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Coldcut How on earth can you sum up Coldcut in a paragraph? Even selected highlights from Matt Black’s and Jon More’s influential and inspirational careers would fill pages. First, you’ve got the whole Lisa Stansfield thing, with People Hold On, and Yazz, and the whole pop connection. And who could forget Doctorin’ the House?! Then you’ve got the fact that they set up Ninja Tune, which 15 years later is still going strong, and is one of the most respected independents in the world, boasting a plethora of genuine talent. Oh, and Big Dada, the equally important hip hop sister label. And don’t forget their classic Autumn Leaves track, the Johnny Mercer cover. However you look at it, they’ve been hugely important in the development of dance music in all its forms, and continue to be, understanding the balance between the underground and the mainstream, both in front of the speakers and behind the scenes through their business ventures. And did we mention VJamm, their proprietary Audio Visual mixing software? No?
We got the chance to speak with Matt Black (pictured above, right) at the beginning of 2006, on the build up to the release of their new album Sound Mirrors at the end of January. You can read what we think of this stunning collection of new tracks in our review, but below you’ll find Matt’s thoughts on the album, along with plenty more on subjects including Grandmaster Flash, Graffiti and hip hop history, The Situationists, how the culture of sampling has changed over the years, Apple, iTunes, the VJ scene. And old kung fu masters. Yes, we perhaps could have edited it a little more, but without the restrictions of print, we thought we’d treat you to a large chunk of the conversation. Enjoy…
PIXELSURGEON: Hello there Matt. Well, first of all, Happy New Year and congratulations on putting together such a great album!
You too and thank you very much.
When did you first begin work on it?
Well about eight years ago, but I guess more seriously over the past couple of years and things have just been building since then.
It covers a wide range of sounds. Did you have an ultimate goal of the kind of album you wanted to make, or did it just build track by track?
It started off as a great plan of how we were going to make this extremely coherent album that would be easy to listen to from start to finish. But typically along the way we found too many flavours that we couldn’t resist bunging in, so it lost a bit of coherency and gained a bit of diversity.
At what point did you decide on the title? Did the Sound Mirrors track just feel like the most representative of the bunch?
The phrase ‘beautiful, moody trip-hop album’ did float around as one description. I don’t think it really ended up like that, but Sound Mirrors was supposed to be the track with a useful measuring touchstone for the rest of what we were trying to produce, so it has diverged quite a lot. It does provide a useful core in terms of textures and the way the tracks are put together.
For Sound Mirrors in particular, which is an instrumental piece featuring strings and so on, did you write the music down in traditional notation?
That track and a lot of the others are in collaboration with people with certain skills that John and I don’t have. We are quite good at mixing in various extra bits, and what happened with that track was initially we had a fairly simple string arrangement, which Jon pretty much put together. BMW speakers approached me to license a track as a promo for their new fifty grand top of the range surround sound system. I thought that maybe Sound Mirrors would be a good track and I wondered how we could expand on it, so we met up with them at Abbey Road and they had the idea of putting it together with a guy called Michael Price, who’s done strings for Bridget Jones’ diary and other films.
They loved the classical yet modern feel of the track, and thought that we could bring out more of the surround sound experience by putting some proper strings on, and a more fully developed arrangement. So Michael took the track, and came up with a string and horn arrangement, which he then bounced back with Jon and me. The end result was we went into Abbey Road with him and recorded the full 30-piece string, and 8-piece horn section. We got a chance to tinkle on Beatles piano (!), and do it all properly. It was also mixed at Abbey Road as part of the session, so that’s not something you’re going to have the opportunity to do every day.
At what point did you decide who you wanted to guest on the tracks. Did you have them in mind immediately?
Each one has been different, but generally we’ve got a track, and we’ve got an idea in mind. With Everything’s Under Control, I had the chorus and a bunch of lyrics for the verse. I actually tried singing them myself but I don’t quite have the welly to do it. I met a guy called Dom Spitzer down the local garage, and that didn’t work out, but it turned out that he’d been taught by Jonathan 20 years ago at school (Jon used to be a teacher), and I ended up doing the track Colours the Soul with him. I invited him round to my house, and just sat down with him. We’ve become friends, so that was quite a nice get together really.
But going back to Everything is Under Control, it was quite a foot on the monitor kind of rock chorus, and we needed someone who could deliver that. And Jon Spencer’s name was suggested by Ross Allen, who as you probably know is a very switched on London DJ that we’ve been working with, who’s provided quite a lot of useful A&R input into the album. And as DJs, we can do that in a kind of slick way. ‘Well I wonder if Jon Spencer would sound good on this track’, as a mixing element. And then you contact them, and get a sense of the person behind it, he’s a great person to work with, very easy going, didn’t give us any hassle about contracts or shit like that. We actually only met him a few weeks ago in Japan, long after the track was completed. We’ve flown him in just to do that track for a couple of live performances, which have been pretty rocking actually. Because he can really deliver that rock charisma and energy convincingly.
