green card?

Harvey Bassett: Yes I am, this year I took a tour of Japan and Europe, which was fun. It was nice to get out and about. I don’t want to spend the next 20 years on the road. It’s nice to be in one place for a couple of months so I’ve been enjoying Venice since I got back.

MK: With such a large gap between visits to Europe, the UK and Japan, have you noticed a dramatic change in any club cultures?

HB: Not dramatically, no. I mean there might be a whole new generation of kids that have come through in that ten years but there was definitely a percentage of the old school represented too. It was good.

MK: Are there any new countries that you’ve toured recently with scenes that have excited you?

HB: Nothing so far. It seems like the scene is small. The venues are maybe only up to 1000 people but globally it seems to be pretty healthy with all the digi-communication and all the rest. People tend to know what’s happening.

MK: You’re involved in thirtyninehotel, a club in Honolulu. How’s that going? Does it have a community following?

HB: Pretty good, chugging along out there. I actually haven’t been out there for ages because I’ve been touring. There are definitely people there but I don’t know if they’re thirtyninehotel people. We’re open five nights a week and stuff goes on there. It could be anything from a seminar of lawyers or earth mothers to a wedding or a jazz band, reggae band, rave party. On the weekend it tends to be R’n’B based music on Fridays and dance music on Saturdays. There are regulars that come out for those nights.

MK: Has this international travel encouraged you to start digging again?

HB: When I was away in Europe I got into it but I think that was more to do with the guys I was hanging with. They’d be like “Harvey there’s a warehouse two miles from here with five million records,” and I’d be like “Let’s go then!”. I don’t purposely go out searching for them anymore but if stuff comes by way or if someone has a bright idea then I’ll go off and dig for some tunes.

MK: Did you have much luck at the warehouse?

HB: That particular spot was in Switzerland. Usually at a place with that many records it takes a whole day just to understand what’s going on in the room. It’s like “OK I’m getting a vibration from this area.” I found one or two records but I actually gave them to the guys I was digging with. Knowledge swapping.

MK: Can you recall your strangest digging experience?

HB: I remember once being in a warehouse somewhere in New York and we had a packed lunch and got locked in for a couple days with mountains high. We uncovered a full working record player so we got to listen to the tracks right there. I’ve had various rooms ankle deep in water with rats and the records are covered in dog shit from the guard dogs at the storage units. Some awful, stinking, brutal stuff. There’s also AIDS hospices where you get gay guys who have been disinherited by their families and all their loved ones have died so all their possessions end up in a warehouse. You go down there and pick up some disco records. That’s maybe morbid instead of strange but at least they go to a good home.

MK: Have there been opportunities for you to tour Australia in the past?

HB: Loads of people have said it but nobody ever made the call or took the kangaroo by the horns. I’ve always been down. I’ve even got some distant relatives and a few good old buddies out there. But this is the first time it’s actually come together and its perfect timing in many ways. It’s a good time of year and it seems like the scene is healthy.

MK: I hear that you’re an avid surfer. Are you looking forward to hitting some waves out here?

HB: Yeah man! As long as it’s not too strenuous! I might drag out a long board. I just bought a new wetsuit and I’m considering bringing it along so I don’t have to borrow someone else’s stinky beaten up wetsuit.

MK: You should watch some cult Australian surf movies like Crystal Voyager or Morning of the Earth. Both have classic psychedelic soundtracks.

HB: I’ve seen both of those. I’m big up on the surf movies.

MK: Earlier in the year I saw you play at Cielo in New York’s Meatpacking District and you opened with a medley of Justin Vandervolgen’s edits. Is he one of a few producer-DJ-edit makers that inspire you?

HB: Yeah I think he’s really good, he’s a friend. Actually I think that was the first three songs off his Golf Channel mix. I was like “that’s fucking great, I’m going to play it!”. So that fantastic mixing wasn’t me. It was Justin making it super smooth although I was adjusting it as it was playing. There’s a thing called Hot Q on the CD player which you can edit on the fly so that’s handy.

Loads of people inspire me. So many European cats making new records and edits and obviously Rub N Tug with Eric Duncan and his C.O.M.B.i stuff. On my European tour I played alongside 20 of the most happening DJs on my scene and everyone gave me a CD with 30 edits on it. And I was like “Whoa!”. Just mind-boggling amounts of rare cosmology. There’s some sublime and some ridiculous, you just have to check them all out.

MK: You’re bringing DJ Garth with you on this forthcoming Australian tour. Do the two of you share a similar spiritual vision?

HB: Spiritual vision (laughs)! There’s not a spiritual bone in my body mate. Me and Garth go back a long way. We’ve been friends for 20 years. He’s a gentleman and a scholar and a real good time DJ. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather be on the road with for a few weeks. He’s definitely part of and a purveyor of the style of DJing, if there is one, that came out of our scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He’s a great DJ and has a great bedside manner as I would say.

MK: How did you two meet?

HB: I don’t really remember. Probably at the Zap club or a TONKA party in Brighton many years ago.

MK: What about Gerry Rooney? How was Black Cock a collaborative effort?

HB: He would often come up with the tracks that we would edit. He’s been a collector, dealer and DJ for many years and has access to unbelievably incredibly great music. We would have some fun cutting up and editing those tracks and putting them out. Although we haven’t done anything together; although we did do a remix kinda but even that wasn’t really together. It was sort of a Black Cock record but he remixed; it was kinda official but he was in London and I was in LA and we basically did a mix each. Gerry was definitely instrumental in the Black Cock thing, for sure.

MK: He seems pretty illusive. What does he do now?

HB: He’s still DJing and dealing records. I’m not sure if he has a website that you can buy records from him or if it’s by secret phone appointment only. I know he DJs out on the scene in London and gets around the world.

MK: The names Black Cock and Map of Africa are pretty potent with a sense of perverse attraction. Were you channeling some raw sexual energy when creating the music?

HB: To a certain extent. Obviously it’s all about sex – the potency of the Black Cock, the double entendre and the tongue in cheek font. And the same with Map of Africa. Just to have fun with word play, and also secret meanings that aren’t that secret. It’s a joke but it’s kinda cool at the same time. To me so much of music is sort of a version of fourplay, especially on the dancefloor. You’re sizing each other up and it’s a version of sexual play in many ways – the way you move and express yourself, shake out or dance with someone. I like names. I often like inventing names and concepts. Obviously Black Cock and Map of Africa are prime examples of the sort of fun we like to have.

MK: Food of the Gods doesn’t feel as erotic.

HB: That’s because I didn’t make it up (laughs)!

MK: Are these just recording projects?

HB: We’ve never performed live as such. It would be nice to be able to put a live unit together and play out but me and Thomas [Bullock] basically never have the time. He’s in New York and I’m in LA, and when I’m in New York, he’s in Europe. To get a tight act together it really takes a couple of months of living together and working together every day for a few months. A couple of years later we’re deep into other projects and our solo projects so I don’t know if Map of Africa will ever play live.

MK: What can you tell me about the Rwandan Ice Cream Project?

HB: Basically these drummer girls came over to New York from Rwanda. They were holocaust survivors and had come over to learn to make ice cream so that they could take the knowledge back to Rwanda and get some parlors going to make a living. It turned out that they were members of this all woman drumming ensemble so we put them in the studio and recorded a couple of hours of songs and chants. It will be released and all the profits will go towards a Rwandan good cause.

MK: Have these girls since returned home?

HB: Yes. Hopefully they’re ice cream millionaires by now.

MK: What does a regular day for Harvey consist of?

HB: Wake up, have a cup of tea, let the fog of the night before clear, decide if I have anything to do, go to the studio, jump in the ocean. You could say I’m awfully romantic and that I get on my motorcycle, drive up to the surf and have a macrobiotic sandwich on the way. It swings between that and peeling the kebab that I slept on the night before off the side of my face. Finishing off the can of hot special brew that I left on the windowsill. Straggling down a very oily 50/50 spliff before staggering out into blinding daylight. In the last couple of months I’ve been pretty healthy and productive. I’m all about good food. A friend of mine catches a lot of fish in the ocean right in front of the house and brings back lobsters and flounders. I would imagine Australian’s are quite used to that behaviour but it’s pretty exotic for an Englishman to actually be able to cook local fish caught a hundred yards away.

MK: Are you eating some quality tacos?

HB: Yes. Without question, the best Mexican food in the world outside of Mexico is in Los Angeles. There are some phenomenal tacos of every variety. I like to eat the ones from the traditional Hispanic taco trucks that feed the workers. You can get three carnitas tacos, a seafood tostada and a Mexican coco cola for five bucks and you’re stuffed and ready to go back to cleaning toilets. Happy and full.

MK: What do you think you’d be doing if you didn’t get into DJing and producing?

HB: Absolutely any kind of mundane brainless job like greeting people at the supermarket. A job that wouldn’t take up any of my brain so that my brain could be left to meditate. I once worked in a factory where the speed of the machines was such that you couldn’t day dream, or you’d loose a finger or two in the blades. I actually learnt to slow the entire productivity of the factory down by turning a particular knob. It was just slow enough so that everybody in the factory could daydream and everyone was happy and could get the job done. But this is where the party’s at and I don’t want other people spoiling party time.

::

As we said at the top this article first appeared on the ace The Blackmail site. Follow them for more. Thank you kindly to Michael Kucyk.

[Apiento]

Wally Badarou On The Gregory Isaacs ‘Night Nurse’ Sessions…

We got in touch with Wally Badarou to find out how his contribution to the classic Gregory Isaacs ‘Night Nurse’ album came about. Here’s what he said.

What do you remember about the Night Nurse sessions?

Everything, because my involvement was brief and very simple: February 22nd 1982, I flew from Paris to Nassau, no specific project in mind. The very night I arrived, I left my suitcases still packed in my flat and went down the studio just to say hello before crashing back in my bed, so jetlagged I was. As I sneaked into Studio A, there was Godwin Loggie, whom I’ve known from the days of Countryman soundtrack recording (he had done Toots “Bam Bam” magnificent version for it), now sitting at the desk mixing some great music. “Hey Wally ! Glad you came by ! Here is the Prophet ready for you !”. The synthesizer was up and ready indeed, God knows who for, prior to my showing up. I had never heard of Gregory Isaacs before, and what came out of the speakers was irresistible already. So despite my near 20 hour trip exhaustion, I agreed to have a go at a couple songs. Less than a couple of hours later, I had overdubbed on the whole of the album, somehow reinvigorated by the “less than two takes or leave it” performance, hypercritical of what I did (as usual), and never realizing this unplanned last minute session would land me to be part of one of reggae’s indisputable classics.

That album is one of the very few I contributed to, that I can listen to from start to finish, skipping no song in the process, with absolutely no favourite in mind: from “Night Nurse” to “Sad To Know That You’re Leaving”, each of the songs bears special momentum, groove, grace and spirituality within.

I met Gregory only once, a few months later, still at Compass Point Studios. We just ran into each other one day, with a “Hi Prophet!” and a “Hi Gregory!” informal exchange, mutually respectful, yet quite brief since, as far as I can recall, each of us was busy doing something. So I never got to know the man really, nor any of the brilliant musicians who performed on that album: I did not attend the main sessions. My contribution was a during-mixing totally unplanned injection, with just Godwin, some assistant and myself in the studio.

[Apiento]

Interview: Chris Carter

Andy Blake of Dissident/Cave Paintings recently interviewed Chris Carter around the re-release of his ‘The Spaces Between’ album on the Optimo Label. They got talking about drum machines, life in Throbbing Gristle and syths, synths and more synths. Over to Andy…

Recently, I had the chance to run a few questions past Chris Carter, a genuine musical and cultural innovator. His detailed and informative answers on the various topics make a great read and if I can persuade him to go for another couple of rounds there may well be a longer, more involved piece at some point. For now though, here is the raw Q&A.

Can you tell me a bit about the composing and recording process for the music included on the original version and this new release of the album ‘The Spaces Between’? Did you have much of a plan for the various tracks before starting work on them or was it more of a case of turning the machines on and seeing what they had to say for themselves?

My workflow for solo pieces hasn’t really changed that much but in those days, in the early 70s, it was usually a case of turning on all the gear and just experimenting for hours on end. I would usually begin with something rhythmic, a sequence, a bass line or a drum machine pattern to improvise over. But I’d always have a cassette deck and a reel-to-reel tape machine plugged into the output of my mixer so I could just hit record at a moments notice. As I accumulated recordings of these experiments I’d often replay them and reintegrate them back into new recording sessions, building up arrangements of live electronics, sequenced patterns, rhythms and earlier experiments.

