interview #12
March 2010
Russ Jones
FWF

DJ, promoter, music programmer, serial compiler of scene-defining records, Hackney Globe Trotter, racing cyclist, jazz and Swing dancer, vintage VW Beetle fan… Russ Jones is a man of many parts, not to mention a man who owns more pairs of funky-coloured glasses than there are days of the week.

Russ was a passionate, even relentless clubber in the late ‘80s and ‘90s (from the Boilerhouse in Kingston to Talking Loud and Saying Something at Dingwalls and from Cock Happy to The Shoom – as you’ll see if you check the old school flyers) before promoting his own events like London Calling in the mid-‘90s, which brought DJs like Gilles Peterson and Norman Jay and Fabio and LTJ Bukem to the fore. He also hosted Around the World In 80 Ways, where he developed the more global dance mix that has inspired him since.
He has co-promoted Future World Funk with Batmacumba main man DJ Cliffy here at the Arts Club for eleven years, and while Cliffy takes a sabbatical in Brazil he is welcoming guest DJs onto the decks.

Q: Hi Russ, how are things with you?
A: ‘I’ve just been booked for Roskilde festival in Denmark this summer and I’m working on developing some other exciting projects abroad as well as making plans for a festival of African music and football during the world cup, so there’s plenty going on.
Plus there are my Arriba La Cumbia parties. I’m starting those at the Hootenanny in Brixton this week. It’s a fantastic place, a proper big old pub that holds 500 people and it’s got a big stage and great big sound system, and it’s all free admission, so if any of the Notting Hill Arts Club regulars live down south they should check it out.’

Q: The Future World Funk on Saturday 6 March had DJ UMB from the generationbass blog, which has built up really rapidly over the past year and focuses on the grittier end of the FWF spectrum. Does that mix of cumbia, kuduru, ghetto bass and so on feel like the future for FWF now?
A: ‘Erm, well, not entirely no. I really like that music and it’s progressive, but for most people it’s a bit too heavy unless it’s for a Saturday night crowd. It is part of the future, because there is some really great stuff that’s come out – Diplo has put out some really exciting stuff on Mad Decent – and I’m hearing more of those great new tracks coming out of Chile, as well as Argentina and Angola. Also I think it is becoming more friendly, not quite so heavy, as they’re coming out with better songs.’

Q: So people on that scene are aiming to cross over a bit more?
A: ‘Yes, I think so. I hope so. For me, though, the future is still embodied in the word tropical. Tropical can take on many different connotations; it can mean old tunes as well as the latest stuff, it encompasses cumbia and maybe old calypso too.’

Q: And is that generally a much more melodic sound, albeit it there may be big fat basslines?
A: ‘Yes, definitely, especially the African sounds, like the original soukous or rumba from Congo and Zaire. I tried to get into it before but all of a sudden that music makes sense for me and I’m playing it out and people really get into it. This music has been around for a long time in London, going right back to clubs like the Mambo Inn. Then it was called world music but now it seems like it’s a bit cooler than that!’

Q: And tropical music isn’t ‘separate’ anymore. It’s not something which is made somewhere near the equator and then imported into Europe, it’s something that we can all hear at the same time via the internet.
A: ‘That’s why the blogs are really opening things up musically. Everything is so instant through the blogs. There are loads of good blogs but there are just a few that I look at regularly. Generation Bass alone is probably posting three or four posts a day, so there are heaps of tracks. It’s really hard just to follow one blog, let alone to write it, post it and follow the other blogs!’

Q: I was going to ask you about where you find your music now. Is it through blogs and, if so, which ones?
A: ‘Yes, most of it is through blogs now. They often reference each other too. There’s generationbass, maddecent.com/blog and ghettobassquake.blogspot.com (that’s run by Vamanos, of the Secousse Sound System) and there’s one called AfriColombia which I go to. And also you’ve got soundcloud, which is where producers host their music. Of course you can have all your friends’ music so it’s like a social network for music. When they post people have the option whether they want it to be for download or streaming, with options to buy. Most of the music posted on the blogs is hosted by Soundcloud.’

Q: Do you still buy the music in record shops?
A: ‘Not anymore. I haven’t got the time. The main record shop I go to is Amazon and that’s to buy CDs. Otherwise I go to iTunes or another one called emusic’

Q: So there are no problems with the quality and tracks being over-compressed?
A: ‘Oh no. The majority of DJs do that, partly because the music is so disposable now, it’s so fast-moving that you wouldn’t be afford to buy it on vinyl, even if it exists. Just getting it ready to take out to DJ is a lot of work. On any one week I’ve probably got somewhere between 15 and 20 tracks that are worthy for me to take out, which means I might have downloaded 40 tracks, so it’s a lot of work to process all that and prepare it so it’s labelled up and you know what style it is ad what BPM it is and you’re ready to roll. It’s quite intensive.’

Q: Why is London not embracing tropical music and global ghettopop more? Sometimes it seems that the Notting Hill Arts Club, Passing Clouds in Dalston, Rich Mix and Favela Chic in Shoreditch and some monthly parties (eg Fftang Fftang at 93 Feet East) are the only places embracing upfront tropical sounds. Are there more?
A: ‘Well, there’s Movimientos which presents events at many other locations as well as their monthly events at the Arts Club [Movimientos Live is next on April 6, but before then there’s Muevete on March 20]. There’s also Cargo and Camino in Kings Cross, and the Hootenanny in Brixton come to mind.’

Q: Going back to Future World Funk, are the mash-up hybrid sounds that are mentioned in the press releases – like ‘Balkan D&B’ and ‘gypsy ragga’ and ‘mambo bhangra’ – are they for real?
A: ‘Yeah, they are pretty much (laughs). I’m not so sure about the Balkan D&B, though I’m sure it’s out there. But all the others are happening, as you’ll find out when you come along to the night.’

Q: How has Future World Funk changed since and Cliffy started it 11 years ago?
‘Well, it’s, erm, a good question. It’s got far broader, musically, and it’s got easier (when we started out the music was SO hard to find). And the audience have come on a journey with us and we’ve all broadened our horizons and our appreciation of music so we can get away with playing a lot more now than we would have done. It’s also more electronic that it was originally. The fidget sound, which is very popular, filters into what we do, for instance, as electronic production has been embraced everywhere.

Q: How many FWF compilations did you and Cliffy do?
A: ‘We did four straight Future World Funk compilations and then we did several others as Future World Funk presents, including desi beats and an Urban Brazil one. I’ve done 13 or 14 comps now, including the more recent ‘Gypsy Beats & Balkan Bangers’ collections (which were given six stars in Time Out, if I remember rightly) and the ‘Arriba La Cumbia’ comp, which came out in 2008.’

Q: Is there a new one lined up?
A: ‘No, but I’d like to present the new music from Colombia because there’s such exciting music coming out of Colombia right now. That may happen but it’s difficult as the market for that kind of compilation is coming to an end, unless it’s for a retro collection like Cliffy did last year or the kind of beautifully-presented collections of old and obscure African and Latin music that Soundway Records do. They will sell because they’re done so well and they’ve really made an effort to find rare tunes that are only on vinyl, so it’s not readily available elsewhere. I’m afraid FWF compilations and all those DJ mixes are history now!’

Q: You’ve guest DJed all over the world, but what have been some of the maddest events you have played?
A: ‘The first time Cliffy and I went to Moscow was crazy. We played at the club gig we’d been booked for and then we were dragged to three more places, another club, an Oxygen bar and then to this really flashy, dodgy club full of Mafia guys and seven-foot blondes wearing sunglasses all night long. It was really moody and horrible but we were clearly expected to play there too. We had no choice, so we DJed and then they put on a fashion show which gradually got more and more pornographic, while Cliffy and I searched through our Brazilian and global tunes to find the right music! We were relieved to get out of there alive, but they ripped us off.
So I was very wary when I was asked to go to Moscow again and demanded BA flights and loads of money, all of which they agreed to. I was put up in a five-star hotel and ended up playing to about 20 people in a glorified cake shop opening party. I was just laughing, because I’d got paid and been put up in a posh hotel and shown around Moscow, but even so, it’s a horribly unequal society there.
Back in London one of the craziest (and best) nights was when I played on a Saturday night at Favela Chic with Jerome [aka Gringo Da Parada, host and DJ at the ace Disorder and Progress monthly at the Arts Club, next on March 27]. It was one of the maddest things I’ve ever done, with the bar staff all dancing on top of the bar… Musically it went from all the Brazilian stuff through to Nirvana and punk then doowop…’

Q: I don’t think there’s any other DJ in London who plays music as adventurously as Gringo Da Parada does. He can be very upfront, playing a fierce new electro-techno tune, and then follow that with a French chanson. And it works.
A: ‘Yeah, I carry a lot of different music and there’s lots of stuff I like, but at the majority of places where I play it’s more specific so I can’t get away with that, but when I play with him it’s mad. We were really battling each other.’

Q: He was telling me the other day that you’re one of the only London DJs he knows who can do that, who has the range of music, the knowledge and the ability to be able to pull it all together.’
A: ‘Really? He said that to you. Oh wow!’

Q: Have you heard the American band Vampire Weekend? They successfully embrace African beats into their core sound, so for a lot of people who are hearing their music it may be the first time they’ve heard hi-life melodies and rhythms like that.
A: ‘I think it’s clever. And it’s no different from the ’60s when so many artists in Africa and Latin America were trying to do the Beatles. No one was being critical of them so why shouldn’t young kids in New York embrace African music and make it their own sound,rather than just trying to emulate.’

Q: I was amazed when I heard Vampire Weekend for the first time because I thought “Wow, that’s hi-life!” I love hi-life, it’s such an uplifting sound.
A: ‘So do I. Which reminds me of a rumba and soukous band I went to see last year at the Jazz Café. The original band were TPOK Jazz with Franco [Luambo Makiadi] from Kinshasha in Congo. They were one of the biggest African bands of all time. Franco died a long time ago but the new band were called Odemba OK Jazz All-Stars. It wasn’t that busy, probably less than 100 people, but I swear it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever, ever seen, definitely the best concert of last year for me. The energy! I’ve never smiled so much, it just made me so happy. It was a really, really cracking gig so, yeah, I’m becoming a big fan of African music.’

Q: So what’s coming up at Future World Funk after March?
A: ‘This friend of mine, Roc Hunter, who used to work with Joe Davis [of leading Brazilian music label Far Out Recordings] is back on April 3 and then I’m looking to book Mo’DJ for May 1. He’s from Bamako in Mali…You may have heard of him when he played one of the Secousse sessions.’

> Future World Funk is back on Saturday March 6 with DJ UMB and on April 3 with guest DJ Roc Hunter.
Find out more at myspace.com/russjones1 or www.futureworldfunk.com
> Listen to Russ Jones’ regular radio show on the SOAS (School of African and Oriental Studies) station at www.openair.fm/hgt (streamed or for download)

Interview: Dave Swindells

interview #11
February 2010
Kevin Jones
Communion

Communion was set up by Cherbourg bassist Kevin Jones and Ben Lovett, keyboard player with Mumford & Sons, and producer Ian Grimble in the summer of 2006 but it’s Jones and Lovett who co-host the night and have overseen the launch of sister clubs in Brighton and Leeds.

Lovett has just attended the first Communion night in Sydney, midway through Mumford & Sons super-successful Australian tour, and the duo are looking forward to the first compilation on Communion Records which gets a special launch party here at the Arts Club on February 28. ‘There really is a new music movement happening in London and further afield,’ says Kevin Jones, ‘and having seen so many of these acts play Communion over the years it's an honour to be responsible for putting some of the pieces of the puzzle…"

Q: I’ve just been reading your Ten Point Plan to Creating A Perfect Club Night (on www.thelineofbestfit.com) and point 10 is ‘Always remember that one Golden Rule, Get as many people as drunk as possible!’
A: ‘Yes, exactly. It really does work, heh heh.’

Q: So is it the key to club happiness in a way?
A: ‘It really is.’

Q: Mind you, your first point is ‘Find yourself a decent venue, somewhere that has a reputation or something unique about it – somewhere people want to play.’ If that’s the first priority then you’re still in a good place!
A: ‘Yes, exactly, we’re very happy with the Arts Club. We really like the vibe. As soon as we get there it feels very homely and community-spirited, as it were.’

Q: You launched Communion Records in September. Why did you choose to do it now rather than, say, a year ago, because this scene as been building for a while?
A: ‘I think it just felt like the right time really. It’s hard to say I guess. We’re really ambitious. We really want to keep promoting the bands who we think are great. We got to a point where we’d set up [club events in] Leeds and Brighton and it seemed like the next logical step to start releasing records as well as promoting bands through live shows.’

Q: So, even despite the success of Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, Noah and the Whale and so on, is it true that the newer acts are just not being picked up?
A: ‘Yeah, we’re really passionate about a lot of the artists that we put on and obviously the ones that are on the compilation, and they’re all really good. They’re obviously earlier in their careers and we want people to know about them and get involved. The thing is, it really is like a movement. It’s become a movement in London in particular and we want to champion that movement and let people know about it.’

Q: Was the major crossover success of the bands we’ve just mentioned a surprise? You’ve obviously known Mumford & Sons for years. Did you think these guys are bound to hit it big at some point?
A: ‘Yep. Well, you can never guarantee anything, but you can tell when something is fantastic. Marcus Mumford played solo at Communion before Mumford & Sons were formed, over two years ago now. It was probably his first billed gig and so many friends played then too. Laura Marling played that day too, I played and Ben who’s now in Mumford & Sons played. The whole point was that everyone mucked in and had a go, supporting Marcus, and that’s what we’ve always aimed to do, get involved and see what comes out of it; and a lot of really good things have come out of it which is really satisfying to see.’

Q: Do the bands who have made it big ever come back and play surprise sets?
A: ‘Well, yeah. Laura Marling came back and played a solo set at the Christmas party last year and Mumford & Sons DJed a few months ago. They’re still around but obviously the bigger they get the harder it is to pin them down…’
'Ben is still very much a part of Communion even though he’s so busy with the band. He’s still booking bands and we’re all doing a lot of producing records for future releases on the label. Ben has produced what will hopefully be the second release and between Ben, myself and Ian Grimble we’ve produced three quarters of the tracks on the compilation, so Ben is very creatively involved in all the processes.’

Q: From February 7 to March 7 you’ll have three events in four weeks; is there any danger of running out of quality artists?
A: ‘It’s funny, but no, actually, I don’t think so. We’re very choosy about who we put on which is hopefully why the night has a good reputation. I’m more excited about the next tree line-ups than I have been about any other line-up we’ve had here – there are so many good bands out there.’

Q: Communion also happens in Brighton and Leeds. Are the scenes and clubs different there?
A: ‘Not really. We’re running it on the same model that we’ve built up here. For example we like to really jam-pack the line-ups, we don’t want to put just a couple of bands on per night, we want to give people value for money so if you are paying a fiver to see six or seven amazing bands that’s pretty good. We’ve been very fortunate in that the promoters we’ve got in Leeds and Brighton we already know well already. Obviously Ben and I are musicians and we’re still touring and we like and respect these promoters, which is one reason why we’ve chosen these cities to establish the nights.’

Q: Have you noticed the audiences changing since many artists became successful?
A: ‘Not really. That’s why I’m so happy with it. When we run the nights there are still many familiar faces and you meet so many nice people but I don’t really feel there’s much difference; it’s still the same type of person; people who really like good music hopefully.’

Q: Do you embrace the nu-folk tag?
A: ‘I guess so. No, well, we do. The compilation is completely nu-folk but that said, a lot of bands that we put on at Communion aren’t folk and as a label we won’t be folk exclusively. A lot of the bands we’re looking to release aren’t folk at all; they’re more alternative.
We always try to make the line-ups as eclectic and varied as possible – we like to treat the audiences with a certain degree of respect. To go and see five indie bands in a row is not as exciting as seeing an indie band, a folk band, a hip hop band, a solo artist… So I guess you can’t ignore the strong nu-folk association but it’s not just about that. Communion is much broader than that. It’s about anything we really like basically.’

Q: Even beards have been trendy for a while, but is it true that only folksters really know how to grow ’em?
A: ‘Oh, I think they’re all too lazy to shave (laughs). That’s more accurate.’

