PBR Streetgang
Yorkshire’s finest house/disco DJ and production unit enjoy a brief sabbatical from the DJ booth and remix duties to unveil their debut album Late Night Party Line. Hamish Mackintosh follows the groove to Leeds to find out more.
Bonar Bradberry and Tom Thorpe, aka PBR Streetgang, have a musical production partnership and DJ alliance stretching over some ten years. Bonding over a mutual love of crate digging when they first met in a Birmingham record store, the friendship was forged further over a shared passion for DJing, and the pair soon established a residency at the renowned Asylum nights at Leeds’s Club Mint, learning the ropes of music production along the way.
Known best for a string of dancefloor-driven EPs – A Streetgang EP, Achilles, Whiplash and Move On to mention but a few – and remixes for luminaries including Lana Del Rey, Bonar and Tom’s Late Night
Party Line sees the pair add several new colours to their musical palette, whilst not forgetting their keen ear for a dancefloor-filling groove.
FM caught up with Bradberry and Thorpe in their Leeds studio to find out more about the making of Late Night Party Line and how it feels for PBR Streetgang to be finally bringing their long-awaited debut long-player to the party.
First up, Bonar Bradberry on some of the duo’s technical details…
You’ve been working together for ten years. How long has this debut album been in the making?
“I think it’s ten years this year, but the album itself came together relatively quickly – three months of intensive work with some tweaking and a little extra mixing after that. We’ve been talking about it for years, so we decided to create a little period in our schedules to just write an album after all the EPs.
“When we actually started, it all came together quickly, and it was done in a matter of months, which, I know, isn’t always the case with albums. We wanted to make sure that it sounded cohesive too, as we worked on it for those three months, so we were aware of the things we’d been working on the previous week so hopefully it all follows some kind of thread stylistically.”
Do you each have set roles in the studio, or is it just do whatever needs done at any given time?
“Not really. I suppose I do most of the engineering and mixing, but it’s more just a case of getting together and sharing ideas. We’ve been producing and remixing as PBR Streetgang for ten years; we were friends and DJing together for probably another six or seven years before that, so we’ve got an intuitive way of working now and don’t really have to sell our point across to the other. Things flow quickly in that way.”
Did you bring a lot of previous ideas into the mix for putting the album together?
“No. Everything was done from scratch. We had a folder of ideas that we thought we might dip into, but we decided against it as we thought it was a bit lazy and some of the stuff in the folder had been done a couple of months prior to starting the album, other ideas in it were from three years ago. We wanted to have the continuity or a bit of a thread between the techniques we were using to make the music on the album, and to have different styles as that’s the way we DJ. We wanted the album to reflect that.”
Are the DJ booth and the music studio becoming ever-more entwined?
“Yeah – our practise DJ setup is behind the production desk. It never used to be the case, and the space only allows so much but, for us, it’s very true. For a lot of what we do, it’s about making stuff that we want to play and that will make people dance. That’s kind of what we’re in it for, as well as making stuff that we’re proud of. For people like us, you’ve always got to listen to things with one ear to the DJ booth, we tried to have as few rules as possible for the album. Naturally though, having been DJs longer than we’ve been producers, I guess everything we do has been influenced by our DJing – whether we like it or not!”
We assume the DJing comes in handy for road-testing new tracks – to see what works and what doesn’t…
“Yeah, that was the good thing with being able to go back and tweak or maybe slightly remix things for the album: playing at festivals and clubs gives you a chance to reference it and gauge reactions.”
Can you maybe talk us through the finer points of your studio setup?
“Everything runs through Ableton, with Push as the central MIDI controller. Everything goes into the soundcard through a patchbay, then all the external keyboards and everything go back out through an eight-channel MIDI port. That way it’s easy to have everything plugged in at any one time, and just patch things in. You can send MIDI out from Push to the synths, and work quickly like that rather than having to plug each instrument in every time. We decided to get the patch bay a couple of years ago, and it’s made the workflow so much quicker.”
So everything’s going through Push?
“Not everything, but a lot of the initial ideas start out there and we can then jump out to the keyboards. There’s a couple of things that aren’t MIDI, like the Jen SX-1000, which is older than me! It’s great to have some things like that where you can’t sync things up and get the LFOs to sync so it sounds a little bit wobbly and crunchy. It’s a very hybrid setup though, as we still use plenty of plugins as well. Whatever the right tools are to get the job done, really.”
Push seems to be quite a versatile little studio workhorse to run with Ableton?
“Amazing, yeah. I’ve had both versions and they’re fantastic. The build-quality of this second one is even better, and the ability to jump between things and to get a quick sketch going is so much nicer when you can be so tactile with it. It’s really integrated, and it means you don’t just have to use plugins if you want to play in some riffs or chords from a keyboard that’s slightly out of reach of your desk. There are loads of little advantages to it. I’m not the greatest keyboard player, and neither is Tom, so it helps you formulate ideas when you use the scales and stuff.
Then you work in between the gaps after you’ve got that initial rough idea going.”