I mostly recorded onto cassette but that was purely a financial constraint because although I had a day job – actually we all had day jobs then, all the way through Throbbing Gristle – reel-to-reel tape compared to cassette tape was relatively expensive, well it was on my wages. Which is ironic because I had some decent reel-to-reel tape recorders, a Tandberg, an Akai and later a Tascam but I couldn’t afford to keep buying fresh tapes for them and eventually ended up using the Tandberg and Akai primarily for tape experiments and looping or as tape-echo machines. Although I did also use them to supplement my income by editing (on tape) quite a few issues of Revealer cassettes.

What was the studio environment like and how much did it change over the period these tracks were made? Was there a fairly stable set up much of the time or were you experimenting with wiring things up in different ways and rebuilding in new configurations after each gig or other reason that meant you had moved the kit around?

I’ve never been one to stick to a rigid set-up for the gear I record and perform with. I’ve owned hundreds of different instruments: synths, keyboards, sound modules, drum machines, effects units, mixers and recorders. Although having said that I do keep the recording side of things unchanged for extended periods. Such as recording onto cassette, which I probably did for five or six years. Even with synth and effects gear I built myself, which was a lot, I’d refine or reconfigure things and re-build stuff again and again, or sell gear to fund bigger and better pieces of gear. Which I still do.

I moved around North London a lot in the seventies, from various bedsits, apartments and shared houses and my gear was set-up on a very ad hoc basis. The equipment I’d built myself could be very temperamental and once I’d got things working together and playing with each other nicely I’d tend to leave them in place for as long as I could, or until I had a performance to do or a jam to play across town. Of course getting a new piece of gear – which was fairly often – always skewed the arrangement somewhat and figuring out different ways to integrate it was fun, and is something I still enjoy.

What I did through most of the seventies would be to configure a set-up of some synths, a few sequencers, a drum machine or two, lots of effects, all going into a mixer and then a recorder of some kind, cassette mostly. I’d also often make a schematic of how things were patched together, not really because I wanted to get the same sounds again or because the set-ups were overly complex but because I like to sit down and visualise on paper how things are connected. It’s something I still do now. It all goes into some logical compartment of my brain that I access when trying out new set-ups. It’s the same with well written instruction manuals, I just love them. I read instruction manuals like people read novels, for pleasure. The downside of this of course is that people who know me know this and are constantly getting in touch asking for advice on this or that. I have a great t-shirt that just says RTFM. Which is an acronym for Read The Fucking Manual.

How aware were you at the time of what the rest of the world was up to musically and culturally? Did you pay much attention to what other people were doing or were you and the other Throbbing Gristle members very much living in your own world then?

I guess we were living in our “own world”, most bands are but then but we were all voracious record collectors too. And although we did share some tastes in music there was an extraordinarily wide range in what we individually enjoyed listening to. I know it may sound like a cliché now but we really did listen to everything from Stockhausen to Abba via Zappa and the Beach Boys. Actually we’re all still like that, only we don’t buy physical product now, just downloads.

I guess I’m trying to get some sense of your awareness and the relative influence – or lack thereof – on your music of things as disparate as; music from the top ten to prog rock and the all the way thru to the avant garde, the Daily Express, the 3 day week, those casual and very dangerous forms of racism, sexism and homophobia that the English seemed to perfect around this time, the heavy and seemingly never-ending hangover from the hippie 60s, punk as it was emerging, the beginning of the end of the job for life etc.

Well I know this phrase has become another cliché and I’ve probably used it too often about the 70s’ but (to Quote Dickens) “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.

On a purely personal level it was the best of times because I just couldn’t get enough of it. I was fresh out of school and like a sponge – soaking up everything: knowledge, music, film, books, relationships, sex, concerts, DIY electronics, I was in different bands, I was performing – all good and the list is endless. It was the worst of times because I’d gone through some truly life changing and traumatic relationships and I was still trying to find myself, I’d had lots of poorly paid day-jobs, I got arrested, I got sick, I got burgled, I was constantly in debt, I was misunderstood, I had a car crash, I got beat up, I moved around a lot – another endless list of twenty-something angsts. The arrogance of youth and articulate self-confidence had completely bypassed me.

Of course, as you mention, we also had all those other 70s issues to cope with – sexism, racism, National Front, the hysterical press, awful TV, power cuts and also with us being ‘outsiders’ constantly getting harassed by the S.P.G., getting chased by Nazi skinheads one day, black gangs the next and punks at the weekends. Nobody seemed to like us then, well except the all welcoming All Nations club opposite our studio, that had the best sound system and played the best dub and ska in East London.

When the original cassette release of The Space Between happened in 1980 what was the main motivation behind bringing the music together into a collection? Did you listen to the tracks much over the preceding few years or did you rediscover them as a group at some point and feel that their time had come?

For years I’d made cassette compilations of my tracks, like mix tapes, but of my own music. I’d give them to friends, to Throbbing Gristle and later to people like Daniel Miller, Geoff Travis and writers such as Sandy Robertson and Jon Savage and journalists on Sounds, NME and Melody Maker that I’d got to know. I’m talking about a handful of copies, not hundreds. Anyway in 1978 shortly after we’d started Industrial Records and were looking for artists to bolster the label Cosey and Sleazy suggested I release some of my tracks as an album on IR.

Was there much that you left out of that release that could have fitted in with it stylistically and/or thematically? Are there plans for more releases and re-releases from the vaults or do you feel that you have covered the 70s and 80s period of your work enough now?

Oh yes there was a tremendous amount I left out, in fact for a long time it was intended to be in two volumes. But in the end I decided to edit it all down to a single 90 cassette. The original IR release also came with a small booklet of my collages and some texts and photos. What I’d like to do at some point would be to re-release the original IR version as a super limited double CD package with the booklet and maybe a couple of tracks from that period which were not included first time around. It’s just making the time to find all the parts and compile it together. But it’ll happen one day I’m sure.

Even by the time i began to spend time in studios in the late 80s the sounds of machines like the 808, 606, 303, 727 etc had already become part of the classic canon of electronic music building blocks and these days they seem as ubiquitous and easily identifiable to almost anyone into electronic music as, say, the piano, or the surf guitar sound or the grungy distortion of the heavy metal guitar. Can you remember what it was like to take those machines out of their boxes and use and hear them for the first time?

The first brand new ‘off the self’ synths I ever bought were an EMS VCS3 (above) and a MiniKorg 700 in 1973 and 1974. Actually you couldn’t get two more disparate synths. One was the pinnacle of keyboard-less experimentation the other was probably the most basic and simple to use home keyboard synth on the market. But buying, unpacking and plugging in both of those synths was like nothing I’d ever encountered before and even though I only owned each of those for a fairly short period (please don’t ask why) they were two of my favourites – each for entirely different reasons – and I’ll never forget that experience. Whereas going though exactly the same process with many of the other pieces of gear I’ve owned over the years has just faded from my memory.

But it’s an area that’s fascinated me for years. I don’t even know what you’d call it: “the psychology of buying new ‘things’ ” possibly? You know? – that new car, new synth, new TV, new fridge, new phone feeling. It’s a process almost everyone goes through at some point, although of course in different ways and usually with different outcomes, but it’s essentially the same for us all. That unboxing, plugging-in and using moment is going to be a different subjective experience for everyone. What may sound fantastic and inspiring to me may sound dull and uninteresting to someone else.

For about 10 years I wrote a lot of in-depth equipment reviews for Sound On Sound. But because I’d been sent so much new gear to review I got very blasé about getting hold of new equipment, particularly if I’d been reviewing a run of things I wasn’t especially impressed with. It’s a shame because that definitely affected my enthusiasm for seeking out new gear for new inspirations and the whole unboxing ritual. Although I think that’s pretty much worn off now.

Was there any sense of the impending paradigm shift due to the sounds themselves and/or the new ways of programming or were they each just one among many new boxes to experiment with?

In 1971, or 1972, the magazine Practical Electronics (above) published some articles on electronic music and synthesis theory complete with diagrams, and photos of experimental musicians: people like Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire and the EMS studios. After reading those pieces I went from hearing electronic, or electronically produced music in the abstract to seeing the absolute logic and sense of it all in those printed schematics and flow charts. It completely entranced and fascinated me and I instantly “got it” and started building my own electronic instruments. Those articles probably set me on this path I’ve been following ever since.

But in terms of equipment and gear I suppose for me the first paradigm shift was buying my VCS3 synth. Although it didn’t really have ‘a sound’ as such, unlike say a Moog synth, I think part of its appeal to some people was that it could sound completely different every time you turned it on. But for me it was as much an aesthetic thing too, presenting all these sonic possibilities in such a complete self-contained package. The next significant shift was when I bought a small Roland sequencer (a 104), a Roland drum machine (a CR78) and a Roland synth (an SH-3A) which could all be interconnected a synchronised to play together, in tune. That was such a major step for me because although I’d already built a basic step sequencer and synth all they could produce were relatively unrepeatable experimental sounds, and I wanted to take my compositions a step further.

And what about modifying things?

In the early days, mostly the Throbbing Gristle period, alongside building much of my own gear I did modify some of our equipment. In that period we weren’t exactly spoilt for choice and the range of things available was either very limited or out of our price range, which was pretty low anyway. And I’m talking about a time before programability, when a lot of things either had a basic set of sounds or a handful of presets built in. So by modifying equipment and instruments beyond their normal comfort zone we could make them sound different to how everyone else was using them. Basically we felt our sonic palate was limited with what we had, so I adapted them. Then by the early 1980s’ there was a boom in new audio manufacturers and gear started to get more sophisticated and prevalent and also more programmable. It was around then that I really got into programming complex sounds, and for a while continued modifying the hardware too. But by the time samplers took off in 1985-86′ish my hardware modifying phase had ceased altogether.

Were you excited when you first hooked a couple of boxes together with sync24 and they locked together? I can vividly remember nearly crapping myself with glee when I hooked an 808 and a DMX together and ran them in sync for the first time even though this was a fair while after it had become possible. It must have been thrilling to do this kind of stuff when this was the vanguard of technology.

I first got into syncing and triggering in the mid 1970’s, I had built a couple of step sequencers, a whole bunch of CV synth modules and a basic trigger-able analogue drum machine. These were all interconnected and being triggered, or triggering each other in sync. For a DIY system it was quite a complex set up at the time, but also quite temperamental, actually you can hear the fruits of me using some of that gear on ‘The Space Between’ album.

I started using Din Sync24 when I got my Roland TR-808 in 1980, shortly before Throbbing Gristle split-up the first time around. Which I should add, was one of the very first units in the UK. I went to pick mine up at Rod Argent’s store and their very first consignment had literally just come off the van and into the stock room, an hour later I had mine hooked up to a Roland CSQ sequencer (above) and some synths and I was recording tracks. Within weeks I’d bought a Roland MC8 sequencer (from Richard Burgess) and I had a technician at Roland who I knew retrofit a Din Sync24 socket to it. At last I could sync up all of my modular system, my keyboards to some decent drum sounds with rock solid timing… and sync it all to a reel-to-reel multitrack tape. Those were really exciting times and the floodgates had opened so to speak.

Looking back we can see now that this was a (short lived) precursor to MIDI, not as versatile but it was a standard way of synchronising rhythm instruments. And I’m not alone in the opinion that Sync24 still has the tightest, most solid sync, much tighter than MIDI. But even at the time I don’t think people outside contemporary music had the slightest idea what a major step the introduction of Sync24 was having on music production, and not just in electronic music. If you look back at the music charts the very early eighties there was an explosion of electronic based contemporary dance music. You’d had the introduction of Din Sync24, the 808, the 909, the Linn Drum, the Oberheim DMX, the Roland Bassline. It really was a golden age.

For you, how revolutionary was the idea of having multiple percussive sounds simultaneously programmable with the now fairly standard 16 step system for the first time? Was this new territory for you or had you been fortunate enough to have access of multiples of sequencers like the Korg SQ-10 and the Arp sequencer and your own similar creations and been able to do something similar before this?

It’s no secret I was a fan of German electronic music, and not just the Berlin School. I suppose it’s fair to say Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream probably had some influence on my sound with their multiple threads of sequences and percussion but the introduction of a standard for syncing everything certainly made life easier for us ‘sequencer heads’.