Q: Who do you expect to follow Mumford & Sons etc getting more mainstream attention?
A: ‘It’s all just a question of not compromising what you’re doing as an artist, while we mustn’t compromise what we do as promoters and a record label. I know for a fact that Mumford & Sons’ album is exactly how they wanted it and they had no interference from their label and as long as the artist can do that… The industry is constantly trying to second-guess what people are looking for, when actually one of the things that we definitely stand for is the artists doing exactly what they want to do. When that happens people so often respond to it as they can see it’s coming from a genuine place.’

Q: Has Communion been somewhat overlooked while some of the artists who play there have become so successful.
A: ‘Yes, perhaps, but I don’t mind that really. We want to keep the feel of it as it is and there are so many people who respond to the friendly atmosphere, and that’s partly because we’re happy to let it tick over and feed itself. It’s not exclusive, it’s very open and we certainly don’t want to make it into a giant corporate machine. We’ve had so many offers to take it to bigger places and do more but we’ve never really felt comfortable doing that; it could water down what we have; what is there now is really nice and it works so we’ll keep it that way.'
‘The whole point is to nurture a group of musicians. We want to sustain the movement that’s happening, that all started off with very humble beginnings, everyone being very open, singer-songwriters collaborating, swapping ideas, playing on each other’s albums or whatever. We’d like to sustain it for the community that’s there, and hopefully we’re managing to do that.’

Q: You mention the scene getting stronger and feeling much more like a movement. Is that because there are so many bands and artists that it feels like a movement, or is this a movement that could have a manifesto with aims and so on?
A: ‘No I do think there is some sort of movement and I hope our booking policy reflects that. Irrespective of the genre of music what links the artists is really personal, heart-felt lyrics and fantastic singing voices. And perhaps, well, it’s kind of hard to make the analogy, but a while back somebody compared it to the Laurel Canyon scene in the ‘60s and ‘70s with Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash and all that kind of thing. It’s perhaps not on such a grand scale as that scene was…’

Q: Well, some of the bands are on world tours already. Mumford & Sons are huge in Australia and their dates in the US are sold out, so it’s spreading fast.
A : ‘Yes, I guess so, I still see it as quite a small thing, but it’s probably not anymore. I don’t have a TV so I miss out on how everybody’s doing.'

Q: While there has been crossover success, folk music is often acoustic or semi-acoustic and therefore suits a more intimate environment. Is that partly why you’ve stayed loyal to the Arts Club just as they’ve stayed loyal to you.
A: ‘Yes, I totally agree with that and I just hope that we’re providing a platform for people who you’d better see in really intimate settings. The audiences are normally very respectful and really do come to listen rather than just have a pint.’

Q: Do you think the March 7 date will be ‘Communion Records Launch Part Two’?
A: ‘No, that’s back to being a normal Communion session, with fresh up-and-coming bands. The whole point of the February 28 date is to showcase artists and bands that we think are great that we’ve put on the record.’

Q: The compilation will be a double-pack vinyl release, but will that come as on CD too?
A: ‘We’re not releasing it on CD. We’re just doing a limited number of vinyl, and when you buy the vinyl you get a download code. So you can get the music digitally, but you must buy the vinyl first.’

Q: And what’s the idea there?
A: ‘We really like vinyl and think listening to records is a fantastic thing to do. We really want to make all our packaging special; we want the objects and the artwork to be as treasured as the music, so vinyl is the perfect platform for that, though we’re well aware that people want to listen to music on their iPods or whatever.’

Q: Well, vinyl still delivers better-quality audio reproduction, and for a while anyway it may limit the amount of music going straight on to file-sharing sites.
A: ‘Although that’s OK too, because we do want people to hear it.’

Q: As far as the label goes, what happens after the compilation?
A: ‘We’ve got various EPs lined up and there are some exciting but I can’t say who’s involved with those at the moment. It’s a case of go to www.communionrecords.co.uk and watch this space!

Q: Did Communion take a while to find its feet?
A: ‘I think it evolved, but the atmosphere and style of the club hasn’t altered too much. We learnt a lot of lessons in the first few months.’

Q: And Mumford and Sons could be said to have grown out of Communion?
A: ‘To an extent. I mean I wouldn’t want to claim that we were in any way responsible but the fact that Ben runs it sure helps. And Communion has also been a great platform for our own projects. Cherbourg, the band I was in, and the couple [of bands] that I’m now playing with now are all going to appear at Communion – I’m now playing with a guy called Marcus Foster who’s on the compilation and he’s fantastic as well.
It’s a really good pool of musicians; just the other day we were looking for a banjo player and bumped into one at a Communion. He’s subsequently played on the EP and now he’s joined the band so the night has the same sort of sense of community, working and playing together that we were looking to establish in the early days.’

Q: Have there been any particular surprises at Communion, in terms of things happening on the night?
A: ‘Anything from people turning up with upright pianos that they’ve tried to wheel into the Arts Club [if you’ve never been there, it’s in a basement] to the changes we’ve made. We turfed it one year to turn it into an indoor festival. We had an indoor barbie as well.’

Q: That must have been a clean-up job!
A: ‘Yeah, I know, they hated us for it! (laughs) Although the Arts Club liked it so much that they kept the turf for about two weeks afterwards. And we had tons of fake snow at the last Christmas party in December, which was great fun.’

Q: Neither of the reviews I read about that night even mentioned the fake snow!
A: ‘That’s true. I don’t know why that’s the case. I guess they were there to see the bands, but we had a whole section of snow…’

Q: Perhaps the getting-them-drunk ploy worked, and they forgot about it!
A: ‘Exactly, hahaha.’

Communion host their monthly Arts Club dates on Sunday 7 February and Sunday March 7, plus the Communion: The Compilation Launch Party on Sunday 28 Feb. The compilation is released on Monday March 1 on Communion Records

To see Communion’s advice on running a club night click here

Interview: Dave Swindells

interview #10
January 2010
Harriet Knowles
Videopia

One of the newest recruits to the Notting Hill Arts Club team, Harriet Knowles, helped conceive and co-ordinate the filmic capers that made Videopia one of the best new London club nights in 2009.

An event which combines asking club guests to take part in re-shooting a famous film while also presenting three live bands and guest DJs was never going to be an easy juggle, but in the carefree spirit of the Be Kind Rewind movie Harriet and the Videopia film crew have made it into a monthly thriller. Getting involved in the filming adds to the fun at Videopia, but how did Harriet first get involved in the Arts Club? And what is going on at the Videopia First Birthday Party?

Q: How do you plan to celebrate the first birthday?
A: ‘We’re moving it to the weekend! It’s the first time we’ve done it at the weekend; we’re giving an opportunity to all of those people who always say “Oh, it’s on a weekday I can’t come along!”
This time we’ll be shooting Film Quote Karaoke. Rather than recreating a whole movie we’re going to film iconic scenes, re-enacting snippets from Hollywood classics. They’ll be scenes that are fairly easy to do with minimal props and costume – like the Travolta and Thurman dance in 'Pulp Fiction' and the diner scene in ‘When Harry Met Sally’. And maybe the seduction scene in ‘The Graduate’ if we can find a Mrs Robinson…
And we’re getting dressed up for our own Videopia Awards, The Golden Strobes, and combining that with TV presenter and Kerrang DJ Christian Stevenson’s mix of Your Favourite Rock Stars’ Wedding tunes, so there should be lots of Dynasty-style shoulder pads, charity-shop tuxedos and kitsch, red-carpet glamour going on…’

Q: What kind of awards will you set give out at the Videopia ‘Golden Strobes’?
A: ‘Well, I don’t think it will be for Best Actor or Best Director! It’s more likely to be Most Prolific Performer or Most Unconvincing Accent. I need to re-watch the films to see what Golden Strobes Awards we should give, and I’ll probably contact the people as we’re not really planning to screen video acceptance speeches.’

Q: Is Videopia moving to a regular weekend slot?
A: ‘Oh no, we’re just changing it around for the birthday. It’ll be back on February 16 and March 16 with three bands and the film shoots, but we’ll be changing it around a little, filming before and after the first band is on so that more people can get involved in the filming. That’s what we did for Home Alone in December and it worked really well. It also meant we could show the film fairly soon after we finish filming, so people who arrive a bit later still know what’s going on!’

Q: How did you get involved in the Arts Club?
A: ‘I emailed Dom [Dominik Prosser, the Programme Manager] about 15 months ago. I sent him my CV and asked if they had any jobs going in the club. It was the direct approach! I was thinking of bar jobs or whatever, because I live fairly close to the club. But Dom checked the CV and noticed I’d helped out promoting a club night called Bang! (they are now called We Like You) in east London. Dom called me in and said he needed an assistant, and I started by working with him on a one-off night by these artists called the Plats Collective.’

Q: So how did Videopia get started?
A: ‘After that night Dom said “you should come up with a night yourself?” We brainstormed for a while and as I’d done English and Film at Kings College I suggested a film night. I’d seen Be Kind, Rewind the week before, fortunately, so we decided to do a night where we made our own films.’

Q: Were you already familiar with the Arts Club?
A: ‘I’d only been once before, to a Movimientos night, and I really liked it. That’s why I sent my CV here because I liked the atmosphere of the place. Since then I’ve been to RoTa quite a few times to see new bands on Saturdays, which is great because it’s free, and I really enjoyed the Radioclit night, Secousse (next on February 5), when I came to that.’

Q: How about other London clubs Do any of them inspire you?
A: ‘It’s such a shame that The End closed down. That was one of the places I was trying to get an internship at but it was so hard to get in. There are so few interesting venues in central London now. I get down to Corsica Studios occasionally for nights like James Holden’s Border Community and the bass-driven events like Trouble Vision.’

Q: Do you call yourself a club promoter now?
A: ‘Yes, I suppose so. I felt quite fed up at the end of the summer because it was so much harder to promote the night in July and August when the students leave town. We can plan for that now, and hopefully we can take Videopia to festivals in the summer. In December Videopia were asked to take part in the Secret Garden Party’s Christmas event at the Troxy in Commercial Road. There was no specific area to film so we used an on-camera light and that gave us so much more variety in terms of shooting. Filming in one corner of the club can make it look like a parent’s video of their kid’s school play – which is how my dad described one of our films!’

Q: What tips would you give would-be sweded film-makers now that you’ve made a lot?
A: ‘The most difficult thing is making them as short as possible. It’s so tempting to make the scenes longer but it’s usually counter-productive. My advice would be to keep it shorts with lots of cuts, and us shots from different angles, so it doesn’t look too static. So when we did ‘Home Alone’ in December we filmed out in the corridor and on the stairs and around the dancefloor and it was a lot more fun to do. And to watch.’

Videopia First Birthday and Your Favourite Rockstars Wedding Party Friday 22 January. 7pm-2am; free before 8pm, £6 before 11pm, £8 after.

interview and images: Dave Swindells / Johny Chiodini

interview #9
November 2009
Danny Howells

On Sunday 22 Nov 09, Danny Howells brings his long-running Dig Deeper party to the artsclub for the first time, an event that coincides with Danny’s birthday celebrations. Dig Deeper was previously held at The End and The Ministry of Sound, (as well as residencies in New York, Montreal and Amsterdam) so this is a significant change in scale, and one which Danny is really excited about: ‘This is one of the venues I originally dreamt would work as the perfect home for Dig Deeper, many moons ago, and I really think it's going to be something special.’

Q: Notting Hill Arts Club Club is right opposite Record & Tape Exchange, which is a regular haunt of yours isn’t it?
‘Yeah, I’m not sure the bank manager’s going be too pleased about it, really. If I’m not too busy then I like to go to the Record and Tape Exchange once a week, and I like to shoot over to Soho once a fortnight to go to Revival Records and Sister Ray.’

Q: So you mostly go record shopping for older, even vintage stuff.
‘Yeah, because I get a weekly stash of house on vinyl from Juno. I should get along to Phonica more often actually, as that’s another great record shop, but I get distracted by the shops selling the old stuff, because I really like to have music on vinyl even though when I play out, especially internationally, it’s nearly always CD-only.’

Q: Your music has often been called deepsexyfuturistictechfunkhouse. Does that description still apply now?
‘Yeah, I hope it still sticks, let’s see: Deep? Yeah. Sexy? Hope so. Futuristic? Not so bothered about that really. Tech funk house? Yeah, I think it works. That description was actually coined by my old manager back in the ’90s I think, and it’s stuck. And I think it sums up my personality as well, having a load of words squashed together.’

Q: Was your first residency at Bedrock in Hastings?
‘No, it wasn’t actually. My first residency was doing the Friday night, Open Till Close, at The Crypt in Hastings, a very small, underground, cool little place, rather like The Arts Club is. I used to love it. But shortly after that one of my friends gave my mixtape to John Digweed and I got a call requesting that I open for him and Pete Tong on Hastings Pier. I’d only been DJing for a short time, but suddenly having that kind of responsibility helped me a lot.’

Q: What first got you excited nightlife wise? Was it DJs visiting the south coast or trips elsewhere?
‘Well, I was really skint actually. I was at college when I first became aware of raves and clubs and stuff like that, and earning a low fee at the club, so my nightlife education, if you like, really began with the DJs that [John] Digweed used to bring down for his Bedrock night. Digweed would throw events using all these different parts of Hastings Pier so on the same bill you’d have Andrew Weatherall, Darren Emerson [Underworld], Dean Thatcher and Terry Farley [Boy’s Own]… and at another party you’d have Paul Oakenfold, Billy Nasty and Orbital and Steve Proctor. Steve Proctor, a Balearic-inspired mixer, was a very early influence actually, because he was one of the first guys I heard who did re-edits and mash-ups and put acapellas on top of other tracks and then pressed them on to acetates. We’d be like, “fucking hell, where did you get this version of the track from?”’

Q: Downsizing isn’t normally what superstar DJs do, so what’s the appeal of a more intimate space for Dig Deeper?
‘Everybody that knows me knows that I’ve always been more at home in smaller, intimate rooms where you can really connect with the crowd. I get a bit overwhelmed by the larger events, I get a bit nervous and sometimes it’s hard to do longer sets and get creative with your sets when you’ve got a very large crowd; it’s very difficult to please everybody. With smaller venues it’s more of a unified vibe, you can see everybody and they’re all at your fingertips, and you can really work a night together more than in a huge room. I enjoy the big events and do them regularly but for a longer set this was what I wanted to do with Dig Deeper originally, have it in a small room where you can connect with people, you can relax a bit more, you’ve got loads of friendly faces that you know. So I’ve never been against downsizing. I’ve always thought you need to constantly evaluate what you do, and sometimes the priorities and circumstances change.
Don’t get me wrong. The Ministry is a great, great club and I really enjoyed playing there and I’ll continue to play, but when I originally set up Dig Deeper it was partly influenced by two things. I’d loved the idea of Francois K’s Deep Space night, which was on Wednesday nights at Cielo in New York. And also Lazy Dog at Notting Hill Arts Club years ago. I’d loved that Sunday afternoon laidback housey, friendly and occasionally silly vibe, where you’re getting into the music but you’re also chatting up birds, and being rejected (laughs).
I never originally intended Dig Deeper to happen on Saturday night in a superclub because even though it worked spectacularly well on many occasions, it is sometimes difficult to maintain the interest over a longer period with larger crowds, and can feel forced into playing more uptempo than you want to. So at the Notting Hill Arts Club on a Sunday afternoon you can relax into it, there’s not so much pressure and if there’s less pressure nine times out of ten I’ll play better and read the crowd better.
So this was my original plan but it just hasn’t quite worked out that way for the first six years or so of Dig Deeper (laughs).’

Q: Can you describe the Dig Deeper crowd.
‘Hopefully they’re open-minded and receptive to the different styles of music that I play. Personally, they’re a nice bunch as well. I’m very proud of the people that turn up at Dig Deeper and there’s a bunch of regulars who come in London who are really lovely people. I rarely see people out there who I’d try and swerve you know; they’re the kind of crowd who I’d like to hang out with and have a good drink-up and natter with, so hopefully they understand the music I play and understand that I may have the occasional off-night.’

