Drumattic Twins Interview

Drumattic Twins image We Catch up with Nick from the Drumattic Twins for his last ever world exclusive interview as a bachelor! We get talking all things Drumattical, what the future lays in store and what their Shades Of Rhythm past still has to offer!

Held up at Stansted airport before they fly out to Parisian night club "Batofar or something like that" seems the show-biz way to pin them down for our interview, discussing progress in 2003 they comment "Most of the beginning of last year we were writing the album, and then getting all the final masters done. Then it was summer where it really started to kick off, started to promote the album, it came out in July. And now, well the dust has settled now and we’ve started to do remixes, done couple of remixes we delivered last week actually - one of them is for a group called Pnau, it’s got 'Kid Creole and The Coconut' vocals I think on it the other one is Super Style Deluxe - I think the Super Style Delux one will be promo'd quite soon actually, quite dirty sounding one, pleased with that one."

Would you say the Drumattic Twins work was a Jekyll and Hyde character from your Shades Of Rhythm guise?
"To be honest ever since we were doing Shades stuff, we always used to work the same, like one of us, either me or Lanx (aka Kevin Lancaster) would come up with the music, and then if the others liked it, then we’d just all get together and just make a track out of all the bits, pretty similar to what we still do now. In-between Shades and this, we’ve been down various roots and it’s ended us up here. We’re virtually back where we started now, doing Breakbeat, Hip-Hoppy tracks… sort of 10 years later we’re back where we started."

Did you come across any major obstacles with the album?
"No, it was the easiest album we’ve ever written, I think it’s basically the chemistry of Finger Lickin’ Records. They’re really nice people to start with but they tell you if something’s not sounding right, we’ve never had that A & R’ing equivalent anywhere else. To us it’s just saved so much time because we’d keep up-dating Justin (from Soul Of Man/A&R at Finger Lickin') on the Album and if there was one little bit he didn’t like, he’d just say lads ‘lose it’! We wrote the whole thing and recorded it in 6 months, apart from ‘Feeling Kinda Strange’ which we wrote about 3 years ago, that’s the oldest track."

Which one’s your favourite track off the album?
"'1000 Speakers' is my personal favourite, I think it’s cause it’s the most recent. We actually finished in the end of May so we’d done the whole album and that was the last track to fit on, you always like your latest thing... We didn’t want ‘Feelin Kinda Strange’ to actually go on the album, we’ve got better stuff than that, we’ve got a lot newer stuff, I suppose that’s just a typical artist really."

How’s it been doing the set live?
"It’s really good, tonight we’re trying something slightly different to what we normally do; usually we’ve got me DJing and Lanx playing samples on top (samples from the album, current samples) it really works well. Where as usually I’m selecting a set for the crowd, you can actually persuade the crowd another way now by putting little snippets of perhaps tracks they know, on top of really heavy beats. But tonight we’re bringing a lap-top out with us doing the same thing but also starting playing tracks via IVST and stuff like that so quite an experiment tonight."

Any Festivals lined up?
"Hopefully we’re gonna be at Glastonbury in the dance tent this year and I think we’re doing a big thing in Newquay, a festival in Newquay but that’ll be under our Shades Of Rhythm disguises…"

We caught you at Homelands as Shades last year and it was amazing!
"That’s the only PA we’ve done, we liked that. We actually re-recorded and stripped all the old tracks down because they were all so dirty and all our old stuff was so dirty and we stripped it all down and started again; recorded all the backing tracks and laid all the strings and piano’s on top, it took us quite a while but it was well worth it!"

What would you say your musical influences are?
"We actually started in the dance scene in, well when we left school in 1983/84, it was seen as the late disco period to the soul and that’s when we started getting in to music properly. Then the early rap came and then the electro, I mean the electro was really influential on us, it was the first sort of scene we felt a part of really. Because we sort of felt we joined all the soul scene and the blues scene, that was a scene we discovered first, the rave days as well, on a much smaller scale, and then the sound of Mantronix, all those were very influential, we were DJing at school discos 20 years ago playing ‘Human League & Depeche Mode’ even Smooches’ we used to play."