And how about Saul Williams, who you’ve used on Mr. Nichols? Because you've worked with him before haven't you? He was on the Xen Cuts album for your ten year anniversary...
Yeah we’d also done a remix of his Pledge to Resist; Not in Our Name, the anti Iraq war polemic, and that was kicked off by DJ Spooky, who’s a good mate of mine. And then we thought it’d be fun to give Saul a rather chilled out track and see what he’d do with it. And he came back with this incredibly calm, deep and moving piece, which actually could be my favourite track on the record.
How about Mpho (pronounced Empo) Skeef who sings on This Island Earth. How did that come about?
She again was someone that Ross knew, and actually turned out to be a good friend of a friend. She’s known for that Booty La La track by Bugz in the Attic. I think actually that was done after we did our track, but she’s a cool, up and coming, talented, sassy vocalist on the London scene and is pretty much in demand, and a great person to work with. That track is kind of harking back a bit to ‘People Hold On’ I suppose.
Do you think that the people you’ve signed to Ninja tune over the years have influenced your own sound?
I think it’s a two-way process definitely. You learn from your children if you’re a switched on parent. Otherwise you just go grey!
After so long in the industry, and having achieved so much, both as artists in your own right, and at the helm of Ninja Tune, what is it that keeps you motivated?
Jon and I just love it - we’re just getting warmed up. Everyone seems to expect that as you get older you crap out, but we thought it’d be fun to not do that!! (Laughs) We haven’t become millionaires either. Quite a few of our contemporaries have mansioned out a bit too substantially, and perhaps won’t be doing anything particularly risky. And you know Jon and I haven’t done that, and we’re still questing and restless. I’m never satisfied, I want to do more, I want to get it right. I read an interview with (Grandmaster) Flash a few years ago, and he said “I want to be a master of my trade, and I’m not there yet.” And I thought that was a great thing for him to say, someone who’s such a hero. You know I can point to Wheels of Steel and say without that particular record I would not be talking to you today. It was such an inspiration, a new way to make music. So for someone like Flash, who made that record, to say that, I thought yeah that’s my attitude as well. Becoming a master is a lifetime’s work, and I can certainly perfect what I’m doing and get better and better at it.
Which totally ties into the whole idea of Ninjas I guess…
Well exactly. Your grey bearded eighty year old kung fu master can see off the broad-chested 20 year old who things who fucking knows it all, but a quick kick from the back toe sends him sprawling.
Over the last couple of years in particular, the Ninja range seems to have grown a lot broader. Was this a deliberate decision, or was it a natural process, where you simply heard new stuff that you really liked?
I think we’ve got to keep moving haven’t we. Today’s music scene is fast-moving, and today’s dance scene as well. We don’t have a zeitgeist, we have a zeitriddim. It changes. But then we define rare groove as that tune that has a universal groove, which is beyond the cycles of fashion. So those are the two polarities we’re dealing with here. We want to have that lasting quality, but yet we want to keep presenting it in fresh ways. We’re all searching. I don’t think any of the Ninja’s are particularly self-satisfied. If they were they wouldn’t be on the label. They gotta keep that restless, self-searching, self-examining edge, and try and find that next turn in the road that’s not expected, that’ll keep us fresh, and keep surprising our audience.
Are any of the Ninja artist discoveries particularly memorable? Some of the older ones, perhaps like when you first heard Kid Koala, or something like that?
Well Kid Koala was a revelation. To find a turntablist with that skill, who yet had that kind of left field (actually left foot, as Norman Jay once said of Jonathan!) sense of humour and playfulness. To find that he regarded Coldcut’s stuff as a big inspiration, and part of what got him started, was extremely flattering! Talking about learning from the younger members, when we first went on tour with him, he showed me and Jon and the rest of the DJs how to set up a turntable so that it was as least likely to jump when you were scratching your ass off on it. First thing he does when he gets to a gig, Eric, is gets to the turntables, takes the arm off with his screwdrivers, and starts jiggering and poking around to make it as good as he can. So it’s good Ninja turntable karma!
Yeah we saw him a couple of years ago in Camden, when he was promoting his last album, and he was just unbelievably good.
