Snaith has never been a stranger to dance music, but he has spent the last couple of years reinforcing his club bona fides in earnest. His breakthrough, early in 2011, was a Caribou remix of Virgo Four’s “It’s a Crime,” which reworked a lost Chicago house cut from the 1980s into one of the most bewitching club anthems in recent memory. Remixes for Hot Chip, Carl Craig, Art Department, and Sinkane, all released under his Daphni alias, further cemented his off-kilter (yet still, somehow, populist) approach, while Daphni’s “Ye Ye,” released on Four Tet’s Text Records, proved him capable of unabashedly huge techno bangers. On the vinyl-only Resista label, he turned his hand to re-edits of songs by Thomas Mapfumo and an obscure Togolese band called Cos-Ber-Zam. And amidst this general flurry of activity, Snaith also launched his own label, Jiaolong, on which he released idiosyncratic club music by Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan and Chaz Bundick’s Les Sins (a.k.a. Toro y Moi) alongside oddities like Daphni remixes of Cleveland’s Emeralds.

People talk about Daphni as though you were a recent convert to dance music, but you were making pretty “proper” 2-step way back in 2003, with “If Assholes Could Fly, This Place Would Be an Airport.” You’re not new to dance music.

No, definitely not. With that track and even my first album, the Manitoba album, I was listening to so much 2-step garage around that time. Even before I moved to London, I was coming over to visit a lot and buying records from Blackmarket every time I was in town. Jeremy [Greenspan] from Junior Boys was the first person that played me Dem 2 records and stuff like that, in Canada — he was probably one of the people who introduced me to Detroit techno. So it’s something I’ve been doing for a long time, but it has come in and out of the music I make.

When I was making Swim, I was like, “Is this all going to make sense on a Caribou album, or is it going to need some other outlet to release it?” The tracks that went on Swim all made sense as Caribou stuff, but there was loads of quite dance-oriented music that I’d made. One of the tracks on the Daphni record, “Ahora,” was made halfway through making Swim, in 2009. So there was a bunch of stuff that definitely didn’t seem like Caribou music. I was already thinking that maybe it’d make sense to do a limited 12-inch under another name, but it took a while to crystallize the difference between the two things, to make sense of it and to act on it. I wasn’t even planning to release a Daphni album until a few months ago. There are loads of Daphni tracks that aren’t going to see a release that I’ve just made to DJ with. That’s what all these tracks are made for. It wasn’t until a few months ago, when I put a bunch of my favorite ones together, that I thought, “This actually is coherent as an album.”

Quite a few Daphni tracks have been edits of funk or Afrobeat songs.

I was making lots of different edits of things to play in my DJ sets. A couple of them went in DJ mixes I did, maybe one for Allez Allez, around the time Swim came out. So people started hearing them, and I could tell that people were interested; people were asking about them. That’s how the Daphni Edits 12-inches [on Resista] came out. For the Cos-Ber-Zam track, I just sampled that loop from the record, just a drum loop and a voice. They’re this Togolese band that only ever released one seven-inch. I found out about them from Analog Africa, this fantastic reissue label that clears everything and contacts all the original musicians. I made it to DJ with, but I really loved it, loved that combination of the synthesized sounds up against the sample, so I asked them [if I could release it].

When I contacted them, they couldn’t track down the publishing rights, so it had to be credited as a remix for it to be released at all. A lot of where the samples come from, and the influence from African music and global music generally, it’s the records that I’m listening to that are exciting to me. There’s such an amazing culture of reissues unearthing this music at the moment. When I was starting to make music in the late ’90s, Soul Jazz were reissuing stuff that has now been quite canonized, like the 100% Dynamite series. They’re amazing — I love that label. But now, I cannot believe the things that crop up on Boomkat — 500 copies of some totally obscure record of somebody playing, like, solo oud or something. It’s hilarious to me, in one sense, but it’s also amazing that there’s this genuine interest in weird music, rare releases, and it doesn’t even have to be danceable.

Having seen you DJ, it seems like you’re trying to open up the idea of what constitutes “dance music.”
That [Cos-Ber-Zam] track, in particular, is totally the wrong tempo to put into a house set. But there’s some crazy energy to it. That’s my favorite thing about the DJs I like the most, and when I’m happiest with my DJ sets, is that ability to really surprise people — to totally blindside the room in a way that somehow makes sense. Sometimes that track works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I play that track after people have gotten accustomed to a certain tempo or a certain kind of music, and it just unleashes this wild energy. People are like, “What is going on right now?” That moment of excitement is something that’s really special in clubs. You’re not watching a band play their hits; a DJ can pick any record from anywhere, and that potential is something I want to make the most of, rather than just playing something that’s uniform.

All the tracks on the Daphni album were made really quickly. The day that I’m DJing, I’ll be working on a track because I want to play some new music, just to see people’s reaction to it, get that kind of buzz. Often, making the music really is almost like a DJ set, to some degree. I’ll have some kind of sampled loop, and I’ll get this modular synthesizer going, and just kind of collide the two things together as if I were mixing an acid record into an older sampled track or whatever. It’s just a collision. But I’m definitely not arranging it. I’m arranging Caribou thinking of there being a notional band involved: There’s gotta be a bass line and then something in the midrange, and a vocal above it and some kind of arrangement that sort of flourishes around it. With the Daphni stuff, there doesn’t need to be that much stuff. There doesn’t have to be a verse and chorus, obviously. Hopefully, there’s a feeling of excitement and spontaneity in these Daphni tracks. Things are happening really fast, and I’m not going back and editing. Caribou records take a lot more time, and I’m a lot more meticulous and go back and really think about them. Daphni tracks, I don’t really think about them, I just do.

What made you decide to start your own label, Jiaolong?
Part of why I wanted to release these Daphni reords is that I could make a track, play it one weekend, have it pressed up on Monday or Tuesday, and it could be in shops three weeks later. That immediacy was very exciting, because Caribou has become quite an involved thing. There are four people in the band. I finish a record, there’s a three- or four-month lead time to releasing the album. I have to book a whole tour, there are singles and videos, blah blah blah, all the normal stuff. So it was really exciting to just be able to make a track and have it out there — if it had been digital, it would’ve been even faster, I guess — as quickly as the medium of vinyl allowed. So that was really the only plan for this music. It wasn’t intended to end up on an album, particularly. And then I released a couple things for friends, like I did a remix for Emeralds, who are close friends, just to play in clubs, and Jeremy from Junior Boys wanted to release some tracks, and Chaz from Toro y Moi sent me some music, and I was like, “I love this, can I release it?” But I definitely have no intention of Jiaolong becoming a real label. Now I’m getting emails from people, like, “Hey Dan, you may remember me from this, do you want to release this friend of mine’s music?” This is my worst nightmare! I spend too much time answering emails already. The last thing I want to do is run a label. But it is a great outlet to get stuff out there quickly.

“Yes I Know” reminds me a lot of Terry Riley’s “You’re No Good,” with its heavy soul loop and freaky synthesizer.
That’s an amazing record. I wasn’t thinking about that when I made it, but thank you. That’s a killer record. The source material for “Yes I Know” is a really short track, and I haven’t done that much with it. I guess that’s another thing I’ve become more confident with over the years. I know that I can write music, and I know that I can compose; if something really simple works, I don’t need to overcomplicate it just to prove to people that I’m really doing something. I’ve got the confidence to be more simple as well as doing things that are more complicated.

How do you determine the line between something for you to play in your own sets versus something that you release under your own name? I thought it was interesting that “Yes I Know” leads off the album, when in some ways it’s just one big loop of someone else’s song.
The liberating thing about making this music is that I wasn’t thinking about those issues at all. That’s probably what happens a lot of time when people make sample-based club music. It’s the excitement of making it that lets the music get made, and then those questions come afterwards. For example, I’ve had experiences with clearing samples where it’s just ground everything to a halt, and I’ve had friends who have not been able to release a track at all because there’s a sample in it. It’s a really great, original piece of music, and it just has some small sample in it. That seems a shame to me when that happens. But I also understand there’s a lot of issues around that, particularly if you’re sampling music made by musicians around the world who aren’t relaxing in a mansion somewhere. That’s why it’s so great to be able to deal with a small label who’s directly in touch with the musicians, and go directly to them and say, “I want this track to come out just because of the music, not because of any kind of financial benefit for me. Can we work something out that everybody’s happy with?” In fact, Analog Africa have never cleared any sample usage before, so it was amazing to me, and kind of ties into my love of the original music, which is obviously what making that track is all about.

It seems like it was your Virgo Four remix that announced your arrival as “dance” producer. Were you surprised at how that took off?
Well, yeah. I finished that track quite quickly, as well, and listening back to it, I was immediately very happy with it. The mix sounded great right off the bat. I knew I was really pleased with it, but it’s quite a specialist thing, in some ways. I know they’re a legendary band, but it’s still a contemporary artist going back and remixing an old track, something that wouldn’t necessarily cross over. I was surprised the way it connected the way it did.

For coming from the fringes of dance music, as you do, a lot of your Daphni cuts are quite big, populist tunes.
I’m certainly not trying to be obtuse or obscure in any way. I love playing a big tune in the middle of a DJ set that has other weird music in it. I love those moments. Who doesn’t love being in a club when everybody’s got their hands in the air? That’s a big thrill for me. Obviously, there are always two sides to that. There are certain tracks where everybody would have their hands in the air and I would have my hands over my ears.

I’m definitely not trying to do anything that’s intentionally not populist, that’s for sure. And I love big melodies. That’s always been a part of the music that I make. That inevitably makes it cross over in a way that something without a lot of strong melodic content wouldn’t.

Do you think your audience is more open to you taking risks because of your history as Caribou? Or do you think that if DJs took more risks, they could get away with it?
It’s funny you say that. I often feel conservative. I’ll see Theo Parrish play something, or Kieran [Hebden, a.k.a., Four Tet], when we’re playing back to back, will play some tune that completely surprises me, and I’m like, “This is a disaster, this is never going to work.” And the next minute everybody’s freaking out to some Steve Reich record or some Brazilian track or something. And I always think, “Damn, I wish I had the balls to play tracks like this.” So I’d say something like that to Kieran, and he’d be like, “What are you talking about? You play totally weird shit all the time.”

It’s funny: Having played so many live shows, I’m never nervous before a Caribou show, but I often get nervous before a DJ set. I’m thinking, “This room is full of people who don’t necessarily have a clue what I’m about, and I could quite easily clear this room.” I’ve definitely cleared some rooms over the years. So there’s that real pressure, but I also have that stubborn streak that I think maybe is helpful as a DJ, that’s like, “I really want people to hear this track right now, and I feel like it’s going to work,” and you just have to kind of will it in there. There’s definitely a tension between those two things.

As far as your question about the audience, I’m not really sure. I end up in quite varied situations. Kieran and I played back to back at Creamfields Andalucía this summer; we just played in Ibiza. That night at Horst [in Berlin, playing an eight-hour set] was amazing — a small club with people who have come specifically to hear me do one thing — but I’ve ended up in lots of different scenarios, which is another reason I get nervous about DJing. It’s more of a crapshoot than a ticketed Caribou show. Often I don’t know what to expect when I’m doing a DJ gig. I’ve got a good idea of a bunch of different clubs around Europe and Canada and in New York, and I play with friends a lot more. But in the beginning, when I was trying to get more DJ sets, and people didn’t really associate me with dance music yet, I’d end up playing after someone who had just played an hour of the biggest Ed Banger tracks ever, and I’d be playing after them, and it would be like, I don’t have one track of anything that can follow this guy, let alone a whole hour. Now I’m getting to do more really long sets where I can kind of build things up, then totally break them down again, and build them up again a few times over the course of the night.

What was it like to play that eight-hour set at Horst?
I think it was the best DJ experience that I’ve ever had. It was such an amazing crowd. I ended up playing for nine hours and then had to go straight to the airport. At the end, Johnny [the club's owner] came up and said, “Dan, I’ve never had anybody play for nine hours and not have to go to the toilet once during the entire time.” And I was just like, “Oh, I just forgot! Now that you mention that, I desperately need to go to the toilet!” But I had just kind of forgotten. At various points, I was like, “Oh, I’ll play a few more tracks, and then I’ll go,” and then the whole night just disappeared.

What did you close with?
That’s a good question. I can’t remember, but it might have been Albert Ayler — it’s quite often this Albert Ayler track, “Love Cry.” That’s one of my favorites. It’s him when he was trying to cross over and made a kind of populist soul album with free-jazz saxophone over the top of it. It’s a real treat, that one.

