Coldcut: Back to the Future

From 1980s cut-and-paste classics such as “Say Kids” and “Beats + Pieces” to their own influential radio shows and record label, Matt Black and Jonathan More rank among the most important and longest-established figures in British electronic music.

Producing and performing together as Coldcut, the duo has spent the last three decades combining chart success and boundary-pushing sonic experimentation, while also nurturing the careers of an array of artists ranging from DJ Food and the Cinematic Orchestra to Mr. Scruff and Kelis.

In this interview, which took place at the duo’s London headquarters in 1999, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton spoke to the Ninja Tune bosses about their philosophy of DJing, the interface of art and technology and their own prescient vision of dance music’s future. Be prepared for a world of bar-room jukeboxes that know what you’re drinking, dancefloors that make beats and much, much more.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Our story sort of crosses the Atlantic a few times. Where you guys come in is when house and hip-hop impact on England, and there’s this incredible creative explosion. I thought a good question to start with would be: Can you remember when you first heard hip-hop?

MATT BLACK

I first heard hip-hop in about 1981. I was living with a bunch of guys in a sort of horrible slum and we used to have pretty good parties. I used to buy import records from the States. The idea of paying £4 for a single was pretty hardcore on a student budget – things like Kurtis [Blow], and the bomb was “Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel” by Grandmaster Flash. I remember coming back from Our Price with a 12" of that.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What did you think when you heard it?

MATT BLACK

It completely blew apart conceptions of what a song should be like. It was so far-out that it just provoked a lot of curiosity and excitement. You had to work out a new way to dance, to nod to that record, to enjoy that record. It forced your body into contortions because the music was so fucked up. And it was like, “Well, how’s this guy done this?” So, at that point I started trying to work out the techniques that must have been used, and trying to read every scrap of material about the art of scratching.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Did house have a similar impact?

MATT BLACK

Yes. Well, house arrived later on. Although, with hip-hop, of course, [there were] seminal early prototypes of rap records, like “King Tim III” [by the Fatback Band], and other records that had a rapping style to them.

FRANK BROUGHTON

A sort of Eddie Cheba kind of thing?

MATT BLACK

Yeah. And similarly with house. I mean, house is a sort of electronic sound with a 4/4 kick, and that had been there before with disco, Telex and all kinds of stuff. But I do remember when I first heard house music. I’d moved over to Spain in 1985 and was spending a year there DJing. I used to get Record Mirror sent over to me and I’d go through it for records that sounded good. [I’d get] a friend of mine to buy some copies and send them over, then I’d sell them.

The two first house records [for me] were “Jack Your Body” and “Love Can’t Turn Around.” They just had a phenomenal impact. Straight away you realized that here was a new style of music. I remember taking “Love Can’t Turn Around” up to the disco where I was working, which was called K, and playing it to the Spanish guys there. They all just sort of came around and said, “What the fuck is this? This sounds amazing.” No other record provoked that kind of reaction. I mean, now they sound a bit primitive, [but] I still love the early house stuff. It’s got it.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Why do you think it inspired so many people to become producers and remixers?

MATT BLACK

House?

FRANK BROUGHTON

Well, hip-hop as well. Hip-hop was probably what started that more.

JONATHAN MORE

I started DJing in 1979. I came up to London from art college and just started buying loads and loads of records, listening to pirate radio stations – they were brilliant. Then I went to college at Goldsmiths. We started doing parties there and I ended up DJing, basically because I was the one who had all the records. I remember going up to the West End – I think it was Groove Records [in Soho] – to find some dance music and buying “Rapper’s Delight” and a couple of others that I can’t remember now. That was my first hip-hop, and [it led to me] getting into that whole culture of buying records from different sources.

MATT BLACK

Groove Records was actually quite a key place, despite the horrible woman who ran it. Before DJing became so super-hip and popular, that was the place where people used to hang out.

BILL BREWSTER

Because Record Shack was more of a sort of Hi-NRG place, wasn’t it? Groove was the blacker [shop musically].

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah. I bought Double Dee & Steinski’s “Lesson 1” and “Lesson 2” from Record Shack.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What was it about that music, though, that particularly inspired people to start making music, rather than just DJing?

JONATHAN MORE

It was the whole scene, I think. Matt was doing various London underground parties and I was doing similar ones. There was Flim-Flam [in South London], there were things going on, Jay Strongman, that whole rare groove kind of thing. The really underground parties, the Dirt Box, etc... And there really wasn’t enough music coming out to fill that desire. There were a lot of old funk records but they were being discovered and discovered. There was good hip-hop from America, but there wasn’t really anything out of the UK, and there was a need to have more records. Well, that was what we felt when we met up.

MATT BLACK

I think there are a lot of different elements, you know. It’s like, there was a keen interest in the old funk grooves and collecting those and having the hippest collection – you know, the idea that hip-hop DJs used breakbeats from funk records was pretty attractive, although not that many people could actually put it together, certainly in the UK. And then we were around for the punk thing and, after that, the DIY record thing. That was very important. The idea that you could make a record yourself was very powerful in the late ’70s, and I did do that with my little band at college. I’m sure hundreds of other people did.

FRANK BROUGHTON

So that was still resonating?

JONATHAN MORE

The whole sort of industrial – Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire – that whole aftermath [of] punk.

MATT BLACK

That music stagnated, but then you got this kick from hip-hop, house and the rare groove thing with the London warehouse scene. The Double Dee & Steinski records were iconic, because they showed, “Yeah, this is actually how you [do this].” There were lessons. “This is how you can actually go about taking a bunch of old stuff and making it into something new,” and it was like [clicks fingers], “Yeah! I get it.” Flash had shown that already, but Double Dee & Steinski took it to the next stage.

JONATHAN MORE

They reinforced it.

FRANK BROUGHTON

And the fact that he wasn’t actually doing it live on turntables must have appealed, because you didn’t have to learn the skills.

MATT BLACK

Well, no. I mean, by the time I got round to doing “Say Kids,” I was pretty decent at scratching but I had an advantage, which was that I knew what a four-track was – I was just into music tech. I always have been.