As I said earlier I was doing the whole ‘sequencers and drums thing’ back in the early 1970s so I guess there wasn’t really a “first time” for me, It kind of crept up on me slowly. The Holy Grail for me, for many years, was being able to synchronise all my different sequencers and drum machines and synths. That was another reason I got into modifying gear. Adding clock and trigger inputs or outputs to things, building weird little interfaces to keep things locked together. I couldn’t afford to buy an Arp or a Moog system, not even a Mini Moog but I had the wherewithal to make an attempt at something that could sound as good as those, well in my own ‘Heath Robinson’ way.

When I could finally afford to buy some ‘real’ gear, shortly after I bought the VCS3, one of the first things I bought was a Roland 104 Step Sequencer to act as a kind of ‘master-clock’ to control my home made modular sequencers, then I got a Roland CR78 drum machine and although all these different modules and units only had trigger ins and outs I could sync them together to each other – after a fashion. Even when playing in Throbbing Gristle, for some studio sessions, I would send Sleazy a constant trigger pulse from my set-up so we could sync up a step-sequencer I’d built him for triggering tape loops and drum sounds. Although the accuracy could be very hit and miss, which sounded fine – it was Throbbing Gristle after all. In retrospect it’s obvious that these methods were an early form of multi-tracking, but without the tape – and without Sync24 or MIDI.

There’s a great quote from Cosey in the Red Bull session where she talks about hearing some other people’s music a few years down the line and wondering if you had been influenced by them before realising that due to the chronology it was actually you that had influenced them.

I know, isn’t that the weirdest thing? We don’t listen to a lot of contemporary music, never have. It’s that old chestnut: the last thing you want to do when you’ve been in the studio for hours and hours is to start listening to someone else’s music when at last you’ve got some free time. We’d rather read a book, watch a movie or listen to Classic FM.

But recently we’d been watching some 80s music documentaries and every now and again we would hear something and say “hang on… that sounds like one of our tracks, which came first”. Thank goodness for Google – because we realised again and again that we’d written ours first, sometimes with a decade between our track and what sounded like it was influenced by our track. Which I suppose is nice, in a “sincerest form of flattery” kind of way.

In the 70s and 80s did you ever have a sense that you had become part of the continuum of influences and incidents that defines the progress of electronic music? Do you find it liberating or limiting in any way or is it just something that you find vaguely interesting and amusing?

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s’ that we really started noticing in interviews that people were referencing me and C&C as being influential or inspirational with our music. Or my use of electronics in both my collaborative work with Cosey and Throbbing Gristle and my solo projects. Of course we’ve been aware of our part in that continuum of influence for years with our work as Throbbing Gristle, although more often than not it was for different reasons and probably less about the electronic aspect of Throbbing Gristle’s music. But by the early 2000s I was resigned to the fact that I’d become part of this nebulous ‘electronic music’ historical timeline, increasingly being referred to in academic crusty tomes and such. It seems as each year passes I’m becoming more a part of it, not that it bothers me – in fact I do find it quite amusing – I guess it’s part of who I am and what I do now isn’t it?

The new release of ‘The Spaces Between’ containing a previously unreleased track is available on Optimo Music.

[Andy Blake]

Interview: Dave Dorrell (Part Two)

Here’s the second part of our interview with Dave Dorrell moving from the RAW days up to acid house, major label deals with Polydor Records, ‘Pump Up The Volume’ and it’s lack of follow-up. Images by james McLintock.

So going forwards, many of the Soul/Jazz Funk DJs took a while to adopt to the acid house thing whereby you, from what I understand, seemed to jump straight in and feel right at home. What was the appeal to you?

It was at RAW when I played my first Acid House record. I had a copy of ‘Funkin With The Drums’ and I didn’t really know where it fitted. It was kind of an anomaly and no-one was writing about this stuff, no internet, so nowhere to find out what it was about. So it just existed as a bit of vinyl which I had but couldn’t play [out].

There was no scene to attach it to…

There was no scene. There were no vocals. It was just a drum machine. And I think there were at the time early attempts to make similar music going on in Nottingham and Manchester. I say Nottingham specifically as Graeme Park was recreating sounds from these records in the studio. So one of these records I was playing at Raw was T-Coy ‘Carino’ which no-one saw as a house record at the time but you look back on it now and it was obviously an attempt to make a house record.

Yeah it sounds like a Latin tune…

Yeah that whole Latin thing out of NY was also kind of doing stuff that was a bit more hip-hop. It was toying with a scene that was growing up around the Paradise Garage but Chicago probably inspired it. Maurice and Noel were trying to play more up-tempo records at that time. I remember them playing Fern Kinney ‘Groove Me’ on plus 8 because it had a 4/4 beat and if you went really fast on it it sounded like a house record and those were the kind of moments when you thought ‘mmmn – there is something in this’.

And then acid as a sound landed in a pile of records in front of me and I still have all three of them. ‘Land Of Confusion’ was the first one that I heard and I was like ‘what is this?’. And it wasn’t as if I was from a purist background so I was like does it have a German influence? No. Does it have an industrial background? Yes, sort of but not really. And it didn’t sound like anything. I didn’t get it. We were getting most of our records from New York and I bought all three acid house records that day that had come in and I played them back-to-back. Another one was Phuture’s ‘Acid Trax’. I played them early as I wanted to see what they were like on the big system at RAW, we had an amazing sound system there, and they sounded incredible. And everyone just kind of stood there in horror (laughs). I told this story a few times. The club started filling up over the course of playing three acid house records back-to-back and at the end of it I thought ‘where can we go from here?’ so I put on ‘Cross The Tracks’ which was the biggest track in London at the time and everyone ran on the dance floor. And I thought whatever that was before, that is really something. Danny and Jenny (Rampling) came down, they were already doing Shoom, it was running parallel, and they did a Wednesday night at RAW with Kid Batchelor. I think about 80-100 came. You know, smoke was going all night, they had Smiley t-shirts and we were like ‘it’s all a bit weird this’ and something’s happening but no-one could quite work out what it was…

So it was the suburban kids that came along and kicked that whole thing along…

Just like with punk, absolutely, maybe it was about money, maybe they are just out there in the suburbs and they are more adventurous…

Something to do…

But yeah, I knew Oakey and all that anyway and it all meshed.

We like that whole Balearic thing at Test Pressing. What records were your favourite records at that time?

I might have to take another pill to feel the same way about Mandy Smith as I did then, but there was a particular little niggly mix by PWL that took Finitribe and mixed it over Mandy Smith. I still listen to Finitribe. I was going to Rough Trade a lot so I guess Split Second and all of those Front 242 records. I was listening to a lot of electronic music to be specific. The funny thing was my old school friend, Luca Anzilotti (one half of SNAP!) had moved to Frankfurt with his family during his last year of school and we got back in touch about ‘86 and I was going to Frankfurt to the Dorian Grey. I mean that club was like nothing in London at that time. You had to go in through Frankfurt airport, past people with trolleys and suitcases, in through what looked like an outdoor café, and from there you’re in. They had huge strobes built into the floor. So you’d go into the club and DJ Hell was the warm-up DJ for DJ Dag and Dag was a legend in Germany at the time. He played stuff that no-one in England was hearing, though some bits were slipping in from Ibiza, which was the kind of Front 242, Split Second sort of tracks. Skinny Puppy, Severed Heads ‘Hot With Fleas’ and things. KFMDM. So I am standing there looking at the DJ, the sound system is incredible, the music is really industrial and clangy and then suddenly this massive Star Trek laser, super strobe goes off for second and it was like ‘shit’. So those elements were really important to me and I came back with tons of records from Frankfurt. Anyway, for me its Finitribe, Mandy Smith and Split Second. Who would put those three in a box together?

So taking it a step forward again, like a lot of people you went from DJing to the studio, when was that an angle?

I was DJ-ing at the RAW one night and this American guy came up to me at the end of night and said ‘I really enjoyed your set – I’m here setting up a music channel called MTV that you might have heard of’. They were setting up MTV Europe. He asked if I’d like to make a musical identity for the channel and offered me an inordinate amount of money to go in to the studio. He wanted me to create a series of 15-second ‘idents’ to go with the animations but we didn’t have those so we had to make them blind. I had a friend of mine called Martin Young who was in Colourbox, and I asked him if we could get a studio as I had all this money. That was the first attempt to do something and it was hugely influenced by what was going on in New York at the time but with a British slant. We were just taking bits and pieces and just layering them all down and it was soon after that in Spring Summer ’87 Martin called me up and said I am in the studio and its going nowhere, do you want to come back in and go back down the avenue we were mucking about with for MTV. I was like ‘yeah sure’. I think he had this kind of basic rhythm track going and the initial idea (from owner of 4 AD, Ivo Watts-Russell) was that he’d work with AR Kane but they had kind of fallen out so he had to deliver something and so went in there and that became the prototype for ‘Pump Up The Volume’.

How did CJ come into it?

CJ was in the band I was managing at the time – Nasty Rox. He was the DJ. Nellee Hooper was the percussionist, John Waddell on guitar, Leo T on bass and Dan Fox on vocals. I’d just swung them a deal with ZTT I thought this was the best thing that could ever happen…

Of course, Trevor Horn at the time was pretty special…

We did the deal, and I was writing about them, promoting gigs and then Trevor got called into court with Frankie Goes to Hollywood so Trevor didn’t produce the record and Steve Lipson did, and he is great as well, but with Trevor Horn it may well have been a different record.

So back to M/A/R/R/S – why no follow up?

Well we started on it. We did a couple of things. We took studio time. We had a very Acid based track we were working on and a few other things then we got a law suit from Cadburys or whatever and it just got a little weird and it fell to pieces. It was kind of odd and it just ended up as a one-off and probably for the best. I guess if we’d been a little bit more focused but CJ was in Nasty Rox, Martin had Colourbox with his brother Steve and his commitments lay there. There’s demos somewhere but we never gave anyone anything.

On the surface you wouldn’t think 4AD (the label that released ‘Pump Up The Volume’) was a good record label for an out and out dance record but the more and more I listen to music on the label there’s a lot of drum machines going on, they are just better at hiding it under layers of guitars or whatever…

I think the walls of music culture were fairly permeable at the time. I think if you look at what was going on you could see that. People were like what is the difference between New Order and Bobby O and it was basically a northern vocal and that’s it. And then you can kind of see there’s not a big leap between New Order and the Cocteau Twins. So you see its all different micro shades from the same spectrum.

So from there you and CJ went off and you were in the studio a lot…

We got asked to go in. A lot of people wanted to trade on the name. We weren’t really mercenary about it but people were asking if we wanted to remix stuff, so we were like ok.

Who was the engineer on your records?

Robin Hancock was our preferred, he now owns Wright Brothers over in Borough market supplying Oysters to the best restaurants in London…

So what were you remixing at the time?

Well we got to do Nu-Beat records like Jade 4U, KAOS ‘Definition Of Love’, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers….

Whose idea was it to lay Aaron Neville’s ‘Hercules’ under your mix of ‘I Come Off’?

I can lay claim to that. I loved that record but it was a bastard to do. 4th & Broadway had it for the UK and they asked us to do it but they said they needed it by January 2nd. CJ was like I don’t want to do it and I was like ‘nah, I really want to do it’, so we booked time on Boxing Day and the day after that. That Aaron Neville break featured on an NME cassette and Neil Spencer had turned me onto it and I was like ‘ok this is ripe for abuse’. So we asked Andrew Hale (Sade) to come in to play keyboards so he came down with his keyboard and set up and we were like ‘we haven’t got a fucking clue’. Then we were like actually – ‘you know that bit in Once In A Lifetime’, it fits perfectly over this’ and if you listen carefully that keyboard line is nicked from Talking Heads. So we delivered it and they (Delicious Vinyl) hated it and I was like ‘we have given up fucking Christmas to do this’ so Julian Palmer who was the head of 4th & Broadway used it as the last track on the B-side of the American one but when it came to the UK they slapped it on the A-side.

What was happening club-wise for you at that time?

I’d been doing Love at the Wag.

Ah, before we go there I’ve just remembered you had a label as well with Polydor…

Yeah that’s right. I’d met Dave Angel in Berwick Street market one afternoon and we got talking. He’d done a bootleg of Sweet Dreams and I thought you know what I know everyone in the record companies so I phoned up RCA and they said we love that but we can’t put it out and then I managed to ok it with Dave Stewart and they couldn’t find the multi-track so Dave and me went in the studio and that was the birth of my relationship with Dave, who I then signed to Love Records…

So Love (Dorrell’s label with Polydor) was one of the first ‘dance’ affiliated labels?

