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What do you think of the British hip-hop scene?
It's getting much better actually. It used
to be very good, I used to think it was better than
American hip-hop around 1989-1990. I used to listen
to a lot more British stuff than American, but it just
disappeared. It was a lot more hardcore and up tempo…
I used to love that stuff, and that’s what got
me into rave and breakbeat. And it just died. But it
seems to be getting much better now. Both UK hip-hop
and UK garage, general black music in England seems
to be almost competing with America which is good because
they’ve got so much money over there which they
throw in for all the production, people like the Neptunes…
it’s just ridiculous.
Do you think there’s a complex of inferiority
in the UK when it comes to music?
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, British people
in general have a complex of inferiority about everything,
that’s just the way we are, always feeling a bit
sorry and guilty for things which stop us from being
as good as we could be. I don’t feel like that
with my music. I’ve never worried at all about
it being inferior. I remember when I first started making
drum’n’bass, I didn’t want to sample
ragga records because I would have felt a bit of a fake,
I never liked ragga. I don’t even care about that
anymore. Those Amen Andrews records are full of ragga
samples. I know a lot of people who still worry about
black / white stuff with music, but I try not to think
about it.
A few years ago, you collaborated with blues
musician BJ Cole on Stop The Panic. How did
you come to work with him?
It came out through him mainly. Obviously,
if I hadn’t been interested it wouldn’t
have happened. He’d heard the Plug stuff and he
came up to me after a gig pretty early on, like 1996.
I don’t think he told me he played pedal steel
guitar the first time. He just said he really liked
my stuff. BJ’s got a really mad face. If you’d
see him you would never forget his face… massive
weird eyes and a really funny head. Then I saw him again
about three months later. I happened to ask him what
he did, and he said he played pedal steel guitar. I
just love that instrument and I just said that I’d
love to do a track with him, just thinking it’d
be just one cheesy Hawaiian pop thing. We did one, and
it was so much fun, and we did another one, and then
another one, and that’s how it happened. We never
thought we'd do a whole album until we’d done
about eight tracks, and suddenly we though that we’d
almost had an album. It was just like that. It was very
good fun to work with him. But we didn’t work
together that much. I’d do a really simple backing
track, give it to him, he’d do something fucking
mad on it, give it back to me, I’d resample his
bit, include it in the track, give it back to him, he’d
do another little bit. That’s the way we liked
working. A few times we tried to be in the same room,
but it didn’t work so well. That’s the good
thing with new technology, you don’t have to be
in the same room.
Did you have the deal with Cookin’ Vinyl
at the time?
No. That was shit as well… I wish we’d
found another label. They were real bastards. We were
going to sell it to this guy, Phil, who’s a really
good friend of mine. He had this tiny record label called
Law & Auder. He used to put out loads of different
compilations, usually with ‘ism’ at the
end, like Avant-gardism, Minimalism.
East-Westercisms was the first one he did.
Big fans of me always know the label because I’ve
given him loads of tracks, so every album he does always
has exclusive tracks by me on, and people always say
they had to buy that album because there’s one
track by me on it and thirty bad ones by people they
hate. We wanted to sell the album to him and he sort
of fucked up, because he said he’d found this
really nice label, they would give him money, give us
money, and in the end they were really nasty. We had
to get lawyers to get in to get our money. Not nice
label, but not many labels are nice. There’s only
Warp, Ninja Tune, Rephlex that I know are nice labels,
that’s it. Mo’Wax were horrible, Virgin
obviously… they just didn’t care about me.
But it was the same with Mo’Wax. I wasn’t
surprised with Virgin, like every time I went there,
I had the feeling I was just nothing, but I got the
same feeling with Mo’Wax which was really horrible.
It really felt like the only important thing was James
Lavelle and the label. He’d just leave you there
to wait in some room occasionally popping to say ‘I’ll
be with you in a minute’, like ‘I’ve
got important things to do and you’re not important’.
What was the reaction of record labels when
you went to see them with the BJ Cole album?
A lot of people said they were really interested,
even big labels like East West, and not so big labels
like XL, but at the end of the day, they just didn’t
know how they could market it and who would buy it.
We also toured for six months, which is the only time
I’ve ever done that. I couldn’t do it now
having kids… I’ll never do that again. We
did this fucking six months tour and the record didn’t
even sale as much as one of my own records does. It
was a frustrating experience… not musically, but
everything else. Musically, it was great and I’m
sure we’ll do it again sometime. I still see BJ.
Did working with him affect the way you create
music now?
