Category Archives: Interview

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Menu Music – Terry Hooligan

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Despite having a wealth of releases between them, Terry Ryan, Matt Welch (of Atomic Hooligan) and Jay Cunning discovered a mutual love for a certain type of breaks that were funky and full of bass. Yet this trio weren’t feeling what other record labels were putting out, so they put their money where their mouths were and set up their own label.

“Me and Jay were in a fish and chip shop in Queens Park in London after doing a radio show a few years ago,” Terry Ryan explains, “and we knew we needed a name for the label. I was saying ‘we can call it chair records or ketchup records, it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s got a name’ then I pointed to the menu and said ‘we can even call it Menu Music‘ and it just stuck. We even went back there to do some of our press shots!” he laughs.

Setting up a music label in this day and age isn’t an easy thing. Many fold from financial pressures, or lose their focus as the green rolls in. Even Adam Freeland’s Marine Parade had to close briefly last year. With so many out there, how will Menu Music stand out? “Well, there’s really only one true way to make a label stand out,” states Ryan, “and that’s the music. You can have promo, good press, radio and all that stuff, but if the music ain’t good, the label won’t stand out. Plus, I think we have a good package. We have the radio show and the multi-deck show that Cunning and me do, so Menu will always have a presence in the clubs on the airwaves. And we have a really clear view of what we like and what we want to play, and that spills over into our A&R for Menu. I don’t think there are many labels at the moment that are really consistent. We are very, very selective with what we want to release. And we wanted to hear music with funk but with enough ass in the bottom end to make the walls shake. That’s what we wanted to hear, and that’s what we want on Menu. That’s quite a broad statement, we realise, but when you hear the first release from Rico Tubbs you will hopefully understand what we mean. Flashlighter and Brazilia sum this up perfectly. And we have even more of this kind of ass funk to come!”

Their style of breaks is hard to define, but it certainly gets the body moving. Rico Tubbs‘ tunes are the bomb, being full of funk with a phatass booty-shaking bassline, while on Atomic Hooligan’s new You Are Here the music unfurls in a confident and stylish manner, eschewing the ‘laddy’ tag that breaks sometimes conjures up and presents a much more mature and interesting side. “We have a couple of new guys I’m really excited about,” Ryan enthuses. “Jay Stewart really has the sound we want for Menu. The next release is by J-Cat who has made this amazing little, half big beat/half ripping breaks number, that’s also got an Atomic Hooligan remix. We have Majool from Argentina who has again given us something completely different but fits into the Menu ethic. And of course there’s Rico – we still have the best to come from him!”

With iTunes and legal internet downloading becoming widespread, I was interested to find out they view vinyl as very important for the label. “Menu will always release on vinyl as our primary format. Just because there are new formats doesn’t mean the old trusted ones are going to disappear. I think there is space for all the various ways for music to be heard, but I love vinyl, no two ways about it,” Ryan declares, “and so does Jay. Personally, vinyl still holds so much magic and potential.”

That said, they also embrace digital music. They sent me a pre-release copy of Flashlighter via email, a process that is becoming far more common. “It puts us closer to the consumer. With no middleman you can really see what’s going on,” Ryan says. “And it’s a worldwide format. On a real practical level, someone in South Africa, someone in Russia and someone in London can all buy the same tune on the day of release, and that’s very positive. No waiting around for weeks for it to get to your local record shop. Plus, it’s unlimited. Once the shops run out of the release, it may take a week or may never get re-stocked; this way, a release can just tick over forever. So if someone gets into the label at a latter date, they will have full access to past releases.”

dB Magazine, Interview, Other, Writing

Tripod – “Gatesy”

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Tripod, the trio comprising of Scod, Yon and Gatesy, have been entertaining Australian audiences for over 10 years, and fresh from winning the 2005 ARIA for best Comedy album, Tripod returns to the Adelaide Fringe to make audiences laugh at their silly songs and on stage antics. Speaking to Steven “Gatesy” Gates was pretty much how I imagined him to be – funny, casual, and laid back, buoyed with the ARIA win and the imminent launch of their first DVD.

“Fucking stoked!” Gates exclaims when I ask him about the ARIA win. “We’ve been nominated a few times and the same people always crop up, like Rodney Rude… I think he’s taken one out,” he says going off on a tangent, the first of many in an entertaining fashion, “it’d be an absolute atrocity if he hasn’t taken one out, considering we all shared his tapes in the 80s as little kids… But I think it was our turn,” he cackles. “The Umbilical Brothers had an awesome DVD; I reckon that should have won, but we won instead, which was good. We were really pleased with that record too; it was a departure for us – it was a studio album we did with a band and things, but I’m glad the ARIA people dug it!”