At that time, a critical factor was the emergence of cheap DIY technology. So, you could actually spend a lot of time messing around yourself, without being in a studio that was costing £1,000 a day. That actually provided creative space where people could experiment and come up with new stuff.

BILL BREWSTER

What sort of equipment are you talking about?

MATT BLACK

Basically, “Say Kids” was done on a Portastudio and a cassette machine with an analog pause button.

JONATHAN MORE

Two turntables and a DJ mixer, and some sound effects. They brought out a range of very cheap drum machines and sampler keyboards.

MATT BLACK

There was an ignorant attitude, which was that if it sounded fresh, you were in. Just like sampling one bass note off a JBs record into this £20 Casio sampler, you could play a bassline. Yeah, it sounded muzzy, but it actually had weight to it and a sound, and you could do it yourself and work it out and get it right. There must have been a lot of people that felt as we did at the time: “Hey! Wow! You know, we can do this. We can actually do this ourselves.” It wouldn’t have happened without those blueprint records.

BILL BREWSTER

Do you think the Steinski thing was made more possible for you because it took away the rapping element? It seems to me that the rapping always deterred British people from making good rap records.

MATT BLACK

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, we did work in the early days with some British rappers. I think one of the more convincing of them was this guy Black Radical and a group called Bass Inc. But, yeah, that has been a problem, and working with vocalists generally is pretty hard work. Writing songs is difficult.

JONATHAN MORE

Stressing certain keys, etc... Can’t have any wacky changes.

MATT BLACK

But also, if you’re a DJ, to have to put your ideas through another interface like that just gets very frustrating, when actually you just want to deal with sound on a basic level.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Do you think DJing and production is really the same skill, just with different toys?

JONATHAN MORE

Certain DJs have both skills, yeah.

MATT BLACK

No. There’s quite a lot of overlap, but they’re not the same. I mean, production involves such things as being able to get the best out of a musician when you’re in the studio with them, and maybe they’re feeling a bit nervous. DJs probably just stick on an even louder record. You know what I mean. Not that we are particularly good producers – Jon’s good at getting the best out of people.

Production is hard. When you’re dealing with the studios, booking engineers, all that kind of stuff as well. DJing is more of a soft trip, but there is overlap in terms of basic technique and feeling for music – the idea that, a disc jockey plays records, a DJ plays with records. By playing with those records, what you’re doing is actually re-arranging them and collaging them together, and to do that you need basic skills of beatmatching, beat-counting.

JONATHAN MORE

Musical understanding in terms of bar length.

MATT BLACK

Yeah, and rhythm, and the ability to loop stuff. So when you’re cutting a record back in off another turntable, you can just be doing that – quick mixing. You’re basically using an analog looping technique in real time. When you go into a studio, you take those techniques and you graft them onto the studio technology, but you still have to know if two beats are actually in time or not. You still have to be able to count stuff. [It’s an] “easy to learn, lifetime to perfect” sort of thing. I mean, I’ve often spent a day just tuning a loop. It can drive you around the twist. DJing is basically taking big sections of pre-recorded sound and re-arranging them using two or more turntables, and in the studio, when you’re making music.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Yeah, conceptually, there must be so many parallels with what you’re doing.

MATT BLACK

Yeah. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to slap an a cappella over the mix than it is to write a song and get a vocalist, so there’s a kind of instant gratification, lazy approach to DJing. You know, if there’s stuff there, you’re going to use it.

JONATHAN MORE

The most important thing for a DJ is being able to see which bits work best with a crowd. That’s something that producers lack – and you can lose [it] quite quickly as well, if you’re not still DJing.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Did the lessons that you learned from DJing transfer naturally into the studio, in terms of what makes people dance?

JONATHAN MORE

To a certain extent, yes. Although we’ve willfully gone away from that on many occasions, it’s still a very important part of it. We used to cut acetates, take them down to clubs and get DJs to play them. We were quite persistent about it. Fortunately, we had a good rapport with most of the people and we could check stuff out.

MATT BLACK

As Jon says, a lot of our stuff is not particularly danceable and that’s because dance – dance dance – isn’t big in our minds. I mean, the DJ equally describes somebody who’s playing records on the radio. But that’s a totally different type of vibe to playing in a club. With the kind of new show that we’re doing, it’s a kind of mixture of those.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Do you think – insofar as a DJ has a lot more at their disposal in terms of other people’s ready-made music – is he freer than a musician?

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, to a certain extent.

MATT BLACK

Freedom’s in your head.

JONATHAN MORE

If you find the fact of writing music and making great songs pretty hardcore, and you’ve got all this lovely material that you can arrange and concentrate on doing that, there is a bigger freedom there.

MATT BLACK

I don’t see it like that. You can’t ask that question without setting up the definitions. So, I mean, the musician has freedom to play music freely and that is an incredible ability, and I wish that I had it – to be able to just play with more than one finger at a time, to actually be able to think in chords. To translate that directly to your hand is amazing. And it’s something that we haven’t got. But we have different types of skills, and a good DJ has a lot of freedom to experiment musically and to entertain people. It’s different sorts of freedom.

FRANK BROUGHTON

One of the themes that we’ve sort of become aware of is that there’s a recurring kind of dialectic, I suppose, where because the DJ has the freedom to do different things whenever he wants – he’s not bound to a record contract, he’s not bound to a particular sound that the band makes.

MATT BLACK

He is. Very often a DJ is.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Very often in practice he is, but in theory he isn’t. And that seems to be why DJs are the people who push music a little bit further.

MATT BLACK

I don’t agree with that. A musician – any musician – can wig out as much as they want any time. That’s just in their head. And so can a DJ. A DJ doesn’t have to go to a club and play the same house records every night, but they still do. Who’s in a straitjacket?

BILL BREWSTER

That’s, I suppose, what we’re talking about – the 2% at the top who are the creative ones who are looking to take things further.

MATT BLACK

But it’s the same with the musicians as well. Most bass players are going to spend their time imitating Jaco Pastorius and will probably never actually take it to the next stage. It takes Squarepusher to actually make a move, to jump up and take it on.