You’ve been doing a lot of back-to-back sets with Four Tet. What’s it like when you two play together?
I’ve been playing back to back with Kieran for 12 or 13 years or something. The way I met Kieran, I met him at the Big Chill festival in the U.K. I was just a punter, and I went up and started talking to him — “I like your music, blah blah blah” — sent him some music later, and then booked him. We were putting on this club night in Toronto when I was in university there. So he came over and stayed for like two weeks on our couch. It was before he started traveling to DJ and to do live shows, and if somebody emailed him now, and was like, “Do you want to not be paid any money? We’ll pay your flight, and you’ll sleep on our couch, and you don’t know us very well…” [Laughs] But it was the right time. He played that club night with us, and then we went on lots of record-buying trips. That was the start of our friendship. I moved to London quite soon after that, and we’d end up playing pubs. We’d get from 10 till midnight, and the two of us would be playing psych-rock records or So Solid Crew or Nas records. We’ve been doing it for a long, long time, but not consistently. We’ve just randomly ended up DJing together here and there. And then last year, we were like, “This seems like a lot of fun and something that people genuinely seem to get excited about.” And we get excited about it. Kieran’s been living in New York the last year, so when we get to hang out the most is if we book a show together.

Your careers have sort of moved in lockstep. You and Four Tet always seem to have new albums out the same year, and now you both have singles-driven albums that aren’t really albums. You have the Jiaolong label, he has Text Records. It’s a little uncanny.
There are two sides to that. There’s no question that I learned the way the quote-unquote music industry works, or how to be a contemporary musician in control of the things I want to control, from Kieran. He’s the person who got me signed, and whenever I needed advice, I’d go to him. I’ve followed his model right from the start. When my first album came out, he had so much experience already. He had done three Fridge albums, he’d signed to a major, been dropped, done 50 remixes, whatever. And the fact that we’ve become the closest friends, that’s the other half of it. Swim and There Is Love in You, these two records line up musically because we’re doing the same things. I’m phoning him up, saying, “There’s this thing on Friday, do you want to go?” We end up checking the same things, seeing the same things, talking to each other about the music that we’re making. We’re both the first person who we send our tracks back and forth to. When I was considering releasing the Daphni tracks, he had put out the “Pinnacles”/”Ye Ye” 12-inch, and I thought, “Maybe I should start putting out music. I’ve got these tracks and I want to put them out.” And Kieran was like, “It’s a piece of piss, running a label! It’s the easiest thing in the world.” So knowing somebody who’s doing the same thing has been a part of why I started releasing music this way.

Have you two ever collaborated on music together?
We have, actually, once, for a Notwist remix. At the time, it was a record we both liked and were excited about. I don’t think it’s either of our best work, that’s for sure. He’s also played in the Caribou Vibration Ensemble, so we’ve had that experience. In terms of producing music, it’s funny — we really should do it, at some point. But it seems like we’re always both so busy, and even though it seems like we’re in lockstep, schedule-wise, there’s a lot of time he’s on tour and we’re not, or he’s in America and I’m over here, or then he comes back and I’m off on tour. It’s not like we’re in the same neighborhood. We used to be quite a lot, literally down the street, and hanging out all the time. But it’s not always the case.

There’s also the fact that we have such similar skill sets. We both kind of work by ourselves and combine samples with programming. It’s almost more fruitful for me to do a duet with a banjo player or something, somebody who does something totally different. And that’s what’s happened on Caribou records in the past. The people that I’ve collaborated with have either played instruments that I don’t play, or sing really well, which I also don’t do. Kieran and I might just be both reaching for the mouse to do the same thing.

I was surprised to see you guys booked at Creamfields Andalucía, which tends to be pretty full-on rave.
There are several stages, but our stage was me and Kieran, James Holden, Luke Abbott, Nathan Fake, John Talabot — all our friends. That was part of the reason we wanted to do it. And also, we wanted to see the carnage on the main stage and go over and check out Tiësto and whatever. Which, I’ve gotta say, was demoralizing. I thought it would be funny, and maybe even spectacular. It was the greatest scam in history. His private jet touches the ground half an hour before he starts. He doesn’t step out of the limo until the intro music is already playing, and they’re still trying to line up the video while he’s playing his first track, like they can’t even be bothered to put together a spectacular LED fuckstravaganza. It’s the laziest shit I’ve ever seen in my life. As for what he was playing, it was absolutely horrible — as I should have expected, but I’ve never seen any of those huge populist guys.

“Fuckstravaganza” — that’s right up there with “EDM barfsplosion,” a recent coinage of yours from the Jiaolong press release. How much are you paying attention to the overground scene in the U.S.?
Musically, it just has zero relevance to what I’m doing. Maybe I was being a bit provocative throwing a bit of “barfsplosion” in there, but I’m fascinated by it as a phenomenon. That’s why I wanted to go see Steve Aoki and Tiësto — are things a lot crazier than at the mega-raves in Toronto that I remember from the ’90s? What’s different this time around? What’s drawing these huge crowds? I’m intrigued by the phenomenon. I don’t really resent it. There’s so much shitty music, or predictable, boring, popular music out there, it’s not something that angers me. I’m not in a grumpy old man mode where I’m like [adopting grumpy old man voice], “Everybody should be listening to Theo Parrish!” That’s not going to happen.

You raved in Toronto in the ’90s?
Yeah, I did. In Toronto, it was enormous. This was when people started taking E: 1994, 1995, a few years after they were already doing lots in Manchester. I had already been going to clubs in high school; I saw Richie Hawtin play literally in the basement of somebody’s house in the town I grew up in, because he was from just down the road. A few people in our high school were listening to Plus 8 and that kind of stuff. My friend’s brother put out a record on Plus 8. So there was a connection to something. But then when I arrived in Toronto, every weekend there’d be two 50- or 60,000 capacity raves, with a huge drum and bass arena, and I don’t know, Oakenfold, all those people. But at the same time in Toronto there were lots of smaller clubs, so I was going to the smaller clubs, places that were playing more diverse music. And I was putting on nights. It was kicking off big time in Toronto; that was definitely a part of the culture that I was making music in.

What are the differences between your experience of raving in the 1990s and EDM today?
I guess there was no festival concept back then, or at least I never went to one. It was more like a big, dark room, not so much in the way of lighting at all. It’s definitely the lights that have exploded. In fact, the next back-to-back thing Kieran and I are doing is this thing at Brixton Academy that’s five pounds, and there’s going to be no lights at all. It’s going to be total darkness in this 5,000-capacity venue. James [Holden] is doing it, Floating Points, all the Hessle Audio guys. That’s more Kieran’s reaction to this lighting thing: Let’s have people listen to the music again.

How has it been for Caribou supporting Radiohead’s tour?
Obviously, all of us in the band are fans, and have been for a long time, so that’s really amazing to get to know them all. They’re all so lovely. And we were picked by them, not by their agent or their manager or somebody who thought, “This would be a good marketing ploy.” They wanted us to play before they played. Even to the extent that for some festivals around Europe, they said, “We’re going to headline, but you have to offer the set before us to Caribou,” which is an amazing thing for them to do. Also, playing two nights to 60,000 people in Mexico City is an experience unlike any other. We’ll never get that again, for sure. That scale is absurd.

Have you had to adapt the band to playing venues that size?
It’s an opening slot, so it’s shorter than we’d normally play. In the beginning, we were like, “We have to play the hits.” We were a bit terrified. But it turns out that of all the bands of that size we could open for, their fan base is the most musically interested in other things. Maybe it’s because we’ve been approved by Radiohead, in some sense, but people are interested in what we want to do. Now we’re starting to play longer sets; I think we’re just going to start playing weirder stuff and whatever we want. We’re back into being comfortable and doing what we want, which I think is the best thing to do anyway — not to worry about “maximizing exposure.” That’s not why we’re doing this.

October 9 2012, 9:34 AM ET
by Philip Sherburne

From the perspective of neuroscience, listening to music is one of the most complex things you can do. Many parts of your brain have to work together to comprehend even the simplest tune. So what is music really doing to our minds?

The Mechanics of Music

There isn’t a single music center of the brain, in large part because listening to even very simple music combines a bunch of distinct neurological processes. Let’s first look at the more strictly mechanical aspects of listening to music. As you might be able to guess from its name, the auditory cortex is an important part of processing the sound of music. Part of the temporal lobe, the auditory cortex takes in information from the ear and assesses the pitch and volume of the sound.

Other parts of the brain deal with different aspects of music. Rhythm, for instance, is only connected in a relatively minor way to the auditory cortex. A lot goes into keeping even relatively simple, regular beats – tapping along to something as basic as a 1:2 rhythm brings in the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex, and right cerebellum, and more unusual rhythms bring in still more areas of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum.

Tonality – the building of musical structure around a central chord – is another crucial part of musical understanding, and it reels in still more parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and many parts of the temporal lobe all go into our ability to recognize the tone of a given piece of music. Taken all together, this means that music already brings in three out of four of the lobes of the human brain – frontal, parietal, and temporal, with only the visual processing occipital lobe unaffected…and there might be a bit more to say about that in a moment.

Music is sometimes given a quick and dirty classification as a “right-brained” activity, meaning that the act of processing music is centered on the right hemisphere of the brain. While this fits nicely with the general dichotomy that the left side of the brain is more engaged in logic and the right in creativity, these are all pretty big oversimplifications. While it is broadly true that music involves more of the right hemisphere than the left, the fact is that the processing of music is so diffuse and decentralized throughout the brain that it’s hard to come up with any single category for all the different areas involved.

The Deeper Impact

Those, however, are just the basic mechanical aspects of listening to music. A good song can trigger a cascade of secondary responses, often involuntarily. An obvious example of this is the propensity to move in time with music – not so much dancing, which is an active, independent process, but simple motions like tapping one’s toe along with the song. This is caused by stimulation of neurons in the motor cortex.

Another intriguing side-effect of listening to music is the activation of the visual cortex, found in the back of the brain in the occipital lobe. Research indicates that some music can provoke a response in this part of the brain, as the engaged listener tries to conjure up appropriate imagery to match the changes and progression in the music.

Part of the reason that music tends to be so meaningful to us is that it’s deeply intertwined with memory. Because the brain is so completely engaged in listening to music, it’s one of the parts of a situation that is remembered most clearly later on. Songs and pieces of music can serve as powerful triggers for memories – hence the cliche about couples and “their song.”

And let’s not forget the language aspect of music. Obviously, not all songs have lyrics, but those that do draw upon the language centers of the brain. The two main parts of the brain associated with language are Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area, the former of which is found in the temporal lobe while the latter is in the frontal lobe. Previous research has tended to indicate that Wernicke’s area is more crucial to language comprehension, while Broca’s area is more tied up in language production, though it now appears that there’s significant overlap. In any event, we can add them to the list of brain regions tied up in music comprehension.

The Subjective Sounds

So just why does music carry so much meaning for us? Because music draws on so many different parts of the brain, it’s hard to say with certainty, but that might actually help give us an answer. Music is extraordinarily complex even before it enters the brain – the pitch of music, for instance, has to be much more stable than frequencies we normally sound, or else it would just devolve into chaotic noise. The same is true of rhythm, tone, and other musical properties – these have to be highly complex to cohere into anything even vaguely musical in the first place.

And it’s not as though there’s any real objective measure of what counts as “musical” and what doesn’t. That shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s ever read a music review, but it’s crucial to remember just how much the brain is involved as an active participant in shaping our interaction with music. Memory is one of the most obvious influences here – you’re more inclined to like a particular piece of music if it carries positive associations, for instance.

It’s also possible that a person’s particular brain chemistry can affect his or her appreciation of music. Considering how many different parts of the brain are activated by listening to music, even one unusual link in that chain can drastically alter the person’s response. There’s also plenty of more everyday factors to consider – how much a person knows about music, whether they themselves play an instrument, whether the music has lyrics, and even whether it’s a recording or a live performance can all dramatically change the particular neural response to the same basic piece of music.

The Hardwired Responses

If there’s one constant in all this, it’s that songs carry a tremendous ability to provoke emotional responses – indeed, it can even seem that that’s our brain’s primary concern when it comes to music. Brain imaging studies have shown that “happy” music stimulates the reward centers of the brain, causing the production of the chemical dopamine. That’s the same chemical produced from eating great food, having sex, and taking drugs.

Even better, the brain hangs onto the ability to understand the emotional impact of music, even if the finer points of comprehension are lost. One study, for instance, focused on a woman with damage to her temporal lobe – and, by extension, her auditory cortex – that made it impossible for her to comprehend different melodies and other basic parts of musical structure. Even so, she was still able to read the basic emotional content of the music, respond appropriately to “happy” and “sad” music in turn.