I wondered if they had difficulties doing the studio album, considering they’re known more for their spontaneity and live performances. “With the recorded album, we took the best songs from the three seasons of the Skithouse show”, he says. “When we recorded them originally, I wouldn’t call it ‘shoddily’ but we did it ourselves in our bedroom. We got the best sound we possibly could with what little knowledge we had. It was funny doing a show to broadcast quality and we’d be recording with mattresses along the walls and standing in the toilet hallway,” he chuckles. “But some of the songs we liked and went into the studio with a proper band and producer and we did them properly. Because they were already done and people thought they were good or funny, and we had performed them live, we just thought lets make the music as good as we can.”

At the mention of Skithouse, which while not consistently funny had some fantastic moments, I lamented to Gates about the lack of comedy on free-to-air television. “It comes in waves, doesn’t it?” Gates agrees. “Like everything, lifestyle shows, cooking shows and shit, I think it comes down to network TV really. They just try to follow each other, jump on each other’s successes. Channel 7 has Deal or No Deal so Channel 9 has to do some fucking game thing… And that’s what happened with the sketch show thing – they decided ‘it’s time, we need comedy and we need local content – sketch shows are the answer!’ So everyone did them for a while, and it stopped, but it’ll come back, I think,” he adds, tentatively. “What’s really needed is, apart from Rove Live, there’s no live comedy show – we were brought up on the Big Gig, which was just ace TV, live stuff where it’s not a concern if someone fucks up and things go wrong.” But Gates thinks Network Television is scared of live shows, citing “I think it’s backwards scary fear thinking,” laughingly adding that he’s not even sure that’s a proper expression.

Just in time for the Fringe, Tripod has a DVD ready. “We’re pretty excited because we’ve never done a live DVD before. Every year since getting back from Edinburgh we’ve been doing these things called “Pod August Nights”, a bunch of gigs on Thursdays and Fridays in August. Last year we did it at the Northcote social club (in Melbourne) and we decided to make a DVD of it. We did it on one night, and now we have a record of actually what we do in a live situation… No one really understands (our live performance)– WE don’t really understand – which was really good, trying to work out what we did and what was funny in the editing suite and put in on film.”

As with all DVDs, there are some specials on there, but the most interesting seems to have been dumped due to fear of landing in hot water. “We had a whole bunch of ideas we couldn’t get clearance for – we went to this elaborate effort to do this animation using Lego set to one of our triple J songs, and everyone was freaking out and scared that Lego were going to sue us for using their image as a backdrop for drugs and sex. So we couldn’t use it,” he laments, but he does hints that it may find it’s own way onto the world wide web.

Something that did make it on to the DVD that Gates believes people will enjoy is footage of the lads in Scotland. “One of the biggest things for us,” he says excitedly, “there’s footage of us in Edinburgh in 1998, this was two years after we started, and we went to the Edinburgh for the Fringe because we had enough balls to do it, but we were pretty much under-prepared, certainly by today’s standards anyway. But there’s this amazing footage, shot after shot of three young, geeky guys trying to make their way in the world bouncing around in colourful outfits trying to make an impact on Edinburgh. I think it’s the most embarrassing footage of us ever seen by man!” he laughs.

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

DJ Z-Trip

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Zach Sciacca doesn’t like to define himself by media produced terms like ‘mash-up’. “In one sense I totally am accepting of it,” Sciacca, better known as DJ Z-Trip, says of the ‘mash-up’ label that’s often applied to his style. “People are going to call me what they’re going to call me, and if that’s how they know me and describe me then that’s fine. But at the same time as I evolve as an artist people are going to want to put me in my own category, my own sound. To me ‘mash-up’ is a very disposable name, it’s a name that came on the scene recently, and I don’t necessarily like to look at myself as being something that is that disposable.”

“But I don’t call it mash up, I’ve always seen it as blending or mixing, and just as something that DJs do,” he explains to me. “It’s what DJs have been doing for years, and it’s only just now seeing its own light and people are starting to identify it. But really at the end of the day if people identify with me, period, and they identify with my music, however they want to label me I don’t really care, as long as they’re getting to hear stuff and keeping an open mind,” he smirks.

