Yes, we’re having a baby. I say ‘we’, obviously my wife is doing most of the leg-work, but it takes two you know.
After grumbling that all the books you get (for ‘free’ (Bounty sneaky marketing)) are aimed at and written for women, my wife bought me a book entitled ‘Pregnancy for men, the whole 9 months’ for Christmas. I’ve read most of it and I have to admit to being utterly scared and intimidated.
Having a child is probably one of the most important things you could do with your life, yet it’s some thing your feel utterly unprepared for. Why is there no (mandatory) course, A-level or degree qualification for becoming a parent? There bloody well should be. I mean we’ve got sex education, how about some parent eduction? You know where babies come from, but no one tells you what to do once you’ve successfully produced one. They just sling a load of books at you and expect you to get on with it (and they wonder why there are so many hooligans). Seems like madness to me.
So yes, I’m excited, but I’m scared too. I’ve learnt all sorts of things, including stuff I wish I didn’t know and quite frankly it’s all a but much. There are the obvious things, things that everyone knows, like how you’ll have to change lots of nappies, survive on no sleep and pay out literally hundreds of thousands of pounds before they’re even a teenager, but it’s all the other stuff. Like ‘feet to foot’ – wtf is that?
Then there’s the stuff that’s so blatantly obvious that I didn’t even think of it. For example, the book says about packing a hospital bag, ready for the delivery and don’t forget the car seat. The baby seat! How did I not even think about that? How else will I get little nipper home. My mind is already worrying about so many other things I’ve forgotten the most obvious. Yet, I haven’t, because it’s not happened yet. But it could, it might. In my theoretical, panic-striken world, it already has. There I am, in the car park, baby in arms, wife glaring at me as I realise I have forgotten the baby seat. That one little thing. Of course, it’s just a little thing, but there are so many little things and they all add up.
Then there’s the big things, like how the hell can we afford it? Where will we fit another human being in the house? What the hell are we going to do when my wife needs to go back to work? You ask other parents this and they always respond the same way. ‘You’ll cope,’ they say in a wise voice. ‘How?’ I ask. ‘You just will.’ Oh, nice helpful answer there, thanks. Bastard.
Of course we’re only 12 weeks in and there’s plenty more to think about between now and the day I’m starting my child in the eyes. And between now and then there’s all sorts of shit that can go wrong and if it doesn’t go wrong it at least needs to be tested for. Downs syndrome, cleft palette, cleft lip, AIDS, hepatitis, defects and abnormalities, myxomatosis and God knows what else. Then there’s the problems with the mother and potentials for her. I won’t go into it, but I’ll say I’m glad she’s the one doing the donkey work…
Oddly though, the thing that scared me most only actually took up about 2 pages in the book. It was about how the birth of your child will effect your relationships. Mainly with your partner. How the person you know and love will utterly change. The baby will be their world, not you. Reading that, it clicked. I got it. That’s why I know so many people who have children with ex-partners. Perhaps that’s a paranoid generalisation and I’m certainly not saying the baby will pop out and I’ll want a divorce but I know it will put a strain on us.
It makes sense for the woman to bond with the baby and know what’s best, I just don’t want to get excluded because of that. Nor, have my opinions dismissed for that reason. I know what my wife is like too. She’s always right (or thinks she is) and quite often treats me like an idiot. So I know what it is going to be like before it’s even happened. We’ve already talked about when they (the baby) is older and we need to discipline. I know she’ll undermine me and disagree in front of the child. I can see it now. I’ll be the bad guy. I’ll be my Dad.
Is that it? Is that my destiny?
I sound negative, but actually my thoughts are of suddenly having found a purpose in life, a reason for living, 42.
If I can be half the father my Dad was, I’ll be a good one.
Now I’m in my 30′s (and counting) and suddenly I realise why I should love my Dad and tell him more often than I do.
Dad and I have never really been chums. To be honest, when I was young he was often grumpy, tired and irritable. I, as the eldest son, would suffer the brunt. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a bad Dad. He didn’t neglect or abuse me. We just didn’t get on. A lack of common interests, an age gap and stress of work caused us to be distant at best. He did spank me when I was naughty and at the time I hated him for it. I got the slipper, the hand across the arse and a good hard spanking when I deserved it. I remember he said ‘I’ll slap you so hard you won’t sit down for a week’ and he wasn’t lying either. I still remember the throbbing pain now. But I don’t hate him for it. If anything, I’m glad he did it. He made me who I am today – a God-fearing, law-abiding citizen and a good son (I hope).
And all those things I hated him for then are the things I love him for now. Of course, I can never tell him that. We don’t have that kind of relationship. He’s an old school man who won the bread, expected dinner on the table when he got home and believed that children should only speak when spoken to. Once, a few years ago, in a drunken stupor, he actually apologised for ‘being a bad father’ – I corrected him, but I’m not sure he believed me. Nonetheless, the sentiment moved me.
Now, as I grow old in years, and the prospect of starting my own family looms, I’ve come to realise I don’t love him enough.
We barely talk, we barely see each other and I know, when he dies, I will shed a tear. Yet, he drives me mad, and I him, no doubt. But he is still my Dad.
When I was recently contemplating life and it’s meaning, I pondered on the point of it all. Why bother having children if that’s what happens? They grow up, move away and barely speak to you. Of course it doesn’t have to be that way, but you can’t really control it. Can you?
Anyway, I’m rambling. I just want to say Dad, I love you and everything you ever did for me and one day I’ll have the courage to tell you.
Awwwwoooooga Awwwwoooooga this phone is stolen or lost….
That is the cry of an Android phone protected by Avast! Mobile Security. A new app I discovered just the other day completely by accident.
I’ve always been a fan of Avast! Anti-Virus since I ditched Norton back in 2005, so I was thoroughly disappointed when I bought my Android phone and found nothing but AVG to protect it. But, the wait was worth it. Sure, Avast! Mobile Security is still in (free) beta, but what a beta!
Much more than just virus protection
Avast! Mobile Security is much more than mere virus protection, it’s a whole wonderful package.
The most impressive feature is in the security features. With ‘smart’ phones one of the biggest fears is losing your phone or having it stolen. No longer is such an occurrence the mere headache it was in the old days. Now thieves have potential access to a wealth of information about you, not just contact details but emails, text messages, emails, website logons, Facebook access, etc, etc. But worry no more, Avast! Mobile Security is here to save the day! It is bloody clever too.
Set it up, with the addition of a pin and your phone is then protected and if it is ever stolen or lost you can access a wealth of features to protect or recover it.
Avast! Mobile Security requires you to set up one or two friends as ‘trusted’ numbers, then when the time comes you simply send a text from their phone to your stolen phone. Include the PIN and the relevant code and you can do all sorts of things, the most extreme of which includes a wipe of all the data.
There are plenty of options to choose from, lock the phone, track the phone via GPS, cc all calls and text messages to your friends phone and even set off a loud and annoying alarm which screams about the phone being stolen.
One of the best parts is the text is never actually displayed on the stolen phone, so the thief might not know what is happening. Even if they do, they might not be able to do anything about it. Avast! Mobile Security is built to be a phone admin, meaning without the pin it cannot be removed or uninstalled. A factory reset won’t work either (apparently), so your phone is thoroughly protected.
It was just lost, not stolen!
Lost your phone around the house? Not a problem! Avast! Mobile Security allows you to send ‘off’ or cancel messages to. Grab your friends phone and SMS your pin and ‘siren on’ once you’ve found your loud phone, SMS ‘siren off’ – job done.
Probably a good idea not to give the PIN to your friend or they could easily abuse you in the middle of an important work meeting.
All this, plus ongoing anti-virus protection, scheduled scans and a wealth of other features, for free? Avast!, I love you.
Before I write this, I just want to make it clear I am not rascist and I believe everyone is entitled to a job where ever they work, but really if you are going to work with English speaking people, you should probably be able to speak English….
I wrote to EA customer support because I want to buy a copy of B2K as a gift for a friend, but there is no obvious ‘gift’ button in the store. So after checking the FAQs I wrote a concise message to EA customer support. This was the reply….
Dear Adrian,
Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.
I have manually entitle “Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand Expansion Pack” on your acccount. Now you should be able to access it.
I hope this helps.
Regards, Ravi kumar Electronic Arts – World Wide Customer Experience
Erm, what? That’s not quite what I meant. Wasn’t I clear enough? I said I wanted to buy it for a friend as a gift, but couldn’t see an option. I already have it myself, why would I want it again?
It is awfully stereotypically British of me to complain about an Indian person not understanding me. But it honestly isn’t meant that way, it’s just funny. I guess they’ve had a lot of complaints about Back to Karkand not working and it’s just a generic, token response that utterly failed to answer my question. Perhaps they don’t want my money?
Google has quite a history of being abused and ‘gamed’ in order to manipulate the search results – usually for financial gain. Black hat SEO techniques were historically used to get business websites to the top of the listings fast. But in modern times such techniques are likely to get your website permenantly banned from the search results and it’s not worth the risk for short term gains. Of course that doesn’t mean the system doesn’t still get abused.
‘Google bombing‘ is an amusing occurrence that happens every now and then when a group of people manipulate results with links and social media in order to tweak Googles results.
The most recent bombing incident occurs when you type ‘Define an English Person’ into Google. Of course, it’s been all over the internet now and news sites have knocked the original 1st spot off the top, but it originally came up with a wikipedia page about the term ‘C*nt’. Classic shennanigans. Of course, the issue has been raised with Google and they are said to be ‘looking into it’.
It’s always interesting to see the search results getting manipulated like this. How many businesses are abusing the same techniques. Wikipedia is unlikely to suffer and would hardly be upset for losing first place listing for that search term, but it is still interesting.
As a lifelong gamer I have fond memories of certain games that I know I’m viewing through rose-tinted goggles and if I went to play them now, they’d be bloody awful. Grand Theft Auto 3 is a perfect example. I loved that game. But when I tried to play it on my PS3, it looked awful, the draw distances were terrible and it was clumsy. Yet, in its day it was fantastic, beautiful and ground-breaking.
