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.
4/5 |