With the release of his debut album, Shifting Gears, Sciacca was hoping to smash the ‘mash-up’ term, and have people call him “‘that really good DJ, guy that you need to check out, really top priority’ rather than ‘that mash-up guy’”, and it’s certainly moved him towards that goal. The album is a collection of straight up old-school party hiphop, with a little bit of rock thrown in for good measure. It features many big named hiphop MCs, alongside lesser known but equally talented performers. “A lot of these MCs I am a fan of and dug what they’ve done,” he says. “The goal was to put really well known people with those not so well known, and old and new. Put Grand Master Cas and Whipper Whip and Chuck D on there with people like Busdriver and Luke Sick, MCs people might not know, to make it as wide open as possible.”

But considering the album is so non-commercial, being devoid of modern day hiphop clichés like sped up vocals and dirty beats, I had to ask Sciacca why he put it out on a major label like Hollywood Records, rather than a more appropriate indie label. “I wanted to go with someone who would put my stuff out a little bit further and whom I thought would have a little bit more steam behind them”, he says. “But it’s funny, in hindsight I’m wondering if that was the right choice. On the one hand they definitely did the job of getting it out there, but on the other hand I still find myself doing a lot of other stuff an independent would do, like pressing up my own promos, and paying for my own tour support, that type of thing. The dream of ‘Yay, I’m gonna get signed, and then I’m never gonna have to worry about it again’ is more of a pipe dream. I learnt that through this whole experience with Hollywood. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it was definitely a learning experience,” he adds philosophically.

When it comes to live performances, you simply have to witness Z-Trip in the mix to believe it. Never have I been so enraptured by a DJ, never before has a DJ held my attention from start to finish like he did. One minute we were dancing to the Who, the next Run DMC, the next moment Credence Clear Water was juggled with Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full and then we’d find ourselves grooving to some drum & bass. “My thing is I’ve always tried to find the common thread with music. And good music is good music, period. No matter what genre and where it comes from, if it’s good and it rocks you and is good quality, I can throw it in the mix. It’s really been my deal – if it’s dope, and I flip it a certain way and keep it dope, people technically should be open minded and appreciative of that and should get it,” Sciacca proclaims.

We can expect to see Z-Trip in top form when he plays Adelaide, as it’s his first gig in the country, and in addition we get to see MC Supernatural, one of the world’s greatest freestyle MCs. “I’m looking forward to it,” he enthuses. “I don’t get to perform with Supernatural often. To fit Supernatural in the mix obviously we’ll perform some songs off my record, and then do some freestyle stuff, and then do some stuff off his new record. It’s nice to actually have a bona fide MC that I know can handle it. If anyone has seen him, they know what to expect, if not… whoa!” he whistles, “He’s definitely one of the best freestyle MCs out there. To have him in with my mixing is going to be something interesting and really fun.”

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Five Dees

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Originally going to be called The Fifth Dimension, but with a group already with that name, Five Deez is all about getting in your headspace, twisting the notions you have of hiphop and rapping. “When you experience music”, explains the main producer / DJ, Fat Jon, named so for his ample girth, “it is in five dimensions. You have the first three that we experience daily, and then there is another dimension of time and space, and finally a dimension of spirituality.”

Five Deez music attracts your attention subtly, not with harsh swearing or stolen 70s hooks common to hiphop, but with sweeps and processes common to trance or electronica, and a very different sound all around, even compared to other alternative hiphop. Beginning in Cincinnati in the 90s, now separated between Berlin, New York and Cincinnati, the groups’ sound is standout in a world of sameness and label clones. My favourite track on the album Kommunicator is BMW, which is to be the first single, and also Fat Jon’s favourite. “I think that track is a good synopsis of the album actually, the sound of it, the energy of it. It’s funky, it’s different, but as far as hiphop goes its familiar, but not really, you know?”

I ask Jon if he thinks living in Berlin has given this album more of a techno edge, with him hearing more techno there than he would in the USA, but he hesitates to agree. “I’ve always done different kind of things with hiphop production,” he explains. “This record being a hybrid of hiphop and electronic beats is to really try and make something different; as our third album and also for hiphop too, to try and take it in a different direction. The truth is, I’ve been doing music a long time, and I want to do something to challenge myself. Making the same stuff over and over is just boring. Being in the studio and doing the same thing you did years ago is just not fun. Trying to do something new, and making it sound dope, is hard,” he laughs, “and that challenge is fun for me, it keeps me on my toes.”