Q: What got you in to playing longer sets?
‘I think I got the bug early on. Three or four months after getting my decks I was landed with a Friday night residency at my favourite club in Hastings playing from open until close. It was only four hours but in that time you’re warming up, playing through the peak time and closing the room out, so I suppose I got it into it then, back in 1991-92. That enjoyment was taken to the next level when I started doing Twilo, which later became Vinyl and then Arc…’

Q: Do you have any significant influences in terms of playing longer sets?
‘I think Danny Tenaglia actually. Hearing Tenaglia at [the Winter Music] Conference in Miami was a big influence, even though I didn’t catch his whole set. I was also due to play with him at Twilo one time, but it was the weekend that Twilo got shut down. As it transpired I did a loft party in Manhattan which went on until 4am or so, and when that finished I went to another loft party which Danny was playing at across town, that carried on until midnight, 17 hours later! It was the biggest journey I’ve ever been on, it was absolutely magical. It was very, very intimate, just friends and acquaintances, so for the bulk of the day it was like just 30-40 people, but he’d be playing ‘On The Run’ by Pink Floyd, ‘Bedtime Stories’ by Madonna, he’d play Marvin Gaye, old Latin music, house classics, it was just really amazing. That inspired me heavily in terms of extended sets.’

Q:The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
‘The Stones without a doubt.’

Q: This is more than just about any physical resemblance isn’t it?
‘Hahaha! What, to Ronnie Wood or Keith Richards?’

Q: I was thinking Ronnie Wood…
‘Yeah, I’ve had that so many times. I actually got asked once, by an air hostess, whether I was Ronnie Wood’s son. Yeah, I adore the Stones, I worship them. Even though the Beatles made more good albums, I think what the Stones did at their peak, between 1968-72 (though there was good stuff before and after that), was just phenomenal and puts them at the top.’

Q: Apart from the artsclub, which are your fave venues to play worldwide?
‘That’s very difficult, but, well, Stereo in Montreal is special. Womb in Tokyo. Anywhere in Buenos Aires, because they’re just such passionate music lovers. Anywhere in New York. The venues change around quite a lot in New York because of political interference and so on, but once again, they’re a friendly crowd and it’s full of people I know and it’s one of my favourite cities in the world.’

Q: You’re a West London boy now, living in Putney. Is that partly for its connections to Heathrow and your home town of Hastings?
‘It’s very convenient for Heathrow and even getting to Gatwick on a good day, and it’s convenient for getting to Hastings to see the old folks. Putney is peaceful as well. I love the vibrant parts of London but I do love the fact that I’m very sort of cocooned here, it’s a peaceful, tranquil area. I love Putney because I’m from Hastings and I lived in the countryside for years so I love greenery. You can drive over the bridge and be in Fulham and Chelsea and from there it’s a short hop to central London. Or, if I go in the other direction, there’s Barnes and Richmond which are quite gorgeous areas, and then you can shoot out and a few minutes beyond it’s open fields.’

Q: Can you tell me about the Dig Deeper label which you launched in January 2009, kicking off with your 13-minute opus, ‘September’.
‘I really liked the idea of setting up my own label which is principally there to release the backlog of tunes I’d made, as well as reflecting the policy of the music that’s played on the Dig Deeper nights. I will have released nine records by the end of 2009, which is quite a lot.
Yes, I’m producing vinyl, because I do like to have a final product at the end of it, so that you can show your grandchildren (if I ever have them). Well, you know I’m old school – you saw how much I enjoyed being in that retro shop [Retro Home, 28 Pembridge Road, W11] today.’

Q: Are you a secret collector of anything other than records?
‘Yes, rock T-shirts. I collect vintage rock shirts and vintage clothes in general, to be honest.’

Q: Ah yes, you’re wearing a 1970s Bowie T-shirt today?
‘Yeah, it’s from 1976 actually and I had to sell a lot of stuff on eBay to pay for it! I’ve amassed a huge collection over the past ten years. Other than that it’s mainly records, oh yes, and ’70s memorabilia and tack too, And lots of brown and orange, that suits me.’ (laughs).

Q: For the next Dig Deeper night you’re thinking a bit more late 1960s, as you’d like to go psychedelic, at least in terms of the visuals?
‘I like the idea of that. I was watching some old Pink Floyd videos recently, rare footage from the ’60s, and I just love that whole vibe, the darkness, the oil-wheel projections, the smoke. It should be a blast in there…’

www.dannyhowells.com
interview: Dave Swindells

interview #8
October 2009

DJ Cliffy
Batmacumba / FWF

Apart from the hosts at the weekly club nights here, DJ Cliffy is the most frequent visitor to the artsclub. The Portuguese-speaking Brazilian music mixmaster hosts and DJs at both the fortnightly Batmacumba sessions and alongside Russ Jones at the equally-pioneering monthly Future World Funk parties.

So we cornered him to find out about his compilation launches, about bringing short films back into Batmacumba, his plans for carnival in Rio and Recife, and his highlights in 2009, including the birth of his baby daughter.

Q: Congratulations on the birth of your daughter! How is the mix of DJing and parenthood treating you and Kuka?
A: ‘It’s pretty good actually. It’s quite an extreme difference going from one or two people at home to a club with a few hundred people who are exuberant and drinking and excited. But it’s a healthy antidote to get back into the real world and see fresh faces, as it’s too easy to get cocooned with a small child. And the hours are fine, because I come in at 3am and give my daughter a feed to save my wife getting up. It’s like I’ve got more energy now.’

Q: You’ve had two compilation launch parties this year at the Arts Club, for ‘Strictly Samba’ (Far Out Recordings) compiled by you and Joe Davis, in February, and ‘Black Rio 2: Original Samba Soul 1968-1981 compiled by DJ Cliffy’ (Strut Records) in July. How were the launch parties?
A: ‘The most recent one, for Black Rio 2 in particular, was wicked. It was a great night with the London School of Samba, and a great launch for a CD that has had such a positive reaction. There’s a well-defined niche for these albums, but so few labels produce them now. So when you do one you get a much stronger response. We had so much press this time and all of it was really positive, and the sales have been good too.
But then there are so few albums like it out there like it. If you look for a Brazilian compilation which has a bit of a story behind it, which considers the history of the music and the movements behind the music and isn’t just “Now That’s What I Call Brazilian!” or whatever, there isn’t one really.
And I think that’s at the root of Batmacumba as a club, that we’ve always tried to go a bit further, a bit deeper, showing the many sides of Brazilian culture, not just scratching on the familiar imagery of carnival for example.’

Q: Batmacumba has ‘forged an alternative vision for Brazilian culture in the UK’, as the Batmacumba Myspace page says, embracing film and photography, graffiti and capoeira and much more, while showcasing Brazilian musicians and DJs, but where does it go from here?
A: Well, specifically, in October we’ve got the UK-based Brazilian drum ’n’ bass producer Human Factor guest DJing on October 9. He’s great; he’s part of the second wave of Brazilian drum ’n’ bass – after artists like DJ Marky and Patife – and as he’s based in the UK he’s incorporating a lot of fresh influences in his music. And on October 23 Tribo, a Bahian carnival band who actually live around Ladbroke Grove and play during the Notting Hill Carnival, will make their Batmacumba debut. That’s very appropriate really.
October 23 is also the date that we’ll relaunch the Shorts Cuts Sessions, showcasing Brazilian short films earlier in the evening, from 8pm-9pm. Short films were always a feature of our events at the ICA and we’ve done it before at the Arts Club and it worked well here too. When we show films we always get more Brazilians coming along, and that’s great because Batmacumba has always been about attracting a mixed crowd.
I’ve just had a meeting with a Brazilian friend, Livia De Melo, who’s an executive film producer in Brazil but she’ll be based in London for a few months and will be curating the films. It’s a great opportunity for us to get wonderful short films in – one of the films on the 23rd, ‘Morro,’ won the best Short Film Prize at Cannes last year.
She has so many connections within the industry and the film she produced recently, "I travel because I have to, I come back because I love you", just had its industry launch at the Venice Film Festival and has got great reviews. We’re really lucky that she’s getting involved.’

Q: Is the idea to focus on new or thematic or music-led Brazilian films?
A: ‘It will mainly be thematic. The first one, for instance, will be loosely themed on films which reference religion in Brazil. Obviously as we are a musical night we like to show films with music but that can be quite tricky. We will do a night featuring films with music but they need to be enjoyable as films, not just because of some specific musical content.’

Q: How is the musical mix at Batmacumba between classic and contemporary tunes?
A: ‘That changes every few months. It’s always shifting around. There’s a lot of great new music, but as for how it will develop musically, it’s hard to say. To know what’s happening you’ve really got to go to Brazil for a month and root it out. There are small bands which live off touring around Brazil and never think of coming abroad, and musical scenes that develop in megacities like Sao Paulo which just don’t get publicity, even with the internet and other media.
And that’s always been how Batmacumba works – that we go out to Brazil for one or so during the winter and find new records, bands and music. That’s what you need to do if you want to do a club like this and keep the sound and flavour authentic and fresh. We’re not trying to recreate Recife or Rio in W11, but it’s authentic in terms of the feeling and the musical experience.’

Q: Could you give me a top five for Batmacumba now?
A: 1. DJ Nick - Summer Samba
2. Zuco 103 - Nunca Mais (Human Factor Remix)
3. Sabo & Zeb - Sanguebom (feat. Andrea Monteiro) (J-Boogie Remix feat. Iggy)
4. Cravo e Canela - Amor no jacuma
5. Rosalia da Souza – Sambinha

Q: Do you still get a lot of ex-patriot Brazilians and Latinos at Batmacumba and has the demographic change since you moved to the artsclub?
A: ‘There has been a bit of a change. Quite a few regulars still come up from South London, but the biggest Brazilian community is in north west London, so the Arts Club is well placed for them. Bayswater used to be called ‘Brazilwater’ because there are so many Brazilians there, but now because of the house price rises most have moved out to Kensal Green, Kensal Rise, Willesden and Kilburn. In fact, there are about half a dozen Brazilian shops on the Harrow Road; it’s a proper community. The Brazilian Butchers up there sometimes has queues an hour long, especially in the summer when everyone wants to do barbecues (and it’s worth the wait!).
Yes, that community was always in the back of my mind when we moved from the centre to west London, but the overriding factor in deciding to move was the overall mix at the artsclub. By that I mean the way that the Arts Club is run, the very broad musical mix that it has and the people who are attracted to it. Of course I was familiar with all of that through playing at Future World Funk with Russ Jones for the past ten years…’

Q: It was very prescient of you and Russ Jones to look beyond the standard definitions of global beats when you started Future World Funk (FWF), but what does the future of world funk look like to you now?
A: ‘It looks very rosy, it looks fantastic. There’s just so much music. The whole paradigm of the music industry has shifted and opened up the global scene massively It comes down to how much time you’ve got to search for it and download it. It was hard work back when we started FWF, because we pretty much played whatever we could find, but it’s become more and more widely available to the extent that now I’ve just bought a programme that enables me to access radio stations worldwide. I can get hold of 15 Venezualan radio stations for example, which is almost ridiculous. Now there’s so much more music than time, so in a way you have to be a better DJ to organise it and find the right music. Russ [Jones] is very good at identifying and picking up on trends, like the Balkan Beats and the cumbia (listen out for his brilliant ‘Arriba La Cumbia’ collection on Crammed Discs) which are his ongoing projects.’

Q: Will you be doing any more compilations of your own soon?
A: ‘Yes, and it’s been quite a long-running saga to get it together. There is a Batmacumba compilation that will come out in the Spring that I’m just finalising now. All the artists have given the tracks for free because the compilation will be a fund-raiser for the Brazilian charity Ruas & Pracas.

Q:That’s the NGO helping street children in Recife, north eastern Brazil, which Batmacumba has supported in the past?
A: ‘We still do. It’s an ongoing relationship with Ruas & Pracas. I’m hoping to get a sponsor to pay for the production so all the money we raise can go to the charity and we’ll use that to do more workshops for the street kids in Recife.
We formed a drumming group in 2006 and 2007 via a series of workshops we did there, and last year the drumming group was invited to play for Brazil’s President Lula when he was visiting Recife. As a result of that event the self-esteem of the kids and of the group as a whole went up so much. Ultimately, it’s about boosting the self-esteem of the kids so that they feel like they’ve got a part to play in society. It was a huge result from very humble beginnings.
Around carnival in February next year we’ll go and do some more workshops, because apart from the drumming we’ve also done pinhole camera workshops, T-shirt customising, singing and percussion workshops where the kids make their own instruments out of gourds and beads.
We’ve already got some money put aside for February. How? Well, myself and my wife built a beach house in Brazil and ten per cent of the money we earn from letting it goes to Ruas & Pracas. Having a beach house in such a beautiful location is such an honour so we wanted to give something back to the community at large.’ [see www.praiadopatacho.com]

Q: Are there any other plans in the pipeline?
A: ‘I’m also starting to work on doing a book about Black Rio, featuring photography of the whole movement in the ’70s. It’ll be published in Brazil but perhaps with an English within it. When I did the first compilation, ‘Black Rio Volume 1’, back in 2002, I had time to look through the archives of a newspaper and found a lot of great photos and imagery. It’s from a period in Brazil when the black culture didn’t get much publicity or support – it was in the middle of dictatorship era, and part of the dictatorship ideal was creating an ideal of national identity of which samba was very much a part, so they were going against that by saying we want to make funky soul music. This period, with the whole crossover between samba, soul and funk, has been overlooked, and there was a whole political side to the movement as well.
Black musicians were saying we want to be able to make funky music like they do in north America, we want to be like James Brown, we want to expand our horizons and create new fusions, but the official media response was that they should stick to making samba back in the favelas. So a lot of it was about black positivity and expressing their feelings. It galvanised people in that respect, and laid the foundations for the funk and hip hop movements that came afterwards, and even the Afro-Bloc movement in Bahia that came in the ’90s too (with bands like Olodum). The reappraisal of black music culture in Brazil started with the Black Rio scene in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, so I’m keen to do a book on that as I’ve come across incredible pictures of the huge parties in Rio and also of the bands and the dancers doing synchronised moves and the amazing shoes and trousers and styles of clothes.’

Q: And you mentioned that you wanted to take Norman Jay out to play during carnival in Brazil next year.
A: ‘I’d love to do that! And I think they’d love Norman Jay in Brazil and it would be great to do a Batmacumba and Norman Jay’s Good Times carnival party.
It would be brilliant to do it in Recife where they do a lot of free stages during the carnival and it could be great to do a British version of carnival, with Norman doing Good Times and hopefully Russ Jones could also come out too we could do a Future World Funk carnival session too.
Norman was out in Brazil a few years ago and he loved it, and I know they’d love him because he’s so good at doing crossover selections. He can play drum ’n’ bass or hip hop, soul, house or whatever he wants! It takes time to build that knowledge, that depth, and that ability to play all genres without compromising too much.
I’ve learnt that after DJing and playing Brazilian and world music over the past 12 years. I know so much more now than I did ten years ago, and I thought then that I was pretty hot (or at least that I had quite a good knowledge), but now it’s a different level completely, in terms of understanding the music and how to put sets together. I definitely feel that I’ve improved so much and coming to the Arts Club has helped me a lot and improved me as a DJ.’

Q: How has bringing Batmacumba to the artsclub helped you as a DJ?
A: ‘Because at the ICA it was a niche venue with a less broad audience and at the Arts Club you get people who come because it’s their local or regular venue, some people come because it’s a Brazilian night, some because they want to see the live bands… and you have to be able to put together a Brazilian music night that can crossover to all these people.
That’s always a challenge and that helps you to improve as a DJ. It was the same when Russ Jones and I were promoting the Future World Funk compilation and we played a lot of festivals. We learnt so much about playing to much broader audiences who may be totally unfamiliar with the music. You have to have a history to DJ really well. Now I think I could DJ with Brazilian music until I’m ninety quite happily’ (laughs). Perhaps not every week but I’ still be there once a month maybe…’

Q: I think in other cultures it’s normal to think of music being a vital part of life for all ages, rather than something that only young people get into…
A: ‘Exactly, and at carnival that really comes across, when you see everybody from babies to grannies taking part. Teenagers are happy to go with their family or take their younger siblings along. It’s not uncool, it’s just normal. Of course they’ll probably stay out much later, but they do go and party together.’

