Paranoid London

Creating Paranoid London a decade ago, Quinn Whalley and Gerardo Delgado hid their identity from their acid house peers. Danny Turner lifts their cloak of anonymity and steps into the duo’s gritty, analogue-infested dungeon

Having entrenched themselves in the UK’s sleazy club scene for decades, Paranoid London duo Quinn Whalley and Gerardo Delgado have probably forgotten more than most people know about dance music’s subversive derivations. To this day, they embrace their love of electro, house, hip-hop and post-punk, and the iconic sounds that lay behind their foundations. The duo first met in 2008, with Whalley providing a helping hand for Delgado’s early productions. After a period of inertia, they teamed up to emit their own take on acid house, releasing several EPs and a self-titled debut album in 2014. Hiding behind the Paranoid London moniker, they refused to send promos to big name DJs and radio stations in order to preserve their anonymity and provide products that had genuine street value.

However, it wasn’t long before the secret was out as the duo spent the next five years working on a follow-up that would delve yet deeper into the dark analogue territories explored on their debut. Simply titled PL, Whalley and Delgado joined forces with the likes of Arthur Baker, Suicide’s Alan Vega, A Certain Ratio’s Simon Topping and Mutado Pintado, collectively adding gritty vocal layers atop Paranoid London’s already sonically deformed, apocalyptic acid instrumentals.

What are your musical backgrounds?

Gerardo Delgado: “I was your typical normal kid, bunking off school and running around London going into every second-hand record shop to look for house, hip-hop and electro music. I helped out in Fat Cat Records for a while and spent the summers DJing at Paradise Lost in Tenerife, where I’m from.”

Quinn Whalley : “My old man was a rock musician in the early to mid-’80s, so I had every drum machine going when I was a kid. Between the ages of eight and 14, I had a Roland TR-808 in my bedroom, Linn Drums, 909s, 707s and Oberheim DMXs. He got the first portastudio that came out, then the Fostex 8-track reel-to-reel. I was really into electro and creating impossible drum beats, so I was massively into drum machines.”

Do you have any anecdotes from that period?

QW: “Towards the end of his deal, my dad asked me what drum machine he should get. It’s not my regret because he’s the one that fucked up, but I told him to get an E-mu SP-12 because it was a sampling drum machine. I said, ‘if you get this, you can have any drum sound you want for the rest of your life,’ but being a rock musician he hadn’t got his head around sampling and bought the Yamaha RX5, which was really expensive but one of the worst drum machines ever made. It literally had three vocal samples: ‘wow’, ‘hey’ and ‘ugh’; so he got rid of my 808 and we ended up with that and a Roland D-50.”

This led you into production?

QW: “I spent a while interning for Guru Josh, so had the run of his studio for about a year. I’d stay there all night every night learning how to use everything.”

At what point did you decide to team up?

QW: “There was a culture of DJs hiring engineers to go into a studio and make a record. The DJ would show up with a bunch of records and the engineer would sample them and they’d put something together. Del had been doing that with a few people, one of whom was just starting to get big so couldn’t do it anymore and gave him the number of Justin Drake who was working with Peace Division so he passed it on to me. Of course, I had bags of time [ laughs]. Del would come over three or four times a year and we’d sit there and try and make whatever was fashionable, but we never put anything out. One night we got pissed and I felt really bad that he’d been paying me as an engineer for years but we hadn’t released a record yet. He wanted to do acid house, so we just went out and got the machines.”

You rarely give interviews. Is that to portray an image of anonymity or would you rather people just focused on the music?

QW: “The main reason was that I’d done something years before that got semi-famous and spent a few months being picked up in a cab every day to do TV interviews. We were doing children’s TV programmes and I looked like an absolute dickhead every time – it was awful and I hated every minute of it. There was also that element of, who really wants to listen to a pair of middle-aged white dudes talking about music technology? Funnily enough, as we’ve realised recently, quite a few people [ laughs].”