“The general hiphoper is close minded, and they just want to hear what’s on the radio,” Jon states. “They don’t like thinking. They wanna turn on a song and not have to think about it, just background music and they do whatever. My music requires your brain to come on and process it. It’s not club music on the radio; it’s something that requires a little bit more from the listener. I’ve heard this a thousand times, but with the Five Deez stuff, people come up and say ‘I don’t really like hiphop but I like your stuff.’ But my stuff IS hiphop. It gets to people who aren’t really into rap and hiphop, and I find that really interesting.”

“I think if you listen to my stuff, you need a certain level of imagination to appreciate it,” he says when I bring up the very obvious sci-fi elements contained in the Five Deez works. “I’m all about space, time travel, different dimensions, all of that – I think about it every day. I think science fiction reflects real life. I’ve always been enamoured with the concept of the future, and where man can go in the process if we don’t destroy ourselves before we get there. And a lot of the concepts are ‘yeah, right, bullshit’ and completely untrue, but at their root they’re based on some type of theory that does exist that needs exploration and experimentation.”

Fat Jon has also got his own record label up and happening, and he plans to bring out re-releases of older tracks and stuff released only in Japan. “A lot of those releases I’m going to be releasing internationally on my new label, Ample Soul. I started it to release some other side project material that I’m working on. It’s a way for me as an artist to have another avenue for my stuff, and maintain the kind of control a lot of artists want over their music. We had our first release back in November with Rebel Clique, featuring Ameleset Solomon, who I worked with on Black Rushmore and BMW on the Kommunicator album.” When I ask about the Japanese only releases, he says, “I release stuff in Japan only mainly for fun, actually. I’ve been to Japan and lived there for a minute, and produced a record strictly for the fans… I feel in some connected to Japan –. Even when I’m there, I don’t know I can’t explain it; I feel like I’m some long lost Japanese dude or something, you know?” he chuckles.

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Krafty Kuts

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Chatting to Martin Reeves, aka Krafty Kuts, in the morning is a sure fire way to brighten your day! He’s jovial, chatty, and a lot of fun. For someone who’s been in the music scene for a while, and been burned in the past, he shows a lot of enthusiasm and respect for his peers, and is really positive about the scene as a whole. However, his usually hefty output of tunes and remixes has been a little thin of late though, and I wondered what he had been up to. “I’ve been slogging away in my studio working on my new album,” he explains. “It’s come along really well and its nearly there, it is a few songs off finished, so I’m going to have it ready to bring over to Australia. I’m really happy with it. It’s taken two years to make, a few tracks have changed, and it’s got a kind of funk feel – it’s one of those records you can listen to in your car and you can play certain tracks in a club.”

He’s worked with a few old favourites again, most of whom worked on the incredible Trickatechnology. “Dr Luke is back, and A-Skills has done some uptempo funk stuff which is interesting, Ashley Slater is on there – he’s worked on the title track Freak Show which is a dark punk meets Krafty Kuts sound if you know what I mean… it’s quite quirky,” Reeve laughs. “ MC Dynamite (part of Roni Size’s Rapresent crew) is on there, along with B-Spoke, an American rapper. I’ve just been working with people who are easy to work with and can tour the album, be part of the whole thing, rather than if I used Method Man or the Beatnuts on a track, it would be quite hard to do the album live because of their tour schedule.”

He’s also been busy promoting the Supercharged night club, held on Wednesday nights in Brighton in the UK, as well as been hard at work with his two labels – Supercharged and Against The Grain. “The Supercharged club night is still going on strong, and that’s keeping us really busy booking the DJs, and putting on really great breaks line ups continuously is really bloody hard!” he exclaims. “And putting out all the releases – Supercharged has put out a lot over the last few months – Split Loop, Superstyle Deluxe and some of the other guys. Against the Grain has been a little quieter, but next year looks to be really busy with a few artist albums and 12 inches and remix packages. But we hoping next year will be really big for us.”

Reeve’s speciality is breaks, although he often dabbles into hiphop and drum and bass, just to give himself, well, a break. But he always returns to it. “Breaks has so many different styles, funky, techy, bassy, hard, and so on, and elements of all of them creep into my sets, and I think that’s what people like about them, I capture every side of the coin of how good breakbeat is. And that’s another good thing about the breaks scene – everyone is really together. Although you have some people, say like Lee Coombs or Meat Katie, and they’re not usually on the same line ups as say Aquasky or Rogue Element, but then there’s shows like Eargasm and three rooms of breaks, and you think that would be too much, but and people are screaming for more at the end of the night. I played with the Plumps the other week and security had to push people away because they just wanted one more!”