Q: What have been your other highlights this year?
A: ‘The SunSplash Antalya festival, held in a really luxurious hotel, the Hillside SU on the Turkish Mediterranean coast, was very special. It was organised by a friend, Serkan Çetin, who’s been such a regular at the Arts Club over the years, so DJs like Phil Asher, Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson were there too.
It was incredible. The hotel where it was held has its own beach and it was so swanky. The festival admission rate included half-board accommodation, which made it a relative bargain, as the buffet for each meal was about 100 metres long! It was beyond belief. Serkan wanted to see how amazed people would be when they got there and they certainly were impressed so I’m looking forward to that next year.’ [See journeyanatolia.com/sunsplash]

Q: Finally, excuse the cliché question but, as you’re married to a Brazilian (having proposed live on national television in the middle of a carnival procession in Rio!) and have visited Brazil so often, is it true that nobody parties like Brazilians do?
‘Except for the British perhaps – when they get drunk they party like crazy! (laughs). But we [British] have a tendency to do it in bursts. In Brazil they tend to start slowly and build up gradually, and they often don’t go out until midnight or 1am anyway, and then they involve the whole family. You don’t see much drunkenness there, especially not before 4am or 5am, and hardly ever for women. I used to get up at 7am to go to record fairs in Sao Paulo and then you’d see some really drunk people trying to play pool.
One of the things about Batmacumba has always been that it’s a club inspired by Brazilian culture here in London, and so it always aims to fuse those different vibes into a special cosmopolitan mix here.’

interview: Dave Swindells

interview #7
September 2009

Cal Jader
Movimientos

Movimientos has been presenting alternative Latin nights across London since 2004, but since Cal Jader launched Movimientos Live at the artsclub two years ago it’s developed into a superb tropical rave party championing the best music from Latin America to the Caribbean, often featuring four mightily diverse artists and bands.

While Movimientos Live continues to break the boundaries of the UK Latin and global live music scene, Jader also hosts the DJ-driven sister party, Muevete, here at the artsclub, and is set to take fresh Latin acts and Movimientos DJs across the country…

Q: Why the name ‘Movimientos’, and where did you get started?
A: ‘It was in 2004 that Jess Crocker [the original co-founder] and I decided to do a new night. We both were working for the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign who had done the Club Sandino night for many years. (Yes, Max Reinhardt, who hosts Radio Gagarin, used to DJ for them too!). We decided that it would be great to do a night that was pan-Latin American rather than exclusively devoted to one country, but that was also socio-politically aware.
The club name has a double meaning because obviously it covers movements on the dance floor and (social) movements of the people in Latin America. We always had an activist element, but It was when we moved it to the Salmon & Compass in Islington at the end of 2005 that the night found its feet and a new format, with films and talks upstairs early on and the DJs downstairs. The format at The Salmon & Compass was really cool and worked very well, and each month we focused on a different country or theme…‘

Q: Is Movimientos ‘the sound of London’s Latin alternative’?
A: ‘The London thing is crucial because we’re not trying to represent exactly or recreate specifically what happens in a particular Latin country. We’re not trying to create a home-from-home for Latin Americans – we’re creating a Latin night that can showcase many aspects of Latino culture here in London.
We love salsa and some commercial Latin music but ultimately we’re coming from an underground perspective, trying to represent music that’s under-represented or marginalised in some way (I know this sounds like an Arts Council application!) but the point is that we’re bringing people together and all having a great time. It’s not a methodical campaign, it’s a party where we bring a lot of great elements together and that attracts cross-over audiences. Our August party was a case in point: we had Argentinian experimental folktronica, then a band from Caracas doing heavy rock and pop, then a Colombian band fusing traditional influences with arabic styles and New Age spiitualism and then a band from Cheltenham who make Airto Moreira and Flora Purim-style Brazilian jazz fusion. This is crazy! But it’s a joy to confuse people in this way. Someone is always going to get something out of the night. Being a showcase night we’re focussing on lots of different bands and musical styles – if it’s a band we’re working on for the first time we’ll try them out at the artsclub first.
We’re far more comfortable with our eclectic approach now. We do try and make things connect, perhaps through the DJ sets in between.'

Q: Is there a political agenda as such or is it more that Latino music is often intimately linked to the need for freedom?
A: ‘We do share a vision and a wish to represent the people of Latin America, where there’s such a history of people being marginalized and exploited for hundreds of years. We definitely identify with President Evo Morales in Bolivia, for example, or the Zapatistas in Mexico.
But at the same time, we’re not engaging in the political realm. We’re an open-minded party which tries not to be too influenced by consumerism. The key point is that we’re trying to create new audiences. We have an undogmatic approach, but there’s also a socio-political dimension that’s connected to the music. For instance, one of our DJs, Pablo N, is the son of two exiles from Chile who came to London after the CIA-backed overthrow of President Allende in Chile. That coup resonated all over the world.'

Q: Do you have personal links to the Latin community?
A: ‘No, it grew out of a love of Latin music and responding to the Sandanistas and I studied Latin American politics at university and then moved on to do voluntary work for the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign. It probably helped my open-minded approach that I learnt about Latin music from other DJs, from people like DJ Arias who was a key component of Movimientos (he’s in Beirut now, unfortunately for us).’

Q: How has Movimientos developed since it came to the artsclub?
A: ‘We worked the Movimientos nights in tandem for nearly two years. David McHugh [Notting Hill Arts Club founder] came to the night at the Salmon & Compass and wanted us to come to the Arts Club, giving us free rein to do as we liked there. But there’s no way we were going to do the same thing twice a month; the Movimientos nights had to have distinct identities.
Movimientos as the Arts Club nights have evolved into a showcase night of eclectic, alternative Latin music. It’s not explicitly political in the same way as it was at the Salmon & Compass. Doing this night has been crucial in developing the scene. It’s taken a while because we didn’t have so much experience of doing a live music night, this was a new chapter for us. it’s become easier for us as we’ve gone along because we’ve built up contacts.
There were a lot of under-represented genres and stuff that was off the radar insofar as it was unfamiliar to most of the audience because nobody else was doing it. We could put on a reggaeton artist like Papo Record or Philipsman alongside a Chilean artist playing ‘nueva cancion’ (politically-inspired music from the ’60s and ’70s in Chile) alongside Brazilian jazz fusion or Afro-Cuban Afrobeat or whatever.
We wanted to mix it up and open people’s minds, I suppose. At the last party we had a rock band from Caracas in Venezuala. People came up to me and said “Well, this isn’t Latin!” I was saying, “But they have rock music in Latin America too!” (the Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura come to mind). Part of the motive with Movimientos is to showcase that Latin America embraces so much more than, say, salsa or the Rio carnival.
Salsa has become sanitized and depoliticized. It can be still be great fun, but what it represents has changed. We love salsa and samba and at Movimientos we always try to incorporate elements of what people normally think of as Latin. We have elements of salsa or traditional Latin and carnival beats because we love that music too and it makes the party a more accessible experience.’

Q: In the past you’ve called the sounds at Movimientos ‘musica mestiza’. Is this just a Spanish way of saying a mash-up mix?
A: ‘Yes, it is. Specifically in Latin America mestizo music represents rock, or cumbia and ska as well as funky radical music and hip hop. To be honest, though, ‘musica mestiza’ seems to confuse people here so the term that we’re using a lot on the artsclub now is from folkloric to electronic, which encompasses traditional rhythms to anything from house music to reggaeton. Musica mestiza also represents an underground, so it’s like a Manu Chau reference, because he’s popularized so many styles of Latin and African music. In fact, Manu Chau is one of the best guest DJs that we ever had – when he played at one of our events in Brixton the mix of salsa and African music and reggae-hip hop that he played was spot-on.’

Q: What about the ‘London effect’: Latin cultures and music coming together in ways that wouldn’t be possible in south America?
A: ‘Here in London we’re able to bring together different styles of music in ways that wouldn’t happen in Latin America, partly because those differet styles may be restricyed to one country or region or social class. Also, we want to popularise a lot of uncool music! We’ve had really funky pan pipe bands, and the music goes down so well. Locandes in particular is a new band that includes Bolivian and Peruvian musicians. There’s such a stigma attached to pan pipes!
Salsa and reggaeton can represent a kind of whitewash of the culture, pandering to a commercial pattern and reinforcing cultural stereotypes. For instance, a lot of the flyers for Latin promotions in London are very tired and predictable – always with a picture of a scantily-clad Latina on them!
Conversely it’s also true that while there are large Latin American communities here in London and the music is popular here, many Latin musicians don’t come to the UK. They go to Germany, France and Spain and even get more bookings in Eastern Europe than they do here. Germany is much more open than the UK to different musical styles.’

Q: How do you see the night developing?
A: ‘It’s already happened. Now we’re seeing the possibilities for the night as a showcase, road-testing new bands and also providing an element of a circuit of venues across London. There’s no circuit as such, but we’re helping to create a scene, working together with venues like Camino in Kings Cross and Passing Clouds in Dalston, Jamm in Brixton and others to get gigs for the bands and musicians… There’s no record industry as such so we have a network of venues which feature Latin musicians.
‘And we also work on the Global Local, an Arts Council project run by Continental Drift. We are the Latin programmers for Global Local, which provides an invaluable outlet for bands to play at festivals and get wider exposure. It’s an example of how our work has evolved because we are doing Movimientos, doing the right thing if you like, and things fall into place. There is a demand for this music and we jus have to work very hard to keep it up.’
The next development is already happening, which is taking acts and bands to different cities, like Brighton, Birmingham, Bristol and so on. The Movimientos DJs go with them. Initialy we’e working with promoters to bring bands to new audiences there. Next year we’re doing a Global Local tour of cities around the UK, bringing the bands and music to new audiences.'

Q: You are also doing a night called Muevete at the artsclub (next on October 17). How is that different to Movimientos?
A: ‘It’s kind of like the pure party version of Movimientos, a fresh tropical, Latin and African night. The Arts Club have always represented the tropical music scenes so well at nights like Brazilian Love Affair, Future World Funk, Batmacumba and Secousse, which is why it’s been a great place to build up [nights like] Movimientos and Muevete. Because of all those great nights the [Arts Club] crowd are very open to different musical styles.
‘Muevete’ actually means move it or ‘shake your ass’ and it’s used in reggaeton and also old salsa and Cuban songs. It focuses on the party aspect and the DJ – which is totally important to what we do. At Muevete it’s more eclectic tropical rave music, making the links with tropical, African and Balkan music. There aren’t live bands at Muevete so it’s focusing on the DJs who share our vision of eclectic Latin music – people like DJ Vamanos from Secousse and Gabriel from Heatwave. I also work with Cliffy from Batmacumba and Russ [who runs Future World Funk and Hackney Globe Trotter] at Arriba La Cumbia, so the night makes the link between tropical, African and Balkan music.
On October 17 we’ll have guest DJ Izem, a Dublin-based DJ who plays on Groovalization.com (the web radio station. Part of our objective is to educate people while making them dance, so it’s great to work at a venue which has such an open-minded crowd.’

Interview: Dave Swindells

interview #6
August 2009

Seb Chew & Leo Greenslade
yOyO

It’s probably most widely known as the club which helped kickstart the careers of Mark Ronson, Lily Allen and La Roux, as each artist held a month of showcase sets there. But above all yOyO is a brilliant weekly party.

Seb Chew and Leo Greenslade are the men on the decks and the mic every Thursday, and though yOyO does invariably feature live bands, frequently has great guest DJs and often attracts big-name fans, that’s still all you really need to know about the night.

It’s been a weekly institution (in a very good way) for more than five years here, as Seb and Leo spin every kind of black dance music – and anything else they fancy – to a crowd who are always clued-up and up for it. But just in case you’d like a little more background…

Q: Yoyo, or rather yOyO, stands for You’re Only Young Once?
Leo: ‘That was a concept that man-about-west-London-town Louis Philo came up with. He helped us launch the night back at Cherry Jam. When we moved the night here to the Arts Club the boss, David McHugh, was concerned that it might discourage older reveller but that was never the intention; it’s simply means capture the moment!’

Q: Have you been tempted to do a yOyO soundsystem at Notting Hill Carnival?
Leo: ‘We talked about it years ago, checking out how much it would cost to do a float at carnival, and it was about £2,500 and then you’d need everything to be signed by loads of people. We’ve done carnival parties over the years because we both live locally, and we love this time of year and the Carnival.’
Seb: ‘It would be great to do it one year. As DJs who have grown up going to Carnival if we did it it would be a very big deal and we’d feel very honoured.’
Leo: ‘It can be quite a headache doing carnival events at the Arts Club because we’re pretty much on the carnival route. So this time around we’re going to do a separate party with 55DSL under the Westway.’
Seb: ‘We’ve done great carnival parties at the Arts Club before but it can turn into a lot of stress. One time we did it and Lily Allen played live and it was bonkers! We could have sold it out about twenty times over.’

Q: Size is important in nightlife, but you’re limited to having just over 200 people in the artsclub. How do you deal with that?
Seb: ‘We’ve always liked smaller venues. The important thing is that we play what we’re into. It’s just a different style from doing big clubs. We do play at bigger clubs like Fabric sometimes, and that’s great, but the Arts Club feels like our home. We’re really staunch west Londoners, we’ve lived here all our lives and that’s very important to us. We wouldn’t want to do it any other way.’
Leo: ‘We could have chosen somewhere else to do yOyO when we left Cherry Jam but we wanted to do something good in a good venue in this area. There were offers from other places, but when the Arts Club approached us we didn’t hesitate really.’
Seb: ‘The Arts Club is somewhere we’ve been going since it opened. We used to go to Inspiration Information on Fridays especially. It’s incredible for us to think that we’ve done a night that comes anywhere near to the things that we’ve been so into since we were kids. Rotation [formerly at Subterania] is another one; [Rotation host and DJ] Femi Fem said recently that yOyO is what he would have wanted Rotation to be like if it was still going now. Rotation is what inspired us, so to think that we can come anywhere near that legacy is amazing.’
Leo: ‘Rotation was very music- and vibe-based, and that’s kind of how we set our stall out with yOyO. It’s always been about music, about Seb and I and our record collections and playing the music that we wanted to play.’

Q: Do people misunderstand yoyo and think it’s purely a hip hop club?
Seb: ‘Some people do, but that’s fine, they should come to see it for themselves.
Leo: ‘We started it as a hip hop versus house night, but that soon moulded into a straight hip hop club.’
Seb: ‘It’s interesting that now it’s gone from hip hop back to house. That’s important because yOyO is about our taste plus whatever the good music that’s going on at the moment, and for a long time that was hip hop because there was so much amazing music coming out of that world, and it’s slowly gone from hip hop to dancehall to a more house direction now. If someone had said seven years ago that in 2009 the kids aren’t going to want to listen to hip hop, they’ll want to hear more house music, I would have said no fucking way! Everyone would have said that, because hip hop people didn’t like house. They were two very different, almost opposite things.’
Leo: ‘The house music that’s played now has a real urban feel to it.’
Seb: ‘We like to balance what we’re into and the quality music of the day, which always changes across different genres and sounds. We like to think that we’re aware of what’s going on and we can pick the music that’s best for us and for the club.’

Q: Is there any part of so called urban music that you wouldn’t touch?
Seb: No, not really. But it’s like when you say urban it’s like do you mean black music? If you mean black music we play all sorts of black music.’

Q: Depending on who’s playing at yOyO you’ll hear disco, dubstep, D&B…
Seb: ‘Well, La Roux isn’t urban for a start. But that’s when it gets a bit blurry and it becomes our taste. We feel like yOyO is based in black music, but it needn’t only be black music, like we’ll occasionally play a White Stripes or Gorillaz tune.’
Leo: ‘There’s a different live side to our night as well, so there’s a crossover period where we can slip different sounds in. There was a stage when there was no live music at all at yoyo and David McHugh [the Arts Club founder] was influential in making us introduce live performance. It’s worked very much in our favour and enables us to present a broader range of music.’
Seb: ‘There was a side to our taste that we weren’t putting into yOyO but since the live thing started to happen it now represents more of the spectrum of music that we work with in the music industry [at Polydor Records and Darling Department PR]. We were working in those areas already, it’s just that we didn’t apply them to yOyO.’

