The only difference now is everything's plastic. The beads, the flowers …. The music? Yeah, it's less soulful. Like an aerobics class. Musically, I don't think there's much of it that will last. But it's great if the kids are having a good time with that energy and adrenaline. It's like going on a ghost train at the fair. And it's still fun for you? Touring and being around the world, it's very exciting and new, but we didn't want to become jaded rock'n'rollers.
We took a bit of a pause. We took the foot off the gas a bit to concentrate on being human again and see friends and family. Also, you realise when you're away from home, you do cut off your ties. I'd get back and find out something happened and wonder why I wasn't invited and friends would say: "Well, you're never here any more.
Is it true your dad didn't let you watch Top of the Pops 2 so you joined the church choir instead? Yeah, he was always very proud of that fact that we didn't watch Top of the Pops. He played us Austrian music and Japanese music. He thought that made me hungry and want it more. It was quite an idyllic country life. Letting the hens out, feeding the horses, growing our own vegetables, time spent climbing trees.
The good life! Why even move to London? I was very into jazz dance 3 and London was the centre for that. When I first moved to London, I was living in Brixton, and I was always told you put on legendary parties at the Dogstar but whenever I went you weren't there!
That's because we never did our parties at the Dogstar. That's misinformation! It was under St Matthew's Church and the Telegraph. Your new project, Power to the People , has people all over the world recording versions of your songs That year also saw the release of the Betta Daze EP. The duo continued to release music at a prolific clip, including the EP Camberwell and that year's B-sides and remixes collection Jaxx Unreleased. For their second album, Ratcliffe and Buxton added some pop gloss to their raw and soulful sound, and the results were June 's Rooty.
Named for Basement Jaxx 's second club night which ended shortly before the album's release , it was an even bigger success than Remedy , reaching number five on the U. Following the lengthy Rooty tour, Ratcliffe and Buxton recharged and took a more song-based approach to their third album. Incorporating disco, new wave, electro, Bollywood, and other influences, and featuring guest vocalists including the Bellrays ' Lisa Kekaula , Siouxsie Sioux , and Dizzee Rascal , October 's Kish Kash was another success, peaking at number 17 on the U.
The album spawned the Top 20 U. Also in , Basement Jaxx issued the aptly named The Singles collection. It topped the charts in the U. The duo headlined the Pyramid Stage at that year's Glastonbury Festival when Kylie Minogue 's cancer diagnosis forced her to cancel.
Following a stint opening for Robbie Williams on his European tour, Ratcliffe and Buxton returned with that September's Crazy Itch Radio , a loosely conceptual set of songs that expanded their palette to include Balkan horns.
Boasting vocals from stars such as Robyn and Lily Allen as well as up-and-coming artists like Lady Marga , the album hit number 16 on the U. In September , the duo delivered Scars , an album that returned to the leaner approach of the Remedy days and featured cameos by Yoko Ono , Yo!
Majesty , Lightspeed Champion , and Santigold. Featuring the Top 40 U. The more experimental companion album Zephyr appeared that December and included music the duo wrote to accompany a work of art shown at London's Tate Modern museum. In , the duo released the non-album single "Dracula. Metropole Orkest , which featured versions of the duo's previously released songs arranged for a piece orchestra, arrived in , along with the score to Joe Cornish's film Attack the Block , on which they collaborated with Stephen Price.
Basement Jaxx returned last year with the album Junto, alongside a new label, Atlantix Jaxx, and a new studio space across the river. Simon Ratcliffe: "It was house music, I suppose. I'd been doing a thing called Tic Tac Toe, which was early hardcore jungle, then Helicopter, which was funky house.
Both did well enough to buy some equipment, which formed the beginnings of a very simple studio. I had a Soundcraft Spirit Desk, one sampler, one keyboard and that was it. He came to my studio with his mates and wanted to make a track, so we did a few sessions. I was living in Wales when I was ten years old, and the first thing I ever bought was Diamond Dogs by David Bowie, only because I made a mistake and thought it was Gary Numan - who I'd seen on telly the night before. I'd watched him doing Are 'Friends' Electric?
I subsequently ended up loving David Bowie as well, just because of that. I'd been in bands, but negotiating and compromising is quite hard; I just liked having that control or power to make something out of my head, and the technology was affording that. The first thing I got was a Fostex X Multitracker, which my mum very kindly bought for me.
That was like having a track studio as far as I was concerned. I could create my own artificial band by bouncing tracks. It was limited, but I worked that thing to death and used everything it could do, using all kinds of tricks.
It was very exciting times, very cool. I used to sample beats and loops into that and do sequencing by pushing it with my foot or hand in time to the Fostex. That's how I started making rave music, really; there were no computers involved whatsoever.
My first track was called Tic Tac Toe and it achieved 'cult status' in the drum 'n' bass world - even Goldie still keeps going on about it. I basically did it all on my Fostex. Then my mates, who were really supportive of me, said, 'Man, this is wicked let's cut it… we'll rent you some equipment for a weekend and make a white label'.
So they rented me a sampler and a reel-to-reel from a studio hire and I suddenly had all this stuff, but didn't know what to do with it. I kept calling the hire guy up all hours of the night saying, 'Hello… it's me again, sorry', and he was getting really pissed off, like if you don't know how to use MIDI, what are you doing with these samplers? Did that trial and error approach to using hardware give you an education that soft synth users miss out on? I think having an idea in mind then having to work out how to do it is fun, and if you do achieve something, you'll probably achieve it in a different way to how other people would, but that's what makes it your own.
With Basement Jaxx, we were forever trying to sound as cool and sophisticated as the American stuff, and we didn't, but in the process we ended up creating our own sound. If you want to create something, you will, but you'll make it within the limitations you've got.
Presets can be great, but if you don't have that inquisitiveness and creativity to want to try and do other things, I don't think you're ever going to achieve that much, really. There's no secret, there's no magic key; the people who want to achieve things will do it because they're born to do it. We were huge fans and honoured to be invited to that party. The track was called For My People and we did a mix quite quickly, which they used as a single edit and cut the video to our remix.
To be honest, remixes seem a bit irrelevant now because everyone's doing them. There's not much preciousness about these things any more. Everything's up for a remix; everything's being mashed up really well and the technology's there to make everything sound amazing.
We had a deal with XL Recordings, which was a five-album deal, although we actually gave them six because of the ambient soundscape album Zephyr, which was like a postscript to Scars.
We'd been in the same studio, doing slightly the same routine for over a decade, so it kind of made sense to freshen up and do something different.
I did a solo project called Dorus Rijkers, which was an electronic jazz fusion sort of thing, which I want to do more of.
0コメント