We chatted about the differences in club shows to festivals, as he’s going to be doing both when he lands in Australia for the New Year party period. “I’m touring with an MC – T C Islam – so I’m obviously doing the live thing with TC, with Ill Type sound and Tricka Technology live, but I’m doing lots of bootys and lots of new tunes. Up until the last few days I’ve been clamouring to get my hands on as many exclusive new tunes that I can, a lot of effort and planning, but it won’t be rehearsed. But I do tend to enjoy DJing on my own because I create a whole atmosphere, and get the crowd into a vibe.”

“Festival gigs are very different, and a lot more difficult,” he explains. “You have to play bigger tunes and the connoisseur of breaks may feel disappointed because he has not heard the new or certain tunes you expect in a club. When you hear a DJ in a club he can take you on a journey and weave in and out from place to place, but when you play a festival you’ve got to keep it on a high, because you’ve got so many people and many people don’t know a lot about breaks. You’ve always got to take into consideration that there’s a few people new to it and if they came and hear a hard or dark or deep set it could put them off. It’s like easing your way into any form of music really.”

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Kosheen

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Since their meteoritic rise to the top of the dance charts, Kosheen, consisting of singer Sian Evans, Darren ‘Decoder’ Beal and Markee ‘Substance’ Morrison has toured the world, playing hundreds of gigs to thousands of people. Their incredible live shows have wowed audiences and their releases impressed critics on all the major continents of the globe. The name Kosheen is, according to Morrison is a mutated version of Cochise, and also means ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in Japanese. That’s an apt description, because Kosheen has been around for a while now, and yet still manages to stay fresh and relevant in the demanding dance music scene.

Both Beal and Morrison grew up on a healthy diet of punk and brit pop. “As a teenager, I was listening to The Jam, The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays,” confesses Morrison, but both grew into the burgeoning Bristol drum and bass scene, along side seminal dnb DJ Roni Size. They met at a nightclub where Morrison DJed, Ruffneck Thing. They also met Evans there, and the trio hit it off. With a view to make actual songs with a beginning, middle and end, rather than little loops and quirky vocals, they took the world by storm with Hide U, which charted in Top 30s around the world.

On the back of this success, the trio began taking their show on the road. “I think we’ve played nearly everywhere in the world except Outer Mongolia and Ecuador!” laughs Morrison. “In Asia we’ve played China, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand. I love that part of the world!!” Travelling for such a long time and to so many places was “exhausting though”, he adds. “Especially at first as we didn’t get home for 3 months. We’re more selective now and space our touring out a bit to stay sane!”

Morrison relates on of his favourite on the road stories from when they toured Serbia in 2001. “Just after the Nato bombing!” he exclaims “We were kinda worried that they were gonna lynch us or something! All the bridges were destroyed and still sticking out of the river and stuff. When we got on stage and started our first song Catch, the entire crowd went mad and 20,000 people were all singing along. Me and Sian looked at each other like ‘Huh?!?’ Apparently our tracks were all over the radio! And when we went to the airport they were selling ‘our album’ at the airport, but it wasn’t even out yet!! And when you asked for it and they went in the back to burn it off and photocopy the cover!! Apparently we sold 50,000, but we never saw a penny though,” he laments.

The last album Kokopelli was seen by many to be darker than their debut Resist, and heralded the start of dnb producers using guitars. I asked Morrison if he has noticed the increase in guitars in dnb from the likes of Pendulum, and what he thinks this means. “Well I can only speak for myself, but the guitar was my first instrument and I write a lot with the guitar. But as kids of the electronic age we’ve experimented and fused the best elements of guitar with electronic production. I think on our new album we’ve reached the apex.” The new album Window on the World is long overdue, being held up with lawyers and contracts and the like, but is out early 2006 through Universal. “It’s the best thing we’ve done,” revels Morrison. “It’s more electronic, and the sound is awesome, it’s the kind of place we’ve been heading to and now we’ve reached it. It’s different to anything else out there, but unique quality music that people will appreciate.”

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Statler and Waldorf

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In the wake of Nubreed and Infusion, Statler and Waldorf, aka Dennis Gascoigne and Leo Hede, have come flying in to the Australian breaks scene with an amazing debut EP ‘Collusions’ and follow up album ‘Andronovavirus’. If you’ve heard the name before but can’t quite put your finger on it, Statler and Waldorf is the name of the two old balcony dwelling grumps from the Muppet show. “We actually prefer looking at the comic, cynic side of them rather than the grumpy side,” Dennis Gascoigne, or Statler, laughs. “It’s a name we thought we could grow into. If we are making music for 80 years it’ll become appropriate.”