Then there was Dizzy. Ah, Dizzy. Small little egg and prince of the Yolk Folk. I have wonderful memories of Dizzy. I used to play Dizzy games way back on the Commodore 64, when we used cassette tapes to load games. Cassette tapes? My children won’t even know what such thing is. I have hazy memories of an awesome platform/rpg adventure where I controlled Dizzy and explored a magic land full of Lions, Trolls, Princesses and, of course, Dilan.
Later in life, I found a wonderful woman who later became my wife. She too had experienced Dizzy, but on PC. Yes, the little egg had had an upgrade and was bouncing about on PC monitors. Fantastic. I relived those classic hazy days with gusto.
Now, it’s 2011 and Codemasters (yes, they are still around!) have redesigned Dizzy Prince of the Yolk Folk for Android and iPhone. Fantastic. It’s the classic Dizzy, with a brand new skin. Ok, so it’s short game and only takes around an hour to complete – especially if you still remember how to complete the puzzles and what counts as red herrings (rather than taking every item and rubbing it against everything in sight until something works) but it is still fantastic and didn’t ruin my hazy gaming delusions. Dizzy is still awesome and now a steal at £1.49…
Format: Lolloping. I love the word lolloping, it’s stupid, it’s great. When you see someone lolloping around it makes me laugh!
Otherwise, the word ‘Word’ is good. It’s one of those silly hip hop slang things where people use it and it has multiple vague meanings. It’s one of those words that we as English gentlemen wouldn’t use, apart from ironically. But then it gets to the point that you use it so often ironically that it’s just become part of your vocabulary. I got a birthday card from my mate the other day and it said in there ‘word’. *laughs*
Age: What’s your least favourite word?
Format: Bling. I really hate that word. It actually makes me angry. And ‘celebrity’ – that’s the worst word because people just attach it to something to try and justify shit TV show or a shit anything. Anything that’s shit, put the word ‘celebrity’ in front of it and it’s great – celebrity X-factor, celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Come Dine With Me. It’s the worst word.
Age: What turns you on?
Format: Just good music and good comedy. I was going to say usually British comedy, but that’s not true because there is so much American nonsense that I like, like Family Guy, American Dad, I love that stuff. Plus The Simpsons is probably my all time favourite TV show.
Age: What turns you off?
Format: Modern celebrity culture and people obsessed with money.
Age: What sound do you love?
Format: Loads
Age: Just pick one.
Format: Yeah but sometimes you can hear a record and you’ll hear a harmonica and you’ll just feel like ‘I love the harmonica’ or an electric guitar will come in and I’ll love that. That’s the thing. It depends what it is and in what context. What I love more than anything. What absolutely just does it for me above anything else is the sound of a raw drum break. There’s nothing more exciting than that.
Age: What sound do you hate?
Format: The warbling bass you get in dubstep – fucking horrible.
Age: What is your favourite curse word?
Format: Shyte. Because it’s almost so silly that it’s not offensive. You could say ‘shit’ and someone might get offended, but if you said ‘shyte’ it’s almost forgivable.
Age: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
Format: I’d be quite happy doing something like carpentry again. I wasn’t very good at it because of the OCD, I’m too slow and careful. But I just like creative stuff, the idea of making things is quite nice. So it would have to be something creative in some way.
Age: What professional would you absolutely not like to try?
Format: It’s funny, I spend so much time, here on my own, in my miserable studio and I love it. But I wouldn’t want to be stuck in an office. I worked in an office occasionally as part of a job i once had where I was mostly on the road, but I couldn’t do that all the time.
Age: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
This is the 3rd part of my interview with the illustrious DJ Format – which focuses on his upcoming album ‘Statement of Intent’.
Age: How did you end up with Sureshot La Rock on the new album, rather than Abdominal?
Format: Just because me and Abdominal have done a lot of songs together over a certain period of time and I think we just naturally wanted to do some stuff without each other for a bit. I was only ever borrowing him from DJ Fase. It was originally Abdominal and DJ Fase and I was lucky enough to borrow him and we had a great partnership, but it’s hard to keep things constantly fresh and Abs wanted to go off and explore different things, musically, lyrically and vocally that probably wouldn’t have fitted in with what I’m doing. And I wanted to go and explore new things that also warranted someone else taking charge of the vocals. We’ve done a lot of stuff together that we’re proud of, but it’s time to move on.
Age: How did you get from that point to Sureshot La Rock?
Format: I was working with a collective called ‘Diggers With Gratitude’ (DWG) which is basically guys that are really passionate about music and collect really obscure overlooked rap stuff from back in the days. I am good friends with one of the guys that runs DWG and we talked about the idea of doing a mix CD which rather than being completely rare undiscovered treasures and super-rare test pressings it could include some great records that people have overlooked that are easy to get. DWG then got the rights to do a load of unreleased Juice Crew songs that hadn’t come out back in the day. They got the rights to release them on vinyl and it was a massive coup to have got these songs and we wanted to do something to help advertise it. They also got a load of unreleased stuff from Main Source (which would have been for their second album), and between the different guys in DWG, they had some pretty exclusive stuff and we all had a bunch of ideas of overlooked records that we thought we could throw in the mix. Sureshot was also a member of DWG and hadn’t written rhymes for years, but was a passionate music guy that still collected records – which is how I got introduced to him, while working on this mix CD. It was mostly me and Sureshot doing the bulk of this mix. I was putting the music together using my computer and the decks and Sureshot was hosting it as an MC. We did it as a kind of a faux radio show. We weren’t trying to fool anyone, it was just meant to have the feel of an old radio show, with people calling in and making requests for songs we already had lined up to play. That’s how we met and hit it off. We realised we had so much personally and musically in common. He played me some old songs that he’d made and some old raps that he’d written but not quite finished and I got really excited and realised that this was the rapper that I’d been looking for – this my new right hand man. We wanted to make the same kind of hip-hop, being serious about our music but not taking ourselves too seriously.
Age: The last album was released in 2005 and it’s now 2011, what have you been doing all this time?
Format: Since the last album, the first big thing was the FabricLive mix which was really great for me. It was around that time that I was looking to start making the new album and it helped because it opened people’s ears to the fact that I wasn’t just a DJ that stood behind the turntables while Abdominal was rapping – I was a DJ first and foremost. It also showed that I don’t just play hip-hop but also soul, funk and other things of that nature. Suddenly I was seen as more than just a hip-hop DJ, which was a great thing, because I’m not just a hip-hop DJ. Around that time, Abs was working on his own solo album ‘Escape From The Pigeon Hole’ and he wanted to do some songs that were in the same vein as the previous work we’d done together. So I produced three songs for his album which we were both really happy with and then I did some mix CDs of my own like European Vacation which was a mix of funk and jazz that I collected on my travels around Europe, especially Eastern Europe, in like Poland, Hungary and places like that and I did the Holy Shit mix CD with Mr Thing which was us just cutting up weird religious records that had cool breaks on them. Then I did my Stealin’ James 12 inch around that time which was my James Brown cut ‘n’ paste tribute.
Around the time I started working towards my new Format Album (Statement of Intent), I started working with Simon James, who had been involved in my stuff previously, mixing songs and helping me out with technical wizardry. We’d both been listening to the same kind of music and been inspired by it – music for film and television, library music, sound tracks and experimental electronics. So we started working on a couple of songs together that were really intended for my Format album and we soon realised that we were going off in a different direction and it wasn’t really suitable as a Format thing. So we used the name ‘The Simonsound‘ and ended up doing a whole album of this kind of material (Reverse Engineering), all inspired by the music we liked. I’m really proud of that album.
I also did some remixes for people that I was really proud of – two remixes for Speedometer, a remix for The Quartertones and some others.
I was constantly working on new music, but it took me a while to find the direction for my new album because ultimately I didn’t want to do the same stuff that I’d done before but also I didn’t want to change completely. I love making music the way that I do, I sample, I use heavy drums, that was going to change but I needed to evolve a little bit. I tried recording with live musicians, some of that worked out, some of it didn’t. It was just a really experimental time and the fact that it’s taken this long to actually get to the point where I’ve finished an album that I’m 100% happy with is not an indication that I’m so damn slow at working (which I kind of am) or out of good ideas – it was just a case of me wanting to take my time until I was 100% happy. I didn’t want to get an album out just for the sake of releasing an album to stay as a ‘current’ artist in the forefront of people’s minds. I’d rather put out nothing than rush out something that wasn’t quite right. It took me a long time to get my focus and direction back and meeting Sureshot really helped with that. He can step away and look at a record as a whole rather than just measuring his own contribution. Sometimes, it’s really not healthy to do every part of a record on your own, without any kind of input.
Age: You previously told me that one of the tracks for the album has been in the works for 13 years, how did that happen?
Format: A lot of my songs are ideas that I might have started a long time ago, got them to a certain stage where I thought they were really promising, but then got stuck. A lot of people would think ‘oh well, that’ll do’ but I don’t do that. I think it’ll happen when it happens. I’ll be out digging one day and I’ll find a record, bring it home and it’ll be a perfect match for what I’m looking for. That happened with one song on my album. It’s called ‘Mayor of a Ghost Town’. I started that 13 years ago as a rap song with some old friends that I was working with and basically I just started out with this lovely violin sample and heavy drums and the rest of the music was completely different but, the song involved 3 different rappers and at different stages they all fell out with each other and basically nothing was going to happen with the song, but I always felt really happy with this violin section that I had and I felt that I could do something quite grand with this song – make an epic instrumental out of it. It took me years and years of finding breaks for this song and trying them out. It used to be called ‘Violent Violins’ that was the working title. Sometimes a sample or two would work, sometimes they wouldn’t. It took a long time to slowly add bits and then finally I found a sample that was almost what I wanted but needed to be changed slightly so I took it to my friend Sanj who is a fantastic musician with a great musical understanding but he also has a great hip-hop knowledge and understanding that other musicians often don’t because he used to be in a hip-hop group called ‘First Down’ years ago. So he is a perfect person to work with. He replayed some of these pianos for me and he was able to give me options of possible changes. Then we got in some musicians to play violins, cello and someone to play bass and it was quite a large undertaking. Again, some of it worked, some of it didn’t then I’d add more samples. I’d put it away for a few months, then go back to it later, but I never settled, I wanted to wait until I was 100% sure. Finally I got together with Simon and he had a load of interesting electronic sounds that he’d created at home and we sat together picking out sounds to subtly add some atmosphere to the song as it just needed a little extra something. After 13 years I was happy and gave it the title ‘Mayor of a Ghost Town’ – I don’t know why. Other people would probably have settled a long time ago. It might be that anyone who hears it doesn’t even like it and thinks it’s rubbish or boring, but it’s a personal thing. For me, I love it, I’m proud of it and it’s crazy that over a period of time I’ve built up this musical jigsaw that ended up being this song that I’m now proud of. I get a kick out of that. The satisfaction I get out of that is really hard to describe.