This process seems to start early, too. Researchers at Brigham Young University found evidence that infants as young as five months are able to discern when a happy song is playing, and by nine months they’ve added comprehension of sad music to their repertoire. Interviewed in 2008, BYU music professor Susan Kenney explained what the babies were responding to:

“The happy songs were all in major keys with fairly short phrases or motives that repeated. The tempo and melodic rhythms were faster than any of the sad selections, and the melodies had a general upward direction. Four of the sad songs were in minor keys and all had a slower beat and long melodic rhythms. For an infant to notice those differences is fascinating.”

And the effects of such music only increases as we get older. (Considering the babies’ responses to the music involved turning their heads slightly, you’d sort of hope it would.) We actually can have physiological reactions to music – happy music with a fast tempo and major key can make us breathe faster, while sad music in a slow tempo and minor key can slow down our pulse and cause blood pressure to rise.

Of course, the roots of those reactions are found back in the brain. It’s just another indication of how powerful and multi-faceted our relationship with music really is, and how it’s able to change our brains in ways both obvious and so subtle that we can barely comprehend what’s happening.

By Alasdair WilkinsSep 7, 2011 9:36 AM

http://io9.com/5837976/what-happens-to-your-brain-under-the-influence-of-music

It’s a clichè but this time it´s really appropriate to say: Meet the man behind the myth. Many things have been circulating about Larry Heard – the man who we owe the meaning of ’deep’ in house music. He is responsible for numerous classics and deserves to be fanatically worshipped by music lovers all around the world. This time the legend himself talks about his true history, how he changed his drums for machines, and how he listened to the radio and finally got into the club circuit of the blossoming house scene in Chicago of the mid-’80s. Doing his ’research’ – as Larry Heard puts it with the thoroughness of a wholehearted musician – he met soulmates like Robert Owens with whom he gave birth to Fingers Inc.. Up to this day the self-proclaimed ’late bloomer’ has stayed a decent, soulful and still productive mastermind amidst the turbulent history of house. You’ll feel it.

RBMA: »And we have a very, very special guest here and it’s my pleasure to announce him. A man who shouldn’t need an introduction, who was maybe not solely responsible for house music but certainly put deepness into it and taught the machines some soul – Mr. Larry Heard.«

(applause / cheers)

Larry Heard: »Thank you. «

RBMA: »Welcome. So, Larry, you told me last night, while you were recording a great radio show for us here, that your time as a child and as a teenager was very important for you in terms of music. How did you come to music?«

Larry Heard: »Well, that were just the formative years for me, just where I started to appreciate music and started to… well, the way I approach music when I do my original music was all formed during these years of maybe from about 1968 to 1978. It covers a lot of styles of music also.«

RBMA: »You were listening to radio a lot back then, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, that’s pretty much all you really had. Back in those days and even the ’60s, I don’t think FM radio had really blossomed at that time, so it was kind of AM radio, two or three minute singles. But the good thing about it was, it was a wide range of style so I can see where in doing some research as far as looking back to be able to say something. I didn’t notice this crazy spectrum of things I was hearing all the time.«

RBMA: »So, it was not one kind of music that caught your attention?«

Larry Heard: »No, like blues, rock, jazz, soul, gospel, I think were the essential ones. And reggae started to come into the picture during my teen years when I started, you know, got to the point where I started seeking out music that I can be related to, that maybe wasn’t on the radio.«

RBMA: »And you also brought the first record that you ever bought with you.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, saved my lunch money. We had this custom to go to this record store with my mother and father and see them buy records and, you know, how kids tend to be, you want to do what you see your parents do, so I saved my lunch money and asked my mother when are we going to the record stores so I can buy me a record too, you know? And this is the record that I bought right here. Actually the main song is Hot Fun In The Summertime, which people probably already know is a big hit for Sly & The Family Stone, but it was the b-side that I was more into. I turn it up. Is it loud enough?«

(music: Sly & The Family Stone – Everybody Is A Star)

»So, that’s the basic essence of the song.«

RBMA: »And were Sly & The Family Stone role models for you in terms of songwriting? «

Larry Heard: »I was too young to have role models other than my parents at this time because I was about nine or ten years old. But I did take notice of the music to the point where I made a mental note and wanted to get this 45. And of course, since I have one 45, you take great pride in that, you just play it over and over and that’s what I did, how kids do. «

RBMA: »And when did you start to learn an instrument?«

Larry Heard: »That would be a lot of years later. I was kind of a late bloomer out of the siblings in my family. I have four brothers and all four of them were playing guitar and things like that when they were like 10 or 11-years old. So my parents always cultivated having some level of coacher injected into our upbringing, so we had a piano in the house, and they would always buy us the toy versions of different instruments, of bongos, guitars, drums, things like that. And my brothers started to really get more into it before I did, I was about 17-years old when I was motivated to pursue learning the drums.«

RBMA: »And did your parents play instruments too?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, they both played piano, they had piano lessons in their upbringing, and they both sang.«

RBMA: »And why drums?«

Larry Heard: »I just thought, it was cool. I took guitar as my instrument in school. We had to take two instruments, well, we had to take two: a flute or recorder and then a second instrument, and I chose guitar for that, because I figured if my brothers would do it, I could do it too. That’s what I did for my grade. But in the process of that going on I was kind of exposed to people playing other instruments, then kind of started paying attention to the drummer’s role in the rhythm section, and felt like that would be a good place for me.«

RBMA: »And you started playing in bands back then already?«

Larry Heard: »Yes, I started right away. Because actually there was a man in the neighbourhood by the name of Kevin Lacey, and he said he was putting a band together. He said he was looking for a drummer and I said: ”Oh, I play drums.“ And I hadn’t started playing drums yet. You know, I was just kind of thinking about it. So I had to escalate the process of getting some drums and hide out from this guy until I kind of learned how to do something. But I found out that I had a natural aptitude for doing it, and as things turned out, I didn’t end up in a band with this guy but in a band with some older guys who were playing r&b covers and things like that.«

RBMA: »How long did you play with them?«

Larry Heard: »I can’t really remember because pretty much all the things I did on drums spanned about a seven year period with me on jam bands, r&b cover bands, art rock bands, reggae bands, contemporary jazz, kind of set-ups, you know?«

RBMA: »And you mentioned 1977 as the year you picked up the drums.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, that’s when I started, sort like that period between ’77 and ’84 where I kind of stumbled into the whole blossoming of kind of house music scene or movement or whatever you want to call it.«

RBMA: »Because 1977 was to my knowledge also the year when Robert Williams opened the Warehouse and brought Frankie Knuckles to Chicago.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, that was the year? I didn’t realize that.«

RBMA: »Were you aware of that whole club [scene]?«

Larry Heard: »No, I wasn’t because I was involved in the live music scene, so the clubs I was familiar with were more the live music venues. So I was kind of late bloomer with regards to club music also because I was just doing something totally different at that time.«

RBMA: »And when did you get on the club circuit then?«

Larry Heard: »Well, ’84, when I got to the point in the bands that I have dealing with were not really receptive to my creative ideas, me being the drummer. I don’t think it’s really customary for the drummer to have creative ideas, they just play the beat. So I left the last band that I was in and bought myself a synthesizer and a drummachine to keep the time, so I could kind of experiment with the sounds I have been hearing. The keyboard players kind of use in the bands, that I have been in, I found it intriguing because of new technology, these Arp synthesizers, Moog’s, Oberheim’s, all those things, I was really drawn to it.«

RBMA: »And do you remember the first synthesizer and the first drummachine?«

Larry Heard: »I bought a Roland TR-707 for the drummachine, the keyboard was a Roland Jupiter 6.«

RBMA: »Do you still have them?«

Larry Heard: »No, I don’t have it because after a certain amount of time with gathering and buying instruments as I was able to, I found myself with a whole lot of equipment, kind of crowding myself out of my place, so I was trying to condense down and I sold it to someone.«

RBMA: »And you knew about the club scene back then as you bought your drummachine and your synthesizer?«

Larry Heard: »Not really. Like I was saying, I was on the live club side of things. And one of the guys on the block, I let him hear the stuff that I was kind of playing around with, he said that it sounded like the music that they play at the Warehouse. And once I got that piece of information and I had to start doing some research and find out: “OK, what does this Warehouse place? Maybe I can be somewhere where I can maybe to be able to test out what I’m doing, seeing if it relates to anything that’s going on, see if anybody likes it.”«

RBMA: »And you paid the Warehouse then a visit?«

Larry Heard: »No, actually, I ended up being a little late for the Warehouse and even though when I did find out where it was located, it turned out that it was like a few blocks from where I worked. I think it was a transition time for them where Frankie Knuckles – was it Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse? Yeah, they were transitioning to the next place Frankie Knuckles played at, which was called The Power Plant. So that’s where I come into full exposure, if you would say, to kind of the club setting, the dance club setting.«

RBMA: »And what was the first song you showed to the friend of yours who said it sounds like Warehouse music?«

Larry Heard: »It was Mystery Of Love, the original version of it.«

RBMA: »You have that with you, right, we can listening to it?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, I do, I will try to find it (looks in his CD case). We may talk while I try to find it.«

RBMA: »This was also the record you released then, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yes. (continues to looks for the song, the moderator helps )«

RBMA: »Should be also on… «

Larry Heard: »That wouldn’t be that version. That’s the third version.«

RBMA: »So how many versions are there of Mystery Of Love?«

Larry Heard: »There was an original version, well, my personal prototype that I had done, that I had a copy of. I made three acetates, I kept a copy, I gave one to Frankie Knuckles and I gave the other one to Ron Hardy and since then I’ve heard they exchanged hands a whole lot of times. I think one of the acetates was in Larry Levan’s posession when he died and from that point I don’t know where it went to. But you can ask me something else while I’m trying to track down this. We got digital music meltdown here. So much stuff.«

RBMA: »You mentioned Ron Hardy, he was probably the other most influential DJ Chicago had back then, right? He was playing at the Music Box.«

Larry Heard: »Yes.«

RBMA: »And you went to the Music Box then?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, I went to it. I think my personal preference, my personality kind of being more a laid back person into that being Frankie Knuckles, me being kind of a serious-natured person and things like that I was more comfortable in what felt more like a serious environment. Whereas Ron Hardy was kind of like real upbeat, real kind of wild for me, but I went to it. And then I went to a lot of events that Ron Hardy played and actually heard him played in different styles that I never have heard before, so I was surprised to find out more about his level of ability.«

RBMA: »So what were the main differences between Frankie Knuckles as a DJ and Ron Hardy?«

Larry Heard: »Well, I couldn’t tell you any in technical terms, but it just felt like Ron Hardy was more aiming for the younger, more energetic crowd. And Frankie Knuckles was kind of doing more the next age bracket up I think, who don’t want to get out and hurt their knees when they are dancing on the dancefloor but do want to get out, and socialize, and hear good music.«

RBMA: »So one being the house punk and one being the soul gentleman or something like that?«

Larry Heard: »(still looking for the CD) Kind of something like that, yeah. I’m still trying to track this out, so I’m down while we are talking though.«

RBMA: »So, what were the reactions to Mystery Of Love then?«

Larry Heard: »Oh, the reactions were great. They were actually so great it was to the point that Ron Hardy claimed that he made the song, and Frankie Knuckles claimed that he made the song (laughter). And I kind of show up on the scene and kind of foil everything for both of them, when people who knew me saying this was the guy who made the Mystery Of Love track.

So that kind of put a little tension in the relationship between myself and Frankie and Ron Hardy. Not from my perspective but I think they maybe always felt like I would harbour some resentment for them, but to me it was more of a compliment. I mean, who would claim something that they feel is crap? So it confirmed for me that I was at something, that I was onto something and people could relate to.«

RBMA: »So was this always a big thing in Chicago that copyrights…? «

Larry Heard: »The scene we are talking about isn’t that like a massive scene, we are not talking about a half million people, you know, we are talking about like maybe a few thousand kids maybe, which is healthy enough to survive but it’s not like the following 50 Cent has or Guns n’ Roses and things like that but enough to kind of survive.«

RBMA: »But competition was fierce nonetheless?«

Larry Heard: »Yes, of course. All of the local DJs, even if you are dealing with like a thousand people who may regularly go out and party, that may be divided between seven or eight DJs who were doing different events and residencies around the city so that number is kind of reduced as far as a certain amount are going to Frankie Knuckles, a certain amount to Ron Hardy, a certain amount going to Wayne Williams and André Hatchet and those other guys, who were around at the time but just less known.«

RBMA: »And this is also manifested in the two main labels back at the time in Chicago: Trax Records on the one hand and DJ International on the other?«

Larry Heard: »I’m not sure I understand where you are coming from.«

RBMA: »The competition thing, you know?«

Larry Heard: »Oh, it was always competition in business. I mean, if I’m selling shirts and you are selling shirts, we are automatically in a competition, so that’s just a natural part of it. But actually, the funny thing about DJ International and Trax is, they started off as a partnership. And they couldn’t keep from betraying each other. And that’s why it turned into two labels. All those storys we heard over the years about the craftyness and some of the business tactics of those guys, they started doing those things to each other and that is what kind of a separated them into two labels.