Yeah I guess so. I got a deal out of David Munns the head of Polydor and I was on my way to ink the contract by the flyover in Hammersmith and I had a mobile phone and London records called me up and said what are you doing? Why are you going to Polydor with this? Bring the contract and we’ll cross out Polydor and write London (Records) on it. The rivalry between the two labels at the time was intense. I probably regret not doing that because David Munns was saying ‘we’re going to put dance music on the map’ so I was like ‘ok… sign the contract’ and then he stuck it to me cause he disappeared after 8 months and got moved upstairs to run the whole group and I got completely screwed. Completely screwed. I remember the first record I put out, which we were told was going to go top ten, went in at 41. Someone tipped me off that the head of marketing, I know who you are and what you did (laughs), had taken the ‘barcode’ off our record and put a Jason Donovan ‘barcode’ across all our 12s. Jason Donovan went in the top ten and we were stranded. It was one of those things, I was suddenly aware of the vicious nature of record companies and a year and a half it all come to an end.

So was it back to DJing then?

No not at all. The last band that I wanted to sign to the label on the back of a three track demo was called Future Primitive, and I knew the singer from the London club scene, Gavin Rossdale. I thought ‘oh fuck this I’m going to manage this instead’. I hated the label so I went off and managed bands again and they became Bush and off we went.

When was the last time you DJ’d?

The last gig I did was for Craig Richards. It had been a really great night and he came up and I said ‘well that’s the last record’ and he said ‘you can play another one’ and I said ‘no that’s the last record I am playing as a DJ’ and I cancelled all my gigs and went to the States with the band. And that was it. I went to chase it.

Do you regret cutting back on DJing to go into management?

The house wave had kind of crashed, Movement 98 anybody? I’d been doing Love at the Wag for two and a half years, a really good run, great DJs coming through the door, Trouble and stuff. Oh and Steve Proctor. (To the dictaphone) ‘What’s with this I was your warm up DJ Steve? It was my club!’ That’s what his website says. ‘I employed you! Big kisses Steve’.

After that I got a phone call from Nicky Holloway asking if I wanted to do the Milk Bar so I thought a Saturday night there would be brilliant. I said to Pete (Tong) do you want to DJ there with me and we called it Hot for the first few months and it had become more Balearic again and House no longer dominated the playlist. You had Soul II Soul and stuff and Italo was coming in and it was a right old mix up and that made it feel like a really good club again. We did it for a couple of years on a Saturday night. The Milk Bar was one of the best clubs I ever did. The bouncers were dancing, the bar staff were on the bar pushing the kids off and everyone singing along to ‘Like A Prayer’. You are in DJ heaven.

They were good nights and then clubbing took this other leap forward and I used to spend my nights running between jelly shots and bottles of Sol at the Milk Bar to go and see Weatherall DJing at Flying across the alleyway, getting knocked out hearing him drop the Primals for the first time down there in a cloud of smoke. I made friends with that whole Flying lot and then all of a sudden I’m dong gigs in Nottingham and Glasgow… I did Boy’s Own in Sussex, one of the best gigs I went to, and I had a nightmare that night and I played Salsoul 3001 (a disco soul version of the 2001 theme tune) and I was so off my head I couldn’t DJ. It was so hot that the sweat was dripping from the roof of the marquee onto the records and the needles were just skidding across but it was a beautiful night. So there were those boys and the Slough posse and Charlie (Chester) had found the next wave really. It was another door opening and another peek into a new world. That period, and the music, were fantastic. You could play what you wanted and the crowd were really responsive…

So it all joins up…

I think I went from RAW to Love to The Milk Bar into the Flying mob for a bit. We did the first gig with Sasha in London, Milk Bar Saturday night. The first gig Sven Vath did, Milk Bar Saturday night. So we had all these connections and bringing them in but there was a point around ‘93 when it all went a bit handbag and by ‘94 I didn’t like the music anymore. I didn’t like the predominant sound at that time. There was no soul in it and it felt extremely white and that was never really what I was for. So at that point it felt time to put it down as I wasn’t as in love with it as I had been over the past years.

What do you think about club reunions?

You know honestly I don’t really like these ideas. I try to avoid them. I’m not really for nostalgia. I don’t think it smells as nice as you think it will. Reunions feel to me like a pair of old shoes. They never feel right even though they were perfect at the time, but when you try and put your feet back in them, they just don’t look right. They don’t feel right.

What do you see the difference between doing things then, making your own flyers compared to now and they way you can get all your information to people in minutes.

The basic elements don’t change. Watching footage of the Dirtbox in Stockwell recently, someone had left a comment that it ‘looks like Dalston today’ and I thought you know what it is like Dalston today. And though it’s probably much easier to make your own flyer on your laptop and print up your own flyer it’s still pretty much the same thing to promote your own night. You don’t have to go round clubs giving out flyers, but if you aren’t actively out there anyway then no-ones going to come. You have to be out there promoting your own thing even if by word-of-mouth and that doesn’t change. I could open a Facebook page and start up a club night but whose going to come unless I actively promote it.

Finally, what’s more important, the art or the money.

The art! I now work as an artist with Melissa Frost and Mihda Koray under the name Slayer Pavilion. We ‘ghost’ Biennales. It’s a lot of work and I probably lose money but ultimately it’s very rewarding. The money? That was never the reason. The crack was the reason. If you could get money out of a label, great, but the things I felt the most connected to were connected to having a good time and meeting people. If it’s good it tends to make money anyway. I don’t think anyone should go without remuneration for their efforts.

Thanks to Terry Farley, Pete Tong and Frank Tope for the additional questions.

[Apiento]

Interview: Hey! Convict Interview Dominik Von Senger

Hey! Convict are Tamas Jones and Jason Evans. Over the last few years they have been forging a relationship with Dominik Von Senger of the Phantom Band, Unknown Cases and a Can cohort (amongst many other things), that resulted in the ‘No Name’ 12 on Golf Channel a few months back. First up we have Jason describing the working process of getting the Golf Channel 12 together and then second we have the interview with Tamas and Dominik discussing Patti Smith, Can recording techniques, drum patterns and more.

Here’s what Jason has to say on the record…

“The original of ‘No Name’ is from Dominik Von Senger’s ‘The First’, a record from ’82 that i found in Melbourne the week before I moved to New York. The whole LP is pretty ace, but this track really blew me away.

Anyway, a short while after i got to New York Tim Sweeney asked us to do Beats In Space and straight away that was one of the tunes I knew we had to put on the mix. Fast forward about six months after the show and we received a really nice thank you email from Dominik. He’d heard the mix and was really happy that people were still playing his record. Naturally, I, being completely blotto at the time, emailed him back asking for the parts with the thought that Tamas and I could fool around with them and maybe do a simple edit.

Dominik responded the very next day, really keen on the idea, explaining he’d just need some time to track down the 24 track tape — which, he said, actually started as an 8 track of bass and drums in Cologne and was fleshed out in London, with many bits and bobs added by Reebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee (both of whom are also both great musicians who played in Can during the years the band recorded ‘Saw Delight’ and ‘Out of Reach’).

A month or so went by and we got another email from Dominik. After a long search that had led him back to Matrix Studios in London, he was sad to inform us that the original 24 track, which had remained in London this whole time, had been wiped clean! In the same email Dominik told me that as a joke Nigel Frieda (the engineer from Matrix) suggested they should record it again…. Of course this sounded to me like a great idea.

So come January, Dominik got together with his new band to record ‘No Name’ for the 2nd time, 26 years after the original. Things were kept loose and it took a few months to get everything down. Dominik would send us demos as he was working on stuff and would allow us, which at this point included Phil South of Golf Channel who had become interested in the project, to offer feedback. It was cool to see the process of how Dominik was approaching the song for the 2nd time… There’s heaps of little things, but for example… Though he was using many of the same instruments this time round he was really excited about trying a different rhythm — as both the Casio Vl.1 and the first Dr.Rhythm machine, which he’d previously used, were pretty limited in what could be programmed.

Anyway, about a month ago Dominik finished his new version, which is the track Phil played on his Beats In Space mix. full circle, right back to Tim’s show, who is the master of all this, because without his show, there would be no Dom vs Con!”

It’s good to read how much time and love goes into some of the music being released at the moment but the long and short of it is that Tamas from Hey! Convict recently did this interview with Dominik and edited it to a soundtrack of his music. Here it is.

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Thank you kindly to Tamas, Dominik and Phil.

[Apiento]

Interview: Dave Dorrell

We haven’t done an interview for some time so after thinking about who to speak to we plumped for Dave Dorrell. Dorrell was involved in many of the seminal London night clubs – The Dirtbox, Batcave, RAW, Love and The Milk Bar – as well as being a journalist and manager of note for the Pet Shop Boys amongst others. There was almost too much to cover so we just started at the beginning and tried to work through the key years. Thanks to Frank Tope, Terry Farley and Pete Tong for additional questions.

Dave Dorrell images by James McLintock. Wild Bunch image by Beezer.

So Dave, where does it all start?

Well as a child I was a hippy. My sister worked at Biba so if you want the first thing I was seven with my hair down to my waist and she took me to see the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park for the free concert. That was my first concert. Barefoot, we walked the length of Oxford Street. That was a day.

What was the first scene you really got into youth culture-wise?

The first thing that we really got into it was kind of the Disco/ soul scene I guess. So Disco, but then at the same time it was Punk. I was about 15 when Punk happened and we started a fanzine at school called The Modern World (after the Jam song). We got an exclusive interview with two of the Sex Pistols – Paul Cook and Steve Jones – cause they lived in a flat in Bell Street, the same street as our school. I skipped first break at 11 o’clock and went up to the top of this old Victorian building and all these nubile punk nymphet’s came skipping about between rooms and we were like ‘it’s eleven o’clock in the morning this is ridiculous’ and then I remember when we did it Sid Vicious went past on a Suzuki motorbike with no helmet on.

So from the off you were brought up on an eclectic mix of music?

Definitely, definitely. From youth clubs days listening to Ska and Soul same as everybody else and then everything from T-Rex and Sweet and all that nonsense and my sisters into Jimi Hendrix and Bowie and all those things were getting fed into the machine at some point.

So you’re out dancing to the records, when did playing them to other people seem like an option?

For me it was at school. There were a few us really into music. Gary Crowley was in the year above me and he was a huge influence on all of us in being so ahead of the curve. He was going to see The Jam really before anyone knew about them and The Clash at The Roundhouse. Me and my old mucker Chris Clunn, a fantastic photographer who did all the pictures for our fanzine, really got into smoking dope and listening to Reggae and were asked to DJ at the 6th form party. Chris said ‘I’m going to call my cousin up (his cousin was Jamaican) and get him to come down as well’. We turned up with a box of seven inch records and they turned up with a sound system that had to be lifted off a lorry. After that we played when we could. From like 16 on we were DJing in local pubs and stuff like that.

When did you get a name for yourself?

I guess from 19 I thought there is more out here. We were going clubbing and seeing bands all the time and we had an eye on doing a party. I think the first thing that we ever did was at Battle Bridge behind Kings Cross. In those days Battle Bridge was still squats, everything from hippies to punks, and they had a hall there and we did a night. We charged to get in and people turned up. We alternated a few times with another clique from West London, which was Sean Oliver and Neneh Cherry and that whole gang. I think they were good days. Those were good parties.

What was the party called?

I think it was Emergency Ward 10.

So was that at the start of warehouse culture?

I mean for me definitely. It’s kind of before any other warehouse parties that I knew about. I think the Dirtbox was around the same time and I DJ’d for the Dirtbox when they opened up a big warehouse in Chelsea. Around the same time there was D-Mob in Beak Street – Chris Brick and co., these crazy Welsh kids. They were doing various bits and pieces. They had an illegal party in the basement on Rosebery Avenue in Islington called the Doghouse which had Maurice and Noel Watson as residents. So that was the beginning of the 80s I guess…

So what came next? You mentioned Neneh Cherry – was she the link to a new crowd?

Well that kind of came about after. I’d been going to the Beat Route where Steve Lewis (above) was Djing and listening to Fela and Gill Scott Heron and Material.