Defining the DJ is going to get even more difficult because we’ve always used whatever toys were available. I maintain that if a drummer is a musician, then tapping on a cup with a spoon is percussion, and scratching a record and making a rhythmic sound is music as well. So, a DJ is a musician. Broadly, I would say that DJs work with pre-recorded, quite big lumps of sound and musicians work with fluid sound, and that’s the difference. But they are merging.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Would you guys still have to lie to join the Musicians Union?

JONATHAN MORE

No.

MATT BLACK

I don’t know. Quite possibly.

JONATHAN MORE

They’d accept us now.

MATT BLACK

They changed their rules. We might have kind of got an “Oldcut Special Award” for hanging around on the scene [laughs].

JONATHAN MORE

For perseverance.

MATT BLACK

But I doubt if the Musicians Union recognize turntables as instruments yet. I think they’re mistaken.

JONATHAN MORE

Laptop playing… Do they accept that?

MATT BLACK

Do they accept that a piece of software can be a musical instrument? These definitions get more and more complicated. They kind of all lead up to one big one, which is, “What is art?” And if machines and software can actually generate stuff that is indistinguishable from what humans create and call art, then what’s going on?

JONATHAN MORE

When DJ Robot comes along, a lot of people are going to have to retire. A piece of software in the pub, you know, put it in a machine that randomly plays that month’s digitized selection of hits.

MATT BLACK

And that measures the reactions of the people in the pub, by how much–

FRANK BROUGHTON

How much the floor’s moving.

MATT BLACK

Or indeed, how much the drink sales go up and automatically mixes the flow of music to encourage that. That’s totally feasible to do now. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that existed in some places.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What about some of the things that you’ve been working on? I know about the VJamm [video-mixing software]. Are you working on any of those kind of directions of travel?

MATT BLACK

Yeah, we have a DJing program called DJamm.

JONATHAN MORE

It’s what we do our live shows with.

MATT BLACK

That was born out of a desire to take the DJing aesthetic, but apply it to digital technology so we could do a live show that was more than just playing records and mixing in someone else’s, more than just taking a bunch of session musicians out on the road and regurgitating sequences from the studio or miming to a DAT or pretending to twiddle with some knobs.

Dance music and DJing deserve a better representation in live performance than they’ve been getting. That just gives fuel to the rock bods who slag dance music off, saying, “There’s no performance there, it’s all fake.” A lot of it is, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

JONATHAN MORE

It’s getting better all the time.

BILL BREWSTER

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with it being fake. I quite like the idea of it annoying rock people.

JONATHAN MORE

Not if it’s a great bit of entertainment. [Say] someone does a stupid, loopy dance to some crap backing track, and the whole performance is brilliant, that’s cool.

MATT BLACK

I mean, you could have a symphony orchestra that played the same thing every night and were pretty boring. But equally, I don’t think people should pay big money to go and see some named dance act and think that it’s live when it’s actually all on DAT. There’s something in me that says, “No!” Even though you could just say, “Well, it’s the people’s fault. They should be paying more attention and who cares anyway, if they’re enjoying it?”

BILL BREWSTER

Do you think that part of the problem is the way that major record labels deal with dance music? You know, the way they always try to make it into rock music?

MATT BLACK

Totally.

BILL BREWSTER

That’s what Underworld and Prodigy are – they’re bands with computers.

MATT BLACK

That’s what they understand. That’s what the music biz understands, even now. So, that’s the mode that dance acts are always forced into. It’s like, “You’ve had the hit single, guys. Now, you’re going to have to go on tour and promote the album, and it’s really going to sell.” And suddenly you’re a rock band and you get the conditioned Pavlovian responses of the audience… Cheering when the saxophonist comes out, which I always find hilarious. When the sax guy takes his solo, people applaud – it doesn’t matter if it’s crap or not – and they’re conditioned to do that because it’s that rock time.

JONATHAN MORE

Yep. Same in our show – when the sax soloist comes on the screen, they all applaud [laughs].

FRANK BROUGHTON

Why do you think the music industry is so stuck in the past, in that respect?

JONATHAN MORE

Because it probably works quite well. You know, selling records and becoming large and stuff.

MATT BLACK

They can’t see beyond the short-term gain. It’s like when all those record companies just put all their resources into reissuing their back-catalog on CDs a few years ago because they knew that that was a swift cash-in. They didn’t put any money into nurturing new bands, and now there’s a lack of new talent. And, you know, it needs a bit of work to actually [move] people into a different level, a different vein, and they don’t want to do it because they’re quite happy. They’re all old rockers, and the Rolling Stones is their idea of the ultimate good time and things have gone downhill since then, so why bother.

FRANK BROUGHTON

There’s also the marketing.

MATT BLACK

Remember, the biggest market is America, and that’s loads and loads of people who are into rock, basically. If you want to make it big, you’ve got to crack America, so you’ve got to be rock. So, you’re going to do that thing. But I think, as I say, that dance music or electronic music deserves a better lick than that. There are alternatives.

FRANK BROUGHTON

In terms of presentation?

MATT BLACK

Yeah, totally. I mean, we’re just starting, I think, with our live shows. We’re just scratching the surface.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What do you think the future holds for that?

MATT BLACK

Well, I think alternative program interfaces must be quite big, so that dancers can actually be triggering the sounds through motion detectors.

JONATHAN MORE

That is happening. There’s mats that you put on the floor and people move to different positions and create sounds.

MATT BLACK

Things like the D-Beam controller, and some of the Roland gear. It’s like a MIDI theremin basically – a hand movement over about a meter will pick up and detect and translate into a MIDI control stream, with which you can, say, [makes electronic noise], control the filters.

BILL BREWSTER

Is that those Japanese guys? I saw that documentary Modulations the other day, and there was an electronic band that was just moving their hands and making weird noises.

MATT BLACK

Yeah. It’s just motion sensors. It’s been around a long time.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Yeah, Laurie Anderson did that thing with pads on a suit. So you envisage that the audience would generate the sound themselves, or that would be a sort of performance?

MATT BLACK

No, I just mean that there’s something there that’s more interesting than just twiddling knobs. Actually, body movement. So even Jon and I doing exaggerated movements like that would be more interesting than just our laptops, basically.