Gascoigne has already been making music since the mid 90s, where he played in skate punk bands at a really early age. “So about ten years… long enough to know better,” he chuckles. Known for their exhilarating live performances, Statler and Waldorf straddle genres and mash all kinds of sounds together providing an interesting yet accessible sound. The name, ‘Andronovavirus’ is an abbreviation for Andromeda, Novation, Virus “which are the synths used the most on the album,” Gascoigne explains. “They’re not so much old school synths but more old school sounds. They’re not like the old Junos, which is probably a little too temperamental for our patient levels to be dealing with gear that old!”

I noted that their EP ‘Collusions’ had a rather different sound to their album, and I read that many people who saw them live were surprised to receive something quite different to what they were expecting. “We produced the EP with a lot of artists we admired and wanted to work with and it ended up sounding very unlike what we do live. People would come up after a live show and ask for our EP and we’d give it to them saying “this sounds nothing like us, what you’ve just heard”. Our aim when we made the album was to make an album to reflect where we were as live performers and as recording artists,” he clarifies, “so when people say ‘we like your stuff’ we can say this album will be their bag, you’ll like this.”

Their album is full of fantastic tunes, and an old school vibe. This feel comes partly from the equipment used, and also partly from the vocals. Duck ‘N Cover is an unabashed celebration of disco bickies and Saturday nights. The Resistance is resplendent with references to hackers and the underground. The vibe is very reminiscent of the mid 90s ‘cyberpunk’ sound. “Excellent!” Gascoigne grins as I say that. “We do a little DJing as well as our live show and one thing we guarantee is a lots of early to mid 90s everything, somewhere between the range 93 through to 98-99. As far as I am personally concerned they are the golden years of electronic music,” he states.

“It had the popularity yet the innovation. No one really knew how the gear worked and they just kept on making weird and wonderful sounds and making them work as popular music. Back before the Prodigy busted into the mainstream in Australia they were making really cool music. Even to the extent some of the rock stuff like Rage Against The Machine had a bit of that feel to it, and Pop Will Eat Itself had a great mixture. It just has a really good feel to it.” Here our conversation devolves into each of us saying how much we love the incredible PWEI, how great they were live, and I let him know that there’s a new album coming out. “I’m getting it!” he shouts excitedly.

Turning back to their music, I mention how much I enjoy Duck ’N Cover, but I had to wonder if the rock mix was put on their to appease the Australian, and particularly Queensland music listener. “Contrary to how we’ve got it on the album, the rock version was actually the original! The way it came about is the bassline, which gets a little buried in the mix, this funky synth bassline, only worked at 155 BPM, which is pretty fast. It’s pretty standard for rock, but you’re getting into your fast breaks, slower drum and bass, which we don’t delve into much. The only way it would work with the vocals, no matter how we squeezed it, was as a rock track. So we finished it as a rock track, and once we knew where it was going we slowed it down to the breaks mix. It’s really fun to perform,” he adds.

We wind up the interview talking about Statler & Waldorf’s gig at Earthcore, which they are both very excited about, but particularly Hede who used to be a hippy, and me lamenting that Adelaide’s breaks scene is still quite small. “The electronic scene in Brisbane is not so big either. You get your ‘weekenders’, guys who go to clubs and if it’s on they won’t leave,” he says, “but people who actively follow breaks and know all the DJs, other than Kid Kenobi who everybody knows, you’ll get a small crew of people but it’s not the scene you’d expect from our population.”

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Roots Manuva

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At age 7, Rodney Smith, thought he was too cool for the violin, and, being the son of poor parents from Jamaica living in South London, he sought out music more to his taste. “I was walking past Stockwell Skate Park and there was this sound system being set up. They were probably just trying out their speakers, and these dodgy-looking blokes standing beside it just admiring the sound of their bass,” the man who is Roots Manuva describes the first time he saw a sound system. His voice over the phone is exactly the same as it is on his albums, and his inflection and tone is wonderfully lyrical. “The sound system has been a massive part of the social actuality of the Afro-Caribbean people. Part of me culture and me heritage. That was what brought me to music, the sound through a big sound system, not the learning of music. I was learning the violin when I was 7, but it wasn’t cool enough for me, you know, so I kinda stumbled into reggae and then in my early teens was attracted to hiphop.”