Q: Do the social networking sites improve the yOyO experience?
Seb: ‘Oh yes, absolutely. We’ve never had a photographer but so many people do take pictures at the night and put them up. We don’t ask people to make them part of an official yOyO group; they tag them as yOyO themselves. We just do what we do and if people are having a good time and they’ve got a camera they’ll take pictures and tag them as yOyO. There’s a huge amount on Facebook relating to the club.’
Leo: ‘And I’d like to use this opportunity to thank those people because they seem to have captured the moment incredibly well over the years. I haven’t even thought about taking a camera down and trying to capture the magic of yOyO and these people have and they come and do it on a regular basis so thank you to those people!’
Seb: ‘They’re just aiming to capture the moment that they’re enjoying down there, so if you look at Facebook or whatever you can see some amazing pictures and watch people as they’ve grown up at the club. It’s like an online diary, and it’s great to see.’
Leo: ‘It’s also quite good as it shows who actually was there. Many people claim to have been part of yOyO over the years but they haven’t all been there!’

Q: Any plans for another monthly showcase in the wake of La Roux, Lily Allen and Mark Ronson? You’ve raised the bar pretty high!
Seb: ‘Those monthly showcases were all for artists that we’re particularly close to. La Roux was my signing at Polydor, Lily was a yOyO regular and is a good friend, and Mark Ronson is someone who’s helped us from the beginning. So far we haven’t done one outside of the “family” as it were. And there are very few acts that we like that could maintain the excitement for a month. People have asked, but it doesn’t feel right unless it’s something that we feel close to.’

Q:But aside from those special showcases you’ve had such a range of live acts at yOyO. Are there any that stand out in particular?
Seb: ‘We had this guy Theophilus London, from New York. He was amazing. And Donaeo was great ’
Leo: ‘Rye Rye from the Mad Decent camp was really good. And, yes, Donaeo was one of the best we’ve ever had. And Bashy was great recently.’
Seb: ‘It’s got to a point where people know it’s something serious. If you can pull it off and make it work there that’s an achievement; we like the fact that it’s not a pushover.’
Leo: ‘The Phenomenal Handclap Band were special too – eight people on stage!’
Seb: ‘There is a kind of never-ending supply of artists that we either work with, or who are looking for a good gig in a reputable club with a good sound system – and the good vibe that goes with it.’

Q: A lot of famous people do come to the night, but who were you most surprised to see partying at yOyO?
Leo: ‘We’re not really surprised at anyone (laughs)’
Seb: We don’t really think like that; we just focus on how we can make yOyO as good as possible. It attracts people hopefully because it’s good and people say good things about it. Whether they’re famous or not, as long as they’re cool, we’re happy to have them. The only person I’d be surprised by, and would be speechless if I saw him, was if Jay-Z turned up!’
Leo: ‘We had Faith Evans down and that was something. We’ve played so much Biggie [Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.] over the years so to see Biggie’s widow standing next to the DJ booth when you’re on the mike and DJing was quite strange.’
Seb: ‘It’s so not a consideration to aim at those [famous] people. I remember having a meeting with Dom Prosser [Arts Club Programme Manager] and Justin Timberlake’s mum, and she was asking “what seating areas can we have and what are the security arrangements?” By the end of it you just go “Bollocks!” That isn’t why we do this. If you want any of that shit go to the West End!’

Q: Are famous folk and paparazzi problematic in a small club with no VIP room?
Seb: ‘No. Before they come people know what to expect and no-one’s has ever stepped over that mark. If they don’t like what yOyO is, that’s cool, we’re not looking to have them come, so please, it’s better to go somewhere else. But if you want to go to a basement in Notting Hill playing good music with good people and good vibes then you’re welcome to come join in with everyone else. ’
Leo: ‘Actually, one person I thought we’d never see was [legendary rapper] Fat Joe. He’s called Fat Joe because he is very large, He’s a big dude and he stayed just a few minutes because there was no seating area for him. The vibe was so hot in the club that night and there was no room for him.’
Seb: ‘We’re glad that he came though. Equally there are other people that don’t need any attention or looking after. To be honest it’s not really special to see someone famous down there so they’re not going to get any hassle. It’s not that kind of night.’

Q: Seb, what particular qualities does Leo bring to the night?
Seb: ‘I know you’re going to do this in return in a minute so I’ve got to be careful.’
Leo: ‘You can be honest! Not much! (laughs)’
Seb: ‘He brings a degree of sort-of madness and spontaneity, either booze-fuelled or not (and much of the time it’s not) and a good complement to what I do. It’s a difficult thing to do something together, and yOyO has always been very much a joint thing from the start, and I don’t think I could do that with anyone else. I can’t really put my finger on other specific points but I do know that that isn’t something that’s easy to do and I can’t think of anyone else that I could do that with on a weekly basis and go through the things that we’ve been through and hopefully succeed.’

Q: You can guess the next question Leo. What qualities does Seb bring to the night?
Leo: ‘I think Seb brings a proper quality to the night. He brings a wealth of experience and an air of professionalism, because before I hooked up with Seb he’d been doing this for years and he had a masterplan all of his own. When we started doing this together I fitted into that and he brought me under his wing. Musically that helped mould and shape yOyO. I’ve grown up as a person over the years and learnt to think on my feet and get up to speed, but when I think about yOyO and Seb and I doing the night, music has always been the primary passion. The qualities Seb brings have always been musical and everything else has grown from there. As promoters we haven’t always made the best decisions over the years but we’ve tried to make the right decisions and we’ve made those by talking to each other, thrashing out ideas and trying to do the best we can. And it’s also about friendship because yOyO is based on Seb and I being friends: our friendship has grown through this night, and if it wasn’t like that yOyO wouldn’t be what it is. What people see is years and years of a friendship developing through the love of music.’
Seb: ‘Yeah, I think that’s really important. I’ve never felt “Oh, I really don’t want to see his face again.” I always feel that not only am I looking forward to the music but I’m looking forward to seeing Leo and whatever journey we take during that night.’
Leo: ‘Don’t get me wrong; we’ve had screaming rows and four-letter tirades on many occasions over the years, and we care about the night so much that we may threaten to cut each other’s heads off and all kinds of dreadful behaviour, but at the end of the day we love doing it and we’re doing it for the right reasons.’

Q: Which leads me to ask how big is the yOyO team?
Seb: ‘We’re the core of it, really, but we’ve added Ben Parmar, who I’ve worked with for four or five years now at Polydor. Ben’s been coming almost every week since the Cherry Jam days and loved what we do, and got to know us as people, so he was a natural extension of the team and he’s been booking the live acts for the past two years. And there’s also Scott Jason, who’s a junior A&R person at Polydor.’
Leo: ‘There have been people who fulfil vital roles all the way through. Dom Prosser at the Arts Club is really instrumental in helping to bring our vision of the club to life. Sadly our door girl, Hazel, has recently moved on for pastures new, which is a shame, because everyone closely involved in the club is important to the experience of it.’

Q: How long can YOyO go on?
Seb: ‘Well, we’re 31 and 32 now and I don’t think either of us want to be the proper old bastard running a night, but as long as we feel happy and comfortable that we can do a good job.’
Leo: ‘We have to enjoy it, that’s the main thing. We’ve brought other people in over the years to love it as much as we do, and that eases the stress, but if it becomes a chore that would be an alarm bell ringing for us…’
Seb: ‘Because we’re always asking are we going in the right direction. When you get to a point when you don’t care as much the quality goes down and it will be obvious.’
Leo: ‘Or if people stop dancing! Because we’re lucky to play the music that we like and create a vibe that people are into. Personally I would love to do it for ten years…’
Seb: ‘If it was ten years we’d go into the “Hall of Fame” of club nights like Trash and Rotation. And if we were considered in those ranks we’d be very proud of that.’

Q: Do you have any plans to relaunch yOyO NYC?
Seb: ‘We did a year of monthly nights in New York and we’d love to do something out there again. But it’s very difficult, especially with the exchange rate at the time when we did it, because we were paying our costs in pounds and getting door money in dollars.’
Leo: ‘We couldn’t even cover our costs really’

Q: Is that when you hooked up with Mark Ronson, because he was based in New York at the time?
Seb: ‘No, that was way before, when we were doing Cherry Jam. He’s always been incredibly supportive and is always happy to play wherever we do parties; if he’s there he’ll do it.’
Leo: ‘Since he’s become more famous he hasn’t been DJing so much. New York happened out of the blue at a time when we were very eager to push yOyO into new areas; we did Ibiza and Paris before we did New York. I’d love to do it again.’
Seb: ‘But it was difficult. No-one in New York wants to pay to get into a club and there’s always ten other parties going on with amazing line-ups. Luckily, we filled a club once a month for a year and did stuff with Rakim, Swizz Beatz, Q-Tip, people that we’d never be able to get here.’
Leo: ‘And we put on the Cool Kids, Trackademicks and all these kind of amazing acts, long before people had heard of them in the UK…’

Q: So those were definitely yOyO moments. Are there others that come to mind?
Seb: ‘There are millions. To be honest every single week I probably get exactly the same amount of massive enjoyment from the night…’
Leo: ‘David Rodigan, who guested at yOyO last week, felt like one of the best parties we’ve ever done.’
Leo: ‘But there are other times when you get to play certain records for the first time, before anyone else has got them and you vibe off that.’
Seb: ‘And it isn’t necessarily based on the big DJ or the famous people in there or whatever, it’s to do with the people that come every week. Doing a weekly thing we’ve always been keen not to focus on guests; it’s got to be about what we do every week. Some of the best ones have just been with me and Leo, when things have just worked and the music flows. For me those are the really killer ones.’

Q: Tell us a yOyO secret…
Leo: ‘The secret is that we do a night on a Thursday at the Notting Hill Arts Club every single week. Don’t tell anyone!’

* Due to yOyO’s popularity getting in is not as easy as just rocking up with a fiver in your hand. You’ll need to join the guest list via myspace.com/yoyouk, or the yOyO Facebook group.
And remember: bring your ID and arrive early because it gets BUSY!

Interview: Dave Swindells

interview #5
July 2009

Max Reinhardt
Radio Gagarin

If you were looking for the most prescient, pioneering and peripatetic party starter in London Max Reinhardt would be near the top of the list. Long before tropical music was fashionable or African music was flavour of the month Max Reinhardt has been DJing and running club events across the city, from DJing at tropical nights like the legendary Mambo Inn in Brixton to launching African adventures like Mwalimu Express and The Shrine.

Here in Notting Hill though, he's best known for being the Godfather of the most unruly child in the Arts Club family, Radio Gagarin. It's a club which is, with no hint of exaggeration, called 'London's only Balkan / Russian / Baltic / Gypsy / Klez / Mash / Thrash / Trash / KULTURKlash!!!'. Radio Gagarin is as likely to present the many-voiced harmonies of the London Bulgarian Choir as Gogol Bordello, while also incorporating improvisational theatre, eastern block films and live art. In fact, almost anything goes at Radio Gagarin, as long as its origins lie somewhere between the Balkans, the Baltic and London's expatriot eastern European communities, as Mr Reinhardt explains.

Q: Radio Gagarin celebrated its fourth birthday in March, but how did it actually get started?
A: 'I'd known Oi Va Voi for many years and worked with them on their tours. Oi Va Voi were still at Outcaste Records then and [label boss] Shabs Jobanputra had links with the Arts Club and suggested to Oi Va Voi's founder Lemez Lovas and myself that we do something there.
I'd had this idea for a while that it would be good to have a night built around a band, like happens in Africa, for example, where there was Fela Kuti's club, Youssou N'Dour's club and others. If you want to catch up with those guys and see what they're up to - obviously not Fela because he's dead but Femi Kuti does the same thing now - there's always a Saturday night at least once a month where you can catch them. Oi Va Voi were very interested, and principally [founder member] Lemez [Lovas], who asked me to join in. The idea was to make a great East European klezmer gypsy night and if anyone's in town they'd want to come play there because it's so cool and hip. It hasn't quite turned into that but there were moments when I thought it would, like when Gogol Bordello came down for example.
Anyway, Oi Va Voi played the first three or four events that we did and then Lemez and the band dropped out of the picture for lots of reasons. Lemez was ill and then he went traveling extensively so that he was out of town for about three years - though he will be back at the next party on July 19 with his new band, The Stetl Superstars.
When Lemez Lovas went away I was asked to carry on the night. I only agreed so long as it didn't become too much work! In fact, Radio Gagarin is a kind of magical thing in a way; people phone up or I hear of bands and people, so I never sit down for days banging my head saying "how am I going to build next month's party?!" It just happens.'

Q: So why is it named after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin?
A: 'Radio Gagarin was a brilliant pun because of the old Queen song [that'll be Radio Ga Ga] but also because Gagarin is a Soviet icon who was probably the only Russian hero who was popular throughout the eastern block. Most of the eastern block were subject peoples to Russia who weren't fond of the Soviet empire, but they always had a lot of time for Gagarin and the Russian space programme because America was regarded as another empire and it was nice to get one over on them.'

Q: It's subtitled Experiments In Sunday Socialism which suggests all kinds of socializing, but is it also an implicit reference to the creative explosion of Russian art, design and film and society in the years immediately after the Russian revolution?
A: 'Exactly, that's what we think that we're tapping into. Russia, post- revolution, but before the Soviet repression. There was a moment in time, maybe it only lasted a a few months or years. Suddenly, if you were in a minority it didn't matter; suddenly, if you were a woman it was being celebrated; suddenly, if you were an artist like Chagall you became a Kommissar of the Arts.
Unless you live through a time like that it's difficult to imagine how it felt because we now know so much about repression in the Soviet Union, about the purges and deaths and Stalin's show trials, but for that glorious moment… People get very excited about revolutions when they happen, whether it's Paris in 1968, the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89 and even what's been happening in Iran this year - there's freedom in the air and people do things and try things that they don't normally do. In a way I'd like it to be like that every other month on a Sunday at Gagarin, and sometimes it is.'

Q: And there have been experiments, especially in nightlife terms. There's been all sorts of poetry and puppetry and strange performances, but what stands out as the strangest?
A: 'Very early on we had this brilliant woman who was a painter. I mean she was probably certifiable, but anyway, she did floor paintings with paper and paint on the floor. Of course the club would get busy, and people would be standing on the floor and she'd paint around them. She kept all her paint brushes in her cleavage so gradually, as the evening went on, she sort of painted herself, by default, as the brushes went in and out of her cleavage. It was all very watchable but the only trouble was that in order to see what she was painting she lit candles all over the place on top of the paper. It became a Health and Safety issue that we couldn't ignore. I think she was banned by the authorities in our first Stalinist purge (laughs)'

Q: An experiment too far!
A: 'Yeah, probably. But there have been lots of other things such as half-naked people being decorated as cakes and there have been wonderful beard competitions too (although the beards were false) and we shouldn't forget the time we gave out the award for the Best Turnip Grower of the Harvest Season.'

Q: A glorious achievement indeed, comrade!
A: 'Exactly. Well, we haven't yet explored Motherhood and Fatherhood, which were an important part of the honours system in the Soviet Union, but we will be doing so.'

Q: So how about the next Radio Gagarin on July 19. You've got the Stetl Superstars playing live for starters…
A: 'Yes, Stetl is actually the name for a Jewish village as it happens. The Stetl Superstars are the child of none other than Lemez Lovas, so he's coming home to Radio Gagarin [following what we're told was 'their triumphant summer tour of the Steppes'] and then we've got the Alright Alreadies, a mixture of people who are fanatic about playing reggae and klezmer music. They say they play something called kleggae. I'd rather not say that (laughs), but they do. And then there's a fantastic radical Turkish act, the Djanan Tjuram Band of whom I expect great things, just from having heard the CD and seen a little bit of YouTube. And after all, the Turks are in te Balkans too. And then there's Trotsky's Talkin' Blooze Buro who will have played their first festival the night before, at the Tolpuddle Martyr's Festival in Dorset on July 18, where Radio Gagarin are hosting a night.'

Q: What is the greatest number of performers that you've had in the club? I heard that the London Bulgarian Choir was pretty large?
A: 'There are about 30 of them in all, and if you also have the Trans-Siberian Marching Bad there are about ten of them too. Most of the bands who play at Gagarin seem to have at least six members - even the Trotsky's Talking Blooze Buro gets up to six with the interpreter.'

Q: Do you need an interpreter?
A: 'Otherwise I don't understand what's going on.' (laughs). Our interpreter is Ariadne Arendt, who translates into Russian while the band are playing and is also one of the DJ team. She was introduced to me by Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello. He said to me, look, there's a Russian girl here from Odessa and I think you ought to work with her. And then he vanished off into the night to collaborate with Madonna or whatever he does (laughs) and so Ariadne and I met. She's been important in bringing in new young bands and knows a lot about the Russian scene.'