In a way, yes. I don’t think I’ve
changed my approach. We were so different. The only
people I’d worked with until then were very much
like me. People like Aphex. We know about computers
and drum machines, you know, all the same things, but
BJ didn’t know anything that I knew and I didn’t
know anything that he knew, so it was really nice that
we were completely compatible in that way. We weren’t
stepping on each other’s toes, where I often do
when working with Aphex or someone who’s more
like me. Richard will start programming the drum machine,
and I’m like ‘shit, I wanted to program
the drum machine’ and silly things like that.
(laughs) With BJ, he was just playing the steel guitar
and that was it, and I did everything else. It was cool,
I liked that. It’s the same with a vocalist, I
don’t do vocals, so we’re not stepping on
each other’s toes. It probably has changed something
working with him. I did a track not too long ago and
I thought that I wouldn’t have done that track
if I hadn’t worked with BJ. There was something
about the track that reminded me of him. I think it’s
the same with everything in life, everything is an influence,
it’s just hard to know how it influences you.
Unlike some of you contemporaries, you’ve
at times opted for straight drum’n’bass
instead of the more leftfield drill’n’bass…
I kind of feel guilty for helping to start
that kind of stuff, because I didn’t want to at
all. I don’t really mind that there are people
like Venetian Snares or DJ Skud, but it’s a bit
brutal. Personally I prefer old jungle from ’94
to ’96. Their stuff is too crazy for me. I love
Squarepusher and I love Aphex, but I think it’s
only because they’re my friends ultimately. I
understand why they make the music they make but if
I didn’t know them, I probably wouldn’t
listen to it much. I can’t be bothered getting
into it because it’s just too… (pause) I’m
just sort of simple I think at the end of the day. Things
have to have grooves, nice bass lines, nice melodies.
I like classic things in a way. Aphex and Squarepusher
and Venetian Snares, they’re like, crazy. It’s
just a bit too full on for me. I feel too old for that
music I think. It’s a lot better live actually.
I wouldn’t choose to listen to, say, Venetian
Snares at home, but live it’s pretty impressive,
and he’s a wicked nice guy. I remember the last
gig I did, and he got really surprised because someone,
I can’t remember who, one of the people we were
playing with, was a bit moody or something, and the
Venetian Snares guy was so surprised because everyone
he’d met in the music business until that time
had been really nice, and I thought it was very sweet.
He was like a little kid… I was lucky in that
way, because my first record deal (with Rising High)
was so bad and dodgy… it was one of these, like
a classic sixties record deals where they made you sign
your life away. They had this old lawyer they cold the
Silver Fox, and that was just his name. It was good
if he was on your side, but if he was against you, he
was such a formidable opponent. He ran off with all
their money in the end, he ripped them off. When I signed
with them, in 1993, that’s when ambient music
was at its height, I just lied. They asked me if I was
making ambient music and I’d never done an ambient
track, but I said yes, and they said to send them a
tape, so I quickly made some ambient stuff and sent
it to them and it became my first record, which isn’t
ambient at all really if I listen to it now, but that
was what I thought ambient music was at the time. It
was my most popular stuff in a way, it’s funny…
It was very quick to make. I did an album and an EP
in a week. There were two extra tracks that they never
used too. People still come to me telling me they wished
I would make music like that again (laughs). I couldn’t.
I didn’t know what I was doing, I was trying to
be ambient (laughs).
With the Amen Andrews project, you return to
hardcore drum & bass, and there are loads of comparisons
with Plug. Why releasing these tracks under a new pseudonym?
I was almost tempted to call it Plug in the
end, just because Plug was always going to be my name
for the drum’n’bass stuff, and this is definitely
drum’n’bass. But then too many people have
said to me how much they loved Plug, and I didn’t
want these people to be upset, thinking ‘yes,
more Plug’ and then realising it’s just
ragga jungle. I didn’t want to confuse people,
so I thought I’d just make up a stupid name and
then no one would have any expectations. They wouldn’t
think ‘Ooh, it’s going to be Plug Vol. 4’
Will you ever release another Plug record?
I don’t think so, no. Not unless I did
a similar thing which to me was with drum’n’bass
kind of rhythms, but it wasn’t all drum’n’bass.
Everything else was just what I like, like easy listening,
jazz and funk samples, and God knows what. I think if
I did stuff like that again, it would be all about the
music more than just beats. The Amen Andrews stuff is
more like ‘c’mon’…
You’ve used some strange samples in you
Amen Andrews stuff though, like you sampled Le Mystère
Des Voix Bulgares on one track, which sound like a strange
combination...