But thinking beyond that, it would be good to have other visual artists to work with – other musicians and collaborators of different sorts, who could be doing stuff around the stage, involved with what we’re doing. Not just some dancers on, dancing to whatever music we’re playing, but dancers whose movements are actually feeding back into the mix. And the audience can be hooked into that as well. I think that’s one way in which DJing and music will move closer together.

That’s actually the big attraction of digital technology – that you can bolt different sorts of stuff together and keep creating ever more complicated structures and networks of elements.

FRANK BROUGHTON

That leads to one question we had. When you’re DJing, is there a tension between trying to be challenging, intelligent and innovative and also being funky on the dancefloor?

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, we call that “the search for ignorance.”

FRANK BROUGHTON

What do you mean by that?

JONATHAN MORE

You go for the jugular on a regular basis. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s just obvious. You know: build it up, build it up, build it up. Stop. Little fill in, build it up, build it up, build it up, build it up, build it up bigger than before. Stop. Everybody puts their arms in the air, you know, chill out for a bit, slam back in, build it up, build it up…

MATT BLACK

We don’t plan out stuff like that.

JONATHAN MORE

But it can work like that.

MATT BLACK

When we put in a certain break, a well-known break, and incorporate that into “Beats + Pieces” – like, we’ve used 45 King’s “900 Number” recently, because we know that it’s a crowd-pleaser – it’s the right BPM and it sounds good, and we can cut it up with the beat-juggler that’s built into DJamm.

JONATHAN MORE

It’s a balance between cheese and non-cheese as well. You know, you can wig out if you give people a bit of something entertaining and something that they know, and you don’t overdo that. Give them a small amount of some really nice bits and pieces that they know and love, then wig out for a bit, then put it back again and give them a bit more of something they know, but [maybe] present it in a different way, so it’s kind of exciting but still familiar.

MATT BLACK

Our live shows are pretty demanding. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. I think [they] ask quite a lot of the audience. I remember I used to work in this place – a very commercial club – and people would be sort of milling around. The guy who was the main DJ, at a certain time he’d just put on “Holiday” by Madonna or something like that, and that would get the dancefloor going.

It was incredibly difficult to get people going if you didn’t play one of those tunes. But once you’d started them off, you could keep them going on any tack that you wanted for quite a while. Then eventually they’d have to refuel – something that they knew again. Then it was okay, so you go off again. It’s like life, isn’t it? It’s like a kid growing up. You’ve got your security of what you know, then you go out and experience something new, it frightens you a little, then you run back to mum to assimilate the new experience.

JONATHAN MORE

I had a bunch of records that I used to put on which were sort of insidious, I suppose. They’d just slowly get people going, and you could see it. They were like 20-minute-long things that would build up slowly, then if you just hit them with something well-known after that, they’d be dancing before they even knew it. DJing is a bit about making a kind of mental trip. You can fuck up big-time quite easily and lose the crowd.

MATT BLACK

We don’t clear dancefloors, we cleanse them [laughs]. Sometimes there’s just too many people on the dancefloor. It’s like, “What are you all looking at us for? Right, we’ll soon sort out the men from the boys.” Put on something incredibly difficult and give the more “into it” element a little more space to wig out in.

FRANK BROUGHTON

When you’re DJing together, how does it work?

MATT BLACK

Generally, Jon chooses records, so he’s more the selector. Quite often I mix them together, or he might mix them together and I do stuff on top.

JONATHAN MORE

We swap around, or if I’m having a problem mixing a record then I’ll give it to Matt to sort out!

MATT BLACK

He’s much better at knowing his music and stuff. I just can’t keep up nowadays. Because I’ve put a lot of time into the media side of things, so actually we don’t DJ together any more.

We were DJing on four decks before that got all trendy, but we weren’t the first people to do that. I remember seeing [DJs at the] Language Lab [club night] in London with four decks in about 1984.

JONATHAN MORE

I just like rocking a party, and even with what we do now with the two pieces of software, which is a bit like playing a computer game, I feel it’s exciting.

MATT BLACK

It’s all about timing, and it’s much more intense. If DJing’s going to survive, I think it will have to grow beyond 12" vinyl, and I think you can see that happening now.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What are the pointers [for that]?

MATT BLACK

Well, things like the Pioneer DJ effects unit that’s just come out. There have been effects units before, but only in the last few years. Patrick [Carpenter of] DJ Food was one of the first people to take an echo foot pedal and use that quite intensively to dub out any sounds he was playing while he was mixing. Now there are actually dedicated units for DJs, and the Pioneer one’s pretty good. You can almost have one guy doing the mixing and one guy processing the sound, afterwards.

Then there’s the whole emergence of the DJ crew, with more than one person doing it – a four-deck scenario, and all the little posses. The Invisibl Skratch Piklz have undoubtedly had a big influence, but as I say, once you’ve started playing with other toys and seen what you can do with software, it’s difficult to restrict yourself just to vinyl, I think.

JONATHAN MORE

Business class.

MATT BLACK

Things like MP3/vinyl interfaces, so you’re going to actually be able to control computer files but with a turntable-style interface. We’ve got a toy that we’ve developed for that called the Dextractor.

FRANK BROUGHTON

How does that work?

MATT BLACK

It’s basically a stainless-steel arm. We’ve got three of them built – prototypes – [that feature] a separate arm that clamps on to SL-1200, and has a sensor in it so that it flops onto the record, with a rubber wheel. By moving the record around, you move the wheel, which is translated into computer information, which can be used to control anything you want – for instance, scratching a video.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Wow.

MATT BLACK

And then there are these other guys who’ve developed a similar thing with a sort of time-coded record that all you need is that one record with a time-code on and then you can use it to control any MPEG file. Then there’s the technology like, you know, Mixman, which is similar to our DJamm program. As I say, if you’re really into DJing – playing with sound – you’re going to be into other ways of playing with sound as well. I think that will provide the motivation to keep things moving on.

BILL BREWSTER

Do you think that the advent of DJ culture over the last 15 years has helped to break down what is considered music? Punk conceptually did that – it inspired a lot of people subsequently. I think that was where it was more important than it was musically.

