Track by track with Dubfire
No Stopping For Nicotine
“This was me really trying to take the musical style that we were known for and giving it a Radiohead-ish, sort of Alternative, vibe. I was good friends with James Lavelle for many years and loved what he was doing with UNKLE, so I was trying to do something like that.
“I was playing with Electronic music and the technology at the time, as well as seeing how Rock-y I could get it to sound – how full on, peak time Rock, which it builds to.
“Funnily enough, it was the least liked song by management and everyone else, but it was one of the ones that spoke to me the most.”
Sacramento
“This one is super heavily inspired by the group, Planet Funk. In fact, we weren’t happy with our mixdown – this went through two or three different engineers – so I just said, ‘Hey, why not just send it to Simon?’ who was the engineer for Planet Funk. He ended up doing a killer job and nailed the vibe we were after.
“It’s still one of my favourite songs. It was one of those ones that was more uptempo and playful and Pop-y, so Sharam was really into it. This actually was one track that both of us were in creative harmony on.”
Flashdance
“There were certain tracks that were more one of us than the other. Flashdance was a Sharam thing. That was something he’d always wanted to cover. The original he did was just a kind of mash-up, but when we realised that it would be difficult to clear we found this other vocalist and brought in musicians – basically Richard Morel’s band, who we were collaborating with anyway.
“Anousheh Khalili is the singer. Sharam discovered her and felt there was something that she could add to the Deep Dish sound. He got in touch and she came to the studio and listened to some demos. And that started a collaboration that lasted to now, as Sharam is still working with her on the new album he’s just released. She was a very introverted, half-Persian, half-American kinda Lounge singer and pianist. Like a Tori Amos-type. She brought an interesting dynamic to the songs and her songwriting wasn’t obvious. It had meaning.”
Swallow Me
“This was a collaboration with Alex Neri Marco Baroni from Planet Funk. We did it in their studio in Florence, just outside the centre. They had a very beautiful and picturesque spot that overlooked this stream. I remember we were there for 14/15 hours straight, all the way up to sunrise. We would take regular breaks for amazing espresso. One night we ended up having dinner on a farm, and to this day it was one of the best dinners I’ve ever had. Amazing times making this.
“Also, this track, for some reason, was built around a sample from Masters At Work’s remix of Chris Cuevas’ Hip Hop, which came out on Atlantic. There were a lot of influences that we were trying to bring to the front on this one.”
Awake Enough
“Anousheh Khalili again on this. Lyrically, maybe it’s about her not having her eyes open to what was happening in the world at the time. I think she did an early version of this with Sharam where she did a temporary backing track. It must have developed from there.
“Sharam was into the vocal, and I hated it. I hated it. And the backing track really sucked as well. It was really cheesy. I wish I could find the instrumental version because it was amazing. It’s me doing all the guitars, and I added that peak time section where the big powerful drums came in. I would have preferred it as an instrumental.”
Everybody’s Wearing My Head
“This is another of our many fruitful collaborations with Richard Morel. I can’t say I was a fan of the production, though, but this one was really catchy for a lot of people. This was around the time that DFA and James Murphy were putting out a lot of cool music like The Rapture. It was inspired by that and the Rock/Dance thing that we kind of kicked off.
“I was trying to do something a bit more Dance-y with it, though, with some Electro/New Wave elements interspersed throughout. It’s got that fuzzy little keyboard bassline in it, with the heavy Rock drums, and was centred around this guitar sample that Richard had come up with.”
Say Hello
“This was something that Anousheh brought to us. It was basically her on vocals and piano. Sharam loved it and asked me to go into the studio with her. She came in and I coached her to sing it the way I was envisioning it. It ended up very different to the early demos she’s sent us. I zeroed in on one particular piano riff and made that the hook. We were always saying, ‘Okay, what is the hook of this song?’. We said that about every track.
“We wanted it a bit more uplifting, as her original demos
were quite ballad-y and melancholic, so we put together various samples to create a very funky, Subliminalesque, New York House groove. It really worked.”
Dreams
“Dreams, to this day, is one of the finest things we’ve ever done. We wanted to cover the Fleetwood Mac original. My girlfriend sang on it first. Then Anousheh re-did it with Sharem. We ended up having a tiff over who should sing it, so to reset everything and clear the air I asked our management to send it to Stevie Nicks [of Fleetwood Mac].
“She loved it. Literally, the time from getting the go-ahead to her being in the booth was a matter of weeks. We did it in this classic studio that she used to record their iconic early albums in.
“She’d worked there since the ’70s so she was very comfortable recording there and all the engineers knew her. We worked two days with her around the clock and she was a joy to work with – very open to ideas and down to earth. Just to have her in the vocals booth, telling her to re-sing such an iconic song was a ‘pinch-me’ moment.”
Dub Shepherd
“Janis Leahy is the vocalist on here. That was my girlfriend who was going to be on Dreams. She finally got to be on a track [ laughs].
“For years I was heavily into The White Stripes. This was me trying to do Seven Nation Army, but an Electronic version. This was one of the last tracks we did for the album. It was me starting to go back to my roots in Techno. I was trying to steer Deep Dish, maybe. By this point I was getting weary of the Rock/Dance thing and I was trying to go a bit more Techno. You can hear those influences. That dark, polished chrome, Dubfire sound I later became known for.”
Sergio’s Theme
“This was another one that I pretty much did most of it, and Sharam hated it. I loved it for the beauty of the guitar work and the super melancholic vibe. “There is this very famous Persian duo, Shahin & Sepehr, and we became friends with the guitarist. They had a lot of respect for what we’d achieved as Iranians. We had the same respect for them so we wanted to collaborate. So they came into the studio and we jammed.
“Whenever I jammed with someone who was better than me it always elevated my playing. I think we credited him with doing some of the guitar work here… Either way he inspired my guitar playing on this track. It’s one on the album that I’m really proud of.
“I end up hearing this track a lot, especially in the summertime, in Ibiza. Anywhere with a beach club. They typically play it at sunset, especially if they know I’m there [ laughs].”
In Love With A Friend
“I was working many years before this with a guy in an electronics store who played stuff and we kept in touch. We decided to actually work together on this. He’d written some lyrics that I got in on and fine-tuned. It was such a fun song to do. The lyrics were so great that I decided to take a stab at singing it. I was in many bands when I was younger and occasionally got pushed into singing. It sounded great and it’s another one I’m super proud of. The only other song I’ve ever sung on since then was when I first went solo I covered Love and Rockets’ Feel Speed.
“A lot of this album was about feeling. It’s not like we set out and wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Okay, this is what we want to achieve’. It was just what each of us was feeling at the time.”
Over the years Deep Dish became a mainstream act. We’re not sure how that happened