Because actually Rocky Jones, who ran DJ International, he was doing the label and Larry Sherman had the pressing plant, so he was doing the pressing for him. And Larry Sherman would bootleg Rocky’s records before they even got out on the street and undercut him, so that’s how it turned into two labels. So the warning signs were there right from the beginning, but we didn’t know the inner workings of what was going on until years later.«

RBMA: »So you didn’t get really all the royalties you should have, right?«

Larry Heard: »No, the things I did on Trax and DJ International, we got good amounts from him. It is a far cry from what producers and artists can look forward to receive right now. Because I definitely got numerous tens of thousands of Dollars from Larry Sherman for one song. But these days you are lucky if you get $100 as an advance for a release, so we didn’t come out of it in the poor house, no.«

RBMA: »So all those stories about the shady business tactics of Larry Sherman are…?«

Larry Heard: »The stories are true, they can be blown out of proportion. Because it’s not like even like right now, I still have the advantage, of where I’m still doing releases and DJ International is not. And I’m still doing releases and who cares about what Trax is doing in 2005? Their whole legacy is like 1986, 1987 and that’s what they have to survive on. Because nobody would trust them with any real good music. They’ll give them their throw away material. Just to kind of do something with the label, just for the sake of doing it.«

RBMA: »But you put Mystery Of Love originally out on your own label, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, that came out on Alleviated, that was Alleviated’s first release.«

RBMA: »And then you licenced it to DJ International.«

Larry Heard: »No, I didn’t, I re-recorded it. It ended up being a totally different version, because the thing I did, it was done at home on – I don’t know if it was a reel to reel or a cassette or something like that, but it was something very low budget, very ’nuts and bolts’-kind of a thing, and so I don’t think the recording quality was up to what they were trying to release, so we went into a studio and did another rendition of it. And the third time I included Robert [Owens] on it doing the spoken part at the beginning and the singing at the end.«

RBMA: »So maybe we should listen to the other version then if you…?«

Larry Heard: »Yes, I totally forgot about the other one.«

RBMA: »If you can find it.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, it’s so hard to find everything in here, it’s so much music. What song am I looking for?«

RBMA: »Mystery Of Love.«

Larry Heard: »I just don’t know if it’s going to be the right version or the initial version, it will be one of them.«

RBMA: »Any version is fine.«

Larry Heard: »But the first one is just special for me, it just holds the essence of what I was doing, what just naturally flowed out of me. The next one has ended up being more rehearsed. So I don’t really feel the same intensity in those versions but that’s showbiz, I guess.«

(music: Larry Heard – Mystery Of Love)

»This is the DJ International version, which is like the third rendition.«

(music: Larry Heard – Mystery Of Love / applause)

RBMA: »When did this version of this timeless piece of house music come out ?«

Larry Heard: »About 1986, yeah, that was the DJ International release.«

RBMA: »And that was also the version that came to the most prominence, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, because DJ International wanted a thing that I kind of rationalized out for myself. Me doing Alleviated, I just basically had records in the trunk of my car. And I could take them to the local record stores that I knew, but I didn’t have a plan as far as giving you outside of the boundaries of Chicago. So that’s what I say when Robert Owens and Harry Dennis were actually the ones who knew something about DJ International and Trax, and took me to meetings with those guys and I felt that at least they can get it outside of the boundaries of the city.

I just didn’t really think that far ahead, it was just me coming from being a drummer to being thrust into the position of a label CEO, it wasn’t really what I was expecting. It’s just what happened at the time, so I didn’t have any plan. That’s where DJ International and Trax did help me out, despite of all the horror stories, you know, I did something get out of it that I wanted.«

RBMA: »You just mentioned Robert Owens and Harry Dennis, how did you get in touch with those guys?«

Larry Heard: »Actually, it was the same guy in my neighbourhood, who told me about the Warehouse, actually introduced me to a DJ named Toni Harris who lived around the corner from where my mother lived. So I met him and kind of was talking with him and was asking about some of the parties going on around town, that were playing like at that time disco music, it was kind of at the end of the disco era, and started to go to some events and just do my research and find out what was going on.

Because prior to that all I was really familiar with was like the biggest hits like the Bee Gees and Donna Summer and that kind of thing, Chic, those kind of groups. And the clubs, of course, were taking it a lot of steps further and maybe not even just one, so I had to go out and see what was going on. I ended up meeting Robert Owens at one of the parties that I went to. Toni Harris introduced me to him, and we started talking, he was telling me about him being a vocalist and things like that and we just exchanged information and just kind of coordinated getting together.

And when we did that on that first day we recorded our prototype to A Path. Because I think he was kind of in a similar situation as myself where his creative ideas were being stifled because he had a lot of people who were telling him that he couldn’t sing, that he never would amount to anything and things like that. And for me being that drummer in the band and the other musicians not being receptive to the ideas we just had all of these bottled up ideas so it was a perfect coming together of like-minded individuals and that’s why it just took off so quickly. I had tons of ideas and he had tons of ideas and we put our ideas together.«

RBMA: »And you formed Fingers Inc. then, right?«

Larry Heard: »The name thing is another tricky issue, because it started off as Loose Fingers, my little brothers made up this whole Loose Fingers thing. It just goes back to my tendency to grab an instrument and start faking like I knew how to play it, get on the piano and fake like I’m playing something. So I always move my fingers fast and they started saying this Loose Fingers thing and it went I put a record out and that’s what I ended up using for the artist name.

I didn’t know what the response was going to this stuff, it’s off the wall, it’s I don’t know anything about the music business other than I hear records and I buy them, that’s pretty much the extent of what I knew. And that’s why I used this name like a safety net. If it turned out to be a total embarassment, I can actually hide and say I don’t know who that Loose Fingers is. And it was modified to Mr. Fingers within one release, really. And then modified to Fingers Inc., you know, when I teamed up with Robert.«

RBMA: »Were you also a DJ back then already?«

Larry Heard: »No, I was kind of new to the whole culture I think and I started to pay more attention, because we had disco music and early electronic music that was already on the radio. But it just made me focus a litttle bit more or intentionally pay attention and – what was the question?«

RBMA: »If you were a DJ back then.«

Larry Heard: »No, I wasn’t a DJ. But the mixes, I think, was the thing that got me curious about how that worked, the principle behind blending the two records together. Me being a drummer, I played in bands with two drummers, it was like: “OK, it’s got to be just like that.” So I think I can do it if I get my hands on some turntables, get all the tools I need, and it turned out that that was true. Once I got my hands on them and I could figure it out, and I just started doing it from that point for my own fun.

In my research, of course, I was starting to buy 12“ records, stuff I was hearing in the mixes. I recorded the mix and get my walkman and get down to the record store and ask the guys what’s this and what’s this and what’s this and buy things and I would come home and do my experimentation and see, can I do what Farley Jackmaster Funk does and all these guys on the radio? So that’s where that started.«

RBMA: »Farley Jackmaster Funk and the radio, this was WBMX, right? Maybe you can talk a little bit about the importance of radio in Chicago back then.«

Larry Heard: »Radio was just as important then as it is now. If you want people to hear what you are doing, they have to have a form where they have access to it. I think that timing has played a key role in the willingness to kind of put on music that was a little outside of the norm or the acceptable standard at the time because FM [radio] was kind of new. So they would typically play like whole album sides on FM radio, because you got stereo now as opposed to AM, and you play a whole rock album, a whole jazz album and things like that, you play the whole 16 minute version of Donna Summer and things like that. So it was more the kind of audiofile place to hear music.

And they were competing against AM, which was the standard at the time and people were just so accustomed to their transistor radio, they just had AM on, they didn’t have FM. So they had liberty to take all kinds of chances back then and they were the ones that in response to some of the college stations in Chicago who had these mixed shows on with guys who not known but doing the same things as Farley and Frankie Knuckles and Hot Mix 5 guys.

And they had the things that they were doing on the college station, and all of the stations started to notice on certain days at certain times that all of their audience would disappear and they would go to these college stations. And so FM radio was the one who decided: ”OK, we need to get some guys who do this on our station,“ which was brave at the time. And that’s where the whole Hot Mix 5 concept originated.«

RBMA: »Hot Mix 5 were Ralph Rosario, Farley Jackmaster Funk, and who else?«

Larry Heard: »Mickey ’Mixin’ Oliver, Scott ’Smokin’ Seals, that’s four.«

RBMA: »Yeah. Who’s the fifth?«

Larry Heard: »I’m not remembering. It’s probably easy but I’m just not remembering who the fifth person is right now.«

RBMA: »And those were mix shows with nothing else but what was being called house music already in Chicago.«

Larry Heard: »It wasn’t being called house music, that didn’t start until later the media got a hold of it and it has to have some identifying title when they get it. We were just listening to these cool records from all around the world, we hadn’t dubbed it anything at the time. It was just the show where they played all those records and you tape it and you run to the record store the next day to find the things you want to get.«

RBMA: »Do you have something with you that is some sort of classic WBMX disco song?«

Larry Heard: »Classic WBMX, well, (looks in his folder), wow.«

(music: One Way – Music)

RBMA: »So, those three tracks are pretty much some sort of essence of what was going on in Chicago back then?«

Larry Heard: »Yes, they are incomplete, because there was a lot of stuff that was coming out of like Belgium, Spain, Holland, Germany, those were actually the predecessors of what has started to happen in Chicago, in Detroit, and New York, of course, always had its own kind of thing going on because of the amount of distance, us being in the Midwest and them being on the East Coast, they had their own kind of approach.«

RBMA: »So we just listened to Chip E – Time To Jack, right? The other one was Savage Progress, – Hot Speaking To Beat and the last one was One Way – Music, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah.«

RBMA: »And you mentioned Italo disco and all that kind of stuff and this was much more important for Chicago than it was for, for instance, New York. And do you know why?«

Larry Heard: »Well, that’s what we were hearing. It was not like we were the ones, you know, telling the radio what to play, that’s what was being placed before us. So, that was someone else’s decision, people, program directors at the stations and in our region, so maybe in Detroit the program directors just had different ideas.«

RBMA: »I’m just asking because some of these Italo tracks have pretty strange lyrics to English ears because the lyrics don’t always make sense, right?«

Larry Heard: »Is that a question?«

RBMA: »Yeah, that is a question. Why it was like that.«

Larry Heard: »Oh, I don’t know, that would be a question for the artist to answer.«

RBMA: »No, why people responded to that kind of stuff.«

Larry Heard: »Well, the music, the rhythmic stuff that was going on, it was in the melodies and things like that, you know? Because we just responded on a primal level, just like when I was a little kid. I mean, it’s not like I knew anything about chords and scales and progressions and things like that, all I knew was, I like it or I don’t. So the same thing applies to the masses, they don’t have any musical knowledge but they know what they like when they hear it. And that was the case with those records we were hearing.«

RBMA: »And in respects to your own career, what went on after Mystery Of Love? «

Larry Heard: »It was a pretty quick progress because by the time Mystery Of Love was on the streets and Robert and I had worked up tons and tons of other things, and we were trying to figure out ways of getting those things out on the street. So hence comes some of the alter ego names in, you know, I was starting to get different projects out on the street as Gherkin Jerks and The It and House Factor, all these different names I started making up at the time, which is inspired by George Clinton, because I saw him doing that, so it was like: ”That could work.“«

RBMA: »So, that’s the explanation for all the different monikers you used? George Clinton?«

Larry Heard: »Yes, there is nothing complicated or a deep philosophical thing, it’s just a way of giving more things out because I had a whole lot of material.«

RBMA: »And during the end of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s you also got a major record deal with MCA?«

Larry Heard: »Think probably around ’88, which is pretty quick once again, because from the scene really kind of taking off and blossoming in Chicago in ’86, and of course New York is a hop, a skip and a jump away and Miami, so those were the three spots where I was really starting to take off. Of course, the label started to notice, when like for myself, I have Mystery Of Love is on the charts right next to What Have You Done For Me Lately. And A&M notices, you know, what is this song? I’m sure they took a great offense to it because there was a much larger investment involved in getting these big name artists on these charts, and the next thing you know, these guys making songs in their basements and they are on the charts right alongside of them.

So, they tried to come. And I think actually the first artist to get signed was Adeva out of New York. I think, Blaze was pretty quick right near the beginnings of that. And Jovonn, even though an album didn’t come out, he got signed by Warner Brothers and it kind of went in little increments like that, whereas the next one being like Ten City with Atlantic. And then, of course, I was always kind of this misunderstood character, where people were like: “Can we even approach this guy? Because it’s like we did never see him, he doesn’t really talk a whole lot to people, he just kind of more observes everything that’s going on.”

