Talking Shop: Mike Schommer
Get Enuff
“I remember this track a lot because it was in the middle of writing this tune that all the labels wanted to sign me. Simon Bushell, an A&R from Sony, brought down his bosses. It was literally a chain of command all the way up to Paul Burger, who was the head of Sony in Europe.
“They all came down the studio to see me, and Lain was in the mic booth at the time recording Get Enuff’, and we had to stop to entertain them. Anyway. They left, happy, and we finished the track.
“We wanted the song to have a good feel, and have a bit of that off-the-wall vibe to it. It’s one to get people up and dancing – the perfect opener to the album.”
Scrappy
“I’d done Scrappy and Down On Me a year before the album. They were the first tracks to have the name Wookie attributed to them. Before that I was working with a guy called Johnny J under the group name of the X-Men.
“We’d done a coupla remix bootlegs of tracks like Whitney Houston’s It’s Not Right But It’s Okay, Brandy’s Angel and Debelah Morgan’s Yesterday. After we’d done those I did Scrappy.
“The whole track was written as it starts. The main melody came to me first, and everything came from that.
“The title ‘ Scrappy’ is because the music sounds like the bit in the Scooby-Doo cartoon when ScrappyDoo goes ‘Puppy Power!’ The song reminded me of that [laughs].”
Battle
“Initially, the bassline on the first drop of Battle was the whole tune. I was writing it as another instrumental club track. And then Lain walked in the studio and started losing his mind. He was like, ‘Oh my god! Let me jump on this, man!’
“I couldn’t hear where a vocalist could sit on it, so I had to adapt it to make it work. I had to change the bassline and go into a different section for the song to work. That’s why there are two parts to the song.
“Lain came up with the idea, vocally, for that one. He’s talking about the everyday struggles of life. We always tried to make songs that were uplifting.
“Lain just stuck his magic on it and that track just blew up, much to my surprise. I didn’t think it would be that big, but it became a classic.”
Down On Me
“I was using a program called ReCycle. I would take loops and breaks and chop them up in that, then feed them back into my sampler, have them spanned across the keys, and then use the sounds to make my drum patterns.
“I liked to make my drums from scratch and build them all up. I’d have all these little parts, each with their own rhythm, and then put them all together until it made up one loop.
“It meant that DJs found it hard to mix my tracks, because there might not be a kick where you’d expect, or the snare might be on the offbeat [laughs].
“I always felt that it should sound interesting, and that you shouldn’t follow the formula. The formula was
“I knew I wanted to do something British. Prior to that I was emulating the Americans, doing R&B. I wanted to represent me, and the scene. I was a big raver. Always at Crystal Palace, Milton Keynes... all over the place. I hung around with DJ Hype … jungle, I was around all that … Metalheadz on Sundays. It was just a vibe. I was heavily influenced by that drum & bass sound, so I fused that with what I already knew, which was the R&B stuff.”
really just whatever way I wanted to write music. If the drop felt like it should go there, I’d put it there.”
Joy My Pride
“The track is about the birth of your first child. The funny thing is that Lain and I didn’t have any kids then. We had no idea about it. But I had this tune idea and Lain totally got with it. We were just thinking of things a father would say to their unborn child.
“In the second verse, the child is born. Lain sings, ‘You’ve got your mother’s eyes/I just can’t get over you/ Moments of sacred love/When God gave us you’. That was about sex, but we tried to make it beautiful.
“To be honest, that is my favourite track on the album because it has the most meaning. The middle eight, where it drops into that abyss of just vocals and melodies, just gets me every time.”
Back Up Back Up Back Up
“It’s an instrumental, but originally it was written for a girl singer we had over from Antigua, and it was called ‘Girl Friend’. We never completed it. It never worked, vocally.
“So I got a guy called Michael McEvoy in. He was an idol of mine, and a musician that Soul II Soul worked with for years. He plays guitar. I asked him to play over the whole track. I wanted him to just be the vocalist with his guitar.
“I let the track play three or four times, and he jammed down to tape. Then I sampled everything he played and created that guitar you hear. Basically comping it out like you would a vocal. I remember cutting and slicing little bits to make a full solo. It was like half an hour of editing to get one riff just right.”
VCF
“That stands for Voltage Control Frequency. It’s actually a control on the SE-1X. I just took that name.
“I liked messing with sounds. All those little morphing frequencies that I’m doing all over the album [mimes