Oh, was that the DJ Cabaret? Yeah I was there - it used to be Dingwalls yeah? That was a great show wasn’t it? I thought that kind of opened up a whole new slant on DJing. I don’t know if anyone else has got the balls or the imagination to really go there apart from Eric, but I thought it was extremely original. It was like; ‘There’s my boy. He doesn’t need to copy Dad’. He can just take what we’ve done and just go further off in his own direction, yet there’s a relation. We’re also getting Kentaro on the label - he’s a pretty hot talent as well.
Definitely. We've read that William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique was as much an influence on your early work as much as hip hop pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash; is this true?
I’m not sure if that was me who said that, but I think there’s some truth in that. I definitely loved Naked Lunch. I found his work very funny actually. My mum’s very liberal, and a fantastic creative woman, but she said ‘oh he’s just a sick old junkie!’ (Laughs) I find some of his stuff very funny and satirical, and his observations on humanity and American culture are hilarious. I tell you what though, it was really only afterwards that I started to understand about Burroughs, and cut-up, and montage, and John Cage and stuff, and how that placed what we were doing in a historical context. And that research continues to this day – I only found out about Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera in the last couple of years. And then, do you know the Situationists and Detournement , that kind of idea? I’ve only found out about that in the last few months, so there’s always more to learn.
So being totally frank about it, the influences were hip hop. It was hop hop. I didn’t have that wider artistic knowledge at that time - I’ve acquired it since.
I’ve recently been looking into the history of graffiti for a separate project, and what’s interesting is that in New York, graffiti and hip hop seemed to grow up separately, but when they came to the UK, they arrived as a package. This had a lot to do with Malcolm Mclaren’s Buffalo Gals track, and the video in particular. It was shown on Top of the Pops in 1982, and featured some graffiti by Dondi, some breaking by the Rock Steady Crew and scratching. It seemed to have a particularly big effect on graffiti in this country, but was it also an influence on you?
Totally! Well I used to do graffiti. I had a bunch of mates I was at college with, we used to do great parties, and then we got Wheels of Steel, and I was sort of the one that went forward and took it onto learning how to scratch and mix. But my homeboys were totally down with me, and supported me cutting up Good Times for four hours in the living room before they told me to shut up. And one day we went on holiday to Bristol, where we encountered the Wild Bunch (graffiti and hip hop crew).
Oh, which is like 3D from Massive Attack….
Yep, and Nellee Hooper. And that would have been 1984. I hadn’t even got my Technics then. We got to Bristol, and the book Style Wars had just come out. You know the book?
Yeah - I remember that was one of the coolest books we had in the school library - I just kept taking it out. Goldie’s like the only UK artist who made it in there or something isn’t he?
Is he?! Oh fuckin ‘nuff respect, I hadn’t even taken that in. But that book kind of blew our minds, me and my mates. We heard the Wild Bunch playing, we went to The Dug Out, and there were pieces by 3D round town. And actually in London, there wasn’t that much going that we’d seen, but here in Bristol it was actually alive in a real convincing form. And so we thought we’d do something, so we bought some spraycans (we didn’t steal them we were too nice for that!), And went out and did a piece in a carpark there. And we got back to town, and I got my decks, and I decided ‘right, I’m gonna fucking learn how to do this’. And my and my mate Jim, I hope he won’t mind me saying; he’s art director of The Guardian now, but back in the day we used to go to Hornsey railway station. I called myself DJ Spectrum at that time. I also learned to body pop a little bit! (Laughs) I was into the whole thing apart from rapping.
Now you mentioned Jim there, and he’s the guy who ended up doing your first covers for Ninja Tune isn’t he?
That’s the guy- he was the graphic designer for all the early Ninja Tune stuff. His real name’s Mark Porter.
Well what’s been the process for covers in recent years? Presumably you see it as an important aspect of the whole Ninja ethos?
Yeah - Ninja have been lucky. Starting with Mark, we did have a strong graphic talent at the heart of Ninja Tune. The next person to take that on was Strictly Kev, who was fresh out of Camberwell Art College. He was a fantastic DJ, and was really into Coldcut, but was also a graphic designer as well. So pretty soon he was doing all the Ninja Tune stuff. He pretty much did 90% of it over the last few years. But in fact when it came to the Coldcut album, he said ‘Guys, I’m not going to be able to do this, because I’d have to devote a year to it, and I’m gonna be a Dad’. And he’s recently become a Dad of two fine twin boys. But he found this guy Nigel Peak, and that’s whose work you’re looking at on the cover. Everyone who looks at it thinks it’s absolutely wicked. And that’s his first ever proper job, as far as I know. He’s fresh out of art school. So that talent is around still. Fresh talent - we love it.