Age: So you’d say that Statement of Intent is ready for release then?
Format: Statement of Intent is absolutely ready in so far as it’s completed. But as we speak February would really be the ideal time. I was waiting on Edan to finish his rhymes. We’ve been trying to work on this collaboration for a long time together. He’s the same as me, he won’t settle, he’ll wait until he’s got his songs just right. I’m grateful to be able to work with someone like that. Someone who would extend me the same respect as they would treat their own songs with. Unfortunately though, that pushed things over my deadline, I was hoping to release by August at the latest but it was only finished at the end of July. So I had to take the decision that it would have to wait until the start of next year, because if I tried to release it at the end of the year then it would just be forgotten. At the end of the year, people are looking to the next year and at the start of the year people will pay more attention. It also gives me more time to prepare and make sure my profile is out there. I obviously want people to be aware that I’ve got this record coming out and hopefully they are anticipating it.
Age: Where did the title come from?
Format: It was just something I kept hearing myself saying to Sureshot. ‘I’ve got to have a statement of intent’ – just an expression that I kept saying to show the way I wanted to come back with some music to let people know that I meant business. Then I realised that it wasn’t a bad title. It’s really difficult to find a good album title. The first album ‘Music for the Mature B-Boy’ was really the perfect title for what I’m all about and the way I view the music that I make. Music for the people that are maybe a little bit older, into hip-hop but just don’t get modern music. The second album, I just wanted to find a way of saying ‘Music for the Mature B-Boy’ but in different words and the best thing I could do was say ‘If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em’ which was my way of saying ‘I don’t care what everyone else is doing, I’m going to do it my way.’ Which was a slightly more aggressive way of saying it – this is my thing, this is what I want to do and I don’t like the way other people are doing it so I’m going to do it my way. So I suppose with the third album ‘Statement of Intent’ ultimately I’m still making music for the mature B-Boys and girls but it’s my Statement of Intent – I’m not fucking about making some OK songs. People may hate them but to me they are proper balls-out songs that I’m happy to be judged on.
Age: Why is the order of the tracks so important?
Format: Because if you’re going to enjoy an album as an album, rather than just a gathering of songs, then the flow and continuity of it is very important.
On my first two albums I spent a lot of time deciding the order. With this new album it wasn’t as difficult to come up with the order. Certain decisions forced the order of the vinyl. I have four down-tempo, moody songs that are less likely to be played in clubs and they need to be the last tracks on the vinyl and it’s going to be on double vinyl, so I knew each one of those songs had to go last on each side of vinyl. This is because the start of the vinyl is the loudest, best quality sounding part of the vinyl and the closer you get to the middle, the more the sound starts to deteriorate. You want to have your big boom-bap songs at the start because they’re more likely to be played in a club environment. That was one factor, deciding that the slow songs finished each of the 4 sides of vinyl. Another factor was that Sureshot was on so many songs that I had to space those out accordingly, so you didn’t hear loads of him on one side, then nothing on the other. I also needed to get the balance between instrumental songs and vocal songs. All these factors shaped things a certain way and the way I naturally started to arrange it to suit those needs just felt right. For the CD and digital release I had more freedom to change the order without worrying about the vinyl sound quality issues so the order is slightly different.
Age: So do you give the CD the same consideration?
Format: I give the CD massive consideration and also the digital release. In a way, that’s more important than the vinyl in terms of the continuous flow, because on vinyl you never listen to it as a whole album, because you’ve got to stop and turn the vinyl over. So yes, it is important and I want people to listen to it as a whole and enjoy it as an entire album. I like a good old fashioned album, where you are drawn in by one song, then maybe you like this song and that song and maybe you’re not sure about another song but because it’s put together in such a way, those songs might grow on you. A lot of songs can be overlooked, in this age where people can just download the songs that they like, I think that people should listen to the whole album a few times, then they can really decide which songs they do and don’t like. Some of them aren’t instant. The ‘club’ tracks have to hit you instantly, but listening to an album in your own time and in your own space is a different experience. I’ve got songs that are suitable for club play and some that aren’t. Songs that are slow-burners and growers. A song like ‘Copper Canyons’ is something where you might find you like the main loop but the more you listen to the song, the more it builds up and up and gets more intricate with loads of different strings, flutes and percussion samples. It’s not exactly a hip-hop song. I don’t know what to describe it as, but it belongs in that genre that you have to acknowledge that DJ Shadow created with his first album. He made great sample based songs that were so inspired by hip-hop and put together using the hip-hop blue print but ultimately it was hard to just pigeon-hole them as hip-hop, but what the hell else do you call them? Songs that I’ve done like ‘Copper Canyons’ and ‘Mayor of a Ghost Town’ – they kind of fit in that bracket that hasn’t really got a title. Songs like that were very much, I don’t want to say ‘inspired’ by Shadow’s album as such, it wasn’t like I made them with that in mind and I don’t want to sound like I’m somehow favourably comparing my own music to DJ Shadow’s first album because that would be presumptuous. That album is obviously a great album and considered to be a classic by most people. I’m just pointing out that he made a certain type of song…possible. To me, some of my songs fit into that bracket. I use his first album as my own clumsy description of what these songs sound like because I don’t know how else to describe what I’ve done. It’s kind of hip-hop, but it’s kind of not, it’s moody, it uses loads of samples. I guess as someone that explores music a lot and uses loads of samples, I’ve just gone down a similar path to DJ Shadow, only 15 years after him!
Age: Can you ever see yourself doing an album where it’s just tracks like that?
Format: No. I’d love to, but ultimately, they are the songs that take the longest. As I said to you, ‘Mayor of a Ghost Town’ technically took me 13 years. On the other hand, ‘Copper Canyons’ came together a lot more quickly. There’s a lot of intricate parts to that song and yet it came together relatively quickly. The first few chunks were put together about 3 years ago and I left it and kept coming back to it, but the rest of it came to life in the last 6 months. So it didn’t take 13 years, but it still happened over a long period. I’d love to do an album of instrumental stuff like that, but I don’t think I could, realistically, put together enough songs like that, which are of the quality that I demand of myself. I just don’t think I could realistically do it.
I do have other songs like that still on the go, but I couldn’t finish them to my own satisfaction in time for this album. So they are on the back-burner, ready for the next album or the one after. Who knows how long I’ll be doing this stuff? Just as long as I’ve got inspiration, I’ll keep working on these songs and keep making more music.
Age: Can’t you just put those aside and dedicate them to a Shadow-esque album?
Format: But that’s the thing, if I’m just doing it on the side, it would just be forever before they were finished. And because they take so long, an album would have to be only 10 or 11 tracks. And you were saying albums weren’t long enough.
Age: But those tracks could be longer, a lot longer to compensate.
Format: Yeah, those do tend to be longer, those kinds of tracks, especially as they are slower. If you’ve got a fast track that plays for 16 bars and then a slow track that plays for 16 bars, you’re just going through the natural cycles and the slower one is just going to be longer. But I do like the fact that I can put together an album that is so diverse. It works as an album, but there are a lot of different styles within it. I don’t know if ultimately I’d want to have an album with just those songs, because then I’d only appeal to just that audience. I like the idea that there’s something for everyone on my album. There’s all out 130bpm b-boy tracks, then there’s down-tempo moody instrumental DJ Shadow-esque tracks like we just discussed, then there’s straight-up Big Daddy Kane inspired rap tracks with Sureshot and then there’s a mad psychedelic rap-meets-rock track with Edan. Then there’s an old school song with Phill Most Chill and Sureshot. Then there’s two kind of bluesy-jazz tracks with Nostalgia77 and then there’s two crazy spaced out b-boy tracks with The Simonsound and somehow this is all on one album and it fits together perfectly- or it does for me. I don’t know about everyone else, but it seems to feel right to me. I like the diversity of that, but it still feels like one album from one artist.
Age: What are you doing differently this time?
Format: I think you can hear the influence of the music that I’ve been listening to over the past few years, which is definitely more heavy rock and psych from the late 60′s and 70′s. That doesn’t mean to say that the album is just that, but you can hear the influence a lot more. There are elements of it in the album, but there’s not electric-guitars all over the album. I think it’s just a more mature sound than before. Ultimately, it’s fundamentally still MY sound but it’s like things have grown up a little bit and advanced a little bit. That’s the way I like to think of it. There are still elements of fun within it and there’s still moments of real b-boy energy in it. It’s not a million miles away from the music that I’ve done before, it’s just a bit more mature and considered but that doesn’t mean that I’ve sucked all the life out of it. It’s got so much energy and I feel that this is my best work. I’ll always be proud of songs like ‘We Know Something You Don’t Know’, ‘Last Bongo in Brighton’, ‘Ill Culinary Behaviour’, ’3 Feet Deep’, ‘Black Cloud’, ‘Rap Machine’, even ‘Ugly Brothers’ - as light-hearted as it is, that’s just me.
Age: What have you learnt from previous releases that you’ve done again?