GD: “We were also quite well-known in house music circles, so to give this a chance we didn’t want to be associated with what we’d done before. By the time all our friends and people from the industry found out that Paranoid London is Quinn and Del, they’d already bought the records. It’s nice that we had that period where the music came before people actually knew who we were.”

These days, is it possible to shun social media as a promotional tool?

QW: “Del doesn’t do it at all, but I love Facebook and check it at least 50 times a day. I think I have quite an easy ride on it being a straight white male from the South East of England. I watch people melting down; but we’ve started using it more now – although we opened an Instagram account about two months ago and are still trying to work out what we’re going to do with it.”

There was once an element of mystique to our musical icons. Is that dissolving?

QW: “Everything we liked as kids was difficult to find out about and you had to work for it. The harder it got, the more you wanted to find out. I always liked my rock & roll stars to be pricks in real life, but with social media they pretend they’re your friends but you don’t really have a connection to these people.”

“I guess we’re trying to get across that feeling of sleazy latenight escapades”

GD: “I quite like it when people come up and talk to me at a gig. If people ask questions about how we created a certain bassline or made a record, I’m happy to talk about that and prefer having that closer connection with people to using social media.”

QW: “We also like to give those who can be bothered to make the effort to spend money on music something that all the other kids can’t have. A vinyl-only release might cost you £10, but we’ll only press 500 copies so you can play it for years.”

GD: “We didn’t give any promos out to the big DJs, so a kid could have a record that a top DJ didn’t have. It also meant that everybody got the record at the same time and if you made the effort to go to the shop on the day it was released, you’d get the record. That makes it worth something.”

To what extent did you participate in the UK acid house scene?

QW: “We were both part of the whole electro thing, then hip-hop and some of us kids branched into house music when it came out. At first, we went to the clubs rather than the raves.”

GD: “I was 17 before it all really kicked off and we liked it because it was our little secret and hadn’t got that big. You had the look and could tell if people were going to the same clubs you were and that made it exciting. You’d see all the same guys buying the same records and would actually see the DJ from the night before in a record shop, which made the movement seem a lot more real and something you could be a part of. It was ours, for a while, but two years later it was everyone’s. We withdrew and started going back to the ‘right’ clubs, so within that big movement you had a secret society.”

Were you aware that the scene derived from Chicago house?

QW: “For us, it was never about white English kids dancing in fields. In our heads, it was all about sweaty clubs in Chicago. That’s what I imagined when I listened to the records or DJed in my bedroom with my decks by the window. I’d pretend I was flipping out in front of 200 gay Latinos or black guys rather than 10,000 white kids with smiley faces. It all came from B Boys, hip-hop and electro, and house music introduced me to that culture.”

GD: “The good thing about the first Chicago records that came over is that hip-hop was quite straight, but as soon as they put a house record on the mood changed. There was Groove Records and two shops down Trax Records in Greek Street, Soho. I got caned walking in there from a group of kids that were walking past, but I thought – this is awesome. Two years later, they all had smiley t-shirts on and I remember thinking, you’re not that bothered now are you?”

Did you also spend time checking out gear in Charing Cross road?

QW: “Turnkey [ laughs]? We’d try the gear out on a pair of headphones but never bought anything in there because it was too fucking expensive. They had the same attitude as the record shops; they were the gatekeepers. You’d have to go in a record shop for months to get the people that worked there to give you any good records and Turnkey was the same with equipment. They knew damn well people like me wouldn’t buy any gear so wouldn’t give us the time of day.”

Does your music also have links to ’90s industrial and EBM, because you have Suicide’s Alan Vega on the new record?

QW: “We didn’t work with him, it was originally a remix of a track he did with Arthur Baker, but Alan’s been a hero of ours for ages. There was a great period where disco, industrial and electro crossed over; stuff like Nitzer Ebb. We actually did a cover version of one of their tracks, Join In The Chant.”