You've lived through an incredible time in music: from labels not really understanding what sampling was all about, to the fearsome backlash as labels did what they could to stop unauthorised sampling, to a slightly more relaxed position, where samples and remixes are pretty much taken for granted. What's the current climate like as far taking bits of songs to incorporate into new tracks, and what are the worst experiences you had with it?
Well touch wood, I think we can say that things have actually been worked out, with an understanding between the underground and the overground. You know, if you just want to sample whatever you like and make a track for you and your mate’s party, that’s great, and that’s become the mashup scene I suppose, which is sampling and DJ mixing gone mainstream. But you’re not going to be able to get that record selling in the shops in any significant quantities, ‘cos you’ll get fucked. If you want to do that, then you’ll have to get clearance, so that justifies the old platitude, ‘where there’s a hit there’s a writ’.
So if you want to be able to commercially exploit your music, if you want to perhaps have the chance of it being picked up for a film, or an advert, which is called a sync licence. And actually, syncs are where the money is at these days. You don’t make a lot of money selling the records. And you’d better make sure that you’ve got your samples cleared and declared. Ninja Tune have quite a clear understanding with our artists now, that if they don’t declare their samples, it’s their ass. And if they do declare them, we work as hard as we can to get clearance where it’s possible and appropriate. So that framework has evolved by mutual necessity of all parties. And George Clinton you know, he was asked about sampling a few years ago, and he was like ‘yeah it’s great you know, do a song, they pay real good’. So he gets paid, they get a hit record, everyone’s happy. The worst thing was on Doctorin’ the House, where we had to pay out 25% of the publishing just to use the phrase “I am the magnificent!” (Laughs)
Apple's iTunes has taken digital downloads and made it mainstream. Do Apple have too much power now, or do you view them as liberators from the established labels?
They’re just a company like Microsoft. I used to respect them as a kind of hippy icon, but I think those days are gone. The iPod’s a great product. However our experience in dealing with them, as regards licensing music for iTunes, has been quite depressing. I believe that what happened was that they basically tried to give the indies a worse deal than the majors, and then when we challenged them about this they denied doing it. And then we proved that that was what was actually going on, and then they said ‘okay, we’ll deal with you on equal terms’. So we, rather reluctantly, got a reasonable deal out of them. I just wish they’d have a bit of respect for the smaller operator, which is after all where they came from, but as I’ve often said, the punks often turn into the suits.
It seems strange, when they’re saying they celebrate musical diversity, whether it’s through iTunes or the iPod…
Yeah, and do you remember those adverts for Apple as well, where the woman bursts into the IBM general meeting, and puts a sledgehammer through their logo, standing up for the small operator. Er, excuse me? Mind you, I buy tunes on iTunes, and I encourage my kids to buy tunes, rather than just download them.
Finally then, who is exciting you musically - and audiovisually - at the moment?
Well I quite like some of the rock that’s going on at the moment actually. I know it’s a bit trendy to say so, but I don’t give a fuck about that. I’m just getting my head a bit re-educated after just having been following my own thing for the last fifteen years. I can even tolerate the new Oasis album, and I like Radiohead. Test Icicles too. Audio-visually, there are lots of good things going on. It is actually taking off now. Every week there’s a new VJ festival. The Optronica festival was quite interesting, and Addictive TV are to be commended for notching up the public awareness of what’s going on with VJ. Karl Bartos, the guy from Kraftwek, he’s doing an audiovisual show, Plaid have done one that’s pretty excellent. So people are coming up to it left right and centre.
How about Eclectic Method?
Ah, we’ll they’re favourite students of mine, definitely. I know Johnny really well, ‘cos we went on this crazy tour of the Balkans a few years ago. They’re amazingly slick and poptastic. What they’ve done, is taken the ideas and the techniques that we’ve been working on with VJamm over the last few years, and applied them to mainstream material, so that people would have a good chance of understanding what the fuck is going on. And I think that was a criticism of some of our stuff, that the concept and techniques have been bulletproof, but the implementation has been a bit too weird, with not enough time spent on it.
We’ve spent all our energy on getting the fucking stuff to work(!), but now that a lot more of it does work we can concentrate on actually making it good. They’ve taken it, and made it good, using material that people know, and it’s quite good to let the young bloods take up the scythe, and go scything through the jungle, clearing a path so that the rest of us can come behind for once. It gets a bit bloody if you’re doing it all yourself!
VJamm 3 has just been released, and the basic version’s only 50 quid. Containing a bunch of samples, which are exactly the same video breakbeats as we use in the Coldcut Live show. So download it, and prove that you’re better than us, which shouldn’t be that difficult! (Laughs)
Well thanks for your time Matt. Best of luck with the album launch, and the forthcoming live shows
Okay - thanks a lot!
(thanks to Arber for additional questions)
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