"The Sport I can't Live Without"

Muzik Heart Of The Natter
December 2000

When you pull together four of dance music's hottest movers and shakers and lock them in a room, only one thing can ensue. That thing is chat. Let's listen in...

Words: Simon Morrison
Photos: Andrew Hobbs
Article printed December 2000 issue of 'Muzik' magazine

THE PANEL

Pete Tong
Tousle-haired DJ and A&R man extraordinaire. Possibly the most powerful man in UK dance music, thanks to his weekly show on Radio 1. Winner of Best Radio Show at the Ericsson Muzik awards. The only member of the panel whose name has passed into rhyming slang.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor
The statuesque singer on Spiller's 'Groovejet', winner of Best Single at the Ericsson Muzik awards. Previously sang with indie no-hopers the audience, about whom the less said the better [Muzik magazine's words, not mine! S-E-B.com Webmaster]

Wookie (aka Jason Chue)
One of the true innovators in the UK garage scene, although his music isn't strictly speaking UK garage. Winner of Best Newcomer at the Ericsson Muzik awards. Has shaved off his excess body hair since his days as an intergalactic bounty hunter.

Mr C
Soon-to-be-wed dancing goblin, ex-Shamen and bon viveur. Owner of The End, one of London's best clubs. Allegedly possesses delivery smooth. Like water from a fountain.

Dance music, dance music. It's purpose built for the dancefloor with a shalf life shorter than a bloke on stilts in a First World War trench. Right? Nope, all kinds of wrong. After all these years we're still making music, still going to clubs, still getting utterly Cheggered and still enjoying ourselves far too much when by rights we should have hung up our dancing trousers and snuggled into a comfy pair of slacks.
People have always tried to predict the day when dance culture would capsize like a dinghy in a disco storm but as we find ourselves in a new millennium, maybe it's about time everyone accepted that it's here to stay. The year 2000 has been another phenomenal year for dance music and club culture, and as the year draws to a close, Muzik has gathered some of this year's major players - who between them cover production, A&R, national radio, DJing, club promotion and, er, singing whilst looking fit - to chew the phat.

Firstly, if we could be so crude, out of 10, how would you rate the state of dance culture in the year 2000?
Pete Tong: "I'd say it was a nine. I say nine because you hope there can still be a better year, but it's been a very challenging year for me personally. I get excited by change and I think it's been a year when things weren't as predictable as they may have been when you start cruising a little."
Wookie: "As one of the people trying to take it elsewhere, with the r&b influence, with the whole song and musicality of it, I'd say about five because it's got so much space left to go."
Sophie Ellis-Bextor: "It's been brilliant, I'm really spoilt but I don't know anything about it really. I know about success but not about dance music. Shall I just get my coat and leave now?"
(Everyone laughs.)
Mr C: "It's extremely healthy, it's a nine or 10. There's so much good music about, there's loads of good clubs and it's developing all over the world - America's falling in with the culture, which is great. It couldn't be better really, could it?"

Talking of which, what gives with America right now? After the Beatles, it's the invasion of the beats (ha!).
PT: "My American tour was just incredible. I didn't anticipate the reaction and it made me re-evaluate a lot of what I do. America right now has got no irony, no cynicism, nothing - it's just a full-on enjoyment of club culture, in the way we did in the late Eighties."

Last year was supposedly the year of trance and this year the meeja scratched their backsides and decided it would be the year of hard house. Did it pan out that way?
Mr C: "What's the difference? Both are a load of cheese. Whoops, did I say that?"
PT: "You couldn't really put your finger on this year and say it was hard house or it was this or it was that, because it was different things for different people at different times. In terms of style I wouldn't look back on it as a vintage year for other people's music, but it's been a very interesting year. It was so much albums, it was moments, it was records."
SEB: "I'd say there's more disco stuff, like Modjo."
Mr C: "The disco loop rules!"
W: "Jazzie B keeps telling me that the Eighties are back, everything's Eighties."
SEB: "The Eighties ARE back, it's not a myth!"
Mr C: "Well then roll on acid house - give us some acid house!"