So I had some people kind of stand-offish about me, and Sony Music was interested and they were calling around and saying: ”What’s this guy like? Is he one of these fanatical artist people where he won’t do what we want him to do because of this whole artistic thing?“ And Capitol and Warner Brothers, of course each one of them had a different concept about the changes they were already going to start to make. Because Warner Brothers was going to replace Ron Wilson with Arnold Jarvis.

Which would have been cool, but I didn’t feel all that comfortable with them all coming in and changing a person that I picked to be in the project that I kind of originated, so I didn’t really like that. So it took a minute for somebody to come around who kind of understood what I wanted to do, and I also wanted continue doing the label thing that I started doing a few years earlier, and so MCA was the one that said: ”We will do a label deal in addition to the artist deal.“ And the Introduction album was already recorded, so it was just a matter of giving the master mixes to them and them getting it out.«

RBMA: »And do you have an example with you of one of the songs of Introduction? Because it was a step further for you, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, this will be maybe about five years into kind of developing my composition skills and production skills. I think something is on here. No, not my version, let’s see, OK.«

(music: Mr. Fingers – What About This Love)

RBMA: »So this song was completely done by you in terms of lyrics, vocals?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, actually, it was actually a milestone for me, the first song that I sang the lead vocals to. But actually there is an interesting story behind it because David Hollister was the one who was planned to sing the song. And he didn’t show up at the studio that day and so I just ended up laying down a rough vocal track, so I can remember the basic melody for the lyrics.

And pretty much everybody that was present at the studio that day was saying that they liked what I had done and thought I should probably keep it that way. To my good fortune I took the advice and we actually released this as a single. Even before the MCA deal because this was done, this dated back to 1989 when I did this one, which is a couple of years before I did the MCA deal and actually started a bidding war because this one ended up on the chart tight next to Been Around The World and stuff like that.

And so all these labels are wondering once again: ”Here are these guys, these basement guys, come and getting right on the chart next to our big artist that we put a million dollars behind.“ So companies started coming with bids at that point, you know?«

RBMA: »What were your final experiences with dealing with a major label?«

Larry Heard: »I didn’t like it because you kind of turn into an employee when you’re a signed artist to a label as opposed to this capacity that I gotten used to. Even though I stumbled into it, I was getting accustomed to the idea of having control over when releases come out, what releases come out, what they sound like, and I didn’t have anybody telling me: “Well, do this, do that, make it sound like Teddy Riley or make it sound like this or something like that,” you know? So I enjoyed having that freedom, and I started to see myself losing that with the major labels.«

RBMA: »So you would always suggest to a young kid when getting into music and releasing music to start his own label?«

Larry Heard: »I mean, if you have the means to do that, if you have money to invest in manufacturing your 12“s or CDs or whatever medium you chose to put out, if you can do that, it’s a great learning experience as far as the innerworkings of selling recorded music. But if you want to just go right straight to the like Eminem thing or Destiny’s Child thing, I guess you will do have to do deal with the majors because you will need their influence as far as radio and television and things like that. So, I enjoy the freedom as opposed to the large financial game personally.«

RBMA: »Speaking of Eminem, what probably most people don’t know is that you have also done a few hip hop beats in your life.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, I have done a lot actually. I had so many closed calls with people where they would thinking about connecting with me to do something but for some reason this cloud has always hung over me that where people think I’m inaccessable and so they say: ”Oh, we want to work with this guy but who knows how to get in touch with him, he’s so mysterious,“ you know? And actually Common Sense was one of those guys, Crucial Confllict, Tongue Twista, some of those early guys.

And some of the people, that were doing some kind of support work for them, were students of mine, where I took a couple of people under my wing and kind of teach them a little bit about different production styles and it would help me at the same time. While they are asking me questions, then I have a reason to learn it so I can give them an answer. So it was kind of a two way thing where I learn something and I share something and some of them work with some of the artists out of Chicago.«

RBMA: »And Common Sense is known as?«

Larry Heard: »Mmh?«

RBMA: »As Common today, right? Common Sense, you mentioned him, is known as Common today.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah.«

RBMA: »And you brought some of those hip hop beats with you, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah. I’ve got a few here. They are old, you know, this is maybe about ten years back now. I really took some time, did my experimenting around with doing some hip hop kind of demos for some guys.«

(music: Larry Heard – unknown)

»That kind of would have been more like a Premier kind of flavour.«

RBMA: »It sounded pretty Pete Rock-ish to me.«

(music: Larry Heard – unknown)

Larry Heard: »It’s another guy who I just thought had a really cool voice, he called himself Don One. I don’t know if he had done anything, but this is what I did.«

(music fades out / applause)

RBMA: »So, it’s so hard in this hip hop business, is this one of the reasons why this stuff never saw the light of the day? It was all unreleased, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yes, it’s unreleased. I was just doing really a demo for these guys because they were trying to pursue their thing. Chicago had its kind of blossoming, well, it had a hip hop scene. So there were people there, of course they were inspired by the things they were hearing, what people do in other parts of the country. But just like the guys said in the label: no Russell’s, no Puff Daddy’s and stuff like that in Chicago. So, they were pretty much on their own, you know? And a lot of people didn’t end up achieving much of anything yet.«

RBMA: »And I have to get back to the ’80s in Chicago once again because what is your take on the term house music? There are so many different stories about this. How did it come up?«

Larry Heard: »Oh, really I have no take. I know what it is, for what it is. It’s just the term that is coined to kind of incapsulate this thing that we are talking about. Just as we like to refer to tomatoes and lettuce as vegetables, we kind of put titles on things to help people get a handle on what it is what we are discussing.«

RBMA: »And it came from the Warehouse then, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah. So that whole Warehouse, that ’house’-part of it was kind of adapted for the name of the style.«

RBMA: »We are talking about terms. Who is ’Jack’ and what is he all about?«

Larry Heard: »Who ’Jack’ is? (laughs, audience joins in) ’Jack’ is a fictional character some guys made up. I don’t know who he is.«

RBMA: »But you don’t know how this came up?«

Larry Heard: »No, I don’t know. That kind of goes back to some of the Hot Mix 5 things on the radio, where in addition to beat mixing records they would sometimes play acapellas and things on top of records, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Angela Davis were popular once for DJs to play. And this particular guy, Chuck Roberts I think, just made up this speech. It was very reminiscent of a Cinnamon thing, I think, something that was on Jive Records, I can’t really recall the title of it in my head, and that was his little speech that became legendary. But there is no real person ’Jack’ to my knowledge.«

RBMA: »And someone took this speech and put it on a track of yours?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, he put in on top of Can You Feel It among others but that was the one that ended up coming out in various bootlegs and things like that.«

(music: Fingers Inc. – Can You Feel It)

RBMA: »Do you remember the day you produced Can You Feel It?«

Larry Heard: »I just remember that it was in the winter and at that time I was living in this apartment that had these really big windows, kind of a loft place and I had a view of downtown Chicago and it was snowing. All of my friends that were over that night, they all remember that visual of the snow falling and this music playing. And actually a friend of mine gave the song it’s title, because I couldn’t think of what to call it. That actually happened a lot that I asked friends to name the song for me. So, sometime in the winter of ’85.«

RBMA: »Makes sense to me. And this song also characterizes maybe the Summer Of Love on a little island called England in the late ’80s and did you experience that too? Because I think you toured Europe with Fingers Inc. back then, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, but I don’t know if we were getting ’round to all of the parties that were going on. And of course, us just coming over for a couple of weeks, we wouldn’t be able to experience what they are experiencing year around. So I can’t say that I fully experienced it.«

RBMA: »But you played at places like the Hacienda in Manchester, right?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, and Hippodrome, The Fridge and some of those old clubs. I don’t know if they are still around now.«

RBMA: »And how did you feel about that coming from Chicago, flying over to Europe and seeing all those kids totally losing it to your music?«

Larry Heard: »Well, of course it is very encouraging to see that happening. But everything was happening so fast because between me getting my handle on operating a label and acting in that capacity and composing and producing stuff and kind of helping Robert Owens out with the live shows and things like that, there were just so many things going on and you didn’t really have time to sit back and just think about everything. We were so busy doing things that we had no time to think until after you finished all the things that were going on.

So I didn’t really have any conscious thoughts other than it being cool to me and just getting a glimpse into what guys like the Jackson 5 had experienced and things like that, that was very cool, but for me it wasn’t really what my goal was as an individual. I think Robert was more the person who was interested in being out front, and me I’m kind of a support person. Like the characteristic of my decision to play drums in the band where I am a integral part but I’m in the background. I wasn’t really interested in being in the front. But it’s a cool experience to go and kind of set the tone for all of the people who started to travel internationally after that.

Because we were a kind of England’s first encounter with neighbourhoods. Because prior to us coming the caliber of artists that had been over there, was like Curtis Mayfield, The Temptations, Earth, Wind and Fire, you know, these big artists. So they had a certain amount of apprehension, and I had people down right scared of me because of movies like Menace II Society and Boyz ‘N The Hood and all this stuff was out there, giving them an impression of what especially black youth were like in America. So we had a lot of people, they were very stand-offish, I got called raggamuffin a whole lot and had to find out what that meant, it was like ’troublemaker’ ( chuckles).«

RBMA: »But you are not really a menace to society?«

Larry Heard: »No, no, I’m cool, I’m a peaceful person here.«

Participant: »The bassline from Can You Feel It, what synth did you use, and what preset, what’s the secret to that fat sound?«

Larry Heard: »The Roland Juno 2, I think. Yeah, Juno 2. It wasn’t even a MIDI-keyboard, it was just kind of an old school synthesizer.«

Participant: »You had to play it?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, play it by hand.«

Participant: »Respect!«

RBMA: »And did you know back then that you created a timeless classic piece of dance music?«

Larry Heard: »Oh no, there is no way to know it upfront if you are doing something. You just really aim to do something that people like, and get something that has a longevity to it, that’s great. But you can’t really plan that upfront or everybody’s record would be a timeless classic. If you could just orchestrate that yourself. It’s something that the people listening to it decide. I couldn’t decide it.«

RBMA: »So how is your approach to songwriting then?«

Larry Heard: »Free flow, very organic. I don’t really go in the studio trying to do anything in particular. I go in there, say I’m going to do something, and if it works out, cool, if it doesn’t, cool too. I will just try again tomorrow. Because that’s pretty much what I do when I’m at home, I’m in the studio every day of the week. So I have plenty of opportunities to kind of sit there and come up with an idea.«

RBMA: »So you relocated during the mid-’90s or during the end of the ’90s from Chicago to Memphis, Tennessee. So what were your reasons for that leaving one of the centers [of house music]?«

Larry Heard: »I just needed to get away, I needed a different backdrop. Once again my personality type comes into play, where me being kind of a low-key laidback person and now I’m thrusted into this stuff. This kind of to me feels like it’s spinning out of control, because first of all it wasn’t planned but even though it’s happening, I’m trying to keep pace with it and keep my sanity at the same time. I felt myself losing it. I can definitely understand Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and these people [who] cured it with drugs. I had to do something before I self-destructed, I had to get away and get somewhere peaceful where I could think and take stock of what was going on in my own personal goals.«

RBMA: »And you are pretty much busy to this day with making and releasing music, because I remembered during the mid-’90s or so, there were all these stories circulating around you that Mr. Fingers has stopped making music and doesn’t want to be related to music anymore?«

Larry Heard: »Well, that is just another one of those instances of the media taking a statement and overblowing it. It’s like a person who works as a teacher or garbage man or doctor, they take a break, they take what’s called a vacation and that’s what I was trying to do. I guess my mistake was mentioning that at all, that probably would have solved everything, but it’s just a classic example of one of the reasons why I tend to be stand-offish when it comes to the media because they never convey what you were actually conveying.«

Participant: »If I go to a family get-together and an uncle of me asks what I’m doing, what I’m playing or what I’m making, it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to call it house music or disco, electro, it’s hard to give a name. It’s just dance music for my part. So, what would you have said in 1984 when the house music was not really born as house music. What did you say?«

Larry Heard: »I would have said I make some music. I make my own little music track here, but the thing that kind of allows the person who is listening to have their freedom is to let them just hear it. Let them decide what it is, you know, for their own practical uses.«

Participant: »Was it dance music from the beginning?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, it was dance music, that’s the purpose of the simplistic four-on-the-floor drumbeat. That’s the easiest universal one for the people to understand; very elementary and anybody can get it and get on the beat and dance.«

Participant: »The sample use in your hip hop productions is pretty obvious.«

Larry Heard: »The what?«

RBMA: »The use of samples. The Al Green drumbreak, for instance. Do you use any samples in your house productions too?«

