Classic Album: DJ Fresh
Much like Garfield, the cartoon cat, DJ Fresh hates Mondays. The grind. The deflated soul-sapping feeling as you wearily join the rat race for another week. But, unlike that lasagne-fiending mute, this drum & bass maverick did something about it.
“It’s a theme that’s been important throughout my life,” says Fresh, as he actually strolls down a beach in Thailand, phone in hand, sand under foot. “You need to take hold of your dreams and make them happen. That’s what life’s for. That was something that I really wanted to explore with this album.”
Joining him on his mission were a cast of extras so extraordinary that the double taking could give you whiplash. Is that DJ Shadow laying down life-affirming beats? No way! Elsewhere, Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant is telling us not to throw our life away! And, crikey! That can’t be ’80s TV prankster Jeremy Beadle book-ending the whole album with sage life lessons and surreal shout-outs, can it? It is! It is!
“He was a really special guy, and very academic and literate,” says Fresh of the much-loved Beadle’s About host, and now unlikely DnB vocalist. “He really makes the intro, and helped us make the album an experience, bringing people in and setting up the themes.
“I wanted it all to be like it was someone telling you something that you needed to hear – something that was going to wake you up. That concept runs through the album.”
Of course, there are dancefloor bangers on here, too – it’s a DnB album from 2006. But, they’re the sweet sugar that coats the truth pill DJ Fresh offers up.
“You had to have your four or five dancefloor killers,” he says. “Without that you’d have no album [laughs]. Once I had enough of those I knew I could build something creative around them, with a bit of meaning.”
And with that insight, he’s off. Literally walking into the sunset. Monday a distant memory...
Nervous
“It felt like a good track to start the album with. It features Mary Byker [Ian Hoxley] from Gaye Bykers On Acid, and later Apollo 440, who were friends of Michael [Mick Vegas] from Bad Company.
“We met that whole Apollo clique through Mick, and became really friendly with them. Their drummer, Paul Kodish, went on to drum with Pendulum, and be part of my Fresh Live show, too.
“Mary seemed like the perfect person for this track, so got him involved. I sang the original hook – you can still hear a little bit of my voice in the backing.
“Actually Rob [Swire] from Pendulum mixed that track. It’s the only track I’ve had mixed by someone else... ever.”
The Pink Panther
“I went to Japan and found some crazy record shop in Osaka, in the middle of nowhere, and trawled through these old Japanese records, looking for samples, and found these crazy old Japanese film samples.
“The live flute is by Nathan Haines, who was on a bunch of DnB records at the time. He was a big
DnB fan, but also a famous flautist from New Zealand. We’d been talking about doing something for a while, so got him in to go off on this crazy flute solo halfway through the track.
“It’s funny – that album, thinking back, is so weird. It was such a different world back then, in terms of making music. You could make albums like that, and go off on some crazy tangents.”
All That Jazz
“I wrote this when I was in New York working with Adam F and some hip-hop guys. We were renting a space in Brooklyn – that was when we had just started our Breakbeat Kaos label.
“I started this track there. Then got together with [MC] Darrison. He’d been someone that Bad Company thought was fucking amazing, and so we started taking him to all of our shows. So we had a really great relationship with him.
“It was a really experimental album. It’s not the one that’s sold the most copies out of the stuff that I’ve done. But I do feel like it’s the album that’s most connected with what I consider to be a quote/unquote ‘DJ Fresh fan’, if such a thing exists, poor things [laughs]. It resonated with them because it was so ‘left’ and crazy.”
“He always used to do this, ‘Drop-drop-drop! Drop-drop another one!’ thing when he was MCing, so I said ‘Why don’t you use that?’. Then we wrote lyrics around it about Darrison being this musical kid who started music wherever he went. That was the story of the song.”
Babylon Rising
“I wrote this with Rob from Pendulum. MC Fats is on vocals. He came down to the studio. We had the backing track, then did the vocal afterwards. I knew Fats through DnB, and he was someone I’d always wanted to work with. He had a great voice and was, you know, hardcore – real DnB, but with his own twist. He’d done some really great tracks at that time – a real talented guy.
“On this one it was probably largely Rob that took the lead. It was more of a dancefloor thing than something that had a plan behind it. Me and Rob did a coupla things around that period – this and another thing called Kingston Vampires.”
