This feature first appeared in Mixmag February 1995

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LEFTFIELD love their music. Whatever the topic of conversation - Paul Daley's recent holiday in Goa, who fancies some tea, whether the biscuits have gone stale - it always circles inexorably back to their shared, driving obsession.
"Music's always been the most important thing to us, we don't do anything else but make music," admits Paul. "I used to be completely obsessed by it - music's like a drug. " It's a compulsion that, in the four years since Paul and Neil Barnes' truly seminal debut single, 'Not Forgotten' came out, has seen them become the single most influential production team working in British dance music, opening up a generation of DJs and producers to the potential power of dub and tribal percussion and inadvertently creating the bass-booming, bongo-powered monster that was progressive house along the way.
If any one record could be said to be responsible for finally making British house more respectable than its American and European cousins, 'Not Forgotten' was it. No longer would British house heads be constantly looking over their shoulders at New York, Ghent, Milan and Berlin. 'Not Forgotten' and subsequent Leftfield classics like 'Release The Pressure' and 'Song Of Life' were the cement that welded a whole new British house scene together. London proudly joined the league of house capitals. British dance music has never looked back.
Neither have Leftfield. But while so many of the producers that filled 1992's leather-trousered dancefloors have spent the last two years doing little more than honing their patent ecstatic breakdowns, Leftfield have moved on, never conforming, never playing the game by the rules, but always staying one crucial step ahead of the pack. Producing records that defied categorisation, but that were simply, well, left of field. Tunes like the dubwise 'Release The Pressure' and the glorious 'Song Of Life' that could sound achingly spiritual at home and brain-shatteringly euphoric on a crowded dancefloor.
They followed up in late 1993 with 'Open Up', a Top Ten hit with vocals from former Sex Pistol John Lydon that tore down the rock n' roll iron curtain, set rock and dance fans alight, and helped the guitar-trance of Underworld to flower in the spirit of musical Glasnost. While it's "Burn, Hollywood, burn" chorus coincided with huge fires all over Southern California.
Now they're back, after over a year's silence, with a major label deal and a glorious motorway pile-up of an album, where hip hop beats collide with Detroit techno, where roots reggae, indie rock and African rhythms are shoehorned pitilessly together with pounding trance. Leftfield have taken their history, their shared heritage of two decades of living steeped in London's underground culture and served it up as a clear pointer to our musical future. And it's looking wicked.

ALTHOUGH they never met until the hazy acid house meltdown of 1988, Paul and Neil had startlingly similar mid-70s adolescences. Listening to their life stories the bubbling pot of influences that go into their sound begins to make a lot more sense. It couldn't have been any other way.
Paul grew up in Margate, listening to Santana, David Bowie and Tamla Motown. Neil grew up in London's Islington, where his schoolmates included Spandau Ballet. "Everyone in my class was totally into music, " he smiles. "Everyone brought their records into school and we'd sit in the sixth form common room playing music all day. "
Being young and British in the 70s was very different from today. The charts were full of the stack-heeled glam rock of Gary Glitter, The Sweet and Slade. The only narrow-ankled trouser wearing alternatives came in the shape of Roxy Music's artschool posing or the pan-sexual hedonism of David Bowie, in the glory days before he married supermodels. When, in 1976, the sneering, gobbing demon punk first pogo-ed itself onto Top Of The Pops, it was, for Neil, Paul and thousands of others across the country, a tantalising glimpse of raw, exciting, undiluted rebellion.
"To be honest, there were very few punk records I really liked, " Neil recalls. "It was more the attitude I was into. Seeing John (Lydon) on television with Bill Grundy... a young guy tearing into this old guy on TV, calling him a cheesy old cunt. Going to early Siouxsie And The Banshees gigs, where it was total free experimentation. People couldn't play their instruments, but they were making great sounds, so it didn't matter. "
"Punk was aimed at mine and Neil's generation, " adds Paul with pride. "It belonged to us."
The only other musical alternative of the time was to be found dancing to the constant stream of now classic American soul at influential clubs like The Goldmine in Canvey Island or The Lacey Lady in Ilford, in the days when Essex soul boys were trendsetters, rather than Paul Calf-like joke figures. Like punk, the soul scene of the time was young, suburban and working class and it was only natural that an uneasy alliance developed between the two emergent musical cults.
For both Neil and Paul, this was their first introduction to the underground black music that was to shape the taste of the next decade, the same hedonistic mix of abrasive indie attitude and irresistibly funky grooves that would later surface in future classics like 'Song Of Life'.
"There was a massive club scene in Margate, " Paul remembers. "There were punk venues next door to soul clubs. It got me into music at an early age: when everyone else was listening to the Top 40, I was going out, listening to Lonnie Liston Smith and coming home to listen to The Clash."
On Bank Holidays Margate would be invaded by visiting London clubbers, heading to now-forgotten funk clubs like Hades. "You'd see all these mad transvestites walking along Margate seafront," grins Paul. "That's when I first thought London must be the place to be. "
At the same time, Neil was hanging out at West End soul clubs like Global Village wearing punk clothes. "It was a really open-minded period, " he muses. "In many ways it was the original Balearic vibe." The next piece of the Leftfield cultural jigsaw was slipped in when a friend introduced him to the spiritual delights of dub reggae. "It just blew my mind," he grins, "When you first heard that music, the way they played with sounds you'd never heard before, it was amazing."
This was the period when the revolutionary dub reggae experiments in musical form, space and pure sound pioneered by Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo were influencing The Clash as much as they did rastas, when if you went to a punk club you'd be as likely to hear the sweet rootsy harmonies of Culture's 'Two Sevens Clash' as you would 'Anarchy In The UK'.
"Punk got a lot of people into reggae, " agrees Neil, "but in the end it was a bit of a fashion thing for most people, an affectation." Neil started heading to Blues parties in Ladbroke Grove, to hear roots reggae played on huge dub sound systems, where he and his mates would be the only white people there.
"It was a really heavy vibe," he remembers, "not violent, but just loads of men, very few women and this huge, pounding dub system." Neil still likes to hang out at reggae clubs, but he bemoans the lack of any decent sound systems. "I like it loud," he shrugs, "in those days, it was so loud you could feel it. " The legacy is there too, in the sternum-quivering basslines of records like 'Not Forgotten', and in the righteous reggae vocal mantra of 'Release The Pressure', and 'Inspection', their album's seismic downtempo collaboration with up and coming roots singer Danny Red.

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