Q: What about the other integral elements of the event, like the Friends of Gagarin adding impromptu performance?
A: 'They are also the design and the animation crew, coordinating everything from the flyers to the slides and films that are shown. And often they've shot a dance film which is on screen at the beginning of the night, when they might show either serious films from Eastern Europe or perhaps the Marx Brothers, because they came from Eastern Europe too (it just depends on who's doing the programming)'

Q: You talked about the club being hip. When Gogol Bordello was in town and you were trying to accommodate bands like London Bulgarian Choir were you thinking we may need a bigger venue?
A: 'We've tried with differing success doing special events elsewhere. We did a special at the ICA and I've never lost so much money (laughs). It was full but you need a grant to do the ICA properly because the costs are huge as you have to bring everything in. I have been dabbling in clubs for years and that's the only night that I've made a real loss.'

Q: So what were the first clubs that you dabbled in? Was it the legendary Mambo Inn in Brixton?
A: 'I guess it came out of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign events that I deejayed at in the mid-'80s. I met this Colombian guy there whose name was Fernando, and he asked whether I wanted to play Latin and African music in a club. I did, partly because I'd seen Dave Hucker at work. When I first heard him DJing it felt like I'd come home. It was just his mix of old reggae and ska, Latino and all kinds of African music. It was a revelation that it was possible to play like this, but I didn't feel that I had the record collection so I asked a mate and DJ friend who was playing tropical music (we never really liked the world music tag), Gerry Lyseight, and he suggested a friend, Sue Steward, who knew Latin music and culture with encyclopaedic depth, and so the three of us got together at a night called Fernando's Hideaway at the Old Queen's Head in Brixton. That folded after a while but we were able to move to the Loughborough Inn where Rita Ray joined the DJ team a little later.'

Q: I remember the Mambo Inn as three rooms of tropical fun in a rambling, huge corner pub (the Loughborough Hotel in Brixton), and that went on for eight years, always with huge queues…
A: 'Exactly. And it had a kind of theatrical side with a designer and we had lots of live bands and performers there, so the roots of Radio Gagarin are there I suppose. And Lemez Lovas used to come up there from Oxford in his student days, as it happens.'

Q: Despite some great compilations (like the 'Gypsy Beats and Balkan Bangers' CDs which Russ Jones put together) and a lot of very fine nights does it bother you that the gypsy / klezmer /Balkan scene has never become as big here as it has in Germany?
A: 'There was a time when there were about six eastern European events but though many of them have stopped there is still a burgeoning live musician scene. There is no shortage of people who want to play at Radio Gagarin and who play music that is linked in some way to Eastern Europe.
The [eastern European] scene in France is as big as in Germany, which seems partly to do with what music gets played on the radio and what kind of radio stations there are. If you spend any time in Paris you'll know that they have remarkable radio stations which we don't have. Radio here seems to operate in a very narrow band which is partly a response to how successful mainstream music is over here. That's not so true in Germany and France so it's a more healthily-fragmented scene there; if there are styles of music that a significant minority of people like there'll be a radio station for it, but it doesn't seem to work that way here. We've got the brilliance of the BBC but then we've got a really mundane and conformist commercial radio sector and I just don't get it. When you go to New York there are 20 jazz stations on the dial, so why isn't there at least one in London?
And in the UK there's an obsession with language, with only listening (and especially buying) music that's in English, which they don't have on the continent, for obvious reasons. The French are very open musically; they have big ears if you like. They have all kinds of music from the North African tradition, the west African tradition, their version of the Caribbean, as well as embracing the music that's come out of the UK over the last 30 years. Obviously there have been some things which have taken off here, like reggae and dub and bhangra and Asian Underground, which has helped those sounds to progress all over the world. I should say that I'm not pissed off about this; it's just the way it is, and it's one reason why I get more work overseas.'

Q: And do you have personal links to Eastern Europe which have helped inspire Radio Gagarin?
A: 'Yes, I do. I'm Jewish, and the thing about klezmer music is that growing up in Europe I didn't experience the music at all. They did in America because enough Jews from Eastern Europe went to live in the US, so there was Yiddish theatre and klezmer music because the tradition was carried on. Obviously the Nazis wiped out East European Jewry and the music along with it and it was only in the '70s that the klezmer resurgence began in the States. When I was a kid the only klezmer I heard were some amazing klezmer breaks in comedy records, like The Spike Jones band did a klezmer version of 'Home On The Range', but by the time we were doing the Mambo Inn in the '90s I was getting some Eastern European music and wondering how to fit these complex rhythm patterns like 13/8 into our night. In fact, you could only play it on New Year's Eve when everyone was obviously completely wankered, and they'd think it was amazing, but it was like novelty music again. But slowly I began to get more and more interested in it. I went to DJ in Lithuania on a trip sponsored by the British Council and I told them that my grandparents came from Lithuania and Ukraine on one side of the family which led to an event where I recreated my grandmother's wedding of 1914. I was doing all this in the run-up to Radio Gagarin starting, and although I wouldn't say that I do Radio Gagarin because of that background, it's kind of there and it adds resonance.'
But if you're on a tube train one day and a woman comes into the carriage and she says "I can't keep this baby anymore, I just can't do it! Will someone please take it from me now, adopt it and be good to it." And if you don't look away and if you say "Oh, alright love!'", well, that's what happened to me. I was just the Godfather, playing a few tunes and doing a bit of MCing and all that, and then suddenly it was my baby (laughs) so I like that about it too.'

Q: Did being so involved in Radio Gagarin (and The Shrine and Mambo Inn) lead to you and Rita Ray being asked to programme the Celebrating Sanctuary festival, which marked its tenth birthday celebrating the art of refugee communities in the UK in June?
A: 'It's true that having an awareness of African bands in London, particularly from refugee communities, was part of doing The Shrine but also Rita and I did this event for about six years on Sunday afternoons in Clapham in South London, called Mwalimu Express. It was like an anti-club club in the sense that it happened in daylight and you couldn't smoke because there were kids and there was live music and sometimes people would dance. The notion was that the Mwalimu Express was a train that stopped in a different town in Africa every week and we'd have a different musician from that country each time so that also fed in a lot to the Celebrating Sanctuary festival, as Radio Gagarin has too. For example we had a Russian hip hop queen who came here as a refugee and she's has performed at Gagarin and at Celebrating Sanctuary. We have good contacts in many communities, but of course sometimes we miss people because it's an unstable life being a refugee… Anyhow, this year's festival was rocking. It was a beautiful day, the bands were brilliant and what was really noticeable was how young the age range was.'

Q: Does Radio Gagarin ever operate as a radio station?
A: 'Well, if you check out our site you can hear a Radio Gagarin broadcast. We did submit it to Resonance FM but we never heard from them again.'

Q: The press release mentions latkes and blinis but do you still have Jewish and eastern European food at the club?
A: 'I'm glad you asked me that because we're about to have a resurgence soon. A woman I know called Eva Oddo asked why we weren't doing food anymore and I suggested that she was welcome to get involved. Recently, three years later, she emailed me to say she's willing to do it, so, yes, the latkes are coming back, hopefully in time for the next party!'

Interview: Dave Swindells

interview #4
June 2009

Nicola Peirce & Kelly Budge

"I’ve never had so much fun as ringing up the morgue and asking for ten body bags. We projected onto the body bags, because they are white."

The nottinghillartsclub is unique in many ways, and one of those is that it’s the only smaller London club with a dedicated visuals team producing brilliant customised images for the nights taking place there. This enables the venue, which is essentially two basement rooms, to take on the appearance of tropical beaches (at Secousse), a punk rockin’ dirty disco den (Death Disco), a Victorian circus (Communion), a Bollywood poster site (Bombay Bronx) or the countless other images that the artsclub visuals team of Kelly Budge (Your Mum) and Nicola Peirce (Jewels Pit) create.

Remarkably the duo have been an integral part of the artsclub for a dozen years, as Kelly and Nicola first got involved shortly after the artsclub opened back in 1997…

Q: You’ve been doing this for a long time, but 35mm projections clearly still inspire you?
Nicola: "As long as we’re producing new work then it’s definitely still enjoyable. I love the visual collage process; it’s a combination of found images, our own photographs and text. And it’s a great outlet for ideas; if the promoters don’t have specific ideas about their visuals you can do what you like. You have a free rein to create as nobody’s telling you what to do."

Q: Essentially the mechanics of Your Mum’s visual projections haven’t really changed. The technology is basically the same, so would it be better and simpler if it was digital, or do you prefer analogue quality?
Kelly: "I guess it’s like the difference between a new car and an old vintage car. I bought the new estate car (laughs) but I’d rather have the vintage one if I could afford to keep it. It’s like with our visuals: there’s a real difference with digital projection."
Nicola: "I don’t like pixels!"
Kelly: "It’s just a different format, so you lose that tactile element, that analogue texture, and the colours are different, partly because of the different mechanics of digital projection. Analogue slide projection is more like a spring day than the glare of summer that you get with digital imagery.
Even so, though I work a lot now with video projectors and a lot of my stuff is digital. So I’m playing around with software programmes and interactive possibilities, which are all digitally-led, but doing really nice graphics and slide projection has always got a place in my heart. When you fill a room with projections like this it really can be beautiful, it gives this amazing light and can make the venue a much more relaxing place to be."

Q: Are you working with digital media Nicola?
Nicola: "No, I’m doing screen printing, so I’m going the other way, narrowing it down to one image. I’ve got all this reference material from years of work so I’m keener to make one-off pieces. You need so many images for moving visuals. There’s an incredible amount of work which goes into VJing for example."

Q: Where else have you worked?
Kelly: "I’ve worked all over, at festivals here and abroad on British Council cultural trips in far off places such as Baku in Azerbaijan and in Kazakhstan Here in London a few of the best spaces I’ve projected in have been the V&A which has this wonderful dome in the foyer and the Tate modern Turbine hall. I also worked on a specially commissioned audio visual installation outside the Tate Modern at Bankside. It was accompanied by music from Robert Miles & Jon Thorne and the visuals were projected onto the surface of a huge sphere."
Nicola: "Recently I’ve been working at Dex Club and Corsica Studios."

Q: Are there other visual artists (particularly working in music or nightclubs) that you admire?
Kelly: "Well I’ve always liked Flat-e. They’ve done stuff for Aphex Twin and they’re quite performance-based and art-centred, rather than just presenting visuals to a musical score. I’ve been working in visuals for quite a while so I’m getting over rocking up with a set of visuals to VJ, I’d like to take the ideas further and develop some of the skills that I’ve learnt. Stuff that involves audience participation and interactive AV. I’ve worked in theatre before and I’m getting excited about a new project I’ve got coming up which will involves multimedia interaction with screens…"
Nicola: "I’m still getting into 35mm projectors." (laughs).

Q: So is it important that the images don’t move? Because if the visuals move they can be distracting so people sometimes stare at them like they’re at home in front of the telly?
Nicola: "It’s more like lit wallpaper which changes every night here."

Q: Which is the most design-savvy of the club nights here?
Kelly: "Probably YoYo, because they have very bold graphics and branding. Their ‘London fucking town’ graphics are pretty strong."
Nicola: "And Kevin [Tritone Jones] of Communion has strong ideas about how he wants the night to appear. He came up with the idea of the Victorian showmen. He’s changed the visuals around a number of times and he’s very clear about how he wants the visuals to tie in with the ideology of the night."

Q: Which club night changes their visuals most often?
Nicola: "Well, each night has a range of slides to choose from so if the event is weekly then each week it will look different. We change the slides at the club ourselves every day so we add to the range of slides all the time, especially if we think we’ve seen the slides often enough ourselves!"

Q: Does it help your work if you’re fans of the night or the music, or is that irrelevant?
Nicola: "Well, it’s not irrelevant. It’s just if someone has a very naff idea that it doesn’t work (laughs). Most promoters are good and they have plenty of ideas to work with."

Q: Have you ever had any problems with images offending people?
Kelly: "There was an incident with Dom [Prosser, the Programme Manager] and a Hell’s Angel. Nicola had used an image which was taken off the back of a Hell’s Angel’s jacket…"
Nicola:"‘It was for the Death Disco night so I was looking for skull images and we used that, but this guy wasn’t very pleased…"
Kelly: "He frogmarched Dom up a ladder and paid him £30 to take the slide out."
Nicola: " 'Don’t ever use that again!' he said. But that was the only time we’ve had a problem."

Q: You must have had a quite a lot of positive feedback too?
Nicola: "Sometimes we do but I’m always quite surprised that people don’t really say very much at all. I often feel quite unloved actually!"
Kelly: "I’ve been down here and people have said they love the visuals and it always takes me by surprise… 'Oh, really? Thanks!' "

Q: People would definitely be more responsive if the slides weren’t here for a while. It’s a lovely venue, but the slides make such a difference!
Nicola: "I quite like the way that the slides just drift into your subconscious when they’re on the wall. Rather than making a big, powerful, look-at-me statement they just quietly sit there, ticking away."

Q: What are the strangest visuals you’ve ever done here at the Arts Club?
Nicola: "I know exactly what that is." (laughs)
Kelly: "What, the body bags?"
Nicola: "That was right at the beginning. I’ve never had so much fun as ringing up the morgue and asking for ten body bags. We projected onto the body bags, because they are white."
Kelly: "It was for a Tarantino-inspired night called Panorama and we did some sound for them too. Like there was a voice saying 'I’m going to get every fucking one of you!' being played on an old stereo hidden in the girls toilets…"

Q: I bet that freaked them out!
Kelly: "And then we took pictures of different parts of our bodies and we cut them up (the photos I mean, not our bodies)…"
Nicola: "…And I had to lie on your floor, naked, while you projected graphics onto me." (laughs)
Kelly: "And then we projected these pictures of our ghostly-white body parts onto the body bags in the back room. That certainly looked pretty strange.
Another time there was a promoter who wanted us to project porn imagery everywhere and everything had to be bathed in red light, which was kind of seedy…"
Nicola: "And then there was the Nothin’ But Funk night where we had to put pictures of women’s big arses everywhere. I had to try and be a little tasteful!"

Q: So how did you first get involved in visual projections?
Kelly: "I was working at the Australian Opera in Sydney, doing scene painting (which is paint-by-numbers really, it’s not that interesting) but the idea of big projections and what could be done with them became quite appealing. The Beastie Boys came out to Australia to launch a shop with their X-Girl and X-Large labels and they were doing a party. They asked me to paint some banners and I said no, 'but I’ll do some projections if you like.' So we went around the city with 16mm cameras attached to shopping trolleys. We shot a load of film and spliced it all up and projected it across these big banners along with slides and graphics so it was a big sort of collage of craziness and moving elements really. Everyone loved it, but I was about to leave Australia anyway. When I came back to London I moved in with my friend Dan Lywood [who later formed Sound Architecture] who knew Alan Grant who worked here at the nottinghillartsclub. The artsclub had only just opened, so this was about 1997. I was asked to do artwork for a new night so I phoned up Nicola. We’d been to college together."

Q: Doing Fine Art?
Nicola: "Yes, and during my course I’d made slides by cutting up all these coloured gels and I put Letraset on and graphics. I used magnifying glasses because it was incredibly fiddly, all working within the 24 x 36mm slide frame! So we’re pretty good with a scalpel and tape!
I can remember going to see The Orb at the Brixton Academy and seeing their visuals and thinking I want to do that! But when we first worked here at the artsclub I just had a Kodak Carousel [slide projector] and Kelly had one too, but we had about 768,000 hours worth of artwork because everything we did was hand-made."
Kelly: "The artsclub was the catalyst for us doing visuals on a serious basis. That was when we realised the potential, so we soon we got a few more projectors. Producing slides by hand was too time-consuming so we started taking our own pictures using EPY [tungsten-balanced] slide film and also photocopying images onto acetate, because we wanted to do text as well so that we could get away from the usual limitations of the frame – our work has always been a collage of overlaying images. Later we discovered Kodalith film [very high contrast black-and-white film] which was amazing, really lovely to work with – all the graphics guys all used to use it in the ’60s…"
Nicola: "All you got on Lith film was black or clear film. There was no grey mid-tones, so it was great for overlaying colour gels."
Kelly: "And the lines on that film were beautiful. Sadly they stopped making Lith film, which is a real shame for us! It’s the same with so many of the analogue technologies, they’re all being discontinued as it all goes digital, so you just can’t get hold of the film anymore…"

Q: Which nights are you fans of?
Kelly: "I think there’s a really broad spectrum of nights here at the artsclub, but I do end up to YoYo more often than I care to admit, especially to dance. I’m keen to go to Videopia [next on June 16], because that sounds great."

