The Beat Surrender

When it comes to legends in dance music they don’t really come much bigger than Coldcut. Pioneers isn’t a word we use lightly but Jon More and Matt Black have been at the forefront of everything electronic with a beat for around the last twenty years.

We were lucky enough to catch up with them for one of the best interviews we’ve had, just prior to the release of their new album Sound Mirrors. We found them in confident mood, no surprise really being as Sound Mirrors is comfortably the best album they’ve ever produced.

Everything Is Under Control your recent single from the forthcoming album was a real statement of intent, did you feel it was important to come back with a bang?

We always bang. Coldcut put the boff in boffin, you know.

The album drops shortly and from the pre-release copy I’ve been listening to it sounds like your most complete album to date, does it stand out from the rest for you or do you just see it as a different album that you are equally as pleased with as you were previous ones?

We are more pleased with this album. We wanted to make a more complete album and everyone tells us we’ve succeeded, and that does feel good. Dance music is about tracks, it’s about 12” singles, and the number of albums by dance artists that can be seen as successful albums is pretty limited, you can almost count it on the fingers of one hand.

Journeys By DJ was a good album, but then that was put together as a montage of loads of other people’s stuff, so that didn’t quite count. We did want to make something complete and coherent that you could put on from start to end. I don’t know if we’ve succeeded in that, but I think we have at least partly succeeded. It’s a balance between coherency and diversity. We are pleased with it, Jon and me are getting better at what we do.

The novelty of just doing phat beats and funky noises has worn off a bit, and we thought – what are we going to do with all this tech now? Answer: write some songs. We’re not Lennon and McCartney yet (!) but we’re still sharpening our edge, not losing it. We’ve always been pleased with our previous albums but we’re more pleased with this. I don’t know if it’s alright to be pleased with yourself, but Chas & Dave are “well pleased with their new album”.

What was your objective when you started writing and recording this album as far as how you wanted it to sound and also lyrically?

We had no fixed ideas. Jon and I are inspired by a lot of great music – that’s one of the advantages of being old, you’ve had the time to listen to and absorb lots of great music. I’m not sure if I can remember it all, or certainly not the lyrics but it’s in there somewhere. It’s hard writing lyrics but we’ve had the fortune to work with some vocalists. Some of them have just done the lyrics themselves, like on True Skool with Roots Manuva. We just gave him a brief, a few sentences on what we thought the track could be about, but we didn’t put words in his mouth. With other ones it was more of a collaboration.

We’re still learning so we didn’t have any preconceptions on how we wanted to sound lyrically, other than wanting to sound good, and have some soul. As far as the sound itself goes we’ve been fortunate to work with Ross Allen. He’s been a sounding board for the record. Even though it’s not a club record, we are informed by club music, and Ross reminded us of that. He’s always saying you want that the crack of that snare drum to hurt your ears. I remember the old days when I just had a four track tape recorder and a six channel mixing desk, I was so ignorant, I didn’t know what I was doing, I just turned the bass up full and the treble up full on the drum track. They did kinda boff, but things have got a lot more sophisticated than that now.

Producers like Dre do get a fantastic sound, and that heavy American sound is something you have to match up to. But I think there will be a counter reaction to feeble sounds. It’s like when you had the gated snare drum sound in the ‘80s you wanted to make the opposite of that, and the staccato minimalism of the JBs side-stick was and answer to that. It’s all very well moaning on about bling records, and worthless American hiphop but those records do sound great so if you want people to listen to your records they’d better sound phat. That was definitely an ambition.

You’ve got some fantastic collaborations on the album from the likes of Jon Spencer, Roots Manuva, Robert Owens and Saul Williams were they hard to get hold of for the album or did they jump at the chance to be involved?

One of the good things about being Coldcut is that we have a fairly good rep because we’ve been round for a long time and we haven’t blotted our copybook too often, we’ve hung in there. If we approach someone like Annette Peacock or Robert Owens and even if they don’t know who we are there mates or their kids say “Yeah, Coldcut, they’re pretty cool, they’ve done a lot of good stuff you might as well give it a go”. So we haven’t been turned down by anyone who we asked to do a vocal for us. Obviously Roots Manuva is on the label, but you can’t force Rodney to do anything, he’s his own master, but he wanted to do a track and we jumped at the chance to do it.

Originally, Jon had done “Walk a Mile” using a white rock / soul vocalist. It sat around for ages and no one really liked it, but he was playing with it one day and me and Ross said, “You know, this is alright, it’s a bit trancey, the vocal’s not right, but the idea is really good.” Jon wasn’t convinced, and neither were the rest of Ninja Tune, but Ross and I hung in there because we reckoned it could be good with a new vocalist. Someone suggested Robert Owens, who we thought would be very difficult to get hold of, because he’s a legend. But I happened to have a friend in London who knew him, so he was very easy to get hold of in the end.

In the case of Saul Williams we’d actually taken an accapella of his called “Not in Our Name”, an anti-Iraq poem. That was a DJ Spooky project which Ninja put it out, and even though it wasn’t a big earner we thought it was an important record to put out. So Saul was open to doing something with us because we’d taken a risk on that.

Did anybody slip through the net that you had a song in mind for?

Jim Morrison…

As well as some of the more well known artists on the album you’ve also given some lesser known artists a chance (which they’ve taken well) on tracks, is that something that you were keen to do as established artists yourself?

Yes, certainly. You don’t just want names people have heard, you want to mix it and match it. Coldcut always mix it up. It’s great to have someone like Dom Spitzer who is pretty unknown, just someone I happened to meet in a garage ‘round where I live. Also there’s Soweto Kinch, who is not exactly unknown but certainly an up-and-coming talent. Jon Matthias was a also a great choice, he’s had some music out on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label, but he’s not exactly a household name.

Coldcut are always keen to give people a chance, and we try and do that with Ninja too. We went through the record company mill ourselves and got fairly well shafted. One of the reasons for starting Ninja was to have a record label that could deal with artists fairly and give them a chance. It sounds a bit patronizing, but it helps us too man, we’re not just doing it for charity! If you get somebody like Jon Matthias in he’s a great talent and that’s a wicked track he’s written.

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