Closer (DJ Fresh Vs DJ Shadow)
“I’d wanted to work with DJ Shadow for ages. We’d remixed Six Days as Bad Company, which he loved, so got in touch. He’s all about crazy break chops and things like that, so I gave him all the track elements here to scratch up.
“So, the first half is me, then Darrison says, ‘Shadow. Switch it up, and rearrange it briefly for us, please.’ Then, from that moment, he added everything for the next two and a half minutes.
“It’s such a mental track. It’s over six minutes and changes tempo, like, four times. It was something I was really proud to be a part of, and lucky and blessed to have Shadow’s involvement. He really came through for me.”
X Project
“The dialogue is from a really old B-movie. That was something that I would do a lot – the way you can take any sound and cut it up. And if you get the timing right, you can make it sound good.
“You ever hear the track I did called The Gatekeeper? I took that dialogue from [TV show] Wife Swap!I like to add some stuff like that in, in the moment of anticipation before the drop.
“The album version, here, has a film soundtrack-y thing that took me ages to make. I wanted it to sound like you were walking into an arcade and playing a video game.
“I really wanted to hold a person’s attention through listening. I love doing that, because I’m a total geek.”
The Immortal
“Similar thing. I came across this dialogue sample [‘The turning of the stars bring a time when my secrets can give you immortality’] and just tried to think of a really cool way to make it become a kind of mantra. Just repeating over and over – like some great universal truth.
“I often think to myself, ‘My God. I wish that I could find another
sample like that again’. It was just one of those moments. As soon as I heard it I was like, ‘Wow! That’s the most amazing sample, ever’. It was all totally built around that.
“There are some nice paddy sounds on here. All that stuff was played. Generally most musical stuff is played in by me, or if it’s guitar or flute, someone else.”
Submarines (Domestic Cold War Edit)
“This was weird. The beat is like an old trance kick and snare. I was wondering if I could make a DnB beat out of those sounds. It was kind of an experiment.
“For this track I had had a strong visual image of the scene in mind. I was imagining these cartoon submarines, coming out of the water after hearing this singing. And then they come up, because someone’s telling them, ‘There’s a better world out there. Just open your mind and believe in yourself’.
“Then they all go back underwater and go, ‘Oh. That was interesting, but we’re too scared to do that shit’. It’s pretty trippy [laughs]. And I know how completely mental this sounds.”
Funk Academy
“This was another sample-based thing. Another experiment. I was trying to use all these kind of ’70s funk synth sounds. I found this really amazing sample with this guy talking about his son, saying he was into the future because he was making music on synthesisers. It was a cool idea.
“I used to play it out a bit at the time in my DJ sets. It wasn’t the most dancefloor friendly of those tracks, but Shy FX used to play it a bit, as well.”
The Looking Glass
“This features [TV host] Jeremy Beadle, narrating. He was someone that people laughed at a bit. He came across as a joker, with not much depth, if you didn’t know him. But, behind closed doors, he was very academic and special.
“He had a library, when I went to record him at his house, that had ladders going up. He basically used to record all his memories and ideas on little cards. He had this filing cabinet full of them. It was the weirdest thing.
“I’d met him a few times over the years. He passed on just after the album. His wife was thinking of using The Looking Glass at his funeral. But in the end decided not to as it could be quite upsetting because it’s quite sombre and serious.”
All Strung Out (Thunder VIP)
“This was a track that had been kicking around for quite a while. Goldie ended up signing it for Metalheadz. I remember when it was new and I was at Andy C’s house one night after a show. He was just listening to the track over and over again. He really loved it.
“It was one of those tracks that I really had to find a way of fitting onto the album. It ended up getting banged onto it at the end because it was just such a snapshot of the time, for me.
“I just gave it a new mix here, to make it fit into the weirdness of the album, by putting loads of thunder samples over it [laughs].”
Throw
“This has [the Pet Shop Boy’s] Neil Tennant on. I started it in a hotel room in Canada. I sung the vocal and wrote the majority of it on my laptop. When I got back to England the whole concept of the album was coming together, with the message and concept, so I called up Neil and played it to him and said, ‘Mate. I can just imagine you sounding so great on this.’
“He really loved it and came down the studio. We were in a small booth together. He thought that it was hilarious, being a bit promiscuous, making jokes, trying to make me uncomfortable. That was fun [laughs].
“He’s a great guy and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in music. Kind of like everyone I worked with on this album. I was surrounded by some great talents.”