Does Ableton make its way into your DJ rig?
“It doesn’t really. I don’t particularly like the idea of having a laptop in the booth. We tried it a few years back as we were early adopters of Ableton, and we were excited by being able to warp things… but trying to incorporate it with vinyl was just fraught with problems. It wasn’t very flexible, and you had to do so much preparation, which meant you then only had a certain number of things that can work. We like to stay flexible and work with a crowd and read a crowd rather than just say ‘This is what we’re playing, like it or lump it’. We’re not that kind of DJs.
“Recently, we’ve been using different mixers like the Mastersounds Radius 4, which is nice. We’ve always had a rotary mixer at home for the past ten years. The Radius is compact and sounds probably better than the Rane we’ve got here in the studio. We’ve been using a Pioneer RMX1000 off and on for a while, and we’re just getting into using the Toraiz SP-16 sampler. The way you can sync that up to things on CDJs is fantastic, and lets you get little drum loops going. You can dip into that easily with the syncability of it. When you’re DJing in a club, you don’t want a huge amount of things planned out, as I prefer to be more spontaneous. The Toraiz in the setup gives you a lot of scope for adding things and creating plenty of happy accidents in your set.”
You don’t want to be a technician over and above playing your actual set…
“Exactly. We’ve just started using one of the DJS-1000s, which is, again, yet another step up in terms of being able to sync things up. You can get a drum loop you’ve just made to sync up with a record you put on that’s pitched at, say, 4.5%, and there’s no BPM read-out – you’re just doing it by ear. The pitchbend on the DJS-1000 really helps with that.”
The Toraiz AS-1 with the Dave Smith synthengine in it looks a bit tasty too, doesn’t it?
“Absolutely. We’ve been using one of those too, and while it’s early days with it, having even one voice of a Prophet is great. We’ve got other workhorses like the Juno-106 and the Roland HS-60, which is a 106, effectively, but with speakers. We use them as our ‘go-to’ polysynths, and I don’t think there’s a track on the album that doesn’t have them on somewhere. The Jen SX-1000 also adds a little extra flavour and grit to things too. And then there’s a Novation Bass Station, which we’ve used for basslines, leads and acidy stuff for a long time. They’re just so malleable. You can get so many different sounds out of them; they’re very tweakable and the arpeggiator and step sequencer are both good. You can go from raw, angry sounds to thick and warm basses.”
Any other hardware?
“I’ve got a thing called a Cheetah MS-6, which is a polyphonic six-voice synth with one mono output and, bizarrely, it sounds really wide! [laughs] I don’t quite understand how that works! It’s good for slightly ’80s synth sounds, without being digital as it’s analogue. It’s useful for pads and ’80s basslines. There’s a couple of basic compressors: a DBX160 and an Alesis 3630, which I think every dance music producer over the age of 30 has owned at some point! For putting vocals in, we’ve got a nice Focusrite ISA Two. For a bit of fun outboard, for reverb and stuff, we’ve got a Lexicon Alex. It’s an old effects processor for reverbs and plate reverbs that’s really nice to send synths through.
“I almost forgot that we’ve also got a Korg MicroKorg Xl and the Volca Bass. We’re just exploring the Volca now as we’re always on the lookout for acidy-sounding things or anything that can do that kind of thing that isn’t just a straight-up 303.”
Dipping back to your DAW, have you moved up to Live 10 yet?
“We’re just about to get onto it as there are a lot of features that look exciting. I didn’t want to upgrade during the making of the album as I didn’t want anything being buggy or crashing – not that Ableton does as it’s probably the most reliable DAW I’ve used. To be honest, it’s usually more about the version of OS X we’re using. Up until last year I was still using Snow Leopard!” Was the album all mixed in-the-box, or is there a desk still involved in the mixing process? “Everything is done in-the-box, unfortunately. That’s why we got the patchbay, so everything could be plugged in at any one time without having to go through a desk. I did buy a Bozak 10-channel stereo mixer a couple of years back. It’s not like a DJ mixer; it’s more for front of house. It’s very limited EQ on it as it was an early-model Bozak. It needs mending, and this is the year I think I’m going to have to finally get it fixed as it would be nice to stem everything out of that and use it as a summing mixer. We’ve got decent-enough convertor and monitors now to warrant using it, as you do notice the difference.”
Do you think getting the right studio monitors is often overlooked when people are putting their studios together?
“We’ve just upgraded the speakers and convertors. To be honest, I’m pretty much, ‘If it works and you know the monitors really well, then that’s all you need.’ It’s massively important to have good sound, but the room and how that sounds is just as important. There’s so many different factors. If
“Everything is done inthe-box, unfortunately. That’s why we got the patchbay”
someone was to ask me what would I spend most money on if I was starting over, then I’d definitely say a good set of monitors and decent convertors. If your room is terrible though, you’d be as well investing in some good headphones! That said, I did have the same pair of Alesis M1 Mk2 monitors for about 14 years, and knew them inside out so I guess one of the main things is to know your gear.”
