Although Paul Harris, Steve Smith and Ben Harris are from Kent and South London, it is in the States that their musical career as Dirty Vegas took off first. All three have strong musical backgrounds. Paul Harris had a regular DJ set at Nicky Holloway’s Milk Bar in the early nineties, playing alongside the likes of Pete Tongue, Paul Oakenfold or Danny Rampling, and went on to play the Ministry Of Sound and Cream and DJ at celebs parties. Steve Smith studied drums at school, and earned his way into clubs by playing percussions here and there, often earning more money in one night than he did the rest of the week. He was also part of a band called Higher Ground for a while. Ben Harris, ironically not a relation of Paul’s, was always going to be a guitar hero, that is until his band, Fluid, booked themselves a session in a studio. He soon began to work as a tape op in a Camdem studio, discovered dance music, built a studio with his brother and started recording as Bullit, producing and remixing for other in parallel. The trio met by chance and the first track they recorded, Days Go By, got them a deal with Parlophone after being championed by Pete Tong on his Radio 1 show. It became a modest top 30 single in the UK. On the other side of the pond, it was going to be a different story. Mitsubishi decided to use the song for one of their TV adds in the States, and suddenly Dirty Vegas were on the radio constantly.
Things haven’t always been easy for Dirty Vegas. Following Days Go By nearly led them to split. With the pressure to produce an album on their shoulder stirring internal tensions, culminating in an afternoon of angry exchanges, the band finally came up with Lost Not Found, which defined a new direction for them to work on.
With an approach to dance music reminiscent of early Underworld, Dirty Vegas bring together rock, ambient and infectious dance music to produce one of the most imaginative records heard this year. With influences ranging from Pink Floyd – Simple Things Part 2 is entirely based on Another Brick In The Wall – and Santana to Kraftwerk and modern electronic, the trio crafts simple and effective songs where guitars flirt with artificial sounds without sounding out of place. Of the more upbeat moments, I should Know, Ghost and the monster instrumentals Throwing Shapes and The Brazilian are all, for different reasons, potential floor fillers. But Dirty Vegas equally excel with more subdued songs. If Candles and All Or Nothing take the listener by surprise with their pop orientation, they are so beautifully crafted that it wouldn’t be surprising to find them on most chill out compilations this autumn.
If the effects used on the vocals tend to remain pretty much the same all the way through, creating a vague impression of uniformity, this doesn’t however affect the strong diversity of the compositions a great deal, and Dirty Vegas simply take club music somewhere it had rarely been before.