The Count & Sinden - After Dark featuring Mystery Jets
Domino, 2010
Joshua Harvey, better known as Hervé, has had a frankly incredible career: making music for Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, remixing the likes of Calvin Harris, Beyoncé and Tiësto, being half of The Count & Sinden, collaborating with stubbly dance music demi-god Armand Van Helden... it’s a CV that could warm the heart of even the most jaded HR manager. Naturally FM was keen to find out Joshua’s until now jealously-guarded music-making secrets, and when he offered to break down The Count & Sinden’s Mystery Jets-featuring classic After Dark we couldn’t get to his East London studio fast enough.
How did you end up collaborating with Mystery Jets?
“Sinden and I were at Notting Hill carnival with some mates and we happened to bump into Kai and Will from Mystery Jets. They came up to us and said they were playing our records and we got chatting. Kai invited us back to his house, and when we got to his place it was two doors down from mine! So from then we used to pop in and out of each other’s houses and hang out all the time. We were talking about doing something for the album and one evening I was round Kai’s and I asked him if he had any vocal ideas, or something we could use. He got his laptop out and played me some demos and things he’d been working on. There was this one track that wasn’t really right, but when it went to the middle eight it was the ‘We never had a heart to heart’ bit. It really stood out to me, so we started with that and used it as the chorus. Then I did the drums, I wanted to make a kind of indie, tropical afro-beat dance record, so that set the tone, and then we went backwards and forwards, and we built it up like that very quickly.
“It was a really fun experience and I remember arranging it thinking, ‘You’ve got to get this right, there’s something about this that’s really going to work’. We were doing well at the time and Mystery Jets had a really good run. I was really nervous thinking ‘Don’t fuck this up!’ It was the last track we did for the album. Domino thought we were roughly there and they weren’t necessarily expecting anything. Then when we sent them After Dark they were
really excited and immediately put the wheels into motion making it the next single. As is the way sometimes, they wanted somebody to mix it for radio. I don’t really mind; I mean, I’ve had tons of stuff that’s been played on the radio that’s been perfectly fine, but sometimes they want that extra level of insurance!”
It’s interesting you chose a middle eight to become a chorus. Would you say that verses, choruses and middle eights have their own characteristics?
“Yeah totally; they definitely have their own characteristics, and anyone who makes music would say ‘Yeah it’s weird that you found this middle eight that would work as a chorus’. A lot of times things don’t work because the sentiment isn’t snappy or doesn’t encapsulate something: it should build up to the chorus, and the chorus has to encapsulate something or melodically be something that you just can’t get out of your head. That magical moment where this thing is just going to transcend everything and just work for everybody. When I heard that part, the emotional sentiment was just so… good! I just thought ‘You still call me up after dark’ was brilliant lyrically. I suppose I separated the vocal lyrics and melody, because musically it was a middle eight – there were these minor keys, and you wouldn’t expert it to be a chorus because it went ‘down’ a bit. But you take the vocal melody out, put it under a kind of afrobeat, tropical thing, and it takes on a new feeling.”
“As is the way sometimes they wanted somebody to mix it for radio. I don’t really mind, it’s whatever... I mean, I’ve had tons of stuff that’s been played on the radio that’s been perfectly fine, but sometimes they want that extra level of insurance!”
It was ahead of its time, in that those tropical sounds became very popular a few years later.
“Yeah 100%. One of the only remixes we did that got turned down was for the Mystery Jets. They thought we were going to do something much more electronic but it was a very tribal, afrobeat-y thing because we were very much in that mood. It was about finding something that was slightly different at the time, something underground you could have fun with and take into a club. You’ve got people like Branko from Buraka Som Sistema who had been doing stuff like the tropical house thing from two or three years ago for a long time. So they were partially inspirational for that moment; it was a mishmash of afrobeat and UK funky. I suppose you’re always going to be ahead of your time if you’re looking for interesting things to steal!”