Tell us about the track Late Night Party Line
“That was started towards the end of the albummaking process. We’d got into a groove where things start to happen quickly, and you begin to roll out tracks quickly. That one happened spontaneously; I think the bare bones only took an afternoon. We’d been working 9-to-5, six days a week for two months by that point, so we were really in the groove. There’s quite a bit of the Juno-106 in the tweaks at the end, but it’s mainly the bassline. We kept it stripped back so it’s not as full as, say, Money, Casino, Brass, which has loads of stuff from the Junos going on.”
Tom Thorpe tells FM a little about the PBR Streetgang DJ methodology… Is PBR Streetgang a democracy?
“Yeah, I think it is. [laughs] It’s basically like a nice working marriage! Ultimately, we’re best mates and we’ve known each other for over 16 years. We met in a record shop, became friends, started DJing together and seemed to be in sync pretty much straight away. We then realised that you really must make music to make a career out of it, so that was a natural progression. We just understand each other, and if something doesn’t work in the studio, which is rare, then we just scrap it! Also, when we DJ, our sets are generally back-to-back which I think says a lot about how we’re generally in tune with one another.”
What’s the first thing you tend to start using in the studio?
“Bon’s a little more hands-on than me, but we start off in different ways these days… whether it’s with drums or a little riff we sample. I would say that my go-to bit of kit tends to be the Novation Bass Station – just because you can get some great- sounding riffs out of it and I’m a bit of a sucker for a bassline! It’s great for making little arpeggiated acid-type sequences, so I just love having a jam on that. For the album, we tried to use as many of the bits of gear in the studio as possible to get that variety of sound rather than just stick with our go-to bits of kit and nothing else.”
What do PBR Streetgang look for in a soft-synth?
“We’ve got a range of plugins, but lots of the clones of old vintage synths that we can’t afford! [laughs] £100 for the software version of a synth that would cost you £10k? Let’s do it! Although we’ve got banks of soft-synths, it’s nice to get a mix of that and hardware too…. I think that if you know how to use something, and it makes great sounds, then just use it. I think the key, for us, is trying to get a nice balance of software and hardware.”
What fills a dancefloor?
“Every party varies, which is what we’ve found, really. We can play house and disco stuff, so ultimately the most important thing for us as DJs was having a residency. We had a ten-year residency with Asylum in Leeds, and I think the most important thing we learned was how to read the crowds. Wherever you go, wherever you are in the world, whatever club or festival, being able to read the crowd is vital.
“I think we can confidently do that because of spending years doing the residency. When you’re a resident you learn, week in, week out, how to play to the crowd – and you also play alongside guest acts, so you’re in the booth with them and you can feed off what they do and watch how they work the crowd, how they mix things and blend things together.
“I think, these days, that residencies are a dying art, and that’s a shame because it’s so important. Look at, say, Craig Richards – fucking hell, he’s probably one of the finest DJs out there. Good selector, and everyone looks up to him. He’s been a resident at Fabric for about 18 years! Same for Larry Levan!”
If someone gives you guys a track to remix, what would your initial way of approaching things be?
“Well, at the moment, we’re remixing a track for Hercules and the Love Affair, and we always approach things from the point of wanting to take it off in a different direction to the original. To put your sonic stamp on it. We’ve approached this one as how you would want to hear our interpretation of it on a dancefloor… so it’s made very much with the clubs in mind.
“That was the interesting thing about us finally making an album. A lot of the things we’ve done prior to making the album: a lot of EPs, were, essentially, music for clubs. The album is totally different in that we didn’t design it specifically for the clubs. We made it so it could be listened to anywhere, and that’s exciting as we’ve talked about doing it for three or four years, so we were massively up for it. We just went in and did it without giving ourselves too many restrictions and, as clichéd as it sounds, just to have a bit of fun with it.”
How do you put your beats together in the studio?
“We’ve used Ableton for a long time now, and we’ve built up our own drum racks full of hits, kicks, and hats that we’ve assembled over the years. We’ve generally gone to them when we’re building beats, but we did try and do things differently for the album as we didn’t want to just use those for every single track.”
Do you ever switch off from listening out for sounds and techniques when you’re out in a nightclub not working?
“I don’t think you can ever properly switch off. Because we’re generally busy DJing, on the road or in the studio I’ve found that you spend less time listening to other people’s music. When I do go out though, I absolutely love it. You have to keep in touch with what other people are playing as it’s such a fast-paced industry and you have to try and keep up with it. It’s good to get new inspiration.”
Is the start of a stream of PBR Streetgang albums now?
“We’re both excited, although we’re a little bit older and both got our feet on the ground. It’s brilliant to be with Skint Records, because they’re a really a nice team and, if everything goes to plan, they want us to do more albums, which we’ll happily do. We want to go back into the studio as quick as possible to make some new music, although we might revert to doing a couple of EPs for the clubs again. Mixing it all up keeps you interested in things. Bon and I both loved the whole process of putting an album together.”
“If something doesn’t work in the studio, which is rare, then we just scrap it!”