Was the idea of the PL album to create a foundation for guest vocalists to perform over?

GD: “Before we were into electro and house music, we listened to loads of obscure punk and post-punk music, so in the back of our minds we always thought about the amazing singers on those tracks and how it would be far more interesting to use them rather than just have a house beat.”

QW: “It usually comes about because we end up meeting someone, hang out with them, have an adventure, realise they’re a lunatic and say, right let’s do some stuff together. If they live far away, we’ll

send them a skeleton track to do something on top of and rip the music out. If they live in London, like Mutado Pintado or Josh Caffe, they’ll come down to the studio.”

And the vocals aren’t lyrical – you prefer to use them in quite a primordial way…

GD: “I guess we’re trying to get across that feeling of sleazy late-night escapades. We meet quite a lot of these characters in the dark corners of clubs and we’re trying to bring that onto the record so people can get the vibe of these amazing places where all sorts go on.”

QW: “I do like some of the records with big songs on, but we’re not talented enough to do anything like that. For us, it’s much easier to do a bassline and a drum beat and have someone ramble over the top rather than turn it into a song.”

GD: “We’re not that clever.”

But knowing your limitations is an art in itself

QW: “That’s what we keep telling ourselves [ laughs]. No, but you’re right, it is quite important to understand what you’re good at. We know when we’re happy with a track because we both start dancing to it in the studio.”

How did the Arthur Baker and Alan Vega track Angel Of Hell come together?

QW: “Alan’s a massive hero, obviously. Mutado Pintado and I went to see Suicide at the Barbican, which I’m pretty sure was the last gig they ever did in England and, weirdly, we met Arthur Baker at Sonar and he emailed us the morning after the Suicide gig saying he’s got this track he did with Alan 15 years ago that never came out and would we be interested in remixing it? Initially, he put our remix out as a digital release on his label, then we called him up and told him it would fit really nicely on our album and would he let us put it on there? Arthur’s the Larry David of electronic music… He’s got a persecution complex – he thinks everyone’s trying to fuck him over all the time. But he’s brilliant – a proper old-school record producer with a real talent for putting people together. He’s got some great stories and he’s a good laugh as well.”

As a duo, how do you tend to work on originating the tracks?

QW: “We just sit here with a drum machine, a Roland TB-303 and a pile of records. We listen to the music, get some vibes and start programming the 303 or the TR-808. For years, we didn’t have a clue how to use the 303 and the only reason I know how to now is because when we started using it in our live show I had to back it up and there’s this little printed chart that teaches you how to use it.”

Before that it was just trial and error?

QW: “Well the thing is we never actually use it that way because the whole point is to get stuff out of it that you could never even dream of. We’ll tap out a load of random pitches and go through 30 or 40 of them until we find something we like and ‘boom’ that’s the track. We’ll usually sit in the studio for two days until we find the patterns we like, record a sequence for 10 minutes and edit out two or three minutes here or there if it’s getting boring. Once we’ve found those patterns, the track’s literally done in a couple of hours.”

Sly Is Watching is so dry and mechanical it sounds like hardly any processing was added

QW: “It’s all really basic and raw – the only outboard we used on the whole album was the Korg Monotrons and the Korg MS-20. We essentially plug everything into the MS-20 and use it as a filter – we never use the oscillators. The overdrive and distortion are beautiful and it took me ages to realise but one of the reasons I don’t like listening to whole records these days is that there’s too much stuff in the high frequencies fighting for your attention, so we prefer to tone the filter down and get that raw, dirty, basic sound. It’s almost a moronic way of doing things.”

GD: “We don’t know where we got one of the sounds off that track from, and if anyone ever finds out we’ve stashed a bit of the publishing away for them. It’s all about putting a 303 through the MS-20 then adding a tiny little sample, so it’s pretty basic.”