Larry Heard: »Not typically, it will be more things that… Say, I have like a chorus or something that I need repeated but I don’t really feel up to sing it the numerous different times, I sample stuff like that in places where it needs to be in the track. But as far as sampling other people’s tracks or things like that, I’m not really into that thing. I think it’s disrespectful. Personally, with my kind of background going into playing music and trying to attain a certain level of proficiency on an instrument, you would know what people go through learning an instrument. You can understand Chick Corea, how much time he had to put in, and Stanley Clarke and Al Di Meola, these great legendary people. And I don’t feel comfortable doing that and I take a great deal of pride knowing that I created something from nothing, which is what the definition of creating is. And you can be creative with samples but creating is taking nothing and making something.«

Participant: »Thank you.«

Larry Heard: »Still trying to find this song, let’s see.«

Participant: »Hi, Larry. I wanted to ask you, because when I hear your songs, one thing that always gets me about them is they are just so warm and emotive like the strings are very emotive. Maybe they sound like an old soul record somehow but it’s all electronic, and I just wondered if – I know it’s pretty hard sometimes to explain how you did that – and maybe I don’t even know if you know how you did that. But if there is any way you can impart on some of how you got that richness into it.«

Larry Heard: »I don’t really can say that I have a technical way that I approach it but I do kind of find my sound, it’s kind of near what I want or what I think in my head or picturing in my head, and I actually alter the sounds. A lot of the sounds that you hear on the records I do, they are not the factory sounds that come out of these units. I gave them modify to kind of really fit into the architecture of what I’m trying to do. Actually, the sounds kind of direct me as far as you know what’s going to happen, and then I just modify until it really fits better in my humble opinion into what I’m doing.«

Participant: »It’s just because I’m trying to imagine how you would start writing something. I can’t imagine how you sit there and actually write those songs, do you see what I mean?«

Larry Heard: »I’m the butt of a lot of jokes among the people who know me because they know the way I work, and there is no structure to it. Even some of the guys that we were with upstairs doing some sessions yesterday, they may have got a glimpse into it like: ”It doesn’t seem like this guy does anything intentionally, he just gets on the equipment and just starts doing something.“ And that’s just actually what I do.«

Participant: »So, do you just switch off the thinking a bit and just go?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, I hate to have to think too much because then it turns into work. And I want the music to be a pleasurable experience and I think even on a primal level that’s conveyed to people. You have a component of our being called intuition. I think people pick up on the tension or that kind of thing in music. And it can either attract or repel you.«

Participant: »When you are writing those songs as well, I mean, would it be something that – you would have all the equipment set up, OK, would you kind of have to have the whole song done in one take kind of thing, dropped off on to a perfect mix the first time? Or were you able to multitrack and go back and correct mistakes?«

Larry Heard: »Well, at the beginning it was all just before DATs and all those other new digital mediums, so I was doing things on cassette tapes and reel to reels and there wasn’t much room for doing any overdubs. So I would maybe do one part on the reel and capture the bassline and the basic chords. Like, for a song like Can You Feel It, I captured the drumpattern that I programmed and the bassline and the chords and in the end some of the other stuff that is on top, I dubbed to a cassette, which was the only thing I had as far as recording, and put the other little lines on the top. And that cassette was the master recording of that song (chuckling).«

Participant: »So, Can You Feel It is just two tracks in a way?«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, Bring Down The Walls is actually a one tape thing and Never No More Lonely, some of those things because me and Robert just got together and just kind of have fun with music. And every once in a while we would just capture something where we just press the record button and something good came out like Bring Down The Walls and we had captured it and we didn’t even attempt to go in and refine it or anything like that. It was like: ”No, this is the track.“«

Participant: »Was it the kind of ’the first cut is the deepest’-mentality, I mean a bit like reggae? It was kind of like: you are in the studio, you jammed it out and then you tried to leave it.«

Larry Heard: »Yeah, it was like the James Brown way of doing things, just go in the studio and jam and what we end up hearing is like a edited down portion of those jam sessions. And we were kind of doing the same thing with very little structure.«

Participant: »And I guess it’s kind of a last one for me, but how do you feel when you hear tracks that kind of rip off Can You Feel It or some of the other really big classics in a very blatant way?«

Larry Heard: »Well, it’s hard to be impressed. I’m more impressed when I hear somebody’s original material and it gives me a connection with them. A lot of times, even if you have a song that is sampled, I have a tendency to where my attention will focus on that original artist and then I don’t really have a connection with the new person. I’m into the Marvin Gaye sample or whoever it may be. So it has a tendency to work in reverse for me.«

RBMA: »Speaking of Robert Owens, are you still in touch with him and making music with him?«

Larry Heard: »We haven’t been able doing any music, my living in Memphis and him living in London makes that a pretty big challenge, but I talk to him all the time. I talked to him a couple of weeks ago, we always stay in touch. I mean, we have a lot of songs that we control jointly, so we do a lot of business together and have to stay in communication and make sure everything is done to each individual satisfaction, you know?«

RBMA: »And it would be really nice to hear the song you did with him on the same day as Bring Down The Walls. If you can dig it up?«

Larry Heard: »(scans his folders) If I had a better system, as far as finding these things, it wouldn’t take us so long here. OK, there it is.«

(music: Fingers Inc. – untitled)

RBMA: »So when will this come out then?«

Larry Heard: »When will it come out? (laughs) I don’t know, because this is like say, we did this on the same day as Bring Down The Walls, which is like in 1986, where we just kind of were fooling around and living and just recording the session, so I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t even guess. We are trying, we are trying our best. But since I fund the label out of my own pocket, and I’m not Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey or someone like that, there are limitations to what I’m able to do and I have to pace myself where I don’t bankrupt myself, where the whole thing has to end. So, hopefully, I’ll try but I can’t tell you when.«

RBMA: »Fingers crossed. So it’s not easy to run your own label these days and make a living out of it?«

Larry Heard: »It’s not easy, but it can be done. I mean, as I am living proof of it and a whole lot of people who run small labels, it’s just how you approach things, how realistic you are about how much you can invest and making a product people will be able to comprehend and receive and want to buy. You just have to be real with yourself.«

RBMA: »OK, do we have any other questions? No? Then I would like to thank Larry Heard very much.«

Were you Manchester born and bred?

No. Salford. Yvette and I were guest editors of Building magazine. Along with everything else we do we’re regeneration experts now, and as regeneration consultants with a bit of a reputation we were invited to guest edit Building Magazine. In it I made the point that neither of us have forgotten our backgrounds – my partner comes from the Ribble Valley, I come from Salford – but by the mid-80s we came from Manchester. Now, until about 1980 when people asked where do you come from I’d have done what I did then, “I come from Salford”. And people would go “Ah, Manchester”, and it’s “No, it’s fucking Salford.” Albert Finney would have said that to you, Ben Kingsley, Alistair Cook, we come from Salford, and there’s a real pride about it.

Suddenly in the early ‘80s, the word Manchester came not just to mean the centre of Manchester, it came to mean “the project”, being the rebuilding of this whole Northern place.

I always say that in the early ’80 s when we built the Hacienda we thought we were idiots, just individual crazies for some strange obscure reason in love with our city and putting some of our money back into the city. It was only by about ’84, ’85, that we realised there were a lot of other people doing exactly the same thing, also individually, on their own, separately thinking they were just the same idiots. Our city fathers, council leaders, were doing, and we all thought it was in isolation, and suddenly by the mid ‘80s were realised we were all doing it.So I’m quite happy to say that I come from Manchester, even though for many many years I would have denied it completely.

What is it about Salford that makes you so proud?

Salford is what it is. It was the working class city. Manchester became the city centre as it were, although Salford is separated from the Manchester city centre by just a river. So Manchester and Salford are a bit like Minneapolis and St Paul, two sides of the same city. There is of course a romance about being working class. Rock’n’roll is meant to be working class but it never is.

Elvis Presley was working class, The Beatles were all grammar school boys, admittedly I have to accept that John Lydon – after he once had a go at me in a seafood restaurant in Malibu where we bought him 16 seabreezes for lunch – was actually working class, but Strummer was diplomat’s son and the origins of punk were in nice middle class intellectual boys having those idea. The fact that Bromley in Kent was the hub of it says it all really. Obviously New Order were grammar school boys in certain ways, and then suddenly you get another burst of real working class rock’n’roll activity with the Mondays and the Roses, which is one of the reason why they’re not still around while the nice middle class work ethic boys of U2 and Coldplay do very well.

Why? Because they have better financial advisors?

No, it’s the work ethic. If you’re middle class you have a work ethic where it’s a wonderful job and you work at it and you make lots of money and take it seriously. If you’re working class in the music industry it’s like robbing the bank. Rob the bank, take the money, shove it up your nose and fuck off. I’m quoting Happy Mondays’ agent Martin Gallagher there.

What did your parents do?

My father was an out of work actor and my mother was a shop-keeper. The core of the family were German émigrés. My grandfather Herman Maximillian Nuffal arrived in Salford in 1900. He’d gone to America and the family said come home, but he said “No, I’ll come nearer home and move to Salford.” Although it sounds very weird – I always thought it was until I realised that if you’re the second son and the Kaiser is bringing in conscription in 1899 and you’d think fuck it, I’m going to America.

Fair enough, I can understand that. But coming to Salford?

Then about 15 years ago that I did a documentary about Haim Wiezmann, who was a Manchester German scientist (and first president of Israel). Of course, doing this film about Weizmann I discovered – which I should have known anyway when you think back about because Engels was here – but if you left Germany in the 19th century, you came to Manchester. Whalley Range, now our prostitute area, used to be called Little Germany, and all the large houses there were built by German émigrés in the 1870s, 1880s. The Halle Orchestra was of course founded by a German. The amazing thing I learned making this documentary was that the only language you would hear spoken in the cocktail bars during the interval at the Hallé was German.

So this was German town.

This is why I always say there were two reasons for Manchester music, and the second was Manchester’s openness. Which city in Britain was welcoming Chicago and Detroit house music in ’86-’87? The answer is Manchester. I always remember even though I think (London club) Shoom!, which was an important part of acid house, probably preceded the Hot night at the Hacienda by about a month, which was April or May ’86, I remember Mike Pickering Djing at the Astoria in January and being bottled off stage and heckled because he played house music. But the history of rock’n’roll is the history of being open to influences, and that’s why things happen.

Anyway, my grandfather apprenticed himself to a jeweller and watchmaker called Mr Ranks. When he died my grandfather got some money out his family in Freiberg and he took over the shop as Nuffal’s. Then it became Nuffal Brothers as my uncles came into the business. The second shop was in Caddeshead, and then Karl the eldest took over the Salford shop and Edgar, who was my immediate uncle who I lived with for many years, had a shop in Eccles. So there were three shops called Nuffal Brothers and they were watchmakers and jewellers. My mother took the money she inherited from my grandfather and bought herself a tobacconist and card shop at the end of William Rd. She married my father in 1948. He was an out of work actor, who then began to run the shop.

Did you go straight into television from university?

When you’re at Oxbridge you know what jobs are coming and you knew your competition. There were two general traineeships at the BBC every year but they were cancelled the year that I left Cambridge, so there were six Thompson newspaper traineeships in Cardiff, two Reuters traineeships, two ITN traineeships, and there were six BBC news trainees. You applied for these knowing that there were 20 others from Oxbridge and maybe five from York or somewhere else, and I just got very very lucky.

I went for my interview at ITN knowing I didn’t get the Reuters job, didn’t get anything at the BBC, and at my interview they said, “Was there anything that we could have done better”, and I said that I didn’t think much of their coverage of Jimi Hendrix’s death. I said, “It might not matter much to you but from the culture I come from Hendrix is a very important person and it seems to me that you should be able to cover it with a little more insight and not treat it as something from the counter culture that means nothing to you.”

About four days later a telegram arrived at my room in Cambridge and I’d got the ITN job. There are some core moments in my job and getting into Cambridge was a core moment, the ITN job was a core moment, and I have to say that very recently getting the second stage of the regeneration project we’re doing right now felt exactly the same.
What was it about TV that attracted you rather than any other media? (Wilson worked at ITV, then at Granada in Manchester where became a local celebrity thanks to music shows What’s On and So It Goes.)

It had words and pictures, I suppose, which rather excited me. I went to ITN which had just reinvented TV news with News At Ten which didn’t have people wearing bowties, and at that point in the early ‘70s the esprit de corps at ITN in Wells Street we were the second best TV news organisation in the world behind CBS News New York, just. If you put yourself up there with CBS New York and its traditions and way of doing things it meant you felt you were the top of the pile.

I learnt so much in those two years.The way you learned at ITN was by becoming a scriptwriter and I used to write the stuff that Andrew Gardner or Sandy Gall or Gordon Honeycomb or Reginald Bosanquet would read. It was a wonderful thrill and wonderful job, and you progressed to doing end pieces or the occasional small item, but I wanted to be a reporter, felt the need to go out on the road and do the next stage.