Do you think it was a year when some of the coundaries were broken down, when people figured that the only thing in pigeonholes is pigeon shite?
W: "If you get bogged down in a routine it's not going to work any more. You have to shake things up every now and then - an electric shock. People are quite amazed that I used an acoustic guitar and strings on my track 'Back Up...' For me, I'm just doing music; going one step further."
Mr C: "It's all about hybrids. The most successful types of music on the dancefloor today are hybrids - like a hybrid of house and trance and you've got this hard house thing; or house and techno and you've got tech-house; or drum & bass and house and you've got nu skool breaks. I think we're going to end up in the same place where we started, thankfully. Back in the late Eighties it didn't matter - you could play acid, house, techno and it all went together."
PT: "I heard a record recently and thought 'this is brilliant - what is it?' I found out what it was, paid for it over the phone and had it sent to my office. I was already in America so I had it sent to LA, opened it up and I couldn't believe my eyes - it was my own fucking record from 10 years ago. It had my sticked on and my handwriting, you know, like you write on records. How weird's that? I dumped it, sold it to someone and ended up buying i back!

Moving through the year, Ibiza was still as hooj as Pavarotti's pyjamas...
SEB: "This year was my first time in Ibiza and I really started to learn about dance music; it was the first time I'd been to a club and just listened, and I was really impressed. People were doing very sophisticated things with the songs they had, using the songs like instruments."

Were you at all aware what a huge track Groovejet would be this summer?
SEB: "I was probably one of the last to realise. When I heard the song I didn't know it had been around as an instrumental, I thought it was like a backing track for someone to write on top of - sorry Spiller. So I thought, 'God, this needs re-arranging,' and I started chopping it around. I remember a lot of people saying they liked it, and when it got the BBC advert I thought, 'well that will help and if it goes Top 15 that will be great.' And then it was like, maybe it will go Top 10. I was so absolutely dead certain it would be number two, completely convinced."

That battle with Posh Spice to get to the top spot must have been a right old chuckle.
SEB: "It was good fun. I've got really happy memories of it now - of course - because I know the ending it makes it a lot more rosy. I was glad she wasn't nasty about me - I was very aware the way that it could have been with me on the other side."
PT: "I think Ibiza was as good as I can remember it this year, particularly for the Space, Pacha and Privilege experience. People were willing to get different sounds and different experiences from the same DJs."

Did Ayia Napa have any impact on Ibiza's dominance?
PT: "It had its own influence but it didn't have a negative influence on Ibiza. It just crystallised the garage scene with its own brand of club culture."
W: "There wasn't really the space for it all to be in Ibiza really, it had to go somewhere else. And the garage scene over here is so big."

Has the impact of garage music taken you by surprise?
W: "At first it wasn't really ready yet, it was still going through a transitional period where it was borrowing a lot of vocals from American r&b. And then they got bored of using those vocals and made their own vocals, you know, getting MCs and singers on the tracks."
Mr C: "Let's be realistic, the UK garage crows is gangsters on their right off, d'ya know what I mean. And I don't mean that in a negative way."
PT: "Not all!"
W: "I'm not a gangster."
(Laughter.)
Mr C: "The people that go to all the really cool parties, the ones that wear the designer suits and drive the flash cars, they're all gangsters and they're doing it on their night off. They're not the sort of people that would drive to Clacton for an all-weekender."
W: "There's ravers and there's clubbers, that's the difference."

How do you think things may shape up in the year 2001?
W: "I know where I want to go. I'd really like to see garage taken more seriously as a genre of music, with artists having their own albums and not just singles and singles recycled on compilations. It is for the record companies to start injecting some belief in the artists and getting them to do album projects and then it's going to get bigger and bigger."
PT: "The whole notion of compilation albums, having been very successful doing it for a while, for me the fun of it has gone in England. I'd much rather do an artistic one. This year it has been either Wookie or Artful Dodger or Craig David that's probably had the sway of the artistic statement with records." (Pete has reverted to some semi-English dialiect here - Ed.)
Mr C: "I'm drawing to a close recording my debut Mr C album, which is quite ironic considering I've been recording for 13 years. I'm really excited about that. The album's called 'Change' because of the change that we're going through - the change that I've been going through in my life in the last year has just been paramount, my whole life is completely in a different place to where it was a year ago."
SEB: "I don't know what Spiller's up to but for me I'm going solo. I want to do stuff that acknowledges both theaudience and Spiller, something that can be played live but you can also have a good dance to. I love disco and that's why I did the 'Groovejet' song because to me it was like contemporary disco and that's where dance music and I meet."
Mr C: "It's all good. There's not so much competition between genres, everyone's mates now. In Miami, you'd go out and be hanging out at a bar drinking with, like, some drum & bass boys, some American house boys, some techno boys and we're all together having a right old laugh about what we're doing. And I think that's what's making this scene special and what's making it stronger and more of a global community: we're all respectful of each other."
SEB: "Your world sounds brilliant with all these lovely people."
Mr C: "Welcome, welcome to the wonderful world of dance!"
W: "Come on board!"

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