The mix…

Yeah absolutely. And that was where my focus was. The mix of things was extremely appealing and soon after that the guys got the Wag Cub and everything properly happened in the space of 24 months yet it feels like it was spread out over years. I started to DJ at The Batcave occasionally. I was starting to write at The NME as a result of a new fanzine we were working on, and it all happened pretty quickly. Across ’80-‘83 I remember going to all sorts of different scenes. Going to see The Specials, going to the The Jam at The Rainbow, watching Skinheads beat up Dexys’ fans at the Electric Ballroom, I guess ‘81 or ‘82, and soon after that I’m writing for The NME and DJing at warehouse parties and the whole thing has a run of about three years.

When you hear a tape of a warehouse party from that time they sound like they have a kind of have a naive amateur edge…

It was. It was completely made up. There were the established clubs, The Mud club, The Batcave was running kind of alongside that, early warehouse parties running alongside that, so you had very divergent scenes that were kind of open to everybody and though I was having a massive Goth moment at one point I was still going out to the warehouse parties the D-Mob guys were throwing as the NME offices were on Carnaby St. I was DJing at one end of Carnaby St at the Batcave then going to D-Mob at the other end.

It was quite unique in that there were an number of very strong scenes, Punk had moved into being almost Gothic, ‘82–‘83, the warehouse scene was coming out of efforts that Chris Sullivan and Ollie were doing at Billie’s in Covent Garden. The Blitz was going at the same time and I’d go there as it was on my doorstep and my sister went out with one of Spandau. I came home one night and there was bloke (Steve Norman) in a Hawaiian shirt playing guitar to her . I was like what is this??? (laughs). You had this very strong youth movement, not even youth movements, they were more explorations into music and style and none of them seemed to be too clear-cut. I’d go to the Beat Route and have a flat-top and mashed up jeans. I’d go to Batcave different jeans, same flat-top and it was odd how it all interlinked but was quite separate.

So obviously there was a point when your tastes refine and you get your own palette – was hip hop the crux of this?

I think that probably is about right. A friend of mine was the editor of Black Echoes and she came back with a 12” of Rappers Delight that she had managed to get from Sylvia Robinson herself. It was the first rap record I’d ever heard and that was an absolutely revelatory moment. It was like ‘what is going on here???’ I guess that opened the floodgates. From there it was trying to get anything I could out of any shops that had records of that nature. Places like Groove Records you know…

So do you think that was the unsaid link that you had with the likes of The Wild Bunch, Nellee Hooper and all that lot?

I can pretty much lay claim to bringing the Wild Bunch up from Bristol. I was going out with a girl from Bristol so I’d go down and see her. I went to one of their parties in St Paul’s and I was doing an occasional night at The Wag on Wednesdays and I got the guys to come up. I remember them coming up and blowing everyone’s minds as they had all these breaks that people in London weren’t plugged into…

Were they on the mic at that time?

They were a little bit on the mic but mostly they were DJing. ESG, their first 6 track EP playing it covered up and at the ‘wrong’ speed, and the break from the B-side of Eddie Kendricks ‘Keep On Trucking’. Cutting between two copies. Seven inches sellotaped to twelve inches – all that stuff. I guess the situation at the time was there was a nascent version of the scene in the West with Newtrament and The Language Lab guys but that was it. It was quite a tiny scene really and you could join the dots fast. Next thing Nellee was moving to London with Miles and they (The Wild Bunch) were getting a deal with 4th & Broadway. I remember being in a studio just around the corner from here, just off Shoreditch High Street, when they recorded the ‘Look Of Love’. Miles was one of the best DJs I ever saw in my life. I remember seeing him in Tokyo around ‘86 or ‘87, at Gold I think. It was an incredible club. It was in a bank vault and the DJ booth was made of Gold bricks. He was DJing and was playing Ramsey Lewis ‘Sun Goddess’ and then mixing some jack track, underneath it… Amazing.

So from the warehouse thing through to Special Branch. How do we get from there to there?

As a journalist I was running around the world for the NME. Going clubbing in New York on the back of generous record companies so I got to do all that stuff and chasing the whole hip hop thing. So Dirtbox started to do a regular night at the Titanic which was Berkley Square and I was bringing lots of electro and playing that. Sometime around ’84. I guess a number of scenes were all starting to converge and I think I met Nicky (Holloway) through Paul Oakenfold. Paul was working at a clothes shop called Ice in St Christopher’s place and we got talking. You know Paul was always a character, and I remember him saying he was going to New York and me saying he was going to have a great time as it was so amazing over there.

Two months later I bump into him and he’s working in another clothes shop and I said ‘how did it go?’ He said ‘it was great – I’m giving up my job and I’m going to start a record pool’. I was like ‘what’s that?’ He explained that DJs in New York got their records from a ‘Promo’ person. He’d kind of fallen into this in New York and saw the classic gap in the market and the market in the gap. The next thing I know he’s wearing a Beastie Boys cap, promoting Def Jam and doing a night at the Embassy. I was like ‘wow you’re get up and go’. At that moment what had been previously very separate scenes started to connect. Meeting Nicky and Paul – years before Spectrum – and that was my connection to the suburban scene that previously I had had no connection with as I was always central. And as such, it was suddenly another door opening. Bringing it back round I can’t remember the first time I met Nicky Holloway but it’s been a lifelong love affair.

So lets go rare groove. Who was the greatest DJ on that scene and why? (Chart above from i-D September ’87)

I’d have to say Barrie Sharpe. I used to warm up for Barrie when the rare groove thing was really kicking in and Rene Gelston had just set up Black Market records, I don’t think it was even a shop, he was a hairdresser and it was just a label in his head at the time, and we got a night at the Wag called Blackmarket and Barrie was the main DJ, Lascelle was playing upstairs and I would warm up downstairs for Barrie, and he would play pretty much two hours of James Brown productions and the full breadth of that was eye-opening. I mean you can’t forget Norman Jay and the Soul II Soul boys as they pulled out some utter gems but in a funny way they weren’t as purist as Barrie. You know if you went to Africa Centre you’d hear Will Powers next to some obscure African funk track and they were throwing things in the mix so they had their own sound so it wasn’t strictly rare groove but Barrie was utterly strict and totally pure.

So where does RAW come into it?

RAW comes about ’84–’85 and ran through to ’87–‘88. RAW was Oliver Peyton’s idea. He was great at finding venues and he found a new one. We were hanging out at the Spice Of Life and going to The Wag a lot and Oliver had just come up from Brighton. Once we saw the venue, it was like ‘wow, we’ve got this amazing venue in the centre of London, what do we do next?’ Oliver had just finished a design degree at Sussex and was like ‘ok, I’m going to drape the whole place in canvas you take care of the music’. He made it look like nothing else. So, I got Rob Milton to come in and do it with me as I was DJing with him at the Dirtbox, and we were the original RAW DJs and much later on Ben and Andy (Boilerhouse). Rob left the country so I had to get someone else in to do it with me and CJ (Mackintosh) used to come occasionally and that was it. Rob was a great DJ.

So when did it really kick off?

I’d say ‘85 into ‘86 it was a line around the block. Like seriously. I think it was the last time that there was such enthusiastic mixing of every single element. We were playing Hip-Hop, Rare groove,Disco and everything went. We’d have the bleachers set up and people would stand up and dance all night whistling. It was a sweatbox. It was 6 floors underground and I’d be drenched by the time the night finished. It lasted for a good couple of years and was it pretty amazing having that as your playground for a couple of years…

So slightly different tangent, who styled the shoot of you in i-D that looked very very Buffalo? It was certainly a very London look…

You know what, no-one styled it. That’s just what we wore at the time. It was me Nellee (Hooper), Milo, Barnsley and Zorha. We were knocking out these Chanel No.5 t-shirts and I was ‘advertising’ one. Product placement I think they call it these days. Nellee had just moved to London with Zohra and Miles and they lived on Delancey St in Camden and we all hung out together. That was kind of the look we were sporting. It was kind of influenced by the Japanese style. Nellee had a Westwood shearling coat on and there was a lot of ‘styling’ going on but no-one styled it.

What other DJs did you respect at that time?

Definitely the Wild Bunch, but then again Jay Strongman stood head and shoulders above all of us. He was the DJ. When he was core DJ at the Dirtbox he was the first person I heard play Double D and Steinski’s ‘Lesson One’. The first person I heard play Go-Go. He’d throw a Cajun record in and it all kind of went together. Because of the music scene the Dirtbox had kind of spawned you’d just as likely hear Theatre Of Hate or something. Jay would merge all of that into what was warehouse culture and would happily play the Clash next to obscure old blues tracks.

It’s funny one – it seems with a few of those guys like Steve Lewis from the Beat Route – they just seem to walk away from it at all at a certain point. Do you think there’s an element of it ‘doesn’t get much better than this…’?

Of course. That’s the secret of life. It’s not the 100th glass of champagne, it’s the anticipation of the first one and it’s almost the anticipation of the first one that’s the most exciting, so by the time you get to the 100th you’re over it…

Quite a few London DJs were spinning in New York pre-acid house – Fat Tony, Noel Watson to name a few – did you get to play out there?

No. Much to my chagrin though I went to every decent club in New York. I was going over mostly as a journalist. The first time I went was in December ‘83 to an exhibition by Keith Haring at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery which was incredible because in the basement Haring had sprayed his signature figurines in fluoro green and pink and yellow all over the entire space – wall, the floor and the ceilings – and he’d installed Grandmaster Flash in the corner as the installation. I was just like ‘wow’. That was when I started think ‘ok – art and music’. The following night I went to The Area. Probably the best club I ever went to. Grandmaster Flash was DJing again, Debbie Harry was dancing on the floor with Andy Warhol, and you just think ‘this is just nuts this place’. New York at the time was absolutely incredible. Meeting people like Mark Kamins who was DJing at Save The Robots and hanging out there a lot. Going to Danceteria and dancing with Madonna, meeting Arthur Baker, just being swept away but the whole scene rather than thinking ‘I want to DJ here’. It was never really my first thought. It was much more anthropological. And that’s how it felt.

You hear about people bringing back tapes from that time, and I suppose when you know what you are going for you want to bring as much of it back as possible and distribute it amongst your mates…

That group of friends they were doing that as well. And by ’86 and ‘87 we had links into Tokyo too. Nellee was over there. Miles was over there. We’d bring over Melon. I introduced them one night at The Astoria. We were doing RAW, must have been ‘86, Nick Truelocke was doing The Astoria with Noel and Maurice (Watson), and half-way through my evening about 12 o’clock, Nellee came over and said they want you to introduce them so I had to run across the road to Astoria and introduce them (Melon) and then run back to RAW and carry on DJing.

Were Melon a big band back then?

They were a big kind of scenester band. The Face and stuff. Anything from Japan was kind of hip. Their album was on Columbia. Everyone was trying to figure out how The Beastie Boys had become the biggest band in the world and everything was up for grabs. Melon and Major Force, as a collective, kind of represented Japan’s end of the game.

Part Two covering the acid house years follows soon.

[Apiento]

Marshall Jefferson Interviewed – A History Of House…

I was looking at Deep House Pages and Marshall Jefferson has been getting involved taking questions from all the forum members and the stories are pretty incredible. I’ve pulled out my favourite points and it’s still pretty long so I’ll keep this intro short and sweet. The copy is as it is on the site. So get your favourite Marshall moment out, press play and read on…

Posted by Julian_Kelly: Marshall, whats the history of the “House Music National Anthem” …how did that tune come to be?

I heard it in my head on my job at the Post Office, but with female vocals, and different words. I got home and did the piano, bass and drums. I thought it was hot as hell, and booked a session at Lito Manlucu’s studio. Called up my buddies from the Post Office (Curtis McClain, Rudy Forbes, Thomas Carr) wrote the verse and the backgrounds in the studio. Recording and mixing time was about 3 hours total. They thought it sucked. I thought it was the hottest shit the dancefloor would ever hear, but I have quite the ego.

The night, I took the song 1st to the Sheba Baby club, where Mike Dunn, Tyree Cooper, and Hugo Hutchinson were DJ’ing. This was before they all had records out, and I was known as Virgo. (loved that nickname!) They loved the song and I gave them a cassette copy, but they said it wasn’t House music because of the piano. From there i drove to the Music Box to give Ron Hardy a copy. Outside in the car i played it on my car system for some friends (One was K-Alexi) and I don’t think they were too impressed. I’d had about 15 unreleased songs playing in the Music Box at that time and they thought some of my other stuff was much hotter. They also said it wasn’t House Music because of the piano.