MATT BLACK

Right. Certainly I think hip-hop did that, and that’s why we called our publishing company Just Isn’t Music. I remember a review in Blues & Soul magazine of the B-Boys’ “Two, Three, Break,” a very early electro record, a scratching record. That was a direct challenge to the establishment and the establishment, in the form of Blues & Soul, couldn’t handle it. [They] said, “Sorry, but this just isn’t music.”

We thought that was wonderful because, obviously, it was music. And so, as you know, the DJ – the hip-hop DJ – was an important part of that. I think it has changed things. Remember the effect that hearing scratching first had – at the time, that chiseling sound was just so rugged that people couldn’t even handle it.

JONATHAN MORE

I’ve had the arm ripped from the turntable quite often in my history.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Really?

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, most of it hardcore hip-hop tunes, and for Fela Kuti.

FRANK BROUGHTON

By who?

JONATHAN MORE

It was punters in clubs. [At one place in the early ’80s] this woman just came up. I was playing a Fela Kuti track. She just came up, she got the arm and not only did she rip it off, she went [makes sound of scratching] across the record, so it would have a big, fuck-off scratch on it. Then the manager came out and escorted me from the building.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What did they want to hear?

JONATHAN MORE

I don’t know, you know. It was just one of those bizarre things.

MATT BLACK

They wanted to hear “Honky Tonk Woman.”

JONATHAN MORE

“A party’s not a party without ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining.’” That used to plague me for some time.

MATT BLACK

It was in reaction to those records that we started.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Is there always an element of subversion to DJing, do you think?

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, if you want to make it that way, you can.

MATT BLACK

It’s like anything.

JONATHAN MORE

You can join the club or you can stand outside and stick two fingers up. It just depends which type of DJ you wanted to become.

MATT BLACK

There could be an element of subversion to being a doctor, or anything. Even working for Microsoft there could be an element of subversion. I don’t think it’s found any more commonly in DJing than it is in Microsoft, to be honest. The majority of DJs are not subversive at all, they’re extremely conventional.

FRANK BROUGHTON

But do you think that, in terms of the music business establishment, there’s more chance for a DJ to be subversive than for most musicians?

MATT BLACK

No, because DJing’s been co-opted by the establishment as a tool, as much as everything else has.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What about things like pirate radio, playing illegal raves and things like that?

JONATHAN MORE

You can do it, but it doesn’t happen that much any longer.

FRANK BROUGHTON

But when it did, wasn’t that an important indication that here you have something that has a lot of force to it?

MATT BLACK

Yeah, but the point is that it doesn’t any more, largely. There was nothing intrinsically subversive about DJing. It was about the state of mind that people were in at the time.

JONATHAN MORE

Who happened to be DJs.

MATT BLACK

It’s dangerous to put that on to DJing, because there are no easy answers to it. You can’t just be a DJ and be subversive. You have to be a human and be subversive.

FRANK BROUGHTON

But what about the fact that pirate radio seems to be doing better than ever?

MATT BLACK

Does it?

FRANK BROUGHTON

Well, there seem to be more pirates around now, and despite the fact that the government’s been giving these licenses to people like KISS and X-FM.

JONATHAN MORE

That’s because they’ve been co-opted by the mainstream into being cheese manufacturers, rather than reflecting the popular opinion.

MATT BLACK

No. Pirate radio is still wicked. I heard the Black Metaphysical Spiritual Regeneration Show the other day, which was a black talk show about spiritual matters. It was about the most exciting talk show I’ve ever heard. It was just this Rasta guy in the studio and these callers. This guy called in and was, like, questioning all these Biblical beliefs and foundations of Rastafarianism.

These two guys were just locked on to each other, like a boxing match, for half an hour, neither of them giving an inch, and it was really exciting. I thought, “Yeah man, this is what pirate radio’s actually about. This is the voice of the community.” It might be only 20 people listening to that, but actually I think things like that could be massive, because they’re a fuck of a lot more interesting than talk shows on the commercial stations.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Did you notice your experience changing with KISS as it became legal? [Coldcut broadcast their Solid Steel radio show on the station between 1988 and 1999.]

JONATHAN MORE

Our experience changed. Our experience of KISS changed.

BILL BREWSTER

What was it like early on?

JONATHAN MORE

Before it was legal?

BILL BREWSTER

Right at the beginning.

JONATHAN MORE

When it was a pirate station? There was an incredible amount of enthusiasm from everybody involved in it, because as it dawned on everybody that it was being listened to by a lot of people and the scene was getting better and bigger, that was very exciting, and we were getting across what we felt. There were still a lot of internal arguments, and Matt and I were still pushing for a broader selection of music, and that was still quite hardcore. We were trying to get various things and that caused quite a series of ructions at meetings. We used to have very mad meetings, where things would sway from one idea to another.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Was there a real sense of idealism?

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, there was.

MATT BLACK

But it wasn’t stated in big letters. Like, “Hey, we’re really into this for the soul.” What we had in common was that we were all just music enthusiasts.

BILL BREWSTER

What about Gordon Mac? Because I got the impression – even from like the early days – he still kind of–

JONATHAN MORE

He was dad.

BILL BREWSTER

He had, like, signs up saying “No Swearing,” and stuff like that.

JONATHAN MORE

Actually, it was me who wrote that!

BILL BREWSTER

Oh, was it?

JONATHAN MORE

I’d been coming to do a show and I’d listened to somebody – I can’t remember who it was – the night before, and they’d kind of rambled on in a really out-of-order fashion about something that had happened – I can’t remember what – and it was just pretty disgusting, so I was pissed off with it, and I wrote a big notice and put it on the wall basically. Do you remember?

MATT BLACK

It said, “No Swearing.”

JONATHAN MORE

“No Drug Stories. No Dissing Women.” Or something like that.

MATT BLACK

“No Bollocks – Music.”

JONATHAN MORE

Music was what it was about as far as we were concerned. I was just trying to remind people.

MATT BLACK

Without going off on one, it was Gordon’s enterprise largely. It was kind of 50% Gordon, 50% the rest of us. He took the risk, we put the energy into it, into organizing everybody. That’s because he thought he could potentially make a return out of it and make it work, and he was right.