Oh yeah… that’s about the most
Plug track. That’s quite an old track that, about
1999. Most of the other tracks were done last year,
and a couple this year. I think maybe I’d like
to release some old Plug things. Same things with the
Vibert & Simmonds stuff on Rephlex where we’re
going back through old tapes and choosing an album of
unreleased classics if you know what I mean. Tracks
that we’ve always liked and never released. I’d
like to do that with Plug as well, because there are
so many Plug tracks that have never been released. I
didn’t released the best ones I think, at least
not on Drum’n’Bass For Papa. I
really like Plug 1 and Plug 2, Plug
3 is OK and the album was pretty good too, but
I don’t think I compiled the best tracks.
The rumour has it that Richard has thousands
of unreleased tracks. Do you have loads of unreleased
material yourself?
I’ve got about six or seven hundred unreleased
tracks, Aphex’s got about three or four hundred,
Mike’s probably got about six or seven hundred,
and same for Tom. I’ve got all of Richard’s
stuff, and all of Mike’s, and they’ve got
all my stuff, but Tom rarely gives us any of his tracks.
He’ll play us bits of something, and I’ll
be asking if I can get it, and he just says no.
Is it because he’s scared of finding
his music on the Internet?
Yeah. I don’t know, he’s just very
protective. I have to still tracks from him… like
that time he played something to me, and I asked and
he said no, then he went into the kitchen or to the
off licence or something, and I quickly copied that
track. I played it recently when I was DJing somewhere,
and he came up to ask what it was, so I told him it
was him and he was like 'have I given it to you' and
I was like, 'yeah!' He couldn’t remember…
it was quite funny. I don’t really care if some
of my music ends up on the net… Richard’s
the same… we don’t really care.
These EPs also mark your return to Rephlex
after almost 10 years. Did you always have at the back
of your mind to work with them again?
Yeah… I feel the same as Richard feels
with Rephlex… Because it’s only two people
who run Rephlex, and they’re really busy, and
they don’t want to hire anyone else because they
haven’t met anyone else who fulfils their working
criteria, I mean, they’ve tried a few people,
but always, after two or three months, they fire the
people because they don’t have the kind of Braindance
attitude or whatever it is that Grant feels you need
to be a Rephlexian (laughs)... So I feel a bit like
Richard, guilty I think. I would always have given them
stuff. But it takes them so long to put stuff out and
they’ve got all these things they want to release,
so if I gave them stuff, I just feel guilty because
I know I could release it on another label, where as
all the other stuff they release could only come out
on Rephlex. Grant talked me into it this year. He was
like ‘come on man, do some 12” or something’.
So eventually I said OK. I thought I wouldn’t
work with them again, just because I thought I should
leave Rephlex to do Rephlex releases, but then I though
fuck it, Rephlex could do with some Vibert vibes. I
thought I’d give in…
Can you tell us about Yoseph, the
new album on Warp? What is the general mood?
Another kind of not really new one. Most of
the tracks are from the nineties, old acid tracks. It
was really nice to do an album with that stuff. On the
last Wagon Christ albums I did, there was only about
one acid track out of fourteen or something. I couldn’t
talk Virgin or Ninja Tune into putting anymore out.
It was a real fight with Ninja just to get one acid
track on the album. I must have played them about thirty
or something, and they were ‘alright, we’ll
have this one’. It was like, ‘c’mon,
you’ve got to have some 303 in there’. So,
with the Warp record, it was really nice to compile
a whole album of that stuff, and it sounds really different.
People are saying ‘oh, this is a new direction’,
but not really. I just never have released a load of
tracks like that, just little bits and pieces.
Is it difficult to get control over what you
release or what you put on an album?
No, not really. I like to let labels decide
as well. I like to give them too many tracks so they
feel happy with the selection. With Ninja and Warp,
I gave them, say, fifty tracks and they chose thirteen
or whatever it is, and I’m happy. I wasn’t
quite happy with Warp actually, so I suggested we took
a couple out and change for something else. It’s
a nice feeling for the record label to be happy. I’m
sure I could say ‘this is the album, start to
finish, you can’t change anything’. I used
to do that, but I’m happy talking with the label,
see what they want, and if we’re all happy, then
I know they’ll try to promote it better.
You’ve previously worked with a different
label for almost each new release? Why?
I’m just trying to see if there’s
a really nice one. It’s only Warp, Ninja and Rephlex
I’ve been left with. I hope that Warp’s
more than a one record deal as well. So far it’s
just one album, but I hope to continue that relationship
until either they disappear or I disappear. They’re
really nice, and it’s a really good deal. They
don’t give me loads of money, but it’s just
50/50 split after profits, which is really cool. Most
labels just give you ten per cent (laughs).
Does the fact that Warp have been kind of associated
with the electronic scene from pretty much the early
days matter?
Oh, yes. Important reasons like it feels really
nice because they’ve influenced me so much. Some
of the first dance records I heard and bought were Warp
records. LFO, Nightmares On Wax, that kind of stuff.