After that, I went into the Music Box and gave DJ Ron Hardy a copy while he was playing. I didn’t expect him to play it right away; usually i just gave him a copy and he’d listen to it later and maybe play it the next weekend. This time he put it in the cassette machine right away. I saw his head quickly go into a violent bobbing motion and I knew he liked the song. He immediately put it on and played it 6 times in a row, putting on a sound effects record while he rewound the tape.

From there it got to be the biggest song in the Music Box. Ron told me not to give it to anybody else, and I held off for awhile, but there were other DJ’s in the city that wanted it and finally I gave in when Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy’s biggest rival got a copy of it. Prior to that,I took it to Trax Records to press it up on my own label. At that time Larry Sherman, the owner, considered himself a House music expert because he’d previously put out Jesse Saunders stuff and also 4 of my records. He hated the song and said it wasn’t House music because of the piano. I didn’t care and paid him to press the record up.

13 months passed before he finally pressed it up, but there were some things that happened before that………………….

After Frankie Knuckles got a copy of it, it seemed the flood gates opened. I had to give Lil Louis and Fast Eddie copies, because Eddie lived 2 doors down from me on my block and Lil Louis lived on the next block. Mike Dunn, Tyree Cooper, and Hugo Hutchinson already had copies. Pretty soon it seemed like every DJ in Chicago had copies…………….some really bad and some passable, but crowds freaked every time it came on.

International DJ’s played it to and this is how I tracked down how they got copies, after talking to the DJ’s and members of the press:

1. Frankie Knuckies got his copy from my friend Sleezy D.
2. Frankie Knuckles’ best friend was Larry Levan from New York’s Paradise Garage. At that time, DJ’s from all over the world would fly to New York to hear what Larry played, because whatever was popular there became hits.
3. Somehow DJ Alfredo from Ibiza got a copy of it, and started playing it in Ibiza.
4. English DJ’s Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, and Jazzy M got copies. Pete Tong and Paul “Trouble” Anderson got copies too, but I’m not sure if they got it at the same time as the 1st 3 or not.
5. Once the English DJ’s started playing, things got weird, because the press got involved. England was quick to jump on a new music trend and got on it right away. “Move Your Body” had the words “Gotta have House music, all night long”, and with that “House” music, you can’t go wrong!” so naturally, the next task was finding out what house music was and getting the full scoop.

I started hearing English accents asking me for interviews when I answered the phone. I thought it was my friends screwing with me, but damn, those accents sounded authentic. I did a few phone interviews and suddenly, a whole herd of British Press all flew to Chicago to interview any and everyone involved with House music. They sat in on sessions and took loads of pics. Of course, Larry Sherman considered himself the resident expert on House Music and offered to take all the press around to all the House music clubs in the city. At that time I’d tried everything to get Larry to press up Move Your Body, but he hated it and said it wasn’t House Music. It was because he said it wasn’t House music that I called it “The House Music Anthem”.I even paid him with my own money to press it up. and he still hadn’t done it.

Well, when Larry took the press around to all the House clubs, Move Your Body was the hottest song playing at every single club-on dirty cassettes. The day after he took the press around to all those clubs, Move Your Body was finally on vinyl.

Posted by jj11: i also heard an interview you did marshall, and you said you were thinking ‘elton john, piano’ when doing ‘move your body’. is there a specific elton john song that your were thinking about ? also the intro reminds me a little bit of ‘deputy of love’. was that any inspiration for it also ? i hear how ‘let’s get busy’ was inspired by the rolling stones.

No specific Elton John song moreso his general piano playing style, which was pretty churchy. I had no idea the intro sounded anything like “Deputy Of Love”.
“Let’s Get Busy” was inspired by “Move Your Body”, but I always liked the Stone’s “Sympathy For The Devil” so I may have grabbed the hook either consciously or unconsciously, can’t remember.

Posted by Prince HiFi: Marshall, I’m wondering about the version of Move Your Body that came out on DJ International, it’s very different than the piano version on Trax – the DJ International 12″ is a beast, for sure. Can you tell us a bit about the different versions, which came out first etc.

Also, can you tell us a bit about the Virgo EP, that EP is pretty is pretty insanely deep, My Space and R U Hot Enough are my jams.

After Move Your Body got hot in the clubs, I stupidly thought I could do a better version in a big studio. The DJ International version is a 24 track version recorded at Paragon in Chicago.

The Virgo EP was supposed to be 2 songs from me and 2 from Adonis and was supposed to be called “Virgo and Adonis”. “No Way Back” was supposed to be on there but Adonis pulled it when it got played at a party and he found out how hot it was. There was another song called “The Final Groove” that he wrote and he pulled that too, but it never came out. “My Space” and “R U Hot Enough” were last minute replacements.

There was also a version of “Under You” called “The Pleasure Exchange” it had female vocals and breathing on it, kind of like a cross between “Sensuous Black Woman” and “Love To Love You Baby” that version never came out either. Hardy played it and copies of it are still floating around. Maybe Jamie will have it. I think Gene Hunt has a copy, but I’m not sure.

Posted by julian_kelly: This is good stuff Marshall. Also, how did Ten City come to be? What the story behind “Devotion” ? I always admired the musicality of Ten City…very well composed songs…and the strings were the trademark that always set it off.

I met Byron Stingily down at Trax records. He’d sang lead on a song called “Funny Love” by Dezz 7. I loved the words and found out he wrote them. From there we started working on songs together……..did about 5 that never came out. Among the ones that did come out were “Devotion” and I Can’t Stay Away”

“Devotion” came about when we were out on a double date. The girls went off on their own and we started singing about them. I went home and did the music, then let Byron hear it the next day. I told him it was the song we wrote last night and he didn’t believe it. After that we could write songs together over the phone just singing parts back and forth. Byron Burke and Herb Lawson were friends of Byron’s. Atlantic Records wanted to sign Byron as a solo act but he didn’t want to be on stage by himself. In fact, his 1st 10 shows as Ten City he performed with his eyes closed. Byron and Herb eventually got more involved in the songwriting process and took over on the 2nd album.

Posted by RAS: Of course the previously mentioned tracks were bangin’. I have very fond memories of your records get dropped at the ‘G’ as I was a newbie in 1985. However, my JOINT is ‘Open our Eyes’…

“Open Our Eyes” is probably the only song I’ve ever done that I don’t think I could do better today. Kenny Bobien and Eddie Stockley sang the backgrounds LIVE to the 2 track master

Posted by julian_kelly: Marshall, I remember first hearing “Just A Little Bit” when I bought one of those import volumes of the Jack Trax series in the mid to late 80′s. What’s the history of Ce Ce Rogers’ “Someday” ? That was a definitely a progressive and socially conscious tune.

Someday, I wrote after watching the news one day. It sat around for a few months because I didn’t know who I was going to get to sing it. Curtis McClain was usually my 1st choice for songs, but we were constantly at each other’s throats while touring for Move Your Body, and I didn’t want to do him any favors.

A promoter named Billy Prest had taken really good care of us while touring the East Coast and asked me if could write a song for his singer, Ce Ce Rogers. He gave me a cassette of Ce Ce singing and I gave it a quick listen and told him I’d do it. I just “happened” to have Someday lying around and gave it to Billy. Made me look like a genius coming up with a song so fast instead of the screwup I actually was.

Billy immediately flew Ce Ce to Chicago to sing the leads. I had the music all recorded when he got into the studio. Billy had specifically instructed Ce Ce to not play keyboards around me, because he didn’t want me to get intimidated. Ce Ce was a Berkley grad and an awesome keyboard player. Ce Ce is also a born showoff and absolutely the most competitive person I’ve ever met in my life, and of course within the 1st minute of him getting in the studio he found a grand piano and was playing so great he could have intimidated Rachmaninov.

Didn’t phase me a bit and I told him when he was done to get in the vocal booth and sing.

I recorded Ce Ce’s warm up and told him to go back to his hotel. It was absolutely phenomenal. Ce Ce panicked and asked to re sing it. I said no at 1st, then finally gave in, but my mind was made up. I told Steve Frisk, the engineer to record him while I went to Macdonalds. When I came back, Ce Ce seemed a bit more satisfied with the second vocal. I took it home and listened to it, but the second vocal seemed a bit contrived compared to the 1st.

My next trip to the east coast, I let Merlin Bobb at Atlantic hear it and he signed it immediately. He also played it on the radio the night he got it.

Ce Ce panicked again and asked Billy and Atlantic to send him to Chicago to sing it one more time. Ce Ce flew to Chicago and re sang it, but this time I had Merlin backing me up that the original vocal sounded better and that’s what went on the record.

Ce Ce Rogers is absolutely, positively the greatest live performer I’ve ever seen in my life, period. No artist should ever follow his performance, I’ve seen singers totally destroyed after watching him sing. I’ve seen him sing to an audience of 3 and had them all standing with their hands in the air and screaming at the top of their lungs.

Anyway, he greatly helped record sales and what went down on record was a performance in the studio, not a production. It was an honor just to be a part of that session and watching him let loose like he did.

Posted by So Easy:hey marshall, if you were virgo, why is vince lawrences name all over the records as if he did it? And tell chauncy, I will get him those other tunes asap.

I did Virgo Go Wild Rhythm Tracks. Vince Lawrence produced it. What Vince did was micromanage the recording process until everything seemed as difficult as Harvard physics. he even had me convinced dust affected the sound. He also convinced me to take all the keyboard parts off, so the end result was a beat tracks album. I felt this was by design because Vince and Jesse didn’t want everybody making house records.

It almost worked. I had lost my confidence and almost quit the music business. Vince and Larry Sherman thought I quit and gone forever because I stopped coming around, but the I guess the album did pretty good because Vince did “Virgo Trax Again”.

What got my confidence back? Ron Hardy was playing 4 of my songs at the Music Box, and people were literally stampeding the dancefloor when they came on………

I also released an EP called “Virgo”, that had “Free Yourself” and 3 other songs. It had produced by Virgo and Adonis on it, but Adonis pulled his 2 tunes at the last minute. One of those was No Way Back. I had to scramble to get the last 2 tunes, so I gave Larry 2 songs on cassette. Those were R U Hot Enough and “My Space”

Posted by ‘Magic’ Juan: Did you have any input at all on “Virgo Trax Again”? If not, did it upset you that he used the Virgo moniker to put out that release? Virgo Go Wild Rhythm Trax is still the sh*t. I sorely regret trading my copy years ago.

I had nothing to do with “Virgo Trax Again”, and yeah, I was pissed off. Not only was “Go Wild” my 1st record, but Virgo was my 1st nickname…..and Vince wasn’t even a Virgo dammit, lol. I also didn’t get paid for it, even though I paid to press it up

When “Move Your Body” got released, it wasn’t released on my label, it was released on Trax records. Larry did a last minute hack job because he was so excited , and didn’t even bother to re-cut or remaster it, he just scratched out my label number (OS2 for Other Side Records 2) on the mothers and added his own (Tx 117) to this day you know you have an original pressing if you see where he scratched out my label number.

Another thing that gave me grief was he put down “Marshall Jefferson” as the artist. I had been using the nickname “Virgo” for more than a year and it was my 1st nickname. All my life i wanted a nickname but never had one, the song being so popular totally blew Virgo to the side and I haven’t used it since. The artist on “Move Your Body was supposed to be “On The House”-my friends from the Post Office, Curtis McClain, Rudy Forbes, and Thomas Carr, and putting it mildly, when the record came out as “Marshall Jefferson”, they weren’t too pleased.

They stormed over my house and asked me wtf was going on. I told them Larry Sherman put it out on his label instead of mine without my consent. They didn’t believe me and I gave them the address to Trax Records so they could go and talk to Larry and straighten it out.

Well, when they got there Larry basically told them that Marshall Jefferson was the name on the label and they could kiss his ass, before telling them to get lost not very politely. They came back over my house and told me how Larry was a crook and all that. Norman Davis, who was Curt’s friend came up with the idea of me signing an affidavit that they sang on the record and that’s what I did.

They then took the signed affidavit to Larry and Larry told them that they were really great singers, and he’d given me $150,000 and put my name on the song because I’d signed a contract. They stormed back over my house and asked me for some of the $150,000. I told them I he hadn’t given me $150,000 and in fact i’d paid him $1500 to press up 1000 copies on my own label, but they didn’t believe me, even after i showed them the receipt. They said they were going to sign a contract with Trax Records because Larry was going to put their names on records and pay them a lot of money. I tried to talk them out of signing a contract, but I guess when your record’s playing on the radio and you have no money and your friends and family are all telling you how great you are things get irrational.