I have to say, and this is something important actually, that it never occurred to me that I would ever be famous. It never occurred to me to be on television just to be on television. I thought that to short circuit the process I would go to a regional ITV company on a local magazine show for two years, learn my trade on the road and come back to ITN a fully trained reporter.

The very first advert I saw was for a different post in my home town of Manchester, but I thought I’d apply, and strangely, even though I completely screwed my interview up I got a job as a reporter. Anyway, a friend said to me, “So you’re going to be a reporter? Oh my God, you’ll become famous.” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “My mate went to Central TV in Birmingham and he got a letter from a woman saying, Oh, I’d like to do this to you, and there was a drawing of a woman performing an obscene act on him.”

I was utterly shocked. I hadn’t connected being on television with being famous. I had always wanted to be an actor, but when I went to Cambridge I discovered that I was either a shit actor or an OK actor, but I wasn’t a great actor, and the whole idea of being famous had removed itself from me. I really was surprised that by being a reporter I might actually be known. So I turned up at Granada to do two years as a reporter, and I got stuck.

So when did the magazine programmes come along?

That was a bit like Broadcast News. It opens with the title, and some guy says “Good evening, here is the latest report from John Thompson in Namibia”. Then it cuts to this incredibly exciting film of a reporter in the jungle dodging bombs, doing incredibly exciting things and pieces to camera and directs the whole thing, and it cuts back to the studio and this guy says, “Thanks, that was John Thompson, we’ll see you next week.” The guy who says “we’ll see you next week” is higher up the food chain than the guy on film.

I was expected to be in the studio as well as being the reporter, but after my first summer there Granada, instead of making me the number two anchorman they hired someone else. I’m thinking, How do I get in the studio? One of the guys had been doing What’s On, an arts round up one night a week, and the guy who’d been presenting it went off to write some novelisation of Blake’s Seven. I liked movies, I liked music, I was into the theatre, I had an arts degree, so I asked if I could do the arts show, and they said yes. From summer 1974 What’s On ran for about four years, and many things that people think were on So It Goes were actually on What’s On.

So for example when I wasn’t allowed to have Blondie on So It Goes because the producer thought they were crap, so I put her on What’s On and she did Rip Her To Shreds. Many north west kids remember, much the same as many people remember seeing the Sex Pistols on TV for the first time, me saying, and now a young singer who’s come up from London, he’s actually from Liverpool, Mr Elvis Costello. And we turned round and there’s Elvis with on a little podium with his electric guitar in his arm, and he’d got up there to do Less Than Zero, but he’d said that he’d written a new song two days ago and could he do that instead, and I said yeah sure, and he did Allison.

Two days old, amazing.

What’s On was about getting me back in the studio, but it became a cult show because it was very whacky and we’d hang parrots around the studio, a camel once ran through the set, it was a weird show. I remember once having (creator of Spider-Man) Stan Lee on and he brought a Spider-Man costume with him and Clive James, who was a friend doing the show with me, spent the whole time walking around in the back of the shot wearing Stan Lee’s Spider-Man costume.

So you were given carte blanche to run riot.

Absolutely. It was a wonderful show. There were some wonderful producers there who just thought, “Why not?” It was anarchy and everyone loved it and let me do exactly what we wanted. The one night they didn’t let me do what I wanted I resigned and walked out. It was 1976. Granada decided to do a What’s On music spin off, hoping it would be a network ITV show to rival Top Of The Pops. We did one pilot and they went, “Well, it’s not a Top Of The Pops rival but we’ll give you a late night series, and that was So It Goes.

Anyway, November ’76, the Anarchy tour, and my friend Roger Eagle from Eric’s in Liverpool rang to say that he had to cancel the Sex Pistols after Merseyside police had been round and told him his licence wouldn’t be renewed later that month if he put the band on. I had a graphic made up saying “What’s Off, Sex Pistols at Eric’s”, but my bosses said I couldn’t use it. I argued that this was the most important thing happening, the greatest band in the world being censored and we had to say something, but I lost the argument.

Being what I thought was a professional I did the show without the graphic then walked upstairs, tore up my cards and walked out the door. They got me back in about five days later and made me sign a piece of paper saying, “I’ll do whatever you tell me, because you fucking pay me.”
I learned so much from that. People who worked for me, I used to say, “You don’t like this? I understand. Start your own fucking company. The tragedy is that I pay your salary, so I can tell you what to do, it’s a tough life but you can also leave.”

So did you set out to make What’s On a whacky or funny show?

God no. I’m not a funny man, I can’t tell a joke. Recently I started telling a story about Steve Coogan, John Thompson and Caroline Ahern at a BAFTA thing and Coogan actually interrupted and shouted, “For fuck’s sake Tony shut up”, and told the story and it was hilariously funny. But I used to write jokes and one producer actually said to me, “You’re not a funny man, you can’t tell jokes, but What’s On is a funny programme, I’m astonished.”

Everyone else who went to see the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976 seems to have formed a band, but you started a record label.

No no, no I didn’t. My job was as a television presenter, and I went back the next day and screamed to my producer that we had to have this band on the show, it was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. They said OK, but I had to take Malcolm the researcher to see them to make sure he liked the band too.

I remember bright blue skies driving from Golden Square in Soho to the Walthamstow Assembly Hall, and walking into the hall at 9 in the evening, still this bright sky, and into this completely dark hall, with 20 people watching in a semi-circle stretching across the whole hall. I soon realised that it was because John was gobbing and they were just out gobbing distance.

So a label didn’t enter your head at the time?

Not at all. That first series of So It Goes was pile of shit except for the last show when we had the Pistols on, before that we’d had Eddie And The Hotrods and Be Bop Deluxe and other safe middle of the road stuff like that, but the second series was brilliant. I would put Buzzcocks and Slaughter And The Dogs on What’s On through the autmn of ’76 and spring ‘77, but I was told I had a new series of So It Goes in autumn ‘77, and would wake up every night that summer in a sweat worried that someone else was going to beat us to it. It was a disaster.

We launched again and were able to put on Iggy Pop and Elvis Costello and the first Jam appearance, Magazine, all this great stuff, and we had it all to ourselves because the Old Grey Whistle Test only put on people who were accomplished musicians or had American accents. They had The Ramones and to my annoyance Patti Smith, but hey. Iggy caused all sorts of trouble by swearing during a rambling bit in the middle of The Passenger and my boss wanted to cut it.

So this was my hobby, my passion, my life, and suddenly I realised that I was clutching this thing had seemed so distant when I went out and bought Jefferson Airplane album and listened to it on the floor going nuts. You know, Elvis Costello would walk on stage and smile at me in the audience! Malcolm McLaren would give me a T-shirt and ask how things were going, even Lydon would grunt at me.

Suddenly I was connected to my heroes and this artform, and I still feel it as an utter, utter privilege. Then I was told, that’s it, no more, but I wanted to stay involved. Then on 24 January 1978, which is why several of our companies are called something to do with the 24th of January, I got a call from my best mate Alan Erasmus who had been managing a band for about nine months called Fast Breeder – since my stag night when we took Dutch speed and went to see them.

There’d been a coup and he was thrown out along with a couple of band members. I said, don’t worry, we’ll form a band around the remaining guys, and that was the moment that got me into the music business. Those two, guitarist was Dave Robotham and the drummer Chris Joyce, who later became Simply Red’s backing band, but we put them together with the ex-Albertos bass player and the guitarist from the Nosebleeds, Vini Reilly, and two singers and that was Duritti Column. We had a group, we needed a place to play, and Alan said I know a club in Hume that we might be able to borrow, so we went and met …. Blah blah

So, starting Factory in 1978…

The thing I remember specifically about starting Factory is that independents are set up to get bands signed to majors. Everyone thinks that punk was all about some anti-capitalist response to the majors, but it wasn’t at all. Malcolm signed the Pistols to anyone, The Clash’s first single came out on CBS, and Buzzcocks signed to United Artists the night I saw them at Electric Circus, which was the same night Elvis Presley died.

It was all major label stuff until this wonderful distribution network called Rough Trade started, and also Pinnacle. Independent labels at the time were to get your band signed to a major label. I remember interviewing Tosh Ryan from Rabid Records during the What’s On days and saying to him why did you sell Jilted John to EMI and John Cooper Clarke to CBS, and he said “Don’t be such a twat, living in this mythical past, that’s what independence is all about, getting your act signed to a major. Alan and I were doing what we thought was the right thing and trying to get Duritti Column and we managed to get Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark signed to Virgin after a bidding war.

I did two or three trips to London with (Joy Division and New Order manager) Rob Gretton to talk to Andrew Lauder who was the leading person to sign Joy Division to Warner Radar Genetic. Then one night at Band On The Wall in Manchester, Rob says to me, “Er, why don’t we do the first Joy Division album and then go to Warners?” I said, “Are you sure? How much will it cost.”

He said Martin Hannett had told him about eight grand, which was a complete lie. I didn’t jump on it because it was a complete surprise, but looking back on it that was the dawn of the British independent movement, all from Rob thinking, well the first single Tony spent £5000, we got £5300 back after paying all the costs and we all made £100. If we made an album we would make real money, which would mean, and I quote Rob here, “I wouldn’t have to go to London every week and talk to cunts.”

Also, being Rob, he then said, “Here’s the deal I suggest: 50-50, and you pay publishing out of your per cent. And that deal, done that day, is the most generous ever for a band, because I didn’t want to make money, and it applied to every Factory act ever, most particularly Joy Division and New Order. That’s why Blue Monday never made money. The sleeve and the vinyl and everything cost 79p and the average return from Pinnacle our distributor was 91p, so we made 2p a copy, which was 1p to New Order and 1p to us, and out of that we paid publishing at 3p a copy, which we had to pay.

Not the greatest business deal you ever made, surely.

No, but I’m a catholic, and the most profound moment of my life was as a young journalist, about 1977, I was asked by my newsroom if I wanted to interview the arch bishop of Sao Paulo. I went along, a good catholic boy to interview, and I was taken to the cathedral and met this rotund prelate. About 15 minutes in I realise this is Cardinal Arns, who was Mr Liberation Theology, in other words the man who put the shits up the Vatican for 30 years, the leading light behind liberation theology who ran the Catholic church on Marxism in South America.

Towards the end, and I’m a good altar boy and playing theology with him and all that, and I said, “But Cardinal, are you saying that to be rich of itself is a sin?” And he leaned back and said with a grin, “Yes my boy”, as if to say, “It’s only taken me 45 minutes but you’ve finally got it.”If you believe that it’s very hard to make money. I’d love to have a yacht and a house on Lake Cuomo, but they’re numbers 98 and 99 on my priorities.

So was this around the same time you decided to sign a contract in blood?

Yes, We agreed the deal and a couple of weeks later Rob had his lawyer write it up and sent it to me. It’s not like the film where I write the whole thing in blood, but as a joke I think I just signed AHW to this formal contract in blood.

How do you actually sign with blood?

You just prick your finger and let it onto the page then take a dry pen nib and write through it. The central feature of the contract, which caused us disruption later, was the phrase “The musicians own everything, the company owns nothing, all our groups have the right to fuck off.” When Polygram and Roger Ames were buying us, it was going along very nicely until a meeting where someone said, “But you have no contract.”

I said that we had a kind of a contract and they looked at it and all the faces on the other side of the table dropped. Roger waved it at me and said, “Tony, don’t you understand, if you have no contract at least you own the catalogue because you paid for it to be recorded. That is, unless you have a piece of fucking paper that specifically says you own nothing.” Far from being the heroic moment portrayed in the movie, I just sort of went, “Oh well.”

So how did Factory make its money?

Selling enormous numbers of albums. We also didn’t market for the first two years. And although I’m accused of refusing to let us have a dance label, all I said was that to make money in dance you have to be a good businessman, and all we’re good at is finding bands no one else wants and getting them to sell a million albums around the world.

So even for overseas sales your 50-50 contract held?

Absolutely. Except that because we felt we weren’t doing as much to sell overseas, that split became more like 60-40, rising to 66-33.

You say Factory was about finding bands no one else wanted, who were the bands you didn’t want?

I don’t think we missed out on anybody, but the bands I didn’t sign that were successful were obviously The Smiths and The Stone Roses. I always thought Steven (Morrissey) was going to be our novelist, our Dostoyevsky, in fact I lost a one act play he wrote about eating toast in Hulme. But I got a phone call one day asking me to come over because he had something to tell me. I went to his mum’s house and he took me into his bedroom with a poster of James Dean on the wall, and he told me that he was going to be a pop star.