Format: The most important thing I’ve learnt from my previous releases is actually something that I’ve avoided. When I made my first album it was just completely me doing what I wanted with no expectations from anyone. Then things got quite successful and me and Abdominal ended up touring around the world and all that great stuff. When it came to recording the second album, there was a lot of emphasis on making sure that I made an album that could be performed on tour, because I realised that was going to be a large part of it. So we decided we should get another person in to rap with Abdominal and be part of the show, we bought in D-sisive, I guess I geared the album around live performance a lot more. For my new album, I realised that I just want the music to be the best that it can be without any other consideration. I don’t want to think about touring and the possibilities of that, because first and foremost music is music. The most important thing. Touring is ultimately now the best way to make money but now I’m happy to go out as a DJ and play my DJ gigs and maybe not maximise things financially but concentrate on the music. It’s a bit more difficult to tour now anyway, because with Sureshot, he’s got his own life in America, he’s got children and a family that he’s very much committed to, he can’t just up and leave to go on tour with me. I knew that from a very early stage and I made a concerted effort to say that it doesn’t matter as I want the music to be as good as it can be as an album. All that other stuff doesn’t matter. I don’t want to look back on this album and regret bits of it because I focused on other things. There are certain elements of my second album that I look back on and I regret – like trying to squeeze in a song here or there because we’d be able to perform it live. In hindsight, it’s hard to regret it too much because things went well, the touring went well, but I want this new album to be the best it can be and the touring will have to be a second consideration after the music.
Age: Would you say you made the second album in such a way so you could make more money from touring?
Format: God no! I don’t mean it in such a contrived way. My brain just doesn’t work that way. In the times where I’m faced with decisions where the sensible answer, that most people would choose involve earning more money, I just go the other way because it’s not right for me. So often, I cut off my nose to spite my face. But I like to think I’m an artist with integrity. There are times where I make decisions based on money but for the most part, my decisions are based on music.
It wasn’t until I almost got to the end of making my first album that the record label suggested that I do some extra songs that I could perform on tour with Abdominal. It just happened that those extra songs that we did were ‘The Hit Song‘ and ‘Vicious Battle Raps‘ which for a lot of people are possibly their favourite songs. That was my introduction to the strategic thinking behind such things. So the second album was a sensible way to do things – to get out there, keep the music alive and reach people. Sure, money is a part of that, but it was never such a cynical thing. Ultimately, we’re very small fry so we were never really making MONEY in the making big money kind of sense, but we were able to live and continue making music that we were passionate about which is the most important thing.
Age: So, if you made no money off the new album, you wouldn’t mind?
Format: I’d be disappointed, but I’m half-prepared for that to be totally honest with you. For the live shows for the new album we haven’t even got round to rehearsing and planning them yet. I’m going to be doing with a lot of stuff with The Simonsound, because Simon has managed to do such a great live show as a way of touring the Reverse Engineering album, without involving me. He’s just developed such an amazing live show using great visuals and one of the vocalists from the album and another vocalist who also plays the flute and other instruments. With Simon doing effects and technical wizardry as well as simple stuff that was just really effective and combining it with all these other elements it just made for a great show that blew people’s minds. I just want to incorporate some of the more b-boy elements from his show and incorporate it into my shows. Something that doesn’t involve vocalists.
Age: So there won’t be a Statement of Intent tour?
Format: Well, yeah, there will, but not with Sureshot and others. I think it will be more geared around an enhanced DJ set with visuals and things of that nature, rather than with an MC. So I know it needs to be more than a DJ set. I know people want value for money and need to be entertained, but it’s going to be a different experience with live electronics.
Age: For the older DJ Format fans, do you ever see a chance of a tour re-uniting with Abs?
Format: Yeah. I absolutely think there will come a time when we’d like to do that in the future. But now I’ve got my new album coming out and Abs is putting the finishing touches on his own album, but we have discussed this. We would both like to get back together and do something one day. We do have slightly different views on how we go about doing that. I personally acknowledge that we need to perform the old material, there’s no question. But in order to keep me sane, I need to make more songs that I’m proud of and excited by and look forward to performing. I can’t just go out there and perform the old stuff. Saying that, I don’t want to put together a load of half-arsed songs that we just put together for some sad reunion tour because we’re just two old guys that are skint. There’s so many rap groups that do that and it’s pitiful. So I’m saying, when the time is right, when we’ve recharged our batteries, we get together, make some new songs, put them out then do a tour performing both the new and old material.
Age: Can you see a new album coming out of that?
Format: Well, again, in my mind, if it’s to happen then we’d be silly not to do another album. But you know me, I’m not going to put something out that I’m not happy with. It’s not going to be ok, it’s going to have to be my best work. I’m not willing to compromise my integrity. I’m not going to go out and regurgitate the old songs, people want something new to be excited about. There’s nothing worse than going to see a rap group that you love and they play all their old songs that you know and love and then they say ‘We’re going to play something from our new album’ and it’s just complete crap and out of touch with everything else they’ve ever done. We’re not going to do that either. If we’ve made our name making hip-hop with nice bass lines and big heavy drums and lots of scratching, I’m not going to come back and promote new songs with electronic hip-hop with dub-step beats. I’m talking about doing stuff that will still satisfy our fan base but is still something fresh that we can be proud of. Of course it’s going to be in keeping with the old stuff. I want to keep doing stuff I’m passionate about – classic hip-hop that has the sound of the late 80′s and early 90′s. That’s not about being stuck in a rut or time-warp, just making classic sounding hip-hop. In the way that jazz musicians still make classic sounding jazz right now. No one is going to criticise someone for making a jazz record that sounds like an old ’60s blue note record because that was some of the most brilliant jazz ever recorded, so why not carry on a great tradition if you can do it properly?
Age: With regards to the new album, are there any ‘proper’ videos in the works?
Format: Yes. A director named Tim Crawley has just made a nice viral video for Spaceship Earth, the song with Edan. Also my friends at Paintshop Studio have painted an interpretation of the new album cover artwork on a giant wall. This was filmed and is currently being edited and synced to an album mini-mix that i put together for internet promotion. Also i’m in discussion with another friend who is interested in making a video for another song from the new album so things are definitely happening. The problem is I have little or no budget so either people are doing it for the love or in some cases we trade favours. For example I’m just finishing a mix for Paintshop Studio’s new website in return for the work they did for me.
Age: What’s the aim of a good Format track?
Format: I can’t honestly say that there is an aim as such. It’s just got to make me feel satisfied, excited and happy in certain ways. I just make this stuff for me and I hope that as many people as possible ultimately enjoy it too. The aim is to make good music that moves me, then hopefully it will move others too. Sometimes, it might just make you nod your head, other times it might move you emotionally. As long as it moves you in some way that’s good enough for me.
Check back for more soon with the 4th and final part of the DJ Format interview.
Finding dope beats with the Fisher Price record player
This is part 2 of my epicly long fan-interview of DJ Format…Enjoy.
Age: You once said to me that ‘If it doesn’t come out on vinyl then it’s not even a real release as far as I am concerned’ – why is vinyl so important?
Format: I don’t want to get all preachy about the roots of hip-hop, but for me, being passionate about hip-hop from such an early age and not taking it lightly but getting really involved in digging for and sampling breaks that I can be proud of making my own records from I think that part of all that is vinyl. It’s how it started. It doesn’t mean it always has to be on vinyl for it to be hip-hop, it’s just the way I see the world. For me, if my album is not released on vinyl then it’s not official, it’s not real until I’ve held it in my hand. It’s like it’s not been documented properly. A CD is at least a physical thing, but MP3, what the fuck is that? What is it? I cherish my records. [Sitting in the studio] We’re surrounded by records. All that mean something to me for one reason or another. *Picks up record* Just look at this as an example, if you read all of this [on the sleeve] she was like a music teacher at school and she’s signed it as ‘housewife mega star’ as a joke, because this woman played an instrument on this album. The record was something to do with a bunch of music teachers that just happened to make a record and it’s been documented forever. If it was an MP3 there’d be nothing for her to sign, there’s no artwork, there’s no record of it. My point is, this is like a piece of history – this woman was involved in a record that was pressed up and has become a part of history. That’s something that someone made in 1976 and it’s documented properly.
With an MP3, I’m aware that you could accompany it with some digital information but ultimately it’s a very different thing. An MP3 is nothing physical, it’s just digital bit of sound that’s passed around in a way that I don’t understand. For me, that’s not enough. When I spend all the time that I do – all that time and effort creating the music – I’m not ready for it to just be an MP3 that people pass around and gets lost and forgotten. Sure, I’m not saying that vinyl doesn’t get lost and forgotten, but for me it’s got to be documented on vinyl. A lot of people would agree with me.
If it's not on vinyl it's not a real release.
Age: What would happen if scientists discovered that vinyl causes cancer?
Format: That’s a funny question, I’ve never thought of that. It almost makes me get really corny – almost to say ‘If I couldn’t have my records then life’s almost not worth living.’ – I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. If you’re basically saying to me that if I don’t get rid of my records then I’d die within a short space of time, then I’d have to get rid of them. Because what would be the point in me saying ‘Well, I’ll die then.’.
I try to justify all this record buying to my girlfriend all the time by saying all these records are such a part of who I am. I’ve collected these records since I was about 15 and now I’m 38 and that’s a lot of years of buying records. Your record collection changes and your tastes change over the years, but it’s such a part of who I am that without it, my life would be completely different.
My girlfriend asks me why I don’t get my records insured. To be honest, I’m very distrusting of insurance companies – they’ll work out what they think my records are worth and charge me a ridiculous premium for what they think they’re worth, then if anything happened they’d probably mess me around and devalue them. I’m not prepared to pay to be fucked over. You hear so many stories about that sort of thing. I’ve always said if my record collection was to get stolen or burnt to the ground I’d just have to make the decision to move on. I wouldn’t exactly start my life over, and there’s a lot of records that I could probably live without. If I broke it down I could probably name 1,000 records that make up the core. But if I did lose them all, I’d just have to move on, there’s so many records that I’d never get again. Some that were produced in such small quantities or records that no one would realise were valuable apart from people like us who get hip-hop and sampling. So you’re either going to find records like that for 50p or £1 or you’ll find it through a record dealer who found it for 50p or £1 but hears the potential because of the drum-break and wants to charge you £100 or £200 because he knows the power of a break like that. Chances are I’d never find a record like that again.
As an example, the record that I sampled at the end of ‘ill culinary behaviour’ where that woman goes ‘this morning for breakfast I had bacon, egg and chips..’ – I’ve never seen that record before or since, yet I found it in a charity shop for 50p and as well as having that on it it’s got a big drum break on the other side. It’s a weird diet and exercise record by a woman from up North. Things like that, how do you decide how much that’s worth? It cost me 50p but I’m never going to get it again.