Q: Which other nights have stood out for you?
Kelly: "Lazy Dog, which Ben Watt and Jay Hannan did for years, was one of the craziest nights. It was like walking into some club in Ibiza or something: Pow!"
Nicola: "The energy level and the sweat were incredible. Those huge fans could never quite keep up with the heat generated by the crowd."
Kelly: "And all those mad Italians!"
Nicola: "I used to set that one up and I’d leave the club at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon and there’d be a huge queue of people outside drinking champagne. And as it went on they’d be arriving even earlier, it was an amazing ritual.
Shabs [Jobanputra’s] night, Outcaste, was another brilliant night. It was a really good little scene, the music was brilliant and the night had a really amazing energy. For Outcaste we got all these beach balls and painted them white and projected onto them."
Kelly: "There have been so many amazing nights down here. There was a book launch for a Martin Amis novel a long time ago, and I had a little dance with Salman Rushdie."
Nicola: "I had a glass of champagne with Lucien Freud."
Kelly: "And there have been some really funny times, including us wrapping David McHugh [the artsclub founder and manager] in cling film. I suppose we shouldn’t say that on the record." (laughs)
Nicola: "Just don’t mention anything else!"

Q: And do you also do visuals for one-off events at the artsclub?
Nicola: "Oh yes, of course! Bespoke imagery for any and every occasion!"

yourmumvisualsjewelspit.com

Interview and images: David Swindells

The result is a brilliant musical collaboration which finds inspiration all over the world, a duo who are producing and working with a fantastic, forward-thinking cast of artists and musicians from the Malawian-born, London-based Esau Mwamwaya to ex-Bonde do Role star Marina, MIA, Santogold and heaps more.

Every month they’re showcasing their latest productions and new live sets at one of the most exuberant, joyful and radical dance nights in the capital. Secousse event on Friday May 1 featured a live set by Afrikan Boy and Hackney Empire, and we caught up with Etienne to find out what Secousse means…

Q: What does Secousse mean? Is it ‘earthquake’ in French?
A:“It’s more simple than that. It means a shake, like shaking. An earthquake would be like a seismic secousse. You can use that term for earthquake but you can also use it for just shaking your bum or something! In Africa the name secousse turned into the music genre soukous. They appropriated the word but changed the spelling, but it‘s really the same word.”

Q: So why did you call the club night Secousse?
A: “There’s a famous French tennis player called Yannick Noah and back in the ’80s he did a very corny hit called ‘Saga Africa’ which is really, really bad. But as part of the chorus it goes ‘Saga Africa! Attention Secousse!’, which means beware of the shaking.”

Q: He was a great tennis player though
A: “Yeah, he was amazing, a proper showman, and he’s still one of the most popular people in France.”

Q: I’ve heard you describe the sounds at Secousse as “the new world music / bongo-dance thing”
A: “Yeah, yeah, we’ve got lots of words – it’s always been our thing to try to come up with new categories for our music because there was nothing available that fitted us. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not; it’s a bit dangerous when you’re a musician or a producer to describe your music but you know that people are going to put you into some categories so we always thought we’d better come up with some names ourselves. So we’ve been calling it ghetto pop. I quite like the idea of talking about third world music because at some point the third world idea was quite controversial and people didn’t want to hear about it even though it’s still pretty much a reality in the world that you have Europe, America and the rest – or the West, the former communist countries and the rest, however you want to see it – so I don’t know. A lot of that music that we play later in the night is quite violent and raw, all the club music that comes from those ghettos and stuff. There’s something really raw and hard about it ad we wanted a name that would reflect that rawness in the music.”

Q: Similarly, I’ve also read somewhere (probably on Fader, which really loves what you do – see www.thefader.com/tag/radioclit) you talking about Esau Mwamwaya’s music, which Radioclit have produced, as being “where traditional African music meets pop/dance/euro/crunk”, because it can go anywhere can’t it?
A: “Exactly. It’s a very exciting time for music. Music genres are fine to talk about music, but now they make less and less sense because people everywhere have the internet, the whole world is colliding and one scene is clashing with another. So I don’t know if you can talk about music using just terms like ‘techno’ or ‘rock’ or ‘world’ because it isn’t making much sense right now.”

Q: So how about global ghetto pop?
“I guess so. The words ‘global’ and ‘world’ keep coming back, but we haven’t got any better terms.”

Q: On May 1 you have Afrikan Boy performing live and I wondered whether African music is at the heart of Secousse because there are many elements within African music, like coupé decalé, kuduru and so many other rhythms and styles (and artists like Esau Mwamwaya incorporate many more), so, while it sounds quite post-colonial, is Africa still unexplored musical territory?
A: “Every culture has its rhythms. I could say a lot about South America, or native Americans, or the Arabs, or gypsies and Eastern Europe, but, also, and, it’s really hard to talk about it in scientific terms, there’s always this feeling that everything started in Africa and beats started in Africa.
Electronic music has become so big in Europe and America and this is so based upon the trance phenomenon – of the rhythm putting you into a trance – which is such an African notion. People don’t make the link, but when I hear people say that techno started with Kraftwerk, which is partially true, but it started two thousand or two million years before when people started hitting hollow logs and animal skins in Africa.”

Q: Have you worked with Afrikan Boy too?
A: “Yeah, we’ve known him for a while and he was one of the ten MCs on our last single (also called) ‘Secousse’, and we’re currently doing a track with him and with another African rapper called K’naan.
This whole tropical thing is becoming a bit fashionable at the moment but Afrikan Boy has always been one of the ambassadors of that scene. The first time I heard about Afrikan Boy was when I heard kids singing his song, ‘One Day I Went to Lidl’, on the bus. For a while, about two years ago, I was hearing that track all the time in Hackney. It was like a massive hit at street level, yet it wasn’t played on the radio, it wasn’t even a single and there were no labels behind it, but all the kids knew it by heart. That was such a powerful thing to witness; that’s when you really see how dynamic the music is for young people in England. It’s really amazing.”

Q: You’ve been working with many other artists too. Marina (formerly of Bonde do Role), MIA, Santogold, Vampire Weekend and others. Has this all been for the Esau Mwamwaya album project?
A: “No, no, no. Esau’s album is done and all of those people are on it but we’ve also been working on a lot of other stuff since we finished his album. We’re currently halfway through the production of Marina’s album so she’s the big thing for us right now, and has been for a few months.”

Q: So when did you finish the Esau [Mwamwaya] album and when is that out?
A:“We finished it a few months ago and it’s due out in September. The album is really pop; it’s definitely not a club record. I would say it’s more of a home-listening album.”

Q: Yes, you’ve described it as like a combination of Phil Collins, Lil’ Wayne and Madonna, with a traditional African singer on top of it all.
A:“That’s right. People will be surprised by it, especially those who know about Radioclit for their club music. We’ll be touring with Esau and going to festivals during the summer, going to America and to Europe – once we’ve sorted out the visa problems. There’s been a lot of immigration politics and the artists we work with (I could talk about this for hours!), including Mo Laudi, who used to be a resident DJ at Secousse. Mo Laudi is living in a village in France right now, but he’s trying to get back to the UK. He’s now our official MC around the world. When you see Radioclit DJ then you also have Mo Laudi on the mic, everywhere in the world except in England! But he’ll be back – we’re working on it.”

Q: Talking of touring, a few months ago you produced a brilliant mixtape, ‘Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit Are The Very Best‘ (download it at www.myspace.com/theverybestmyspace) and you’ve recently gone to the South by South West festival in America to perform. How did ‘The Very Best’ go down among the myriad rocking bands in Austin, Texas?
A: “That was really amazing. We’ve just recruited our American live team over there, so we had two amazing dancers who are really party girls like you’ve never seem before. And we had MoLaudi there too so we were a big crew, seven people all arriving on stage. There were all these indie and rock bands playing and then we came on and turned the place into a party basically. We did five shows in all and two of those were stopped in mid-performance because things were getting out of control. People were climbing on stage and it was really mad, actually. It’s great to feel that we were doing something so different from what everyone else was doing around us.”

Q: I was surprised when I heard you were going to South By South West!
A: “But people loved it! They’re really ready for it.”

Q: I bet they are. Because there have also been a lot of global and tropical samples, rhythms in indie and rock music recently too. Though isn’t that a bit like here we go again…?
A: “That’s the thing: world music is like a pair of jeans; it never really goes out of fashion. And if you look at the last three or four decades in music you’re always going to find big albums that could fit that category. There is a small trend at the moment, but I think western pop music is going to assimilate and use more and more sounds from across the world. It’s just the beginning now. Pop and rock music has been going in circles for a long time, the whole, bass guitar and drum set-up and all those rules that pop music has that are becoming really quite irritating now. I can’t wait to see what these clashes bring. You talk about indie bands using all these global influences but the opposite is really true. My favourite music at the moment is made in the Sahara desert by people called Desert Blues, it’s like the Tuareg in the desert and they use electric guitars to make rock desert. There’s also a great label called Sublime Frequencies and they released an album by Group Doueh, it’s like as if Jimi Hendrix went to the desert and made amazing psychedelic music with a trancey vibe and it goes really well with world music.”

Q: There’s definitely a kind of Hackney-in-West-London feel to Secousse!
A: “Yeah, you could say that. Everything we’ve done in the last few years was so east London-based, so it’s great to get into a new area. West London still seems like a new foreign territory for us to discover and invade!
It’s great, I really love Notting Hill, I love the mixed crowd and the fact that there’s a tourist vibe, there’s the posh, hot girls vibe, I love the more grimey Notting Hill feeling as well. We don’t do a lot of gigs in London and many of our friends are also living in the east and sometimes it’s a bit hard to bring them over. London is a big city and sometimes people don’t want to travel across it, but that’s part of the charm I guess.”

Q: Where else do you DJ that is really inspiring you? Paris? Stockholm?
A: “The Secousse idea is one that we want to export as well. I already did a Secousse in Paris and we’re doing one in Berlin soon and hopefully in Beijing in China also. I'm really hoping to take the Secousse sound to new places around the world.“

Q: And you’re going to be doing a radio show on London Fields Radio too?
“I hope so. I’m really tempted to do it. And the fact that there’s ‘Radio’ in Radioclit is partly because it started as a web radio show playing weird records and I quite like the idea of going back to that now.”

Below are a few images from Secousse at the artsclub. You can find more on our gallery page and some 300dpi high res photos on our press resource, both at www.nottinghillartsclub.com

catch Secousse every 1st Friday of the month

by Dave Swindells / May 2009

Local boy made good? Oh yes. But new Programme Manager Dom Prosser is much more than that; acting locally and thinking globally, he wants the Notting Hill Arts Club to have one of the best programme of nights in the world.

He’s done almost every other job in the club before taking over the programming role, and in an in-depth interview he talks about some of the strangest nights here, his passion for YoYo, why the Arts Club is so much more than a celebrity hangout and where else to go in West London. Oh, and he reveals his all-time top five trainers too.

The photo to the left shows him at the club with his pals Seb Chew (left) and Mark Ronson (mid)

Q: Hi Dominic, it’s Thursday afternoon, so you must be getting ready for YoYo?
A: ‘Yes, it’s quite a long build-up. It takes a few hours just to do the guest list for the night. People get to us through Facebook, MySpace, email, text messages, phone calls… so it’s a process of putting together this ridiculous puzzle.’

Q: Is it a little less mental now that La Roux has finished her residency?
A: ‘Yeah, that really was crazy stuff. We had hundreds of extra people wanting to get in each night.’

Q: What was your first-ever experience of the Notting Hill Arts Club? I imagine it was as a punter…
A: ‘It was through my friend Fedja who I started promoting with when I was 18. He was doing a night here called Soleal and when I came back from Australia having lived abroad for 2 years. I came down and I soon started promoting the night with him and bringing a lot of people down here. I was working for an internet company at the time, writing content for a skateboard website, and when the internet bubble burst I needed a job. Fedja suggested that I talk to Sonya [Lee] here at the Arts Club and she put me on the bar and after a couple of shifts they made me Bar Manager. That was way back in 2000.

Q: So what was your first impression of the Arts Cub when you came to Soleal?
A: ‘I remember seeing the DJ Booth under the stairs and I thought that was a unique feature, and I remember Tim, who’s now a very good friend, was working behind the bar, and thinking what a character he was. That’s it really: I just remember thinking that the Arts Club was full of characters and that I needed to do be a part of it, and that’s why I wanted to promote and later work there.’

Q: So your first job was behind the bar and since then I guess you’ve done most other jobs too?
A: ‘Yeah, I’ve worked cloakroom, I’ve worked the floor, I’ve done ‘bar back’ when necessary; I’ve mopped up; I’ve played in a band there once, (I’ll never do that again – because I’m fucking petrified of the stage); I’ve DJed several times; I’ve promoted, I’ve kicked people out, I’ve worked on the door, I’ve done everything, I’ve cleaned up sick…’

Q: No, well, let’s not dwell on that image. What does the Arts Club add to W11?
A: ‘This is my area and I feel very, very strongly about this area. For me the Arts Club is very much a bastion, or even a vendetta, against the gentrification of my area. I grew up and went to school around here [at Hallfield Primary and Holland Park Comprehensive, fact fans] and I feel very strongly about what this area offers to London in general. It’s very much a multicultural, diverse area that was one of the original bohemian areas of London and, as the area has moved on, inevitably it has become less dangerous, less edgy and less vital and less musically- and culturally-relevant for young people. And I feel the Arts Club is a bastion of the values that this area used to represent – multiculturalism, acceptance of all creeds and colours, and a feeling that art is a very important part of the community and can significantly improve the community. Also that everybody is responsible for their own area and that by taking responsibility for the area we’ll all have a better place to live.’

Q: What’s your favourite night?
‘It’s definitely YoYo. YoYo is my baby. I wanted to do hip hop here at the club for years and years. But I really wanted to get it right because it’s the kind of thing that if you get it wrong it will go badly wrong and we’ll never be able to do hip hop here again. So when Shabs [Jobanputra, who’s been a consultant to the Arts Club for the past decade] made us aware of Seb Chew and Leo Greenslade’s YoYo night – I already knew of Seb from way back when at Rotation [the long-running hip hop and R&B Friday nighter at Subterania, which later became Neighbourhood] and I knew Leo through his girlfriend (now his wife) – it just clicked immediately. YoYo was at Cherry Jam beforehand, but they’d stopped promoting it there and were looking for a new venue when Shabs wisely jumped on it. Shabs has been instrumental in bringing in a lot of our major nights, like Inspiration Information, Outcaste (which led to Bombay Bronx), Brazilian Love Affair and other stuff which Shabs has picked up on. He’s got a very good ear for music, he reads personalities very well and he knows who’s capable of pulling it off…’

Q: Other clubs do their utmost to get celebrities in. That’s not a feature of the Arts Club, but they often come here anyway. Is that problematic?
A: ‘I think it’s problematic in the sense that I don’t want people to think of us as a celebrity haunt. And it can be problematic insofar that journalists sometimes wrote about the Arts Club as “the hangout of Kate Moss and Sadie Frost”, and then it was “the hangout of Lily Allen” and now it’s sometimes referred to as “the hangout of Mark Ronson and Lindsay Lohan”. It’s quite frustrating when you work as many hours as we do each week, trying to make the music as good and as interesting and vibrant and current as it is, that you get people just picking up on the fact that Lindsay Lohan is in the club when she basically adds absolutely nothing to the club. It’s kind of irksome on that level. On another level, the only reason why Mark [Ronson] and Lily [Allen] are here is that they have a musical connection to the club because they’ve played here and they’re here for the music. Which is very flattering, because they’ve got a choice (as has everyone else). At the end of the day the reason they come here is because it’s an unpretentious club where they can get sweaty and just get into the music and not necessarily be the focal point of attention. I’m being quite magnanimous about this, but at the end of the day it’s pretty cool when Kanye West comes down. There are certain people that are pretty cool to have coming down. We almost had Jay-Z come here after The O2 concert in Hyde Park recently, and I think if Jay-Z had come to YoYo I might have just quit and said, “That’s it, I’m out of here, I’m all done, I’m satisfied now, bye!” (laughs)
There’s one more thing I wanted to say about celebrities and that’s that they’re attracted here by some things other than press and VIP rooms which is also flattering and important to remember.’