This is what I put it down to and I tried my best to talk them out of signing a contract, but they did it anyway. To make a long story short Larry gave them no money, but he did put their “On The House” as the artist on 2 records.

The problem was, after I started meeting with major labels, everybody wanted to sign the guys that made Move Your Body, but they’d already signed with Trax records.

Posted by julian_kelly: What was your experience like when you first went to the east coast? How did it differ from the Chicago scene? Did Chicago and New York artist/jocks really know each other? Do you know if Hardy knew Levan?

Chicago vs New York club scene: this may. Take awhile because I’m on my iPhone and I may not be up to it.

The 1st thing I remember is New York was infinitely better financed than Chicago, in fact, way better financed than any club system I’ve ever seen in the world before or since. Everything was 1st class-over 300 clubs all had Richard Long sound systems and separate sound AND lighting systems for the live acts as standard, and even unknown resident DJ’s were getting over $1000 a night. This because the Mafia was laundering money through all those clubs through one guy – Steve Juliano. They’d tell Steve to set up a new club for them and he’d do it within weeks. I remember Steve getting busted and the entire New York club scene collapsed by 1988 except for 1 or 2 clubs – one of those was the Junior Vasquez’ Sound Factory. I remember DJ’s going from $3000 a night to like $50-and they were happy to have somewhere to play. Live acts started singing through DJ mixers with no stage and no lights, it was sad man. Artists with records out could count on making hundred of thousands per year performing just in New York, all that was over…….

Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan were best friends since they were about 12 years old. Robert Williams was also from New York at one time was a guidance counselor for both boys. Robert was the 1st to come to Chicago and he tried to bring the New York club experience to Chicago.he tried to get Larry 1st but Larry was already playing at successful clubs, so he got Frankie. Of course, things were pretty ghetto in comparison because the Mafia wasn’t involved-at least not the sophisticated system New York had where you basically had almost unlimited money, so Chicago never had a live dance music scene.

Ron Hardy of course knew who Larry Levan was, but because he was Frankies rival he had no direct contact. I don’t think Larry was even aware of Hardy. He’d gotten copies of Jamie Principle from Frankie, but he didn’t get Move Your Body from Hardy; he had to wait until Frankie got a copy from Sleezy.

Sound systems: the Paradise Garage had the cleanest, but the Music Box on 16th had the loudest I’ve ever heard in my life. And Hardy knew how to work it. Who was better? Personal preference on any given night; both were fueled by drugs and both were god.

Posted by DUBFLY: Damm my ears are still ringing from the Garage system and you said the music box was louder …….FUCK …LOL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Marshall this thread rocks good looking on the history brother!

The Music Box systems was only louder because it was in a much smaller room, technically the Garage had the greatest sound system ever put in a club, but some tell me the Loft was louder…….

When I 1st got to Zanzibar, Tony Humphries was the DJ and Tee Scott had Moved to the Cheetah. Both were great. I didn’t really listen to Tee the 1st time at Cheetah because I was too busy hitting on Queen Latifah, who’s career was just starting (yeah, she’s a BIG time househead from wayyyyyy back!).

Posted by Mike Barnes: Marshall, Slyvia Rhone(Former CEO of Atlantic/East-West records, During the early to mid 90′s), And, Merlin Bob put more than a few cats down on the Atlantic label, In regards to Dance music, Like, CeCe Rodgers, Jomanda(Big Beat), Ten City, Etc, Marshall, Would you Care to build on the impact and contributions that Slyvia Rhone and Merlin Bob had on the dance music circuit, During the late 80′s to late 90′s, Also, Was Dwayne Powell Ten City’s Manager(I remember seeing Dwayne Powells name listed on Ten City’s album’s, During the 90′s, Though, I never found out what role Dwayne Powell actually played with Ten City.

Dwayne Powell was a 25 year old extremely arrogant black attorney when I met him in 1986. I really liked his confidence and love of the music. Dwayne irritated all the old guard of music attorneys in Chicago because he got meetings with all the major labels at will. Problem was all the established music attorneys couldn’t even get majors to take their calls-until Dwayne broke down the door with House music.

It seemed like all the labels, attorneys, and music business establishment in Chicago all converged on Dwayne at the same time that year; his name couldn’t enter a conversation without insults and slander. I loved Dwayne; not only did he handle my 1st major label deals, but his boyfriend Andre Walker, who was Oprah’s hairdresser, would do my girlfriend’s hair for free. Needless to say a lot of perks came from that.

Early 1987, I was touring the east coast with Byron Stingily. It was Byron’s 1st trip and he wanted to make the most of it, so we stayed 2 extra weeks. Byron and Dwayne set up meetings with the majors. Our 1st meeting was with a guy at Capitol, and we had one rough demo, which turned out later to be “Devotion”. That A & R guy cussed us out for 2 hours about how unprepared we were; we had no photos, no bios, and only one song demoed on cassette. We felt 1 inch tall when he finished with us and we were ready to give it all up.

2 days later, we had a meeting with Merlin Bobb. Merlin listened to the demo of “Devotion” and said “This is the SHIT!” “I’m playing it tonight!”. Merlin not only played it that night, but he signed it 2 weeks later. He also signed Ce Ce Rogers when I let him hear that. He would ask me for stuff from cassette and immediately play it on the radio. Timmy Regisford at MCA was the same way, and I wish I could have thrown stuff his way, but Merlin was just beating him to the punch.

Sylvia was Merlin’s boss. She gave him the freedom to sign anything he wanted. When House music was there, Atlantic’s black music department made its 1st profit since 1967. We liked to joke that we financed En Vogue, Levert, and Mikki Howard, because they never spent money on videos for us. They could basically just drop us with no promotion and do good numbers.

The thing was though, we were out there and happy to be there, and Sylvia and Merlin were a major part of that and we appreciated it.

Thanks to Julian_Kelly, jj11, Prince HiFi, RAS, So Easy, ‘Magic’ Juan, DUBFLY and Mike Barnes of the Deep House Pages forum and Marshall Jefferson.

[Apiento]

Conversation: Phil Mison (Cantoma) and Joel Martin (Quiet VIllage)

Phil Mison’s Cantoma album is released soon on Leng/Claremont so we thought we’d put Phil in conversation with Joel Martin of Quiet Villiage to get some thoughts on music, the internet, finding new music and their clubbing pasts.

Test Pressing: Easy one for 5… When did you two first meet each other?

P: We first met properly through Oscar from Trax (London record shop). You gave me some CDs with mixes on and then I think we were doing a party in West Hampstead and you came down and played, Gerry (Rooney) played, and DJ Gareth (friend of Phil’s who live and hung out in NYC for years) played. It was a good party.

J: Gareth! He would tell you a little story about the records he played. Like I remember when he played Dennis Parker ‘Like An Eagle’ and he’d say about everyone in 12 West (an early club in NYC) where Tom Savarese was DJing…

P: Yeah I remember that. Apparently they had some massive steps at the back and loads of dancers would be doing a dance waving their arms like birds.

Test Pressing: You both put a lot of value in hunting down records for yourself, the same as say The Idjut Boys, Harvey, Gerry Rooney etc. How do you think the internet impacts upon what you are trying to do finding new music without everyone else discovering it?

J: I think it stems from people coming to see you and you having exclusive things that only you play and they can only hear you play. I think sometimes people get overtly paranoid about other people finding out about what they play and with re-edits, the internet and bootlegging, you never know whats gong to happen. But you do have to realise that DJs are only playing other peoples records and the artist would think it insane that you wouldn’t want to share their music with other people. It’s not like Scott and the Antarctic but it’s nice to have music that you have found yourself. With the internet now people don’t have to venture out. You can find what you want on the internet and its all about money – if you have it, you can own the record.

P: Maybe the day of clubs with one core DJ who has a core crowd going to hear them every week and hearing music from that DJ is long gone. It was like going to Pure or Glam (Danny Rampling clubs) and that was the only place you could go and hear ‘Come On Boy’ by DJ H featuring Stefy before it was bootlegged. If you’ve got the power and the crowd then that is a justification for not telling anyone about those records.

J: I had this discussion with Gerry Rooney the other day, and I am sure Phil agrees, that for quite a few of us there is as much a buzz in finding something in the field yourself (laughs) , as there is to listening to it and playing it. Finding it, and physically tracking it down is almost a bigger thrill or high than the music contained within.

Test Pressing: It’s definitely true that people used to make more of an effort to go and track records down in the late 80s and early 90s…

P: I heard about a fight in Trax records over a copy of ‘Numero Uno’.

J: (In disbelief) ‘Numero Uno’?! But yeah, there weren’t any record shops where you could get that stuff.

Test Pressing: I miss those days of wandering round Soho with your list of records trying to cross them off…

P: Yeah religiously from about November ’87 I’d go out every week and buy records. I’d panic if I missed a week buying records. Ridiculous.

J: It’s happening again with the small little labels. If you miss that first press and don’t get it within the first couple of weeks of it being out, you can get it on Discogs or whatever, but it will be £30 or £40 as no-one is doing long runs of vinyl anymore. Not on 12 inches.

Test Pressing: It feels pretty healthy at the moment…

P: I agree. There’s loads of good music out there.

J: I speak to certain trusted people as I won’t listen to clips. Mates of mine will listen to clips on sites for hours, and then make a list, and then go and listen to them properly in a record shop and then decide whether or not to buy the record. But for me, if I am going to spend £8 or £9 on a record then I want that record to be something that I’ll be listening to in 10 or 20 years time, and that will also sound good at home, because otherwise I’ll get it on CD.

Test Pressing: There seems to be a select few of you sharing music…

P: You realise how small this scene is sometimes to be honest.

Test Pressing: Have you both done LA?

P: I did a party with Tony Watson on the Hollywood Boulevard and we DJ’d in a bar with George Takei’s star outside and it was a great party. LA is a werid place. It’s hit or miss. You know you have the Sarcastic parties and that’s the biggest thing, I am not sure how big as I haven’t been, but I have been to Candelas and that’s only about 80 people.

Test Pressing: What about Japan?

P: The first time I went to Japan, it was to play at Ageha which is like a superclub over there. They took me up to the booth and it was 8 decks in there. But I wasn’t DJing there, I was in the shed outside (laughs). It was 200 people and me DJing all night. As it was getting a little bit light they pulled the doors open behind me and the sun was rising over a lake outside. I was like ‘fucking hell…’.

Test Pressing: Who was the last DJ you heard that you really enjoyed?

P: I’d say Mark7 at Disco Bloodbath.

J: Frankie Valentine at a small do in Stoke Newington. He was playing, and I thought he’d play house but he was playing serious serious adult music, and I didn’t know most of it. He was playing soul and disco, Euro records, then a boogie record and then a rocky cut… I had to go and say ‘this is serious Frankie’. I love to go out and hear music I don’t know.

P: But you’re a music obsessive. It must be hard to go out and hear records you don’t know…

J: No. Even when I was 17 going out, I was never the one wishing to hear a certain tune, I would revel in hearing music I didn’t know. It would be a real ecstatic rush. I definitely had the mentality of wanting to know what music was though, as once you hear a piece of joyous music you want to repeat that.

P: I remember going on a tour of Portugal with Muzik magazine with Paper Recordings, Danny Tenaglia and loads of others and Elliot Eastwick played Eric Kupper’s ‘Planet K’ and it was like what the hell is this…

J: He did a great mix of Robert Palmer. Do you remember? Rampling played it…

Test Pressing: Is that where you two meet musically?

J: Rampling was one of the first DJs I remember hearing club-wise, as I was always a big radio-head, but Rampling and Trouble I liked for different reasons. Rampling would play Euro and also New Jersey records and then Trouble would play the full on garage madness which is a different lick.

P: Rampling told me the story about how he booked Tony Humphries for Shoom. He had the tapes from Kiss or whatever, so he went to New York on the off-chance of meeting him. He went to Zanzibar and he wasn’t playing, went somewhere else and he wasn’t there and he was like ‘oh no’. So he was like ‘it’s a wasted journey’ and then he had one number and thought he’d have a final go. He dialed from the airport, Humphries picked up, he canceled his flight and went back. He met him, then he came over and played. I love stories like that as it shows the passion for it.

Test Pressing: Finally, what’s the one record you wish you hadn’t played?

J: The first record…
P: All of them (laughs)…

Cantoma’s album ‘Out Of Town’ is released on Leng/Claremont 56 on May the 4th.

