Happy Christmas y’all! I’ve had this little interview and mix package from breakbeat trailblazers Shut Up and Dance wrapped up and sitting under my Christmas tree for a while, and have just been waiting for you all to be full of mince pies, nicely tipsy and sitting comfortably before bringing it out (or, more likely story, I’ve been subjected to an internet drought due to moving house and so had to surgically remove myself from the laptop and abandon blogging for a couple of weeks). So sit back, grab another mulled wine if the fancy takes you (work starts again tomorrow so make the most of it!) and read on….
Welcome PJ, welcome Smiley. It’s a pleasure to have you on Noise Porn today.
The aim of this interview is to delve into your musical past, to hear about what you’re up to nowadays, to celebrate the all new mega-album “How the East was Won 1989-2009″ (a showcase of the last two glorious decades of Shut Up & Dance) and to show breaks-heads reading this blog where their music of choice has come from! Over to you guys then!
NP: When/how did you guys meet?
SUAD: We met at secondary school plus we both lived in the same area, Hackney, east London.
NP: Would you say that your local area played a big part in shaping your sound and your musical success?
SUAD: Definitely, cause in our area you could go to so many different types of clubs and hear a wide variety of music…the sound system thing was very big in east London as well.
NP: You started off by hauling your soundsystem (“Heatwave”… with DJ Daddy & DJ Hype) around disused warehouses and holding your own illegal raves. What kinds of music did you guys play at this stage? What did a typical live set consist of?
SUAD: Well you had us on the microphone rapping, DJ Hype was on the decks cutting and scratching, and Daddy Earl was a reggae Mc, so we would play from Hip-Hop to Reggae to rare groove to dancehall, it was a mixed bag, but very exciting cause you never knew what you were gonna get next. We were one of the only sound systems to mix up our music like this, which made us different from the rest.
NP: At what stage did you get into production? What equipment did you record on in the early days?
SUAD: We got into production in about early 1988, back then we had a Digitec sampler, and a Tascam 4 Track recorder.
NP: Which one bit of production gear would you say you could never have lived without?
SUAD: Our S5000 Akai sampler, that piece of kit changed the face of music. Because of the in built effects & filters etc, it suddenly opened up your imagination a bit more, and allowed you to push the boundaries in terms of twisting up sounds etc.
NP: Which one bit of production gear is on your current wishlist?
SUAD: We have it already, the Spectrasonics Omnisphere module. A great piece of kit. Love this baby.
NP: Nowadays, pretty much anyone can produce a track in their own home, for very little cost and comparatively little effort! Do you see this as a positive or a negative thing?
SUAD: A bit of both, on the negative side it’s led to decline in the standard of music, because essentially there’s no longer any quality control, if someone can just knock up a track in their bedroom then rush to put it out, if they haven’t played that track to friends or whatever then who’s to say the tracks any good? On the positive, if you have a home studio at least you can potentially spend a lot more time developing your sound without watching the clock because you know you’re being charged by the hour.
NP: How much harder was it to get your name out back when you guys started? You were pretty much the first people in dance music to self-release a record on your own label. How easy was it to do this? Did you find competition from major labels made things difficult at all?
SUAD: It wasn’t easy, there was a lot of hard work involved cause essentially you were doing everything yourself, from music production, artwork, promotion right through to distribution in the early days. Remember we only did it because we couldn’t get a record deal in the first place. We can be very headstrong, (must be our east London background) so when we couldn’t get a deal, we figured we had no other choice but to do it ourselves, creating a DIY (Do It Yourself) attitude to the music business in the process.
NP: Walk us through the album “How the East was Won 1989-2009″. What does it consist of, tell us a bit about what it means for you and for Shut Up & Dance fans worldwide.