But the way it’s worked out, I don’t think… I mean, he’s done pretty good out of it and the rest of us have done pretty shit out of it. Not us – we’ve done all right. We resigned on our own terms, but I’m sure even Gordon would have quite a lot of regrets about the way things have gone. It’s not very funny that, 12 years ago, KISS was broadcasting out of Manasseh’s council flat, and they could have gone to jail for that. 12 years later, they’re just sacked without any thanks or explanation. That tells you all you need to know about the industry, how priorities change and how our experience of KISS changed.

BILL BREWSTER

In that case, how did you manage to hang on so long? Because you were there till about 1997?

MATT BLACK

They didn’t want to get rid of us because, even all through it, we always had a vague kind of hipness.

JONATHAN MORE

We were just the token underground act at some point, and we could be used as a [reason] for not opening the station up any more.

BILL BREWSTER

Sort of like having John Peel on Radio 1?

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, until that kind of thing became untenable and they wanted to marginalize things that we were doing.

MATT BLACK

The bottom line is, we had our show on Saturday night. They can probably get more listeners for a house show – it’s Mr. C on now – and you know, it’s a pretty good show, and there are still more house heads than there are anybody else, even though it’s a kind of dying form. So, that’s the commercial reality.

JONATHAN MORE

And DJ Robot [is what] they wanted on during the week, basically, from midnight till two. They put an automated playlist with credits that are pre-recorded by one of the daytime DJs. That’s purely a business matter of reducing numbers of wages, and making the daytime jocks earn their money.

MATT BLACK

It is a business, but it’s a bit dread, because the whole reason KISS FM was licensed was because that license was granted on grounds of a particular type of service – public interest. And you know, we and a lot of the other people represented quite a bit of that public interest.

BILL BREWSTER

Do you think it’s a measure of the success of the original KISS – I mean, before it went legal – that BBC Radio 1 has largely co-opted in a very diluted form what KISS [does]?

MATT BLACK

I think that’s obvious, isn’t it really? I mean, a lot of the good people went to Radio 1. All the marketable people. And you have to remember when we did “Doctorin’ the House” in 1988, Radio 1 wouldn’t playlist it. It got to #6 in the charts and they wouldn’t playlist it because American dance music did not accurately represent the pop taste of the nation. It didn’t take them long to flop all over us and decide we were actually a good thing, though.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What do you think the role of pirate radio is now? Or should be?

MATT BLACK

I think it provides an alternative, definitely. Even the adverts on pirate radio are a lot more entertaining. I can’t bear to listen to adverts on commercial stations, except as a kind of incredibly rarefied, super-ironic, post-post-modernist type of piss-take thing.

JONATHAN MORE

Pirates have improved since [our time on pirates] – they’ve changed quite considerably.

MATT BLACK

We’re hoping to actually host some of the good people on the net. [It’s like] the new pirate radio network, where actually it’s a lot easier to set yourself up as a radio station. [You won’t] have your door kicked in and your records and all your stuff nicked, and it can transmit to anywhere around the world. Yeah, you need a computer and a phone line to tune in, but still. There’s an amazing freedom available now, if you check some of the stuff that is on the web, people doing their own sharecast stations from their bedrooms. I think that is the new energy, really. So, the corporations fail in the end.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Do you think they try and live off the energy of the outlaws?

MATT BLACK

It’s a sort of cyclical process.

JONATHAN MORE

They want to see things proved, you know. They’re not going to move in and risk anything until they’ve seen it proved, and it’s only the outlaw kind of people, or the people with belief in what they do, who do actually prove it. Once they’ve proved it, other people imitate it, and then the record companies move in and buy some [of those] provers, but mostly [end up with the] imitators.

MATT BLACK

Like when the Soul II Soul beat came out; it was quite a few months before the advertising agencies fastened onto it as the hip new sound. When jungle came out, they seemed to be on it really fast – just a couple of months. It was scary. So maybe that process is speeding up. But the underground [is always generating] new forms, they get co-opted, the original energy gets lost and then another thing comes along.

BILL BREWSTER

Going back a little bit – what were your intentions with things like “Say Kids” and the Eric B. & Rakim remix?

JONATHAN MORE

Well, with Eric B. & Rakim we were kind of giggling all the way through it, thinking that we were making it so fucked up that people wouldn’t be into it. I remember that, don’t you, Matt?

MATT BLACK

“This’ll really fuck ’em up!”

JONATHAN MORE

“They won’t be able to handle this!” I dunno. We were just so excited as well, and it was a 39-hour marathon session, constructed entirely from turntables and copies of the record and stuff like that. And it was just like, “Well, I hope they’re going to accept it,” by the time we’d finished it. We wouldn’t let anybody hear it. They wanted to come in and listen to it halfway through.

MATT BLACK

Fatal.

JONATHAN MORE

We said, “No way.” And, you know, they loved it – fortunately.

MATT BLACK

We just do what we do. There’s never been any plan.

JONATHAN MORE

It’s the act of doing the work.

MATT BLACK

And with each new thing that we make, we’re learning a whole bunch of new techniques, so we’re kind of quite clumsy with them. We had quite a lot of good stored-up favorite bits to use.

JONATHAN MORE

Plenty of fuel to keep us going.

MATT BLACK

“Say Kids” was purely an attempt to–

JONATHAN MORE

It was for a competition, wasn’t it?

MATT BLACK

Yeah, but it was purely an attempt to make a record like Steinski’s Lessons [series]. I lived with these guys who I was at college with. It was like, “Um, guys, you know, Double Dee & Steinski on a scale of zero to ten, they’re on a ten. What’s ‘Say Kids’ on?” They said, like, seven-and-a-half, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s good enough.” OK, no illusions – I mean, for me, Double Dee & Steinski records are–

JONATHAN MORE

The bomb!