So if I did have to get rid of all my records, I wouldn’t be the same person. Maybe I would turn into a ‘regular’ person who’d have music on MP3!
Age: Can you see yourself just making music on the computer?
Format: I don’t think so, no. I don’t want to be stubborn, but I love vinyl, I love the artwork, I love getting them out and putting them on the turntables. Why would I want to change? Now that I’ve bought a house and settled I’ve got no reason to want to get rid of any of my records. When I used to move house, then I hated it. At that time I’d get serious and get rid of a lot of records I didn’t need. When I moved to Bristol from Brighton I had like 60 crates of records to move and I lived on the 3rd floor so it was a pain. When I moved again, I decided to get rid of some.
The mammoth record collection has a guardian
Age: I recently watched an interview with Samuel L Jackson where he admitted that his greed was the best bit of his personality because it’s what saved him from drink and drugs and made him the star that he is now. So the question is; what’s a negative part of your personality that helps you with your music?
Format: Obsessive compulsive or perfectionist, whatever way you look at it. I’ll keep working on a song until I’m 100% happy with it. If this new album goes down in history as a piece of crap that nobody likes then that would be a shame but I would have no complaints because I’m totally happy with it. In the past, there were songs that still had little bits in that bugged me and they weren’t quite right. Usually people won’t notice these things and it’s fine, but it still bugs me.
With Mr DJ, for example, the amount of work that goes into it – trying to replace a rapper’s rhymes with some scratching, it’s intricate and if you do it half-heartedly then it’s not going to be right. Why not spend the extra time and make it perfect.
It’s taken way longer than is sensible to finish this record, but that is what makes me me. Sometimes, it is a negative thing. It’s been 6 years since my last album. Obviously I’ve not spent that entire time working on this album. I’ve done an album with The SimonSound, I’ve done a mix for The Fania DJ series. I did the FabricLive 27 mix and plenty of other things, but ultimately, I still would have liked to have finished my album a lot sooner. But because I went to those extra lengths to make the album perfect, it did take a lot longer than it probably should have. But if I’m happy with it then I can’t regret taking a bit longer as I’m happy and that’s what makes me me – that annoying trait.
Age: I tend to think that anything under 72 minutes for an album is too short. What do you think is a good length?
Format: Record labels seem to want short albums. But music lovers, fans of music, obviously I include myself in that, want as much as possible. Obviously I don’t mean filler tracks that you put in there to make it as long as possible – nobody wants that. But you want as much good material by the artist that you love as possible. My new album has 14 tracks on it. My friend and ex-manager literally went berserk when he heard that saying ‘it’s so long, what the hell are you thinking?’ whereas you on the other hand said it was a bit short, almost in a disappointed tone. To me, I can’t make it any longer in terms of what will fit on vinyl comfortably, it’s already a double album with 14 songs. When you say ‘why can’t it be longer’ – where do you draw the line between having an actual album and just having a bunch of songs. I’ve got to the stage where I really feel that I’ve got a good balance of different moods, different styles but it still feels like a good album by one artist. Obviously I feature other artists on there, but essentially it’s my record. I’m still working on more songs with Sureshot, I’ve sent him some new beats and he’s writing rhymes for them so maybe I’ll include them, but at the moment I think I’ve got the balance right.
Age: What would you do in that case? Save them for a later album?
Format: Yes or a 12 inch. I wouldn’t release them digitally because that would be derogatory to those tracks, because like I say, it’s not a real release is it?. I know that in Japan they want extra tracks for their ‘exclusive’ Japanese releases, but unless it’s going to come out on vinyl I wouldn’t do that. I can’t put any more on the vinyl and I don’t mind giving them an extra track or two for a CD, but it would be something that already came out on vinyl, like ‘Stealin’ James’ or ‘Here Comes The Dope Pusher!’ which was my instrumental Psych/B-boy thing.
It is an interesting debate though, why do record labels want an album to be more short and concise? I don’t get that. I mean, I literally don’t have the answer. Surely, the more the merrier, as long as the quality is there?
Age: Maybe it’s a price thing. If there’s more songs, they can’t sell it at a higher price to make it worth it so they want to keep costs down? To sell more.
Format: Nope. I think if you’re just talking about submitting an album, they want it to be short. It’s not about what they have to pay in studio costs. It’s just their view. My manager said that he thought record companies would be taken aback by the length of this album and I wasn’t doing myself any favours by making it that length. Which I don’t get.
Age: Is your sister really hot? (Reference ‘Ugly Brothers’)
Format: Obviously I have to be careful how I word this one, but yeah, she’s lovely. It’s funny because some of my friends get freaked out sometimes when we’re hanging out together. We’ll do or say certain things and they’ll say we’re exactly the same and ‘It’s weird looking at her, it’s like you with a wig on.’ – obviously comments like that would make you think well, how can she be good looking? But I just think there are certain characteristics and similarities that are there that crack people up.
Age: If the whole world suddenly went deaf, what would you do instead?
Format: Erm. I don’t know. I’d like to think that I’m somewhat artistic, like when it comes to artwork for my records and stuff like that. Sometimes, I can get quite involved in that. I have no idea how to put it together, but I have ideas. I could see myself getting more into that kind of thing. Otherwise I’d probably just be a regular twat doing a regular shit job, like I used to do.
Age: Which song, if any, do you regret?
Format: I don’t think I actually regret any songs outright, I just think there are elements to songs where I think I don’t like them now or think they aren’t good enough. There are things I’d like to change now in hindsight, but equally there are other things that I am pleasantly surprised about. Some of the intricate stuff I do where I chop stuff up, sometimes I’ll listen back and I’m impressed that I could be bothered to do that as it probably took me forever. I can’t think of a song that I outright regret.
There are certain elements of songs and videos that I think are pretty cheesy but I don’t regret them as it was all part of the journey.
Age: Rappers get to tell their story with their rhymes, do you feel you get the same chance as a DJ?
Format: I like to think I get a certain element of me across in my music. I’m a joker and I like to piss around. I think that does come across in my music. But I don’t want to be perceived as cheesy, so I probably haven’t let it come across so much in my new album. I wouldn’t put that old skit on there about bacon, egg and chips, because I’m now older and I’ve matured as a person. Stuff like that is a little too silly for this album. On the other hand, I’ve done the song ‘Mr DJ’ with Sureshot which to some people might be a bit silly or a bit light-hearted to them. But to me it’s still tough – it’s a DJ and an MC with the MC bragging about the DJ and going back and forth between each other. I do think a little bit of my personality comes out, but I’m not really a person with a story to tell. If I was that kind of person with something to say, then maybe I would have gone more towards lyrics in the first place, but it’s not my style, I’d rather keep myself to myself and let the music do the talking.
To be fair, it was a loooooooooong interview.
Come back soon for parts 3 & 4…
Be sure to follow @DJFormat4 on Twitter for all the good stuff.
And everything you need to know about DJ Format on the World Wide Web – www.about.me/DJFormat
I'm not sure who these chaps are, but this guys a legend.
I’ll warn you now, this interview is epicly long. DJ Format loves talking about music and once he get’s going, he won’t shut up. The original interview document is 29 A4 pages long and that’s the trimmed down version. The original interview, which I recorded at his house, lasted around 6 hours, including a part where he stopped to eat beans on toast, but that’s another story. Enjoy…
Age: What’s the worst question you’ve ever been asked at interview?
Format: I don’t know what constitutes a bad question, but there was a time that all the information on what I’d been doing was readily available and you’d get someone who obviously hadn’t done their homework and would ask me a question that I’d just think ‘surely anyone that’s remotely interested in me would know that wouldn’t they?’ – but at the end of the day it’s not a bad thing. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the public eye to that degree. Back then it was like ‘oh my God, you’re still asking me about driving the tour bus for Jurassic 5?’
Age: If you weren’t DJ Format, what would your alternative DJ name be?
Format: I don’t know because when I started DJ’ing I was messing around with graffiti to a poor standard, so some of my DJ names before Format were just silly graffiti tags that I had – nothing that meant anything. It wasn’t until I’d done a mixtape – literally something I taped for my 3 mates that cared and my mate Jay did a little cover for it with DJ Format but with a number 4 – I don’t even think that he realised, but someone else said that DJ 4mat is like Matt J Ford and that was when it got cemented. I like it when someone has something that relates to their name, it means something, rather than just like ‘DJ Lobster Scratch’ or something – maybe there’s someone called ‘DJ Lobster Scratch’ who’s gonna be really offended now.
Age: So, the graffiti, was it just tags or proper art-work?
Format: Well, I did try to do pieces, but I’m happy to admit I was not a natural at it. I guess I realised that I didn’t have a flair for it. I used to do a lot of tagging. If we were out drinking on a Friday or Saturday, our journey home would be littered with the evidence of what way we went home – whether it was pens, permanent markers or that sort of thing. So I just concentrated on the music. You just go towards what you are more comfortable with, I just wasn’t good at graffiti and I was happy to admit that and just cracked on with the music.
Age: Did you try anything else then? Did you do any break dancing?
Format: No, I was always too awkward and gangly and I never felt natural doing that sort of thing. So no, no break dancing, apart from when I was like 10 and Herbie Hancock ‘Rocket’ was in the charts and that was when the first wave of break dancing reached the UK. There was an American kid who was in the year below me at school and he could break dance and he was trying to teach me. All I could ever do was the worm or caterpillar or whatever you call it. I didn’t pick up on hip-hop at that time, I was just a normal 10 year and I’d listen to Herbie Hancock then also listened to something bad, regular pop music like Spandau Ballet. I was just a normal kid. It wasn’t until ’86 or ’87 that I started to really focus on hip-hop.
Age: What caused that then?
Format: When you’re 13/14 I think you start to develop who you are.
Yes, that is nice. I've seen better though.
Age: Is there any particular album that you can think of?