Q: It’s hardly as though you’re going to chuck people out of a corner and saying this is their VIP area…
A: ‘No, absolutely. And that’s cool. I like it like that.’

Q: What was your strangest experience there?
A: ‘Strangest moment here? God, there’s quite a few that I can’t mention (chuckles). Kanye West coming down here was pretty funny, and Fat Joe [American hip hop star] turning up was pretty strange as well. He really lives up to his name – he’s huge. And he has five guys with him who are all wearing massive jackets and they all came to the back of the dancefloor and they took up about a quarter of the room. They just stood there and nodded their heads for a while and every time I tried to offer them a drink or something they were just like “Nah, Nah, we’re cool”. And then they just kind of pushed me out of the way and marched out. It was quite weird!
There was a woman who did a performance where she covered herself in ketchup and ran around the club making aeroplane noises, and another time there was an amputee doing hanging contortionism (with rope binding), and there have also been naked girls doing a performance rolling around with loads of piles of flour on the floor…’

Q: You’ve had Craft Night here, so I guess that was Baking Night?
A: ‘Yeah, kind of. There have so many different types of odd. Every Radio Gagarin night will bring up some pretty strange moments!’

Q: Isn’t it easy programming the Notting Hill Arts Club, as there’s so little competition on this side of town?
A: ‘No, because we’re competing with every single club in London. And hopefully, not to sound too arrogant, with clubs around the world. I want to have one of the best programmes in the world.
Sometimes I look at the people who’ve played here over the years and I’m just amazed. But it’s because of the way that the club is set up, and because of the people that have been, and are, associated with the club. This isn’t all my doing! If you work with Alan McGee for ten years he’s going to pull things out of the bag that really couldn’t happen anywhere else. And the same applies with Seb and Leo at YoYo, and with Ben Watt and Jay Hannan at Lazy Dog, with Phil Asher and Patrick Forge, and so many others. They’re all people who have a long, long career in the music business, which helps attract some really amazing musicians to the club; we’ve been blessed by the people that pass through. A couple of Wednesdays ago we had Glasvegas play for free at Death Disco, we’ve had Kenny Dope [Gonzalez, of Masters at Work] DJing here on a night when it was £5 admission. I think those kind of events count for a lot, and in the grand scheme of things there aren’t many places that can compete with us on that level.’

Q: My impression is that there may be quite a lot happening in West London but only West Londoners (in their Facebook groups) know about it?
A: ‘Over the last ten to 15 years West London has been usurped by East London – a lot of club life has moved to East London. Consequently, the clubs have got smaller and cater more to locals and perhaps they’re no longer trying to reach out across London; they’re just trying to attract West Londoners. But I think that’s changing. There are a couple of venues which are being developed at the moment which will be able to attract people from across the city to West London again. If that doesn’t happen West London is in danger of becoming a rich ghetto for investment bankers and the like. We need investment bankers, but we also need the students and young professionals and hippies and everybody else to be comfortable as well.’

Q: So you would welcome more competition?
A: ‘Absolutely. I don’t see it as competition, I see it as enhancing the area. The more destination venues there are in the area the better for us.’

Q: Where else would you recommend Arts Club regulars to go on the Westside?
A: ‘OK, now you’re going to put me on the spot. There’s The Tabernacle on Powis Square, which has just been refurbished and will start to do stuff on a regular basis soon; at the moment there are one-off events there. It’s a beautiful building that was a very famous venue – the Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd and the like all played there. There’s also Ginglik in Shepherds Bush; it’s pretty small but they put on some very nice stuff; there are also live venues like Bush Hall and the Shepherds Bush Empire. There’s a scene developing in Kensal Rise, which is interesting, mostly in Victorian boozers which are being renovated and turned into music venues. The Paradise [Paradise By Way Of Kensal Green] is the spearhead of that, and they’ve got a pretty good programme there. And The Westbury in Kilburn is bigger and able to put on more ambitious musical programming. There is also project under the Westway that will hopefully come to fruition at the end of 2009 which could provide another arrow in our quiver!’

Q: What’s new and coming up at the Arts Club? The monthly Videopia has been a real hit…
A: ‘I’m absolutely bowled over by the public reaction to Videopia. I’m absolutely amazed that we could pull it off. Me and Harri [Harriet Knowles] came up with the idea, but at the first one in January we were worried. At the start of the night we were thinking “Oh God, we don’t know if anyone will show up, we don’t know how to do this and if it’s going to work, we don’t know if this will be interesting…” But yes, it was great. It’s been really good every time. You have to take that leap of faith and hope it comes off. I wish it happened more, but you have to put your thought and time and effort and word on the line and just say “it will work, it will work!’ And sometimes it does.’

Q: It chimed in with the way other people were thinking too.
A: ‘Yes, it’s had lots of media support, especially from Time Out and the BBC. They’ve particularly responded to the interactive element. We were looking for an interactive night with lots of audience participation. Too many things are attributed to the credit crunch but I think people are looking for more out of their experience (and their money) and they’re re-evaluating the way they spend their free time. That’s a good thing: asking for more out of your hard-earned money is perfectly reasonable, and it pushes venues to come up with something.
I think this is a trend actually. We’ve moved from having a DJ-driven culture to a culture of live bands, (as well as different styles of performance, like cabaret and burlesque) and from that to the next stage, which is interaction –- and coming away having felt that you’ve done something creative rather than just hedonism and escapism.’

Q: What’s been your worst experience?
A: ‘The worst thing is when you know you’ve got something that’s really good but the audience doesn’t respond to it. Like the Dive night that we ran here. I think if we’d done the Dive night now it would have gone off. At Dive we had DJs like Hannah Holland [Trailer Trash and Bastard Batty Bass], arch bloggers Slutty Fringe, we had DJ Warboy from All You Can Eat… We had the fidget house DJ all-stars, the Harlem Globetrotters of that scene, but we just did it a year early really. It’s very annoying because I would have loved that to have come off. It’s frustrating because there are only seven days a week, of which four are the days people actually want to promote on, so if I had ten Thursdays a month I could do some really great stuff! It’s frustrating because you want to be able to tick all the musical boxes and sometimes it’s just not possible. I really would like to do a gay and fidget house night at the moment, but I need to find the right person to do it.’

Q: But isn’t it true that many of the crowd who go to those (predominantly) gay and fidget house nights live further east and won’t necessarily travel across town to go out?
A: ‘There is an element of that. I try not to have geographical boundaries but I’ve always been of the opinion that if you book the right thing the club will be full, and if we only get 400 people coming through the club then we’ve had a super-successful night. And that isn’t a massive amount of people. But you’re right, that particular audience is very much centred around a geographically-specific area. It’s not even Bethnal Green, it’s Kingsland Road and Dalston. And they have bars and venues that satisfy their needs there, which is fine; I’m happy that they’re there and I’m happy that they’re having fun but they should live over this side and come to the Arts Club!!’

Q: By the same token there must be many people who’d appreciate those styles of music and clubbing who live in Shepherd’s Bush, Kensal Rise, Queens Park…
A: ‘Queens Park. That could be a bloody good name for the night, actually. Anyway, it’s about accessing the right crowd of people and giving them what they need. At the Arts Club we’re not trying to impose our will on other people, we’re trying to be a resource for the area. So it’s really about ascertaining what people want out of the club. And if there is that audience there, then I have to be able to represent them, but I need to find the right person to act as a conduit into that scene.’

Q: The Arts Club is famous for its diversity, but would you like to spread the net even wider?
A: ‘Of course.’

Q: Almost anything goes then?
A: ‘Not almost. Definitely anything goes. I’ll do an Eskimo or Innuit night here if there are 250 eskimos living within one hundred miles, and they want to dance.’

Q: As a skateboarder and all-round hip hop fan, name your all-time top five trainers?
A: ‘Trainers? Ooh, OK then…
1. Nike Jordan V. The black and silver Jordan Vs are # 1, without a shadow of a doubt.
2. Nike AirMax Lites.
3. Adidas Top Tens.
4. Adidas Decades.
5. Vans! I’d have to say the Vans Classic Hi

a few more pictures of Dominic in his natural habitat:

by Dave Swindells / April 2009

'We don't actually go out and say "Hey, non-Asians, come and hang out with the Asians!"' says Nihal. 'It's up to people if they want to come in, but it's been interesting recently, seeing people walking in to Bombay Bronx - without knowing anything about it - and really enjoying it.' In that respect it's like many other nights that happen at the Notting Hill Arts Club. Nihal himself enjoyed the Balkan-to-the-Baltic Eastern European night, Radio Gagarin, here. 'I went to that night,' said Nihal, 'and I'm not Eastern European, but I thought it was brilliant! So, in the same way, come to Bombay Bronx and hopefully you'll think it's brilliant because of the sheer energy, the music and the atmosphere.'

Q: Is it important to get non-Asian guests?
A: 'I think so. It's not just about getting Asian bands and artists [for a predominantly Asian crowd], it's about giving music that everybody likes really. We play such diverse music, from the big names in Asian music like Jay Sean, Raghav and Richie Rich, who've played there many many times, to Killa Kela who's been down there, Westwood has DJed there, so it's worth checking it out for this year as I really want to try something different with the fifth birthday coming in May.'

Q: If you were starting the night now now would it still be called Bombay Bronx? Or would you call Mumbai Rocks or Bangalore Beats or something?
A: 'Oh no. Most people in Bombay still call it Bombay so I would still call it Bombay Bronx. There's a kind of old school feel to both of those names - the Bronx obviously has an old school hip hop feel to me - and so there'd be no reason to change it as the name still works.'

Q: Last May you had the fourth birthday - did that night live up to the occasion?
A: 'It was amazing. Jay Sean performed, there were queues around the block, it was absolutely insane. I remember someone once said to me that you can't say you've properly done a club night until you've done a year and now we're in our fifth year, so to keep it relevant, and to keep programming it with new British Asian artists and above all perhaps, to have an Asian club night where there's no trouble - I think in over four and-a-half years we've had just two or three instances of trouble.'

Q: It has to be trouble free otherwise...
'It kills it off. There are other nights which have had a fair few problems over the years, and we're really happy that we've mostly avoided that.'

Q: How has the night developed - or is it pretty much the same concept that you started out with?
A: 'It's developed in the sense that new artists and new concepts come through. We've had really diverse artists within the Asian community, from hardcore bhangra to electronica to guys with drum machines; we've had human beatboxes and we've had MC battles and lots of different things. And, as I said, last year and this year we're trying to get that live thing back again; everything had to be live so you couldn't just come on and rap to a CD, there had to be some live instrumentation on stage.'

Q: I was going to ask you about the MC battles because you used to be a regular performer yourself didn't you?
A: 'Well, I used to pick up a microphone now and then, and if someone drops out I'll have a little go at trying to verbally humiliate someone, yeah, definitely. I still enjoy watching it on YouTube but I'm more of a backseat battler now, as opposed to being in the driving seat.'

Q: That's the way the night has been but how do you see it developing? More diverse British Asian performers?
A: 'Yeah, well, I don't spend every waking hour thinking how can it be different from any other Asian night because it kind of always will be. In fact, it's a bit sad that the Asian scene hasn't produced another night like Bombay Bronx over the past four-and-a-half years.

Q: A night to challenge it, I suppose...
A: 'Yeah, there are loads of Asian nights in London but there are none that attract the diverse crowd that Bombay Bronx does, from my hoodies to members of the Tory party. It's bizarre, the sheer breath of people from students to lawyers, fashion and graphic designers, musicians, producers and singers by the bucket load; just a real range of different people you know.'

Q: That's what you've always aimed for I guess: a sound and culture clash.
A: Absolutely. That's what it's all about. The whole point of Bombay Bronx was to try and recreate that moment in the 70s in New York when hip hop crossed over from the Bronx to midtown Manhattan and now those two crowds mixed for the first time, and that's kind of what I wanted to happen here in London...'

Q: So, as the press release says, the culture clash of desi divas and Asian bad boys. Is that still how it works for you?
A: 'Oh yes, I don't think it's changed. It's still very much about that meeting of people who perhaps have a bit of a mutual distrust of each other and through music they can hang out together. It's important to make sure that people aren't aggressive or sexist, that they're not idiots basically, so we keep the idiots out as well.'

Q: How about the musical mix? On your Bombay Bronx myspace you write about playing rap music (from De La Soul to Lupe Fiasco via Busta, Jay and Nas); Bollywood funk (from Naushad Ali and the great playback singers); raucous and beautiful drum 'n' bass (DJ Sanz, Brookes Brothers, Photek, Nasha Sounds and Chase & Status); bhangra from Miss Pooja and others and Sri Lankan rap and R&B... Is that still accurate?
A: 'Yeah. Yeah, all of that still applies, absolutely.'

Q: The Asian 8 Mile MC Battles used to be a major feature of the night. Was that a phase that the club went through or will that happen again?
'It could. We did it for two years but the problem was that it became so difficult to find MCs that could do it. Riz MC and Swami Baracus were the two guys who won during the two years that we did it and they're amazing guys. Riz MC is also the actor, Riswan Ahmed, who's done loads of films and TV shows, he was in 'Road To Guantanamo' and he called me today, he's got three movies lined up. He was a real regular at Bombay Bronx...'

Q:How much crossover is there between the Radio 1 show you do with Bobby Friction (or the Asian Network shows) and Bombay Bronx?
A: 'Quite a lot, in the sense that a lot of the new artists that we've played on Radio 1 have ended up performing at the club. We discovered a lot of them so it's great to showcase them at the night.'

Q: Bombay Bronx: It's where the Asian A-list hang out but nobody else would be interested. Discuss.
A: 'Hmmm. I'm not sure. Jamie Cullum's been quite a regular over the years... Some people may assume that, or say "Oh, that's that Asian club." But we don't actually go out and say "Hey, non-Asians, come and hang out with the Asians!" It's up to people if they want to come in. It's been quite interesting recently, seeing people walking in to Bombay Bronx - without knowing anything about it - and really enjoying it. I suppose it's like a lot of the nights that happen at the Notting Hill Arts Club, like the eastern European night, Radio Gagarin. Now, I went to that night and I'm not Eastern European but I thought it was brilliant! So, in the same way, come to Bombay Bronx and hopefully you'll think it's brilliant because of the sheer energy and atmosphere.'

Q: Slumdog Millionaire has a soundtrack by Bollywood legend AR Rahman which even includes MIA's 'Paper Planes'. Does that film feel like a pivotal event to you, or is it just a film industry moment?
A: 'I don't think it will have the same resonance, in music terms, that Punjabi MC did. That was very strange and we were right in the heart of that. That was very bizarre when that happened, and also what happened with the whole Asian music scene in 2003-2004.It's just an amazing film and it's great that a film that's set there has done so extraordinarily well, it's such a great story but does it suddenly mean that all Asians are cool?
I talked about it on Radio 1 as soon as I saw it. It's a great film, regardless of where you come from or what you do. City of God didn't suddenly make everyone want to be Brazilian or make Brazilian music.
Funnily enough, they just got me to do the voice-over for the sound track of the film, and Chris Moyles was taking the piss out of the fact that they got me to do it. He goes "I didn't know that the film was set in Essex!" He was quietly taking the piss out of the fact that when it came to getting somebody to do the voice-over, they got the Asian bloke to do it.'

Q: It could have been worse. They could have got Chris Moyles to do it.'
A: Exactly!'

Nihal's top five tunes:
Amar feat Rebel – ‘Show It Off’
A.R.Rahman – ‘Jai Ho’ (Wez Clarke Remix)
DJ Vix feat Shin – ‘Ah Chak Botel Daru Di’ (The Revix)
AG Dolla – ‘AG Dolla's Here’
Ranidu ft Pason & Kokiladevi Weerathunga’ – ‘Athamita Kasi’

Make a date for Bombay Bronx on the first Monday every month! www.myspace.com/bombaybronx

by Dave Swindells / April 2009