MATT BLACK

They could never be beaten. It was purely a kind of rip-off/tribute to that. In fact, by the time we got to “Beats + Pieces,” I think we were actually moving it [on] a bit. That was a kind of idea-vomit that people are still shaking off themselves ten years later, allegedly, because it [has been] credited with having sparked off the big beat idea. A very simple idea, really. It’s heavy metal drum breaks and heavy metal stabs mixed with hip-hop references. It took two days of listening to heavy metal records to find the stab on there. It’s Grand Funk Railroad. It’s [also] got Ted Nugent. Ted Nugent and Grand Funk Railroad – the two baddest stabs that we could find.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Where do you think you guys fit into today’s DJ culture?

JONATHAN MORE

Where do we fit? Well, we have sort of been described as éminences grises, which I think is possibly accurate because we have been around for quite a long time.

FRANK BROUGHTON

I don’t know what that means.

MATT BLACK

Grey eminence.

JONATHAN MORE

Grudgingly respected [laughs].

MATT BLACK

Stone-cold daddies that have always been down.

JONATHAN MORE

I think we get the award for survival as well.

MATT BLACK

Yeah, but then again, you know, look at Eno and Steve Reich and people. It’s like, if we’ve managed to keep going for that length of time, then we’ve achieved something.

JONATHAN MORE

We’ve just started, man.

MATT BLACK

We don’t fit in. We – for whatever reason – seem to have sparked up a few ideas that people get into. We’re just starting with the live show and I think that we’ve got a long way to go; quite a few ideas to come yet. We’re in a good position now, because we’ve been around a long time, so [things] are a bit more open [to us]. I mean, we’re playing with Steve Reich next month and it doesn’t get better than that.

FRANK BROUGHTON

What did you think when DJs suddenly became pop stars around you?

JONATHAN MORE

Awful.

MATT BLACK

Yeah. “Oh my God, we’ve created our own monster.” It was horrible.

JONATHAN MORE

Yeah, it was horrible.

MATT BLACK

You know, DJs just aren’t able to get it up on that kind of level.

JONATHAN MORE

Name the Jim Morrison of DJs. Or the Joan Baez of DJs.

BILL BREWSTER

But in one sense it’s no worse than being a rock superstar.

MATT BLACK

It’s no worse, but it’s no better.

JONATHAN MORE

It’s like being a wrestler as well. It’s the same sort of thing.

MATT BLACK

We met James Brown, yeah. And James Brown is a star. He radiates a sort of psychic, very full-on star quality, which just is there, and it’s not just because we know him and all his music and stuff. He just does. I’m sure Jim Morrison radiated that as well, in his own fucked-up way, and there’s a few people that have got it. But I sometimes wonder whether the entire canon of dance music will survive as long as “Rocket Man” by Elton John, which is a wicked song. It’s a very ephemeral business we’re dealing with. This has all been around before with disco, really. The DJ wasn’t so much in the frame then.

BILL BREWSTER

He kind of was, but on a more localized level in New York.

MATT BLACK

You know, Kool Herc was already saying this in that Arena documentary about hip-hop. You know the one I mean?

BILL BREWSTER

Yeah, the Alan Yentob one.

MATT BLACK

[Herc] said he was at his club and was doing his thing, cutting up breaks, then he jumped down. There was a fight, and someone stabbed him. He was in hospital for a few months, and when he came back it was just DJs, DJs, DJs, and the music that he was playing was all over town, and he couldn’t catch up. And this is… What are we talking, 1983, 1982, something like that?

FRANK BROUGHTON

Yeah, I think it was ’79, even, when he was stabbed.

MATT BLACK

So, yeah, too many DJs.

FRANK BROUGHTON

The DJ as pop star – do you think it’s got a lot to do with record companies’ marketing plans in terms of, “Here’s a figure that you can put on your wall.” I mean, you go and see Paul Oakenfold and everyone’s facing him.

MATT BLACK

They’ve colluded in it, yeah. It’s useful. But it wouldn’t happen without, kind of, people letting themselves be suckered into it, and enough people thinking that this is the fast route to some birds and an exciting lifestyle.

FRANK BROUGHTON

But there’s also a sense in which the consumer wants to be suckered into that, because now there’s just so much music that you need this person – the DJ – to filter the music for you.

MATT BLACK

Yeah, maybe that’s a symptom there. Maybe the DJ is kind of a little bit different from the rock star, because the density of information has become greater. You’re kind of bombarded with the stuff all the time, so that person can filter it down and put it in a more easy-to-digest fashion.

BILL BREWSTER

I mean, that’s relevant whether you’re Coldcut or whether you’re Paul Oakenfold, really.

MATT BLACK

To take a broad, general view without slagging people off, which is really the best one to take – there’s, like, music is software, yeah? And software is something that has an application that is useful. Now, if [what] you want is to go out and you maybe take an E or get lagered up, bounce up and down, have a good time and feel that particular vibe, and the software helps you do that, then that’s fine. That’s the purpose of it, and people that curate that software and present it in a good way, they are doing a valuable job. But the question is, “Is that software generically all the same, or is there a better level of software experience?” And I think that there is because, as I said before, I don’t think that music is just about that limited set of values.

JONATHAN MORE

The soundtrack to the working week.

MATT BLACK

Yeah, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s the soundtrack to meditation and the rhythm we all have in our bodies, and the sound that you play when a baby’s being born, and poems and songs. It’s all pretty deep stuff. It’s more than just a hamburger because you’re hungry.

BILL BREWSTER

But the average Saturday night for a kid who’s been working all week, wanting to get fucked up on a Saturday – it’s not much different to–

MATT BLACK

It’s not much different, but not all kids want to do that. Some kids might work hard all week, and then they might go to technical college at the weekend, because they want to know a bit more. Their friends might say they’re crazy, but they might get some wisdom out of that, which will actually propel them on in their lives and make them happy and fulfilled. It’s down to the individual, not down to the form that the information’s being sold in.

FRANK BROUGHTON

But then, isn’t there an argument that dance music is – because it’s about creating an effect – it’s simply become really effective, but it’s lost track of being any good? It’s kind of like “disco sucks.” We’ve got to the stage where you can do it and it gets people dancing but it’s not necessarily [any good].

MATT BLACK

I agree.

JONATHAN MORE

Dry-humping, I call it.