SUAD: How The East Was Won is a compilation representing & celebrating 20 years of the Shut Up And Dance Record Label, And also Shut Up & Dance as recording artists. We started the label in 1989 and are still going strong in 2009, so we we’ve put together a collection of classic tracks we’ve released over that period and trust me….It’s sounding good!!! ☺
It’s 3 Cd’s covering 2 decades because we have so many era’s to cover, like the late eighties to the mid nineties which was the rave era, tracks like: £20 pounds to in, The green man, Hooligan 69, Spiiffhead, & Raving im raving, then from mid nineties up till the millennium you had the drum & bass & Breakbeat era, with tracks like: Bastards, Hip-Hip & Here this. From the millennium onwards music was more about the 2 step garage style, and the harder end of breakbeat, tracks like: Holdtight , Nova, No Doubt, Reclaim The Streets. Basically it’s a chance for all Shut Up & Dance fans to get their hands on any tracks from the label they may have missed.
NP: Your tunes tend to revolve around a good breakbeat and a good lyric. What usually inspires you in terms of lyrics?
SUAD: Things that are happening around us, things we or our friends are going through. Inspiration usually comes from needing to get something of our chest.
NP: You were credited with pioneering UK breakbeat, and in turn the genres that it spawned (drum n bass, jungle, breaks etc). What got you started on the whole breakbeat vibe?
SUAD: We hail from Hip-Hop roots, and so we use to chopped them up, speed them up and create our own beats from them.(Nowadays you can just go out and buy a sound bank library). We were the first to do this, and we built our whole sound off of this benchmark. We still stay true to it now.
NP: Which current breaks artists do you rate?
SUAD: We like a whole range, but we’re feeling the Afghan Headspin stuff, we just did a collaboration together, also Mechanoise, Ctrl-Z, the list is quite extensive.
NP: Any new SUAD projects we should know about for 2010?
SUAD: A new Shut Up & Dance artist album in 2010, it doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s sounding FAT!!!
NP: Before you realised your chosen path was to re-write the course of underground dance music, what did you want to be when you grew up?
SUAD: All we knew was we didn’t want to end up working in an office environment; we both like to be out in the open as much as possible. But strangely enough we did anyway, because when taking care of the business side of the label, we can be sat in front of a Pc all day, emailing etc, How ironic is that?
NP: When you are improvising lyrics on the mic, does your mind ever wander to random stuff, like what you’re gonna have for tea?
Naw, im kinda immersed in the vibe, I love my job! ☺
NP: What is your favourite cheese?
SUAD: I’m a big cheese lover, apart from the mouldy looking stuff, YUK!!. I Couldn’t live without cheese, Music & SEX ☺, but not necessarily in that order.
NP: Noise Porn interview challenge… How far can you throw a piece of A4 paper, unfolded?
SUAD: Not very, can we cheat and throw a whole book ☺
Thanks! NP
So there we go, the album is out on Beatport, you can go buy the full release or any of the individual tracks here. Never before has such a comprehensive back catalogue been available for Shut Up and Dance, so now’s the time to get downloading your favourite tracks by the east London legends!
Oh, and you can get their latest mixtape below as well. Download, stick it on, be quiet and boogie.
Shut Up & Dance Winter Promo Mix 2009.mp3
1. Shut Up and Dance feat. A’de – Love Will [Shut Up & Dance Music]
2. Rennie Pilgrem – Somewhere [TCR]
3. Shut Up & Dance – Cream [Shut Up & Dance Music]
4. Zinc – Unknown [White Label]
5. BSD – This Could Be You [iBreaks]
6. Hackney Soldiers – Holdtight [New Deal Recordings]
7. Augur – Unknown [White Label]
8. Tittsworth – WTF (Deekline & Tim Healey Remix) [Rat Records]
9. Kosheen – Unknown [White Label]
10. Bomberman – Unknown (Shut Up & Dance Remix) [Lucky Break]
11. Shut Up & Dance – Gunfinger [Shut Up & Dance Music]
12. Breakfastaz – Acting Wrong [Breakfast Club]
13. Shut Up & Dance – The Green Man [Shut Up & Dance Music]
14. Shut Up & Dance, Afghan Headspin – Suicide [Shut Up & Dance Music]
15. Unknown – We Rule [White Label]
These words came from , posted on December 27, 2009 at 10:55 pm, filed under Interviews, Mixes. Read and leave comments here. Follow any comments here with an RSS feed.