Smith has just finished a “Back To Mine” mix, and just completed a tour of Australia, (sadly missing Adelaide), but I got the opportunity to see him not only at Park Life in Sydney, but a few years ago in Melbourne too at Vibes on a Summers Day 2001. In 2001 he just had a DJ and extra MC, but this time around he had a whole band. I asked the enigmatic performer why he came down with the band this time. “Using a band just seemed natural, just a natural evolution from sampling and using the machines. It adds a whole new dimension and flexibility to the live entity. It’s more of a challenge, it’s more scary, and there’s a higher place to fall from when you’re using a band.”

Smith enjoyed his tour, but finds travelling tedious. “It’s such a pleasure to be performing to such large numbers in Australia. It was a good ego boost, or ‘a ripper’ as you say over there,” he laughs. “Travelling is a real pain in the arse,” he adds. “Just as you’re getting into a place, you’re flying away again. And with Australia being so far away and so big, going through all those time zones it was such a physical engagement. There was many a tetchy moment between the band. There’s just so much to think about – everyone’s emotional state is fragile and up in the air, and it took a force from another world to come down and assist us to keep it together,” he says, with his voice rising like a preacher.

His last artist album, ‘Awfully Deep’ released at the beginning of this year, was also quite a challenge. “It was more intense, more of a laboured process, with more attention to finicky detail. Our past records have been more punk rock,” his laugh booms again. “A demo recorded in my front room, and other times we’d take five skeletons of tracks down to the studio and try and get five tracks done in two days. Have a couple of spliffs and a half a bottle of champagne and it was like, ‘right that’s it!’ But no more, we don’t have the time or money to be messing around,” he says sternly. “This time I would start off with the stripped down laptop ditty and take that to a bunch of musicians and get them to musically embellish what I do to step it further to a different sonic harmonic spectrum.”

Our chat takes us to his latest project, Back To Mine. “This compilation wasn’t about influences for me, it was more about putting together a bunch of music under the context of people coming back to my house after a night out,” he says, when I ask about the tracks he’s chosen. I mention how I think this Back To Mine is one of the most enjoyable, most listenable and accessible, especially compared to Adam Freeland’s Back To Mine. “Is it?” he asks, thanking me. “Well I’m always making mix tapes, so I kind of tried to hit it with the mix tape stroke radio show vibe. Definitely thinking about my audience, and not sitting there scratching my own balls and showing everyone how I have a deep, deep knowledge of all there is in music,” he laughs.

 

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Bass Kleph

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Twenty four year old Stu Tyson was just an 8 year old when he caught the bug for drum breaks. “They had everyone in the school band to write down a list of the instruments we would want to play in order of preference. Being 1988, the first thing I wrote down was obvious… Saxophone! But I didn’t have a second choice. So, I actually looked at the guy’s paper next to me, and saw on his “Drums”. I immediately added that to the top of my list of now two instruments,” and in a twist of fate in losing out to drums, from that moment on Tyson was hooked to the sound of sticks banging canvas.

He found his way into numerous bands as a drummer, but like a lot of performers, found rock to be a little lacking, and moved into listening to dance music. “Initially, it was the drums that got me. Most of the dance music I’d heard was house and techno. I liked it, especially the production quality and mix style, as the drums were massive, but being a drummer, the old ‘4 on the floor’ couldn’t hold my attention for too long. It was actually drum and bass that got me first, and then breaks eventually took over. When I heard these huge broken beats and deep bass, I was hooked. See you have to remember; I was coming from rock music where that style is all about guitarists. Finally I’d found a style that was all about me,” he laughs.

Shaking the shackles of rock, Tyson began his career as Bass Kleph, which Tyson claims “is the medical term for leaving a watch inside a patient… and also a musical symbol to define all instruments in the lower frequency region,” he laughs. And his career has been on the up and up ever since winning the Triple J Australia wide remix comp of Downsyde’s El Questro. “Ah, Downsyde,” he muses with a smile, “that was so long ago. It’s so flattering that people still talk about it. It was great, especially for the national exposure. Before then I hadn’t released any of my original tunes, so being able to play a little bit of Bass Kleph (via that song) to the whole of Australia was a great introduction for me. I’m so thankful we have a national radio station that plays breaks!” he cheers.