Vicious Games has a few pad sounds on, but because most of the other tracks are so dry, they colour and illuminate the whole record…

QW: “The DJ Genesis track on the last album did that too; we used a Juno-106 for the pads. We’ve tried so many times to make melodic music and we’re not very good at it, but every now and then we’ll come up with something that fits nicely.”

GD: “With Vicious Games, we nearly had the album finished but felt we needed to add a more uplifting track with a sweet vocal. That melody was literally the first thing we played.”

QW: “The way we sync stuff also makes the tracks a little bit weird and funky. There’s no swing on the 808 or 303 and the way we sync things up is very pre-MIDI so everything drifts a little bit. These machines are funky without even trying – the only bit of footage I ever put up of my kid on Facebook is her smashing something out on the 808.”

Is the computer purely used as a recording device or more than that?

QW: “We used the basic Ableton reverb and a reel-to-reel tape machine, but all the warmth comes from the Korgs. Ableton clocks everything and records the takes then we chop out what we don’t want. We use Ableton because it’s much quicker and easier than Logic or Cubase. Ableton’s just like using another bit of hardware – and even then we’ll run that through the Korg to bring everything out and make it come alive again.”

What do you use to EQ?

QW: “On the Mackie mixer there’s a high mid knob, so I just turn that down a little bit and that’s all the EQing I do on anything. I’m being a bit disingenuous because I spent years grabbing every plugin I could possibly get, but it all got a bit dull and boring. We just found this nice method of working where I know that this knob makes stuff sound less harsh, this drum machine has a really nice boom to it and that synth makes stuff sound really bassy. The 303 still constantly surprises us; it comes up with things you’d never be able to dream of or programme.”

Were software emulators a poor substitute?

QW: “We used Rebirth and it was alright, but it doesn’t compare. There’s nothing better than mucking about with hardware, but I guess it could be any drum machine or synthesiser with a sequencer on it. Our sound just happens to derive from whatever gear we’ve got.”

You have some other hardware outboard…

QW: “On the outboard side, we have a TC Electronic M5000, the Ensoniq DP4 and the old Alesis Quadraverb, which in my opinion is the best multi-effects machine ever released. They’re all plumbed into an old Allen & Heath MixWizard WZ16:2DX, which belongs to the guy we share this studio with. So we’ll EQ on the outboard and feed them back into each other.”

The 808’s your main machine for beats?

QW: “The 808’s always got a lead going into the external-in of the MS-20. It’s patched so the envelope is always open and you don’t have to trigger anything. The 808 sounds pretty good clean but when you put it through the Korg you’ll get a nice bit of overdrive which makes it all fuzzy and warm. We’ll also put stuff through the Korg Monotron, which is the best £40 you’ll ever spend. It’s got an MS-20 filter with an analogue delay unit in it, which is just insane. We use four of them during the live show.”

What other hardware do you use?

QW: “We use the 303 for all our basslines and the Juno-101 for pads. The 909 is different to the 808; we’ve only used it on a few records but prefer to use it live because it’s got a much punchier kick. It’s good to swap between the two. When we’re playing a live set, it’s almost like having two separate decks and cutting between them. The Cyclone Beat Bot TT-78 is also really good. It’s a clone of an old CR-78 drum machine. Sometimes we’ll use the Doepfer Dark Time Analogue Sequencer – you can use all the knobs for tuning, which is great for making something weird and out there.”

You had a revelation with the Casio RZ-1?

QW: “The first time I hooked it up, I sampled the 808 through it and, boom, I had the Todd Terry snare and kick drum sound. It’s like, cool, so that’s how he did it! I think it’s 8-bit and it’s got an old sampler on it. There’s four pads on the end and you don’t get more than a second’s worth of sample time spread across all of them, but it’s brilliant for putting kicks and snares through because it sounds really filthy. I think you can still buy them pretty cheap.”

want to know more?

Paranoid London’s second album PL is released 30th August on Paranoid London Records. For more information, visit: facebook.com/ParanoidLondon