Format: Yeah, like the Beastie Boys – ‘Licensed to ill’, Run DMC’s first 3 albums, LL Cool J, Public Enemy – basically when all the Def Jam stuff exploded it was just like ‘Wow, this is the best thing ever’. Also we had the ‘Electro Albums’ which started with 1 and I think it went up to about 13, then they changed the name to ‘Hip-Hop’ although they tried to introduce it slowly with ‘Electro/Hip-Hop’ – they would be compilation albums where you’d get 3 or 4 songs mixed together by a DJ and it was a good way to hear stuff you wouldn’t otherwise have heard, especially growing up in Southampton and didn’t have a way to get import records. When I grew up, Hip-Hop was really something you had to seek out, now it’s like everywhere, it’s in adverts and it didn’t used to be like that.
I really enjoyed things like Dougie Fresh and occasionally there would be a cross-over track in the chart like Run DMC ‘Walk This Way’ – things like that, even though it’s not hard core rap or hip-hop it is still an influential thing for me in a way. It’s easy to conveniently say ‘yes I was into the most credible records that now have been remember more kindly’ but at the time I loved ‘Walk this way’ and ‘You be illin’ – the fun, commercial tracks that got me into hip-hop. I remember Dougie Fresh and Slick Rick being on Top of the pops and performing ‘The Show’ and I loved it.
Age: Who are your influences?
Format: They were my early influences, but then once I started to really get the bug for hip-hop and I realised that this stuff was speaking to me like nothing before. I’d hear someone on the Electro compliations and get a copy of their album – MC Shann, Boogie Down Productions, people like that. Back then I didn’t have the money to just go out and buy the records myself or even be able to get to the shops that might sell them. So I’d maybe find someone at school whose older brother had some records or tapes and just dubbed things on tape – just tape-to-tape. My entire record collection was just bootlegged tapes when I was still at school.
Still to this day my favourite hip-hop album of all time is ‘Critical beatdown’ by Ultra-Magnetic MCs. That stuff was really influential on me and so were things like Tribe Called Quest and Main Source, but they came later. But the earlier stuff was Public Enemy, Schoolly D, Stetsasonic , Big Daddy Kane, Mantronics, people like that.
Age: What influenced you to start making music of your own?
Format: That would come a little bit later. DJ’ing came before making music.
Doing what he does best...
Age: How did you get into DJ’ing?
Format: I tried writing rhymes and instantly realised that it wasn’t for me. I felt that I could kind of do it, but I didn’t have the voice for it and I didn’t really want to be brag-a-docious egotistical front man. The scratching just appealed to me more a little bit more and I can tell you the record that actually made me want to scratch. It was a record that will be laughed at by some people it was called ‘Throw the D’ by 2LiveCrew – it was a corny record about a dance involving grabbing your dick. The DJ was Mister Mixx and the scratching in that song was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. I loved the heavy base and drum machine programming and to a certain extent the raps but especially the scratching. I remember turning up the scratching as loud as I could get on my stereo and when the scratching came in I’d get goose bumps and I used to think ‘Shit, I wanna do that!’. And that was what made me really want to do it. I had my Dad’s old stereo on top of an old wardrobe that I had and I remember I had a bit of A4 paper that I’d taken from school and had torn the corners off to form a slipmat and put on a record and tried to scratch it, but of course that sort of turntable wasn’t built for that sort of thing so of course it was a complete disaster and I think my Dad came in one time when I was doing it and took the record player off me because he thought I was going to ruin it.
On my 16th birthday, me and a friend chipped in together – I think maybe £30 each to buy an old all in one unit which was two turntables and a mixer but proper old school style where someone had built the box to have it as a unit that you take out and we clubbed in a bought that together but kept it at his house because my parents were so against the stuff they heard coming out of my room. They thought hip-hop was awful.
Age: So it was all about the scratching back at that time?
Format: Yeah, that was what it was all about for me. An old friend of ours called Ian, he was already a bit ahead of us and he already had turntables and tried to teach us the basics of mixing and scratching. ‘When you do the scratch movement, basically if you break it down into slow-motion, the fader goes up, but then it comes down again, slightly quicker before the record drags back so you don’t heard the record drag back.’
And he taught us the basics and that was how we started. I just practiced more and it wasn’t long before I decided that it was what I wanted to do, I’d tried it and it wasn’t going to be a fad. So I had to get some proper turntables because these things we’d bought were rubbish. So I bought some Technics 1200’s and a Phonic MRT60 mixer which at the time was the latest mixer that had a special button on it where you could do really good transformer scratches on it.
I’d come in from work and I’d be scratching all night and I couldn’t keep my hands of the turntables. Just learning the basics, doing little mixes, recording myself scratching. The next step from there was getting a 4-track recorder, so you could literally record your mix, then have another channel recording yourself doing scratching over the top.
It wasn’t until a friend of a friend had an Amiga computer and they used it to sample a beat from one record, a bass line from another and a scratch from another and put them all together. It was very uncreative realistically speaking, but to us it was amazing. They’d made their own song! So I had to do it – I got myself an Amiga computer in probably 1991. Then shortly after that our friend Ian had an AKAI S950 and a Atari ST computer to do the sequencing and instantly opened up our world – showing us what he was doing with that. At that time I was training to be a carpenter, so I bought myself the AKAI sampler and the computer and Ian taught my friend Ben and Ben taught me and then we went off and did our own thing. That’s how it kind of started I guess. Just messing around and sampling other Hip-Hop records and thinking we were clever.
I’ve probably talked about this in interview before and said different things, but this is how my brain is remembering it today.
That was the starting point. That was when I realised I needed to find my own things to sample. I realised I couldn’t just keep looping up bits of other peoples records. That was when I started finding breaks and discovering breaks.
By this time I was working in a maintenance department of this leisure centre because the carpentry thing hadn’t really panned out. So there I was, just doing general maintenance jobs and I used to go and chat with the cleaning ladies and just sweet talk them:
‘Hey, has your husband got any records?’
‘Yeah, he’s got loads.’
‘Oh, sweet, can you just bring them in so I can borrow them?’
So these cleaning ladies were just bringing bags of their husbands records in for me and mostly they were just crap, but this one lady – Verna, who I’m still in touch with to this day, bought in her husband’s record, a UK pressing of ‘The Meters’ album and everything on the album was a classic break that had already been sampled by everyone else. It took the magic away from hip-hop for a while because I realised that every record that I loved had essentially taken a sample from this album. But then I went out to record shops and trying to find things to sample.
Back then I didn’t even have a portable record player, so I’d literally have to judge a record by its cover. ‘Ok, so there are some black guys on this record so it’s going to be funky’. But of course, anyone with a brain would realise that’s not always the case. But back then, I didn’t know. It wasn’t a bit ‘til a bit later when I got a portable record player that I started checking stuff out before I was buying.
Then my mate Diggs dragged me to a car boot sale. I remember saying ‘I don’t want to go to a car boot sale, people just selling their old crap’ and sure enough, we went there and picked up a few good albums and it was an instant success. It was like ‘Oh my God, people are just selling great records for like 50p. Are they crazy?’
The record collection is rather large.
Age: How do you feel about the DJ being overshadowed by the MC?
Format: I don’t have a problem with the MC being the star and the focal point, that’s just the way that hip-hop evolved. What I’m not too happy with is the way the DJ just got wiped out of the occasion. You go and see rappers perform now and they don’t even have a DJ with them, they’ll just press play on a CD turntable and start their show.
Some of the hip-hop I loved the most was groups where it was a DJ and MC in perfect harmony. Something like RUN DMC – they were the two focal characters, but when you see them perform, they were getting their energy from Jam Master Jay and they wouldn’t have been the same otherwise. I’m talking about the hip-hop I love, that is where it all came from.
The way it started was obviously DJs playing records, rocking parties, getting two copies, trying to extend the breaks and then getting the MCs to big up the DJs. But then rap as an art-form evolved to a point where it all became about the MC.
Age: On a personal level though, you like to be behind the scenes though don’t you?
Format: My happiest time was with Abdominal when we first came out supporting Jurassic 5and Ugly Duckling, we were very underground. When we were on tour, I would DJ for like half an hour and we’d stretch out the material between us and there was a chemistry between us. Abs was the front man and the focal point, but the way we’d perform sometimes was I’d be on the turntables by the side of him and it would be a little bit more interactive. I had no ambitions to get out from behind the decks and rap, but I like the idea that when you go to a show you’re supposed to be entertained. Unfortunately now, when you go to see a show a lot of rappers just shout their songs at you. I’d rather have the proper energy of a DJ and MC bouncing off each other. Me and Abs would have routines where he’d ask me questions and I’d scratch the answers. It was in a light-hearted way but it kept the crowd engaged and made people aware that we were a team.
Later on, when it was Abdominal and D-sissive on the stage commanding the crowd and me in the background, I was happy with that too, but it felt like they were competing to be the dominant MC on the stage and it felt like it took away from the team element.
Age: Would you say you prefer performing with an MC or would you rather do it on your own?
Format: Well, it is very different. When it comes to doing a live show with an MC you are just restricted to playing your own songs again and again, which I find incredibly boring. I understand that people go to a show to be entertained and hear the songs that they know. It’s the same for me when I go to a show, but when the shoe is on the other foot and I’m on the stage I think ‘Surely the people in the audience want to hear something different. Newer, fresher and interesting?’ So when I’m just performing as a DJ, the freedom is great, so I can play anything I like, I’m just playing other peoples records in a way that I think and hope people will enjoy.
I don’t plan on doing any new shows with MCs in the future. Because the people that I’ve worked with on my new album it’s not going to be easy to get them together on the same stage so I’ve got to find other ways to present my new album without getting MCs on the stage.
Age: What’s your favourite part of being a DJ?
Format: I think my favorite part of being a DJ is the fact that I can go dig and discover a record and instantly visualise and think ‘I can’t wait to play that at a party’ or realise that no ones heard it before or no one in the room on that particular night will have heard it. I like to play something that will be different to what other DJs are playing. A lot of people like to operate by playing the latest promos and saying those are things that other people don’t have, but I go the other way, go back and dig for records that have been overlooked and are waiting to be re-discovered by people like me and then play them now, today and get people to enjoy them – bringing something new to people’s ears.