Since the win, Tyson has burst on to the international breakbeat scene with a string of chart smashing releases; receiving rave reviews the world over. Wild Card was added to Triple Js daily rotation and since featured on Kid Kenobi’s “Clubbers Guide To Breaks 04”, Triple J’s “Home Grown” CD, “Future Breaks”, Ministry Of Sound TV commercials and more. His tunes with Boiling Point stable mate Nick Thayer Fucking The Groove and Fucking The Synth sold out in the first week in the UK, and their next release, the remix of Feelin’ Kinda Strange by Drumattic Twins, is soon to be launched on Finger Lickin’ Records. This came about from the Twins’ seeing how they used the vox from the tune looped in a set. “We’d just loop the breakdown, cut the bass and – instant acapella! They thought it was great and suggested we do a remix. There was never a guarantee it would be released, but we thought we’d give it a nudge anyway. Since then it’s blown up all over the world.”

Fantastic news for the Australian breaks scene, although I was surprised to hear that Tyson doesn’t have a club residency anywhere. “I play different places every week. There are clubs in Sydney I play at whenever I’m in town, like Hijack (which unfortunately was recently closed down), Kink, Chinese Laundry and so on, but I wouldn’t call them residencies. I prefer to take my music to as many different places as possible, and luckily for me there is enough interest to do this.”

Tyson is coming to Adelaide, so what can we expect? “I use mostly CDs these days, and still some vinyl. The CD players are so good now, and most of the freshest music I get is digital. Think about it,” he adds, “the people who wrote it are gonna have it on CD from the day its finished. It’s only on vinyl when it gets signed and cut.” I mention three decks, and he laughs, “buy me and drink and maybe I’ll do four! Trick wise there is plenty of stuff going on, but only in a musical sense. I’m only really into things that sound like part of the song, or sound like they are complimenting the song. As for scratching, I leave that to the professionals!”

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Stereo MCs

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The Stereo MCs are back after a few years in the wilderness with a new label, a new record Paradise, and new positive outlook. Speaking with Nick Hallam from the band was an interesting experience. Listening to someone who has experienced the worst of what the fickle music industry has to offer, but someone who’s still positive about the band’s musical future, gives even jaded music reporter like myself some hope that beyond marketing, money and managers, music is still the most important thing.

Even though the core group of people who form the Stereo MCs – Rob Birch, the indomitable front man of the group, writer and instrumentalist Nick Hallam, and singer Stephanie Mckay – have been on the road and in each others face on tour busses for quite a long time, there is still a great deal of love for each other. “If we’re not making music, we go to Rob’s house and listen and play records, play some table football, that kind of thing,” says Hallam.

Hallam claims there is quite a lot of optimism now about all aspects of the group. “We toured Deep Down and Dirty for about a year or two after the release,” he says of the last few years. “It was a bit of a weird time really. Because Deep Down and Dirty didn’t sell as well as Connected, the record company started becoming a bit negative, and we felt we had to get away from them.”

Things then changed quite dramatically in the Stereo MCs camp. “We fired our manager and we carried on doing quite a lot of live shows for a number of years and then got back into the writing process. In the meantime we were sorting out our legal troubles as our manager took us to the lawyers. And after that all got sorted out, we got out of our deal with Island Records, which we thought of as a corporate record company and we didn’t feel anything for them. Then we got a new manager, who is really positive and helped us start our own label, and we started to get our confidence back.”

Not surprisingly, the legal and contractual problems left a bad taste in the group’s mouth. “There was so much negativity around us at that stage that we kind of lost the plot a little bit, we thought it was all a bit pointless, we didn’t feel as though we were part of something anymore. Island were acting like a bank and we just felt de-motivated by the whole thing,” he laments. “But now we feel it’s a new start – we’ve got the new label, we’re doing it kind of low key really, but we’re establishing a firm base for ourselves again to build something. We’ve done some live shows around the UK and Europe and it’s been real nice, it’s feeling good, as good as when we first started even,” he enthuses. “It’s refreshing.”

“After Connected we had a few bad years where we shouldn’t have been in the studio. We needed to get some fresh juice really. We did the DJ Kicks thing for K7! and it kick started us into making records again. When we did Deep Down and Dirty we felt really good about it, because we had broken through a hurdle for ourselves in terms of actually making a record, so we were a bit disappointed at how the record label treated us like a fucking donkey, you know what I mean?” he laughs.

“But now I think we have control over what we are doing, we’ve got our shit back and we’re feeling more inspired than we have done for about 10 years. Once we cleared the decks of all the bullshit, got rid of people who had grudges against us because we hadn’t made them rich,” he chuckles. “Now we got a new team who have an open minded, positive approach to us and what we were doing, and it has became about making a good record and having fun doing it.”