MATT BLACK

The thing is, it’s incredibly easy to generate that energy of house that we spoke about before. It’s now available to anyone with a few quid to get a drum machine or a computer – there are literally programs that will do it for you in a box. I’m into that. It’s great. It generates an excitement in your body, but it’s an excitement that I’ve heard so often before, and that’s the problem.

Maybe I’m just after a bigger thrill, and if you can still feel the big kick-drum talking to you, and it still feels like God’s tapping you on the head with a pencil, then more power to you, but now it just hurts my ears and I switch off. I find it difficult to interpret any musical side that comes with that, because the kicks kind of kick me out.

JONATHAN MORE

Doof.

MATT BLACK

Yeah, “the doof,” as they call it in Australia. The doof means “the rave” in Australia. The Goa-style rave. Yeah. Doof. “That was a good doof the other night.”

BILL BREWSTER

Do you think we’re kind of at the sort of “disco sucks” stage with house, the only difference being that the industries know how to market house when it never did disco?

JONATHAN MORE

We’re getting very close to it.

MATT BLACK

They must have known how to market disco a little.

BILL BREWSTER

No, there were a few acts that they learned how to market belatedly, but really much less effectively. If you look at all the really big disco acts, they were on independent labels. Most of them – Casablanca, TK – they were the ones that had really big hits. Majors came on it very late and really fucked it up. They were the ones doing the Andy Williams records and Ethel Merman.

MATT BLACK

Right. Sure, sure.

BILL BREWSTER

Whereas here, I think house has been much more effectively co-opted into the mainstream.

MATT BLACK

It has.

JONATHAN MORE

There’s just nothing. There’s no kind of new wave, really, to get rid of it.

MATT BLACK

Maybe it’s because nothing’s got that energy.

JONATHAN MORE

Nothing’s got the energy of punk when it first came along, dance music when it first came along. It just needs something new like that.

MATT BLACK

And it’s got, you know, it’s tied into the E thing. We don’t do E, but obviously some people pretty much get off on it, and in combination with house music it is pretty powerful. Once that gets a hold on you, it’s quite strong.

BILL BREWSTER

Musical crack!

MATT BLACK

Well, yeah. It’s a bit like talking about television as mind control. I believe it is appropriate to talk about it like that. You’re dealing directly with manipulating the mind through sounds and images, so you can get addicted to that and need more strong stimulation, and it affects your behaviour.

But the world is so much more connected now. There are lot more people, things are bigger, things are kind of denser, the ideas move around more quickly. Yet with house, house could be petering out in London, but somewhere else it could just be starting to get into this energy and excitement, and it might even inspire some kids to come up with [something] that’s legitimate. It’s like garage, you know? I just can’t see any kind of development coming out of the garage camp, no further innovation, it’s a dead end.

BILL BREWSTER

What about speed garage or whatever?

MATT BLACK

Well, speed garage is quite interesting because I have to admit, you know, when I first heard the term, I thought, “Right, so they just mean speeded-up garage. So, garage is crap, you know, it’s not going anywhere, so faster garage is obviously just speeded up, so that’s going to be crap, so it’s not really worth listening to any of the records.” Then eventually I heard some of the records, and they weren’t really like garage at all. I thought some of the rhythm tracks were wicked! It’s just the chipmunk vocals – the cheesy girl vocals totally did me in. But the actual rhythm tracks are more akin to a kind of slower speed, more jazzy, fucked-up, dubby kind of Photek-meets-electro.

BILL BREWSTER

You mean that sort of 2-step rhythm?

FRANK BROUGHTON

Yeah. I remember going to Twice As Nice, coming back from New York, and checking this new crazy music out that everyone was talking about, and I just remember that there wasn’t a single record that I would have inquired the name of, but it was really effective music. It was really making me dance – without drugs – and it was, “Wow, I’ve got to dance to this.” And that was its power, but you didn’t want to go and buy [any of it].

MATT BLACK

There’s a kind of thing with “faster” isn’t there, as well? It’s like, if you put a slow record on, then put something fast on, the fast one sounds really exciting, but if you put faster and faster and faster on – about 200 BPM – there’s not really any point in going faster, because really over 100 BPM you can’t cope with it. And jungle did score over house and techno by being faster [laughs]. That was wonderful. It was like, “Fucking hell. This is really, really fast.”

BILL BREWSTER

It was the Cockney Rejects.

JONATHAN MORE

And you could go at two different tempos.

FRANK BROUGHTON

If you got tired, you could go at half-speed.

MATT BLACK

Yeah. But, no. House is like 120 BPM. I think there is actually something about BPMs of music that is tied into the heartbeat. It’s like, the range of the human heart is pretty much 60 BPM to 200 BPM. Normally you take one breath to every four heartbeats, don’t you? There’s other natural body rhythms that are in there. And then if you think about the speed of sex as well, you know, typically–

BILL BREWSTER

Which I haven’t done lately!

MATT BLACK

Right, well, next time, check it out and sort of… ambient out and go incredibly slow. Actually, you ride to a much more intense rush than hammering away at 120 BPM [laughs].

FRANK BROUGHTON

Well, that’s what George Clinton said about disco [“To me, disco was like fucking with one stroke.”]

MATT BLACK

Yeah. I’ve been told that, you know, DJs make love in the same way that they play music. If you think about it, it’s got to be true. Also, great DJs are great cooks, my girlfriend reckons.

BILL BREWSTER

Why’s that? Paul Oakenfold was a chef.

FRANK BROUGHTON

Laurent Garnier, Bill Brewster.

MATT BLACK

Oakenfold’s the best of his kind at what he’s doing, isn’t he? We’ve known him for a long time. We went to see him after we did “Say Kids” with another jam that we’d done to get his opinion, when he was still at Champion [Records].

BILL BREWSTER

What track did George Michael sample?

JONATHAN MORE

“Spiral” by DJ Food. Good old George.

BILL BREWSTER

Did that help Ninja Tune financially?

MATT BLACK

Yeah. We got paid, like, six grand, including publishing.

JONATHAN MORE

They were as hardcore as you’d expect from that end of things, but, you know, that was a result really for us.

This interview was conducted on April 14th, 1999. © DJ History