Age: Do you expect a certain reaction from the audience that if you don’t get you’re not happy?
Format: Obviously people walking out is not a good thing. If everyone is dancing, then it’s obvious that it’s going well. But personally, if I’m at a club listening to someone’s music, it’s very rare that I would dance because dancing is not a natural thing to me. The only time I’d dance is if I’m quite drunk and really letting go of my inhibitions. It’s not that I’m too uptight to dance, it’s just that I find it unnatural. So I have to remember that when I’m DJ’ing. Some people might just be standing there nodding their heads or sat in a corner quietly, but they might be having the time of their life. It’s easier to know that they are enjoying themselves if they are up and dancing, but you just have to gauge if people are enjoying it. A lot of times I’ve done gigs and there was a lot of people just stood around and not really dancing, maybe they didn’t enjoy it or they were expecting something different to what I gave them and they were disappointed, but at the end they’ll come up and be really enthusiastic, telling me how much they enjoyed the music. So I have to remind myself, those guys are just like me, they aren’t natural dancers, but they had a great time.
Age: What do you hate about being a DJ?
Format: I hate it when people come up and ask for a really commercial record that is just something that I’d never play. Like when they come up to me at a party where I’m playing hip-hop and funk and ask for a Lady Gaga record. If I was at a club and I heard a DJ playing music I didn’t like then I’d just assume that he/she had tastes different to mine and me going up and saying ‘Hey, can you play so-and-so’s record’ is not going to change them into a DJ that I instantly like, I’m just in the wrong place. Just forget it.
Age: What would you say in those circumstances?
Format: I’m usually polite. There’s no point in being ignorant about it, we’re both entitled to our own opinions. I just say that I’m playing hip-hop, funk, latin, things of that nature and it might not be their cup of tea, if they like Lady Gaga, but sorry, this is what it’s going to be for the next hour or two. I’m usually so nice about it that they are actually apologetic to me. Sometimes they get angry that I don’t have Lady Gaga, but that’s normally how I’d handle it.
Age: What’s the best venue you’ve ever played at?
Format: As a venue, if we’re being specific, I love playing at the Jazz Cafe because it’s small and intimate enough that you’re really kinda there amongst the people. Even if you’re on the stage it’s still small and intimate enough that it’s enjoyable. I don’t really enjoy being the supposed ‘centre of attention’ on the stage, but at the Jazz Cafe the sound is really good and the people that go there are really good music lovers – choosy music lovers that are there because they know roughly what to expect from you and they won’t come up and ask for stupid records. They’re just there to enjoy what they’re given. By the side of the stage they’ve built a DJ booth and it’s the perfect booth – the turntables, the mixer, everything is setup at the right height, the equipment works perfectly, the monitor speakers in there are crystal clear and you can hear what you’re doing without blasting your ears. As a DJ it’s just a pleasure to play there for all those reasons. The atmosphere is great and the customers that are there are generally great.
Age: What was your favourite gig?
Format: When me and Abdominal supported Jurrassic 5 in 2003, the final two gigs of the tour were 2 nights in Brixton Academy. And while I wouldn’t describe Brixton Academy as my favourite venue – because it’s too big for me, it scared the shit out of me. That was probably one of my proudest moments, because there were 5,000 people, 2 nights in a row going crazy to our music, when half an hour before they might not have heard of us. We won over Jurrassic 5′s audience and it was incredible to get that many people getting what we were doing almost instantly. But it wouldn’t be my choice to play somewhere that big but it was great playing to that many people with that amazing atmosphere. Also Glastonbury and Leeds and Reading festivals on various occasions that have been amazing. I’ve played as a DJ at the Big Chill festival and that’s been good. Sometimes at festivals like that, I might follow another DJ that I feel is so far removed musically from what I do that I just feel like I almost don’t want to go out there and play my music because I feel how can the audience like what this person has just played and also be open to the kind of music that I’m going to play? And I swear nearly every time I think that I’m just completely wrong. People are just more open than I realise. One of the most shocking was at the Big Chill festival about 4 or 5 years ago and before me it was really cheesy dance music and I was thinking it was just a mistake – how could anyone like my music after listening to that. But it was the total opposite, I went out there and started playing my funk and hip-hop and the whole place was just with me and by the end of it I was playing anything and everything, even psychedelic blues records at one point. Festivals have been really kind to me.
Age: If you were playing somewhere as DJ Format would you rather have a small audience or play somewhere large like Brixton.
Format: That’s a tough question because obviously the more people I’m playing to then the bigger of a success I might feel, whereas I’m most comfortable somewhere like the Jazz Cafe where I’m at the same height as the audience and maybe they can’t see me and it’s not all just about me – I’m just providing the music that all these like-minded people are enjoying. That’s probably more me. That’s me in my comfort zone at my happiest.
A few years ago I toured around Australia with ZTrip, Swollen Members and The Jungle Brothers. Some of those shows were quite big and I was there trying to do my intimate club DJ set. I really underestimated the size of what it was and it made me realise that maybe I’m just not cut out for a giant stage, I’m not the kind of DJ that’s going to get on the mic and really hype the crowd up and then play a massive anthem that’s just going to make them go wild. That kind of stuff is cool and it has its place, but it’s not just me. I’m not the guy to be doing that sort of stuff. I’m the guy who drops the unknown gems discretely from behind the turntables and hopefully the majority of people are dancing and enjoying it but there are a few nerds like me standing around thinking ‘wow, what the hell is this record? I’ve never heard it before but it sounds awesome.’ That’s the stuff I get a kick out of. I’m not cut out for the big time and it’s just not for me. I just love the idea of having a small, enthusiastic, loyal fan base who will come and see me play with an open mind. They know I’m not going to play a big anthem. Anyone can do that and I’m not knocking it but it’s not for me.
Age: Who have you enjoyed collaborating with the most?
Format: I’ve genuinely enjoyed collaborating with all the guys I’ve worked with. I’ve been really lucky, I haven’t chosen egotistical dick-heads. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve hooked up with down-to-earth people like myself. Sure you could say that Charli Tuna and Akil are big stars, but they’re the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. I’ve toured with Ugly Duckling, Little Barry and people like that who are just lovely.
When it comes to making records, I’ve enjoyed working with all the people I’ve worked with. Abs was a pleasure to work with particularly, but since I’ve hooked up with Sure Shot La Rock…I know it’s easy to big up the person you’re working with now, but honestly, the partnership I’ve got now with Sure Shot is something that I’ve never quite had before. I just wish we lived in the same damn Country. But, the working relationship we have is just incredible – the mutual respect and trust of each other’s opinions – like for example, Sure Shot will completely respect and be open to my opinion when it comes to his rhymes and at the same time I’m completely open to his opinion when it comes to my production and the beats or the scratches or whatever. The key is wanting to make the best records possible and having no ego about it – just whatever is best for the record and we both have that. We want to go in the same direction.
Working with Abdominal, he was just off and write a good song and I’d never need to have any input in it, he would write the lyrics and the hook. Obviously there was still a level of collaboration, but I would never say anything about the rhymes because he just didn’t have that particular relationship. Usually, rappers wanna do their thing and you can’t tell them anything. I’m the same to a certain extent, I don’t want someone telling me ‘Yeah you should change that bass line’. But that’s the funny thing, with Sure Shot we’re never treading on each other’s toes, we just make suggestions on each other’s work and we just compliment each other perfectly. With Sure Shot, we’re on exactly the same wavelength.
Age: What happens with making a track, do you start off making the beats and then the rapper writes the rhymes?
Format: Yeah, 9 times out of 10 that’s what happens. I’ll make the beat and then give it to a rapper to do their thing. When I’m doing a remix with someone, it’s very different because I’ve already got the track, so it’s very different to creating a song from nothing. But sometimes it doesn’t work like that.
Originally Dope Pusher was a much faster song but that song actually ended up becoming something different – a song called ‘Here Comes the Dope Pusher’ a song I turned into a weird instrumental/spoken word/crazy hip-hop meets psyche with lots of scratches and samples about ‘dope’. I’d accidentally made something different. Hearing the one of the original songs I sampled, I don’t want to name it but it was a Bill Crosby song, and it made me want to do a throw back song about dope.
There have been other times where it’s been different. There’s a song I did for Abdominals album called ‘Breathe Later’ which was a completely different approach for me, yet I’m so proud for the outcome as I never would have made that song if we’d have done it the normal way, I would have just given him a beat that I thought was right and he would have performed the raps over it. But this was raps that he had written years ago and you might have seen him perform them on stage at shows – he would take one breath and then rap as many bars as he could just on one breath. He would do that on stage and it got to the point that he knew he wanted that to be an epic song, but he didn’t know what the music was going to be and eventually he just went in the studio and recorded it to a metronome. He chose a tempo that he felt comfortable with and recorded it to a click track then just sent me the a capella. Then I ended up fitting the music around what he was saying and I got really adventurous using all these samples around breathing and human beat-boxing and scratching breathing sounds and totally having fun with it.
Another example of when I worked a different way comes from my new album. There’s a song with Sure Shot called ‘A Quick Ego Trip‘ – he wrote those rhymes because he was inspired by a beat he heard by the Daily Diggers that particularly inspired him and he started writing this rap and I got inspired by that. So it got to the point where I got a drum break that was the right tempo for the rhymes he’d written, I think it was 85bpm and I knew I wanted to keep it basic and rap but it had to also be kinda funky to fit the whole mood of his raps. It got to the point where he’d recorded the song and so many different versions of it and I hadn’t settled on the right beat for this track and it wasn’t until quite a long time afterwards that I actually found a break that I thought was right for that song. And so that was again working backwards to the way I normally work.
Age: You’re obviously a big fan of digging in the crates, do you have any secret spots like DJ Shadow reveals in ‘Scratch’.
Format: I wouldn’t say I have any ‘secret’ spots, but if I do find a good record shop I’m not going to shout my mouth off about it to too many people because it’s getting harder and harder to find good record shops so I don’t want to cut my nose off to spite my face. It’s a dilemma for me because record shops find it hard to stay in business and I find it frustrating that so many times you walk in record shops and just see the same old crap because people have put the interesting stuff on the internet, on Ebay, because they think they’re going to get more money that way. So when I find a good record shop, I want to shout about it to help the record shop owner to help keep that shop in business, but from a selfish point of view I want to keep that quiet so when I go back there there might be some good records again.