[Apiento]

Interview: Steve Reich (Maker Of Harmonic Invention) At The Red Bull Music Academy

So today we got invited to the Red Bull Music Academy to hear Steve Reich (pronounced Risch) talk. Hearing Reich talk about his life and work is very inspiring. He starts with his initial tape experiments with loops and phasing whilst working as a cab driver, and in turn a postman (due to crashing the cab), moves through his 1970 trip to Ghana and then plays two phases from his seminal ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ (to avoid discussing it). It was, to say the least, a very informative two hours and to hear him play ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ on the RBMA’s ridiculously big Genelec speakers was pretty special. Along with many others I would have been quite happy to hear the whole 56 minutes of the piece.

His love of John Coltrane is discussed (Reich apparently saw Coltrane over 50 times), with his favourite Coltrane album being ‘Africa/Brass’. Reich describes this as a piece of ‘incredible melodic invention’ with Coltrane ‘screaming noise’ in the piece. He described the clear influences on his work as being its, ‘rhythmic complexity, timbral variety and harmonic invention’. In the same breath he also mentions Jr Walkers ‘Shotgun’ which was released at the same time, and the fact that there was clearly something in the air.

Reich goes on to explain canons, a form of music that repeats and moves, that can be used as a framework for whatever form you like, or in Reich’s words, ‘Coke or Red Bull – it’s your choice’. Forthcoming work from Reich will be a piece based around 9/11 which I am sure will replicate the power of his award winning ‘Different Trains’.

So to round off here are the top three points we took from the talk…

1) It’s your job as a musician not to put yourself in a box. Its your job to make the piece.

2) If it’s burning a hole in you, go and do it.

3) The big thing to do is decide do I need to go through this before you embark on the something very time consuming, and if you do, more power to you.

In just under two hours we got a clear understanding of why Reich’s music sounds the way it does. Check the interview at the RBMA website when you get a chance.

Thanks to the Red Bull Music Academy.

[Apiento]

Interview: Andrew Weatherall

Good interview from Expletive Undeleted with Andrew Weatherall discussing being narky in the early days, MP3s and the reforming of PiL. Refreshing to see something raw in this day and age. Nice work chaps.

Thanks to Andy C for the heads up.

[Apiento]

‘Sup Magazine: Carl Craig Interview

Carl Craig talks Dilla’s ‘Big Booty Express’, Steve Reich, Detroit (of course) and why Leonard Cohen’s band need to loosen up. Interview from ‘Sup Magazine by Kelly “K-Fresh” Frazier and photography by Dennis Duijnhouwer.




[Apiento]

Interview: Dave Lee

Dave Lee has a new CD Sunburst Band album hitting the shops soon so we caught up with him to do a quick interview. The CD brings together all the remixes to date of The Sunburst Band and very good it is too. Anyway, the album is in the shops soon but until then here’s Dave.

What is this new CD you are promoting?

A new CD from The Sunburst Band, with all the best remixes we’ve had done plus a few new ones exclusive to this fantastic double CD. Some of the remixers included are Dennis Ferrer, Milton Jackson, Henrik Schwarz, DJ Meme, Grant Nelson, Idjut Boys, Yam Who, Recloose, IG Culture….as well as a few boring ones I’ve done.

Is it as bent as your other releases?

It’s a bi CD… This CD will have sex with anything. Pretty much like me. But it’s maybe a bit more expensive than I am.

What DJ’s have been supporting it on the scene?

The remixes have been played by Carl Craig, Ashley Beedle, Gilles Peterson Jimpster, Kerri Chandler, Seamus Haji, Groove Armada, Danny Krivit, Fedde Le Grand, Danny Rampling, Dimitri From Paris, DJ Spinna, DJ Spen, Domu, Tony Humphries, Glenn Underground, Roger Sanchez, , Jazzanova, Laurent Garnier, Benji B, Ben Watt, Karizma, Prins Thomas, Quentin Harris, X-Press 2, King Britt, Osunlade, Faze Action…..WOW!!!!!!

Does the scene still exist?

Which scene? For house music, yeah I guess. Though it’s not going through a particularly strong period in terms of crossover success, there is still some good music being made. The problem is there is an awful lot of rubbish out there. Possibly a bigger problem is the fact that a lot of the shit seems to sell pretty well.

Where does the inspiration for the Sunburst Band come from?

My love of disco, boogie, jazz funk and heavily soiled underwear.

If you could take the Sunburst Band back in time where would you like them to play live?

Be nice to have them playing during the Battle of Hastings, though I suspect we’d have problems with the amps.

And who would be your three dream front women to front the project?

Patrice Rushen, Minnie Ripperton and Philip Schofield wearing a bra/panties and blonde wig

Have you been thrown out of any bars recently for inappropriately touching anyone?

Why are you asking me this? You know it was part of the settlement that i can’t talk about it.

You have possibly the best collection of ‘pure’ disco in London. Why are you such a rubbish DJ? I never see your name on posters round Shoreditch.

I don’t know, I often ask myself that. And I’m such an arrogant c**t too!

Why don’t you DJ at some good clubs rather than that Southport Weekender with all those old blokes?

In the next couple of months I’m playing Lovebox, Garden Festival in Croatia, Beachdown Festival Brighton, Zouk Singapore, a couple of decent places in Italy . I guess lots of the trendy London places have gone very electro/minimal/deep house – though I like some of that stuff (not all night) its not what I’m known to play, so I guess I’m not the obvious choice. The other factor is I’m pretty expensive and though I do occasionally play for less I can’t do it too often as its what finances everything really. Also, lots of the well paid gigs are pretty good and on several occasions I’ve done things for nout and they’ve been shit, as though the promoter might love good music he’s crap at organising his night. Anyway, I will always stick up for Southport as it is a wicked event, a mixture of ages and has a great vibe.

Cheers Dave.

Peace.

[Apiento]

Interview: Map Of Africa

This interview by Jaclyn Marinese with Map Of Africa first appeared in Issue 18 of ‘Sup Magazine.

[Apiento]

Last Call For The PCO Under 5′s

If you are open minded and of a balearic nature you might want to check out Music From The Penguin Cafe who are playing at the ICA this Saturday and Sunday. Expect new compositions from Arthur Jeffes and lots of PCO material. Reports of the Manchester show (hello Moon & Mike) were it was a lovely night all round with a standing ovation at the last. Here’s an interview with Arthur Jeffes from today’s Guardian.

[Apiento]

Dubplate Sufferah: An Interview With Dennis Bovell (Part Two)

Last time man like DB told all about his early days as a producer, and about hanging about outside cutting houses whilst Jah Shaka prepped his soundbombs. In the second part of his interview about cutting houses, how disco stole Sly and Robbie’s flying cymbal and turning sound system clashes into band clashes.

How much of a disadvantage were you at, making English reggae? And how much of a problem was it that you didn’t come from Jamaica in the first place [Bovell moved to the UK from Barbados aged 12]?

I had to go the extra mile. I had to make sure my stuff was stinging. By the time I done ‘Silly Games’, I showed them my craft and it was totally FM sounding and wasn’t off the radio – still isn’t off the radio! – and I’d created a new drum beat. The intention was to make every tune with that drum beat in that reggae style, but the success of it… I couldn’t. People would have thought it was all I could do. Sly Dunbar had the same one on every tune! We called it “Flying Cymbal” but it was so infectious disco had it and called it disco.

Lloyd Bradley told me that cutting houses had a very specific job in that world of reggae, and didn’t move out of that world until punk came along…

The invention of the cassette ruined it too. D’you know, by the time Lovers Rock had hit I’d stopped using Hessle because by the time I cut Yuh Learn I’d learned not to cut my stereo tapes in mono any more. I wasn’t aiming at sound systems any more. I was aiming at radio and the wider ear.

Was there overlap between what you’d call ‘wax culture’ and the uptown places?

The dub cutters were John Hessell and a place in the West End called LTS, London Transcription Service. LTS was owned by a friend of mine’s brother, Bill Farley in Tin Pan Alley, Denmark St. Shaka used to use there. I quickly stumbled on a guy called John Dent. John Dent was first called Sound Clinic and he was the cutting room that was attached to Island Records. That’s where I cut The Slits, Linton Kwesi Johnson. This guy has cut all Bob Marley and all U2. As cutting engineers in this country go, he’s the man. He built another cutting room called The Exchange in Camden. Him and Graham, then he left and went and opened his new cutting rooms called Loud.

Can you give me an example from the time at Island, with John Dent, when something clicked for you as an artist?

There was another guy called Aaron Chakraverty at Master Rooms. He made me realise how far I could push that piece of plastic to reproduce and enhance, even, what you intended from the mixing room.

That post-punk period was really interesting…

I produced Orange Juice. There was a song called ‘Wheels Of Love’. I’d done what I call a skid mix, which involved lots of backwards sequencing. If you hear the 12” version you’ll hear it. Once I’d done it I needed to go to the cutting room to hear how they sounded.

Why could you not know that in your studio?

Too much bass makes the wave got like that (shows jump in the air). The skid was a piece of information backwards that could trip the cutter head and make the cutter head think it’s a square wave, and think it can’t read it. If you printed a record like that, it would jump. The first few copies of the Pop Group album I cut, I lifted the cutter head before conventional standard dictated. It was just another crazy idea.

Was there a link between early pirate radio, back in the early ‘80s, and cutting houses?

You’d have to ask Dread Lepke about that. He’s going to open a radio station in Ghana, for his sister. You know, Rita Marley.

Who would you bump into at a typical cutting house?

You’d try not to bump into people. It was inevitable at Hessle’s, because people would just turn up, typical sound system stuff. Count Shelley, Neville The Enchanter, they’d be everywhere cutting dubplates. You’d have to phone up and book a particular cutting time: here on Monday, there on Tuesday. come the weekend you have to have dubplate!

It hadn’t occurred to me the volume of music people would be getting. How important have cutting rooms been to UK street music?

It was the only means to liberate the stuff that was being recorded. Before I pressed Matumbi’s ‘After Tonight’, that song was on the sound systems of Great Britain for about two years. People were flocking to London to see me to get a dubplate of that, from Birmingham, from Manchester, from Leeds, from Coventry, from Doncaster, from Bristol.

What did they have to do to get their dubplate?

Chat to me at the right time…. and pay me, basically. They’d be cut to order. People would bring their deposit or cash or a postal order. You had to go to the source, to get a dubplate. If cut a dub for someone and I heard they let someone else cut it, they weren’t getting no more dubs from me. You had to go to the source.

Going to the source. What impact does that have on the music?

It just allows me to know where the music’s gone. It would allow me to know if I was popular enough to do a live show. If my tune was being played on the Bristol sounds, I could safely go to Bristol with my band and do a show there because people knew my music, people would come. Birmingham, the same.

Who else was in the same position as you? A DJ and producer and musician?

I used to get a lot of flak from the band: what are you? A sound man or a musician? Sometimes the rehearsals might clash with the sound playing out. They’d be like, ‘I’m fed up of going to hear your sound!’

So what are you, soundman or musician?

I am me. I’m both. The soundman did win, back then. This was a time when sounds were more important than bands. It was sounds and oh – there’s a group playing too. I remember arriving once at Acton Town Hall with Matumbi. We arrived and all the sounds had lined the stages with their boxes. I was like ‘Ya! Move dem!’ They deemed it their right. ‘We’re the sound! You’re only a group!’ It was only because I was in both worlds that people would listen. That kind of thing would cause friction. Groups were disrespected by sound systems, people getting turned off so the sound could play. Luckily no-one would do that to Matumbi. We’d plug a desk from the stage into the sound so it went around the room in this enormous PA system. We used to have group showdowns. There was this group called Black Volts, that was led by Michael Bruno, Frank’s older brother. Our band would clash Black Volts in Pountney Hill, just up the road from the Beaufoy, that was the scene of the big sound clashes between Duke Reid, Sir Coxon, Count Shelley, Neville the Enchanter. Those big sounds would have soundclashes there. So we decided to do a group clash. It was a show of strength.

Do people need to know why all this was important?

We found a way to bring [the music] from the studio to the living room, via the cutting room. From the control room, to the cutting room, then to the living room. It’s all rooms, isn’t it? There was room for improvement, in maximising the quality, and the best way to do that was to get it right at the cutting room stage. Even if it lacked something in the control room, in the studio, you could inject, elasticate frequencies, then it would lock them in, so that any reproduction of it would be regular. They are the heroes. Of ears.

[Emma Warren]