Are you tempted to explore any other genres?
"Funny thing is, when we delivered our album we also delivered to Finger Lickin’ a really slow album, which Justin’s really into - only way I can describe it is electronic soul really, it’s got the Drumattic sound to it but it’s very much more soulful, which originally we wanted to package and put it out as a comedown piece, but I think it’s gonna have to wait for the second album, we didn’t want to flood them with everything completely - Justin said it’s probably best to wait a year or so when people have heard the name a bit better."

What was your first big break?
"We all sort of went to school together anyway, Shades, cause there’s Rayan Gee as well who was with Shades, Rayan was a little bit older so he wasn’t at school with us, all in the same area and we all used to hang about before we even put Shades together. Then we just sort of like formed a band really and we’d just practise in an old TV workshop, literally set everything up, practise for about an hour and then set everything down again, religiously for years. I suppose the break came, we pressed up the Frequency LP, we made a 1000 copies ourselves, we put like I think it was 6 tracks on each side so the mixing was terrible, we were completely wet behind the ears didn’t know what we were doing really - we put all the records in the back of my Cavalier, first of all we drove to Manchester and went to the record shops there and they brought a load off us, went down to London then and Ray who used to work for Mash records and he now works for Vinyl Addiction which is quite ironic, he brought a load off us when he worked at Oxford Street at Mash, and then we went home thinking ‘hmm wonder if anyone will buy that’ the phone started ringing and it just went ballistic, everybody re-ordered and we sold the rest of the 1000 the next week, all these record shops were hearing it, it got bootlegged in the charts, obviously it was the time when the raves were getting bigger and it was getting caned at all those, all the illegal raves, and then ZTT rang us, quite a few record companies rang us, we thought we were going with the best fish but in hindsight you can see the down falls, at the time we were just like ‘well we’ll give it a go’, the idea with ZTT was we’d have the backing of Warners, but sort of the independence of ZTT but I think with Warner’s 51% it just destroyed our thinking."

Pinnacle of your career so far?
"To me personally it was this year just gone, 2002. One particular gig We were playing the ‘Exit Festival’ in Serbia, we played there, it was in an old 14^th century castle as well and we were playing the dance tent was in the moat of this castle, the sound was amazing… it goes on for 14 days non-stop they have all kinds of music, we went for three days but we just played for one night."

Any other countries world wide you'd like to play?
"Everybody tells me that Australia’s just amazing, I think we’re playing at the field day on New Years Day 2004 that’s one place I really wanna go. (booked up already? OD) Well I’m getting married on Sunday, a little baby on the way in June as well so it’s a busy year!"

Where do you see yourselves in another ten years times?
"Looking how the last ten years have gone I can’t see me doing much different, writing tunes and keep on putting them out, I really hope our Freakazoid stuff picks up a bit, we do a Freakazoid project with Lee Coombs, and at the moment cause he’s busy and we’re busy it’s sort of took a back seat. When we get together and do one we really enjoy it, in fact we’re doing one the week after the wedding actually we’re gonna finish off part 7 there, it’s more Electro really, it’s like an old-skool Electro sound similar to what I was talking about, what we used to be in to, that’s pretty important to us, also our studio as well our studio we’ve had 10 years now it would be nice to pick it up a gear, everything in there I’ve got in my computer now!"

Any final thoughts…
"Final thought at the moment is to get back to my wedding, Carl my partner @ Bungalow (there nights in hometown of Peterborough) from Twisted Tracks is the best man, Lanx is the usher - he can hold the flowers.. 18^th April gonna be a good one we got the Plump DJ’s coming down...

One more final thought for you and it’s an exclusive as well, Justin probably kill me, Finger Lickin’ are just doing a deal to get our old material back, and fingers crossed the Plump DJ’s are doing a mix of Sweet Sensation and Soul Of Man is doing a mix of ‘Sound Of Eden’ and Lee Coombs is doing ‘Excersist’ and Crafty Cuts is doing ‘Homicide’ and we’re gonna do a couple ourselves as well!"

For more info on all things Drumattic & Finger Lickin’ check out www.FingerLickin.co.uk