There aren’t any real secrets spots. This Country is not such a big place. In America you can have places like that, like where Shadow goes – record shops with basements full of 50,000 records but it’s not like that in this Country. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I can’t think of many places like that here.
I definitely love digging when I’m touring or away and I don’t mind talking about those spots because I’m less likely to go back to them. If I’ve got a friend like Mr Thing who’s going to a certain city and I know there’s a good record shop there then of course I’m going to tell them but I wouldn’t start shouting about it on the internet.
Portable record players - a DJ's best friend.
Age: How do you go about finding the perfect break?
Format: I’ve got loads of different portable record players but really the one I take digging these days is the ‘Sound Burger‘ because it’s kind of the smallest and most convenient and it is also a really good quality player. I used to take my Fisher Price kids record player everywhere but some record shops owners get a little freaked out by kids records players and don’t wanna let you play their valuable records on a kids record player. But I’ve found that with the Sound Burger you’re more likely to be able to gain the trust of a record dealer because it is a quality bit of equipment. With the Sound Burger, you can hear the sound in stereo. While with the Fisher Price player they didn’t have stereo, they just came with a mono speaker and the wiring inside is very simple. And so when you hook up a headphone socket into it, it just puts it into mono. Some things admittedly sound better in mono but in some cases I might miss something. If I’m listening with the Sound Burger I might find that the drums are in the right channel and the bass line is in the left and when I get home I could just separate them and sample it, but on the Fisher Price I might have missed out on that. Especially with late 60s records, they were still experimenting with stereo sound and they were literally panning the drums over to the left and the guitar over to the right, it was as crude as that. It wasn’t very subtle and you can do some clever work with the sampler if you know what you’re doing.
So I just look for little signs on the record. Personally I’m digging for late 60s records, rock and stuff like that. A lot of records will tell you the instruments that are played on the album on the back of the sleeve and I could work out what the record might be like – if they’re playing banjos and steel guitars it might not be any good to me. I’ll also look out for producers that I know make good music and other telltale signs. For a novice it all sounds a bit vague, but for people like me it will make sense. It’s just something you figure out for yourself, even if no one ever tells you, it’s just common sense, it’s instinct.
Age: I see some Battle Breaks in your collection. Do you have many of those?
Format: I’ve only got a couple. For me, that’s the best one, the first one that came out. They put so many good things in there. But then it just got exhausted, people were just making records with the scratches and all the sounds. But there are nice little intricate things to scratch on and use in a track.
Age: What’s your favourite bit of equipment?
Format: The portable record player. Without that I’d have missed a lot of records. But when I get home the AKAI is good for sampling but now with computers I can easily get the sounds that I want. For me it’s all about the sample source. Some people can take a mediocre sound or break and make it sound better through studio wizardry, but personally I’m all about finding that incredible record to begin with and putting it together with something that works perfectly. Finding the right scratches, drum break with the right bass line that compliment each other and putting it all together. I like to think that my technical skills are not really where the magic is – I’m not great with that stuff. I know my way around a sampler, I’ve been using them since ’92/’93 but computers not so much. But in most instances if I can’t use one bit of equipment I can use another. But it’s all about the beats and how do I find them? With a Sound Burger and a bit of common sense.
Age: What’s a typical day in the life of DJ Format?
Format: Ha! A typical day in my life will depend on what day of the week it is. If we’re talking about a typical Friday or a typical Saturday, it’s going to involve a lot of travelling, a lot of time on my own going to a venue, hopefully a bit of digging when I get there and a lot of waiting around. It’s not al glamorous. I spend a lot of time waiting around. Then DJ’ing, having a few drinks and playing the music that I love. That’s a good typical Friday or Saturday, while a bad one is a lot of travelling and a lot of boring time spent on my own with no good record shops to look at and a situation where the promoter of the venue loves my music but he’s misjudged his audience and there’s no way that my music is going to go down well because it’s full of young kids who want to hear loads of commercial music. So I might spend a quite frustrating night playing records that I know people don’t really want but I’m not going to compromise and play music that I don’t like.
A typical weekday would be…get up, feed the cat, have a shower, normal every day things that everyone does. Then spend a lot of time in my studio messing around with ideas and just working on music. But I do get distracted by everyday stuff like having to do the washing. Because I’m doing something that I love I can do it all day and night. Mostly I’m just in the studio working.
It’s funny because I spend so much time on my own. People think that my life must be exciting and yeah, I really enjoy it, but it’s not what you think. I spend a lot of time on my own just pleasing myself and making music, with not much contact with the outside world. I’m not drinking champagne and hanging out with super models, I’m just doing regular stuff and spending hours and hours with music.
Age: How do you feel about the manufactured garbage caused by X-Factor and Pop Idol?
Format: I have really mixed feelings about it…well, not that mixed, it’s all negative. But some days it makes me angry, while other days it makes me sad. Ultimately I think it’s sad that people are just force-fed that this is ‘good’ music and this is a judge of whether this is good music or not – according to a nob like Simon Cowell. All they are looking for is commercial potential and that’s not a measure of talent. Basically they’re just trying to decide if they can make money from these people. That’s just a different world to what I live in. So yeah, I think it’s disturbing but it is a lot of people’s idea of music and the whole quest for fame. People think ‘I want to be famous’ – why? Why do you want to be famous? Do you even have any idea of what that would entail? Do you really want to be recognised everywhere you go and hounded by people? Why would anyone want that? Ultimately it’s entertainment but it’s all about a handful of people making a shit-load of money out of other people. It’s not a part of the world I live in so I try not to let it bother me too much.
Age: What’s the last cassette tape that you bought?
Format: At a car boot sale a few weeks ago I bought the cassette version of the original ‘League of Gentleman‘ Radio 4 comedy series from before it was on TV. On that same day I got an album by James Brown called ‘Hell‘ and LL Cool J’s ‘Bad’ album. I bought those cassettes because I was at this car boot trying to find records and I couldn’t find anything and so it was kind of out of desperation with me thinking ‘Bloody hell I’ve to buy something.’ and because I’ve still got a tape cassette player in my car I thought it might be fun to listen to while I’m driving round.
That's 'Mr' DJ to you.
Age: What do you think about the prominence of DJ culture in modern advertising?
Format: I try not to let it bother me too much. Hip-hop culture has just become such a part of everyday life that you’ll see all this stuff in adverts. I would say that the scene that I know and love is dying and has been dying for a long time but that doesn’t make me hate seeing hip-hop elements in adverts. I’d feel happier if there was a healthier scene of authentic hip-hop that was still alive. If there were a few more of us doing the right thing and making some proper music without constantly worrying about money, fame and nonsense like that but just for the sake of making good music or putting on good shows and having a bit of unity – like the original values of hip-hop ‘peace, unity and having fun’ – if there was a bit more of that then I wouldn’t worry about anything else. It’s just the way things of gone. Advertisers latch onto anything they think is trendy and fashionable.
Age: Would you ever get involved in making music for advertising or computer games?
Format: I don’t like the idea of making music to order. I know it’s a cliché, but I really do just want to make the music for myself – the music that I want to hear. I wish other people made it, so I just get on and do it myself the way I want to hear it done. I can’t say I’d definitely not want to do it, but it would depend on the circumstances.
I had a friend that was doing some art design work, I think it was for DJ Hero and he offered to put my name forward to do some music for it and I told him not to. I didn’t like the idea of it. I don’t want them to come back to me and tell me to make changes to my music. If I’ve made something the way I want it and someone comes along and asks if they can use it for a certain purpose then I can consider that, if it’s suitable and something I want to do. Some people make music to order, but that’s something I really don’t want to do, I’d rather just get a regular job that was soul-destroying in its own ways. For me it would be far more soul-destroying to make music that I didn’t want to make, than do a job that I didn’t want to do because music is my passion and I take it very personally. So to do stuff I knew was shit, I’d find that hard.
But it depends how much freedom I’ve got, depending on the circumstances. Unfortunately, there’s very little hope of making much money from the sort of music that I want to make. So it might be acceptable if I had to do it in order to keep myself afloat.
When it comes to having my music used on adverts. It hasn’t happened yet, but I have turned stuff down. It was for something really cheesy that I didn’t want my music associated with. It’s also because the way that I make music a lot of the time is using samples. Most of the time, it’s using samples. There’s a couple of tracks on the new album with musicians but generally speaking the majority of what I do is working with samples. So, I have to be careful putting my music in a place where it’s going to be heard by a lot of people and people know that you’re going to be making a lot of money off of it. Because then the people that you’ve sampled might start coming after you. I need to be respectful of that fact. I creatively borrow and however you want to look at it, I ultimately steal other people’s music without asking. If you break it down in the most truthful way, that’s what I’m doing. I like to think I’m doing something artistic with it that has a purpose, but maybe the artist that I’ve sampled wouldn’t agree with that and wouldn’t approve, so I’ve got to be respectful of the fact that this is how I choose to make music, I can’t start bitching about how I’m not making money from it because ultimately if these other people hadn’t made it in the first place I wouldn’t be regurgitating it and doing my thing with it.
DJ's gotta eat.
Age: But someone like DJ Shadow samples other people and his stuff gets used in all sorts of advertising.
Format: Yeah, but he’s at a different end of the spectrum. He’s making so much money that he can afford to clear his samples and do that sort of stuff, where, the level that I’m at I’ve gotta just do what I’m doing and hope no one notices and if they do, hopefully they’ll notice I’m not doing much and obviously not making much money and therefore aren’t worth pursuing legally. Whereas anyone that looks at Shadow’s business affairs are going to realise that he’s very successful and is making a lot of money, selling a lot of records and is obviously an easier target to sue. I like to be realistic about my situation.
Age: What happened with PIAS?
Format: Wall of Sound merged with PIAS and unfortunately PIAS became PIAS/Wall of Sound and lost all its staff and artists. I don’t want to sound bitter about it, it’s just a shame.
Check back in again soon for part 2, 3, 4….
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