I had to stifle my laughter because I thought this was the last person in the world about to become a pop star. I had a conversation with Richard Boon, Buzzcocks’ manager and a mutual friend, saying can you believe he’d ever be a pop star? Four months later I went to either their first or second gig at the Manhattan club and being utterly stunned. I remember walking out and Richard saying, “Now do you believe me?” Obviously I did, it was stunning.

But that point in time, there are three stories. The Smiths’ story is that Wilson was a cunt, blah blah blah, there is my version of the story which is that I had James and Stockholm Monsters and couldn’t sell their singles, and Factory was two and a half years old and a dinosaur. Not marketing and being weird had worked very, very well, but suddenly it had grown old and stale. I was very depressed at the time.

Why wasn’t it working?

I think that when everyone is promoting like mad and you don’t promote there’s a two year window when that works fantastically well, when not promoting is the best promotion there is. But then it all… I was extremely depressed about Factory at the time. Movement, the first New Order album, had sold extremely poorly, and I felt that I couldn’t sell the first James single or the first Stockholm Monsters single, and thought my company had lost something. I didn’t know what it was we’d lost, but I wasn’t going to saddle Steven with a shit record company.

Now Rob Gretton, who was more significant within the company than me, was wandering around Manchester telling everyone that The Smiths were the new Beatles, but he was telling The Smiths that their demo was shit, and I’m not signing you until you’ve got a good demo. But whatever, The Smiths have their own version of the story, and Steven is a nightmare to work with. Historically though, Pinnacle went bust, and I probably lost about £150,000 in that, but if The Smiths hadn’t gone to Rough Trade that probably would have gone bust too, and the British independent movement would have ended right there, never lasted beyond the mid ‘80s.

The Stone Roses, I hated. I’d seen them in the early ‘80s when they were a goth band and badly dressed. By the time they started spreading their names all over Manchester they were managed by my ex-wife, my ex-business partner Martin Hannett, my ex-protégé from the Hacienda Tim, who’s now Ticketmaster, and the guy who used to run the Hacienda, Howard Jones. So everyone who was an ex in my life was involved with the Roses, so I completely ignored them.

One night I was at home, about to crash out in front of the TV, and the Mondays were playing Chester in the small basement of a pub. I had the strange feeling that they were about to break, I don’t know why because we were releasing the third version of Wrote For Luck, but I thought this might be the last time they played a small gig, and indeed it was. Anyway, I went into the dressing room and the drummer Gaz Whelan goes, “Hey, Tone, listen to this”, and put something in the cassette player, and the cassette plays and I’m like, “Fuck that’s fantastic, what is it?” The whole group go, “Nyah, it’s the Roses,” because they all knew I hated the Roses.

But I always say that they were a rock’n’roll band. That Stone Roses album, along with Guns N’ Roses, were the great rock albums of the ‘80s, but now we remember them for Fool’s Gold. What people don’t understand is that there’s no Fool’s Gold and no Loaded by Primal Scream without Happy Mondays changing music. Shaun Ryder once said to me, “I bet you wish you’d signed The Stone Roses.” I asked him why and he said, “They sell more records than us.”

But I said to him, “Shaun, I only wanted to sign the most important groups, and you were the most important group.”
One of the reasons that I got involved with the 24 hour party people record is the Mondays. Joy Division and New Order are regularly regarded among the 50 greatest bands of all time, and the Monday are not. Over the years, particularly the last four years, people have come to accept that, but it’s only because they were working class and in the words of some writers looked like the kind of people who’d steal your stereo, they were one of the great groups.

Historical perspective will always win through.

rue. In many ways Shaun didn’t do himself many favours, a rock star posing with scrubbers in a hot tub and so on, but in the end people are realising the quality of his work. The Manchester cancer event recently at Gmex (on 18th January 2006) with Andy Rourke, Doves, Elbow, New Order… someone rang me up and asked if Shaun would be interested. I was a bit shocked because Wrote For Luck has become quite electronic these days performed by Happy Mondays, and this was a much more guitar thing, but it was a thrill to see my two singers on stage together.

The two American producers of the Joy Division movie were at the show and they said, “Tony, we don’t understand, when Shaun came out the audience were already excited but they raised to a whole other level.” Well, number one, Shaun is the singer of one of the five great Manchester groups, Joy Division/New Order, The Smiths, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and Oasis. Second, everyone knows Shaun has taken more drugs than almost anyone else, and this is a drug town and people respect that.

When I went to the Peruvian jungle to take (psychoactive drink) Ayahuasca for a Channel 4 documentary I couldn’t wait to get back and show off to Shaun. I said to him, “I’ve been taking this amazing stuff in the jungle, Ayahuasca,” and he just goes, “Fucking great, in’t it?” I couldn’t believe it, “How could you know?” “I’ve fucking taken it.” And I’m, like, “I went to the far corners of the fucking rainforest to take it, how could you have had it. And he goes, “Oh, Bez brought some back from his holidays.”

And he described this Peruvian jungle hallucinogen in more detail and more eloquently even than the 60-year-old shaman I’d been working with in Peru. He said that it did change you, and that Bez was a totally different person for six months after taking it until it wore off, and I guess I was too.

The third thing, actually, is that in Manchester we know that Acid House was as big a youth explosion as punk, and was as colourful and wonderful and exotic. In terms of acid house everyone is now slowly beginning to understand that Shaun Ryder is the Johnny Rotten of acid house, and that is a major cultural thing, and that is why people went nuts when he came on the stage.

I always say that my two main groups – notice that I say my groups, I even say my songs even though I never wrote any of them which is a bit cheeky – both achieved something very rare: they both created classic timeless albums back to back. I’m talking about Unknown Pleasures and Closer and Bummed and Pills N Thrills And Bellyaches. The rarity of that in the rock pantheon is that normally groups have to go through one or two, even three transitional albums to get to something new, but they got it straight away.

Why Manchester?

It’s been Britain’s immigrant city since 1200, and that openness is essential. But the other reason is a guy called Dave Ambrose. He was a famous A&R man, but I only recently found out he signed Duran Duran so I should have shot him. Anyway, Dave Ambrose signed Duran, and about 1990 I saw him in Deansgate and I asked what he was doing back here, everything was signed. No one was left, but he said he was back because Manchester kids have the best record collections. And that summed it up.

When he said that I immediately flicked to a squat in Hulme in the early ‘80s, ACR’s place or somewhere similar, and there on this floor with no carpet and little furniture, will be 200 albums. And in those albums will be the entire Parliament, Funkadelic catalogue, and 20 Brazilian samba albums, and German metal noise albums. In a Liverpool falt you’ll find the entire works of Love, and The White Album. Tra la la. Also, Scouse bands tend to sing with an American accent and that’s just wrong. Listen to Arctic Monkeys. They’re the least American sounding band ever, you could cut steel with those accents. It’s that broadness that we’ve lost over recent years because we suddenly closed ourselves and became dance snobs.

Could Factory have thrived in today’s market?

Well, the bright group of the 21st century will always sign with an indie and grow with the label. Ryder always says the Mondays signed with Factory because no one else would have them, but in the 21st century there is a very real choice. And this century the two most significant bands so far, Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys, have both chosen to go with an indie.

Style and not being afraid of wealth seemed a big part of factory and Manchester in general.

Well, I used to have this 13 year cycle theory that British youth culture exploded every three years. It wasn’t much but I noticed that the Beatles happened in 1963, then punk in 1976 and ’89 was acid house. Then someone pointed out that if you go back 13 years from ’63 you get teddy boy. Anyway, it suddenly made some kind of sense.

I thought that in normal British youth culture fashion we would take North America, invest it with English style and wit, and I thought that would happen with nu metal. Sure enough, someone did, and there were Lost Prophets and Funeral For A Friend who came out of the Rhonda Valley, who I thought were fantastic. They are wonderful, but there was nothing to it. I went to a Funeral For A Friend gig a couple of months ago but it was only music. The was no drug, there was no politics with a small “p”, there were no clothes, nothing that goes with a cultural explosion. And that’s why in Manchester all those other things went with it, the drugs, the loose fit look all of it.

The Idjut Boys. No one could take you seriously with a name like that. Well, not unless you’re Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell that is.

Idjut Boys call themselves stupid, yet their music is anything but. It’s a world away from the dumb productions that usually proliferate dance music,that’s for sure. Tracks where they grab disco, dub, electro, funk, house, hip hop and rock, then fuse the lot into the kind of groove that leaves dancefloors reeling and their peers speechless.

So why on earth do they then lumber these little pieces of nightclub magic with titles like ‘Frogs Arrrse’, ‘Tea Tray Formerly Known As Coffee Table’ and ‘Gurner’s Choice’?

“It’s just us doing what we do,” offers Conrad, lighting up in their hackney based studio. “Maybe we use daft names to lighten the mood a little. So many producers take what they do too seriously. All we want to do is give people a good time and maybe put a smile on their face while we do it.”

Entertaining people is something Conrad and Dan have been doing since they met each other, in Cambridge, at the end of the Eighties. “It’s that type of town,” explains Dan. “The type of place that everyone knows everyone else. Conrad was working, bizarrely enough, as a life-guard during the day and either working or hanging out in bars at night. I’d been studying in Manchester and was back in Cambridge for the summer. We were both into the same sort of music and both travelled to Brighton to check Harvey dj’ing at the Tonka events. It was inevitable that we’d hook up at some point.”

From there, the pair moved to London and started throwing their own U-Star parties. Inviting New York legends like Hector Romero and Ted Patterson to compliment their own twisted disco sound. Against a back-drop of hands-in-the-air house and tiresome techno, their fresh approach was bound to get noticed. They secured gigs everywhere from Stockholm to San Francisco and it was only a matter of time before they made the move from the decks to the mixing console.

In 1994, their first label, U-Star Records, was born. “After we released our fourth twelve inch,” Conrad remembers. “That’s when I knew for sure that we were on the right track. I was down at the Ministry to see François Kevorkian play and, right at the peak of his set, he started mixing up two copies of ‘Not Reggae’. I was freaking. I mean if what we were doing was turning someone like him on. Someone who’s been producing since the late seventies and worked with everyone from D Train to Depeche Mode. Then it was definitely worth it.”

Since then, they’ve rarely stopped to draw breath.

Their eclectic DJ sets have become legendary, consistently winning them new fans the world over as a new generation of clubbers find that the best music is made in the margins. They’ve remixed here, there and everywhom in house. They’ve released 2 much treasured volumes of their DJ mix series, ‘Saturday Nite Live’. Their debut album, ‘Life – The Shoeing You Deserve’, released on the much missed Glasgow Underground, received critical acclaim from all corners of the music press on its release in 2001.

Currently they own and run 3 highly acclaimed labels, purveying new work from themselves, producing new sounds for their friends.

U-Star, the first of the three, pushes a more organic live house sound. With long out of print early productions now changing hands for £400+ on E-Bay, U Star are amongst the most collectable in British House Music history.

At the other end of things is Noid. Noid is reserved for your more, ahem, unofficial, under the counter re-edits and straight up dancefloor bombs. Look out for a fresh album of Noid cuts sometime in late 2005.

Finally, and most excitingly, there’s the newest of the labels, Cottage. Cottage, like say Environ in the USA and Feedelity in Sandinavia, pushes a hybrid sound of disco, dub and electronics. Supporting and releasing artists such as oddball legend Maurice Fulton and Norway’s Lindstrom, Cottage is one of the most acclaimed labels of the minute.

Alongside this they’’ve just finished a re-edits project for Tirk, the new label from the people behind Nuphonic. Featuring 17 exclusive re-edits -compiled, tweaked and twisted by Idjut Boys. ‘Press Play’ is breathless, eclectic mix of future heroes (Jackson), lost gems (Tantra), cult classics (Harry Thuman)…..and, er, Haircut 100 (honest, it works).

Of any release ‘Press Play’ probably shows the Boys at their smart arse, fun loving, rule breaking, sheer joy for music! best. A collage of current favourites and influences, it’s a classic compilation from 2 people who, though know what they’re talking about, are still looking to buy new, different, unheard records.

If anything 2005 see’s the world turning back to meet the Idjuts. Eclecticism, musical variation, the underground, those margins where the true music enthusiast thrives, it’s all back and anything is possible.

The collapse of mainstream house is not unlike the post disco scene of the early eighties; a time the Idjuts championed when almost no-one else gave a damn. With dance music out of the spotlight it’s a fertile time for people excited by experimentation. And its that fuck it, anything goes, just as long as its quality, spirit of creativity which drives them – just check the range at work on ‘Press Play’ for starters.

“There’s one thing you learn the longer you do this,” adds Conrad, as he thinks to the future. “There’s nothing you can’t do. The only thing that limits you is your imagination.”

Knowing these two, that means the possibilities are endless. So listen up, there’s (more) exciting times ahead.