And then Aphex and Squarepusher being on Warp, it feels
really nice that way. I also hope it’s better
for sales and silly things like that. I just hope that
because it’s Warp and me, people will be more
interested than if it was me and some label they’d
never heard of. But that’s not about the music
that… I just think it’s nice to put something
back on a label that’s influenced me so much.
There’s not that many labels I’d like to
be on, and Warp is definitely one of them.
And what about the new Wagon Christ album you
mentioned earlier?
Same old shit really, just like trip-hop full
of samples (laughs). Same old bollocks, but hopefully
better than Musipal. Musipal was for
me a bit of a weird transition album between my Atari
and my new computer set up. There were a few tracks
done with the Atari on there, and a couple made on the
new computer. I like all the tracks, it’s just
that the whole thing has a strange vibe to me. It’s
probably my least favourite album. I just never felt
quite comfortable with that one, so I’m hoping
that it’ll be different with the new one. I haven’t
even played it to Ninja yet, which is quite funny. I’m
sort of punishing them for putting it so late. They’re
like ‘can we hear it? Can we hear it?’ and
I’m like, ‘no, you’ll hear it when
you’re ready to put it out’ (laughs). I
know that if they hear it now, they’ll just say
that they like this track and not that one… Just
decide next year when you’re ready to put it out
(laughs). They’re a bit funny Ninja. They’re
so democratic it’s a bit bad in a way. They’re
a bit too nice and too democratic. They play me all
the Mr Scruff tracks, DJ Food stuff, Amon Tobin, and
ask me what I think. They’re like, talking and
discussing things. They play all of my tracks to all
these other people, then I get faxes and emails from
people saying ‘yeah, I think number six is a bit
this or a bit that’… and you want to say
‘fuck off’ (laughs). It’s really good
that they can all do that, but artistically it gets
a bit painful, like with Musipal it took really
long finally getting one album that every fucking person
was happy with, because it’s Coldcut, and the
main guy, Ninja Pete, and all the other people who have
their opinions. They all count, they really listen to
everyone’s opinion.
You’re about to embark on a US tour with
Squarepusher…
Yeah, I’ve got two US tours this year.
One with Tom, nine gigs I think, everyday, airplanes
and stuff, and a nicer one in November, on a bus, which
I really like because I’m a smoker and it’s
really bad on planes in America, especially since September
11. Even on internal flights, they check all over you,
it’s really crazy, so it’s really hard to
take weed. Every time we land, all I’m doing is
asking people for weed. If you’re on a bus, you
can just take it with you… I was trying to make
it a bus tour. The November one is with Plaid. I’m
sure it’ll be more fun. It’s a much bigger
tour that, twenty or twenty one dates, with a few days
off.
What can people expect to see live? Do you
have any plans to tour the UK and Europe soon?
Yes, some UK dates near the release of the
album, like October or November time. I’ve got
quite a few gigs already arranged for September to November,
but there are some others slotting in in the gaps. It
looks like it’s going to be a pretty busy three
months or so, which is cool. I just hope it works…
usually those things don’t seem to work, like
touring and promoting a record. You sometimes have the
feeling that you may as well stay at home. I really
like playing to people, so even if I didn’t’
sale any records, I would still play because I like
it. It can be depressing though, like the BJ Cole album
that we toured so much, and we were actually playing
live. That’s the only time I’ve ever played
live. Then when we got back home, looking at the sales
figures to see how much difference we’d made,
and it was worse than records I’d never promoted
or talked about. I don’t think it works…
Like Black Dog who refused to play live or do interviews
and they sold ten times the amount of records I’ve
ever sold. I don’t think it makes much difference,
but I love playing. I’m a bit worried about the
Squarepusher tour though because I’ve never done
a tour with him, and he’s a bit of a mental character.
Up and down. He hasn’t successfully completed
a tour for so long now. I’m sure that’s
why they asked me to do it, because I’m their
best insurance policy that he’ll actually finish
the tour just because I’ll be there with him,
holding his hand. Yeah, I’m a bit worried about
that one, I don’t think that one will be much
fun, it’s always a bit stressful with Tom. Everything
is a bit close to him, you know, everything really affects
him, he can’t just chill out. Everything is a
bit intense, not very relaxing. Not like Aphex…
Aphex is always the same. With Tom, one minute, he’s
so mellow and the next he’s like wired.
Will you be taking the whole family with you
on tour?
No. God, no… it’s a really bad
idea to take your girlfriend on the road with you I
discovered. Maybe not some girlfriends, some girlfriends
might fit in fine, but my girlfriend didn’t (laughs)...
Interview done on 9 July 2003 in Covent
Garden, London
Thank you to Luke & Marcus
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