Month: July 2009

I can’t remember the last time that I blushed fully crimson from head to toe, but this little Twitter exchange from last week certainly did the trick. Oh, I was hyper-ventilating like a giddy thing…

(And yes, that really is HIM. I checked.)

If you have Spotify installed (with all due apologies to overseas readers who don’t have the option), then you might enjoy this four-hour playlist, which I compiled “as live” over the weekend – i.e. by playing all the tracks in full, and only adding to the list one track in advance, like the proper DJ that I used to be. Designed specifically to be heard on a sticky, sultry summer evening, it starts very gently, hots up, calms down a bit, then hots up all over again. It’s totally retro, and precision-geared towards pure pleasure.

Click on the partial Spotify screengrab to activate the playlist. (There are a few more tracks above, and many more tracks below.)

And if you do already have Spotify installed, then might I urge you to cough up £9.99 a month for the premium version? Not only is it advert-free, but an ever-increasing number of tracks will now stream at 320k, which is double the bit rate of the free version. Worth every penny, I’d say.

My feature on Unicorn Kid – a 17-year old electronic dance musician from Leith who recently remixed “Did You See Me Coming” for Pet Shop Boys – is in today’s Guardian Film & Music supplement. You can read the feature here.

Here are some additional out-takes from the interview.

It’s a really good remix. It was the first time I heard you. I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys show on Radio 2, in the bath. And it came on, and I thought: oh, this is good. And then the next I heard of you was via Twitter, where Jake Shears was giving you a shout-out. Did he came to your London gig?

He actually missed it, but I went out for a drink with him afterwards with some other people and it was really cool. And also Peter Robinson [Popjustice], who has been really supportive. It was actually him who got me the Pet Shop Boys remix. He was the one who set it up.

Did you go into the studio, or did you do it all at home?

I did it all in my bedroom actually, during the Easter holidays. (Laughs)

Is that the first time that you worked with a vocal track?

I’d had goes at remixes, of my friends’ vocal tracks and stuff like that, just to mess around with what it would be like. It was the first time that I’d actually applied myself and thought: I actually have to finish this.

How long did it take?

The full two weeks of the holidays. Working every day in my room.

Did they just e-mail you the constituent parts?

It was on an FTP server, on the Internet. All I needed were the vocals, but they sent me every single part. So there were something like 30 or 40 WAV files that got sent to me. But I only touched five vocal parts.

So you didn’t even take a rhythm track from there?

No, no. I sped the whole thing up, as well. So it’s completely different.

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So, this tour that you’ve been doing: have you had different reactions in different places?

Yeah, I tend not to like doing over 18s, because you realise it’s 14-to-19 that’s the demographic, or even younger. I like that, and I gear what I’m doing towards that. I like playing to those guys better than I like playing to the over 18s. I’ve played about four Club NME dates on the tour. Some of them were good and some of them were bad. Chelmsford was horrendous, it was really bad. It was empty, and nobody got it.

I think because when you’re playing a club night, everyone’s enjoying dancing to things that they know, and they’re all having a good time. Then someone weird like me comes on, and plays stuff that they don’t have a clue about, at such a faster pace. I didn’t get booed off the stage or anything, but nobody was really feeling it. But when I play 14+ gigs, people jump around and have a good time. I gauge the success of a show on how much the crowd seem to be enjoying it.

And you know that their senses haven’t been dulled by alcohol, so it’s all genuine. How much of the music do you create on stage?

The different parts of the songs are being triggered by pads on a MIDI controller. They’re being filtered or changed, or drums or bass are being taken in, or a chorus as a whole. There’s also synth parts being played over live.

I like to jump around and stuff like that, so there’s nothing much else more that I can do without kind of dampening [the effect]. It’s just me on stage, so I have to create a live energy. I couldn’t be doing any more without having to stand really, really still.

So you’re not picking out those incredibly fast melody lines with your fingers?

No, no way. My keyboard playing is poor. It’s done with a mouse. Essentially, you get almost like a piano down the side, and I kind of type it in. I think that’s how the melodies are so weird, because I’ve got free rein to click what I want.

But I’m happy with the legitimacy of my live show. If I wasn’t on stage, the songs would not be playing. If I pressed Go, it would be looping on the same bit, the same 30 seconds, for the next hour.

And you’ve got the freedom to change it around?

Definitely. Each live show is completely different to the next one. I might choose to go to one bit, one time, depending on if the crowd is enjoying it. If the crowd’s enjoying the chorus, then I can keep it on for another, or I can double it, or whatever.

You had a problem at one of the venues – they weren’t going to let you in because of your age?

That was Chelmsford. I got kicked out before we had even played the gig! We were sitting down on the sofa, and I was bored because I knew it wasn’t going to be a good one, and I was a bit moody because I was tired after London, and I’d just done Brighton. And the guy said, have you got any ID. And I said, I’m playing tonight, I don’t need any ID! And then he was like, get outside. Are you kidding?

That must have been your first “don’t you know who I am” moment.

I was like, are you honestly kicking me out? Because if you’re kicking me out, I’ll go. I’ll go home if you want me to. And then the manager came over and had a word with the bouncer. But obviously I would never not play the show, because a couple of guys did come down to see me who actually knew who I was. I wasn’t going to go away.

Even if there’s only two people in the room who have made the effort…

And they enjoyed it. They drove 40 minutes to come and see me. I also played Southampton, it was an over-18s one. And it was a girl’s birthday – I think she was 14 – and she and a bunch of her friends had come down for the gig. But it was an over 18s, so I had to turn them away at the door. It was heartbreaking, you know? And they’d driven about an hour and a half to come over, and it was about 9 o’clock at night. So I gave them all CDs and took pictures with them – but I felt really bad.

Well, at least they let you play. When Laura Marling was 16, she was barred from her own gig in Soho, so she ended up busking on the pavement outside.

I heard about that! Somebody used that as a comparison, saying you should have done that. But it would be difficult for me, I suppose!

You’d have to find a plug socket.

It would take about an hour to set up!

I loved your comment on Twitter. You were obviously replying to someone who was worried about going to the gig because they felt too old. And you said: just pretend you’re a journalist. That made me feel so much better about myself.