PAUL moved to London in the early 80s, living in a squat and eking out a living
as a session percussionist. "To be honest, a lot of that
period's a blur," shrugs Paul with a hapless grin,
"because I was having such a mad time going to a lot of
the warehouse parties that were happening at the time. I'd go out on Friday
night with a pound in my pocket and come back at lunchtime the next day. I went
to some mad places in the East End, where they were playing a lot of the early
hip hop from New York. It had the same buzz as punk, something different,
exciting."
Both remember dancing at parties like Dirtbox, Norman Jay and Judge Jules'
Shake And Fingerpop and going to Bank Holiday all-dayers held in the basement
of multi-storey car parks. "It was all completely
illegal, but the police did nothing about it, because they didn't even know it
was going on," Paul says, sighing wistfully for the
Met's lost innocence.
Elsewhere, the future of music was being etched out on now obsolete
circuitboards and Neil was entranced by the crisp electronic sounds of early
electro. When he saw Afrika Bambaataa's Soulsonic Force in 1983 it was the
first time he'd seen a drum machine being used in anger, let alone a DJ who
cut and scratched his records into a seamless collage of funk, rather than
simply played them. It was a revelatory experience.
"There was a big geezer slapping records on the deck
and mixing them, while this machine played over the top. I went up to one of
them afterwards and asked him what it was - it was a Linn Drum - and I
remember thinking I had to have one, but that I'd never be able to afford it.
"
IT could be early drum machines or it could be the furious drumming on old punk
records, either way Paul and Neil are confirmed percussion nutters. Even their
record label, Hard Hands, is named after a 60s hit by salsa percussion legend
Ray Barretto. It's this preoccupation with making noises by hitting things that
makes the drums on a Leftfield record sound crisper, harder, funkier and just
plain better than, well, the drums on any other dance records.
"All good dance music is based on rhythm,
" Paul affirms, "and that
happens to be what me and Neil are good at."
Paul was given his first drum kit at the age of eight, by his grandad, also a
keen drummer. At school he played drums for a local punk group and proudly
listened to their first and only release on John Peel's Radio One show. By
the mid-80s, he was playing percussion for innumerable bands, including early
incarnations of both Primal Scream and The Brand New Heavies.
Neil was hammering percussion for living, playing in a jazz group, with
friends like Will Wildcat from acid beatnik posse the Sandals. When the
Sandals started their own club at a run-down Soho sex joint called Violets in
1988, both Paul and Neil were invited to come down and play percussion over
the records. It was a fateful meeting.
"At the time I used to play percussion at lot of early
deep house clubs," Paul recalls,
"that was how I first got into house music, just
drumming to pay the rent. Now I can't really remember a time when I wasn't
into house music."
"Violets was really good fun,
" adds Neil. "There'd be all
sorts of mad shit going on, poetry readings, Derek from the Sandals doing
action painting with a bike on the dancefloor. The owners of the club never
really knew what was happening there."
Discovering a shared background of sweaty punk gigs and sweatier funk
all-nighters, Paul and Neil hit it off. 18 months later, when Paul was playing
with acid jazz group A Man Called Adam, he found himself recording down the
corridor from Neil, where his future partner was working on the mix of film
dialogue, Arabic singing and tribal percussion that would become his first
single, 'Not Forgotten'.
Both of them were bored of playing for other people's bands; Neil was into A
Man Called Adam's 60s-jazz-meets-deep-house space-cadet soundclash and Paul
thought what Neil was up to was wicked. They agreed to work together in the
future. As Neil puts it, "The music we'd both been
involved with up till then had been fairly retro and we wanted to do something
else. Something that was all ours."
The first Leftfield record was Neil's solo version of 'Not Forgotten',
released in the summer of 1990. "The sound of 15 years
of frustration coming out in one record," as Neil
describes it. It mashed his interests in film soundtracks, high gravity reggae
basslines and world music into seven minutes of deep house heaven.
"I went to Ibiza and heard Weatherall playing it in
Ku," Paul reminisces, "I
thought it sounded wicked, totally different to anything else around at the
time." On his return, Neil roped Paul in to help on
a remix of 'Not Forgotten' for the B-side of the next Leftfield single, 'More
Than I Know'.
Although Neil now dismisses 'More Than I Know' as "a
pile of shit", it was a clear indicator of the
downtempo headfunk direction Leftfield would occasionally take in the future.
Paul's remix of 'Not Forgotten', however, was something else entirely.
"We left Paul in a room on his own,
" Neil grins, "and he
re-edited the whole thing on old fashioned quarter-inch tape. The whole room
was full of these cut-up pieces of tape he stuck back together.
"
The end result was revolutionary, a timeless dance classic, driven by
stuttering edits, spinbacks, rollickingly funky percussion, breakdowns
that opened up like bottomless crevices and gated sound effects that took an
already good tune off into hyperspace. "And Leftfield,
" Paul intones sonorously, "
...was born."
NOBODY had heard anything quite like it before - a dance record that was
undoubtedly British, but retaining all the funk and sass of American house. It
took about six months for the remix to become a staple part of every
self-respecting British house DJs set, but when it did, it was massive. Bedroom
producers across the country took notice, starting work on dubby house tracks,
featuring driving percussion loops and arm-raisingly uplifting breakdowns. By
late 1991, the sound Mixmag later termed progressive house held sway with
clubland's tastemakers.
"We were completely surprised by it all,
" Neil freely admits, while Paul enthuses,
"It was wicked, you'd go to a club and everyone would
be going fucking mental to your record."
Although DJs and clubbers were eager to hear the next Leftfield tune, they had
to be content instead with a constant stream of remixes. Legal hassles with
Outer Rhythm, the label that released 'Not Forgotten', left the duo unable to
use the fledgling group's name on their own records. But the remixes
themselves were good enough, with the unique, compulsive Leftfield grooves
they contributed to tunes like React 2 Rhythm's 'Intoxication' being sampled
again and again by other remixers.
"We come from a background of grooves,
" nods Paul, expounding on the unstoppable Leftfield
groove monster. "Whether it's jazz, funk, hip hop,
we've always been into grooves."
"And punk encouraged us to be experimental,
" adds Neil, "to do things
like sticking a sitar on 'Not Forgotten'."
Their abilities at the mixing desk were paid the ultimate compliment when in
1992, they were asked to remix 'Jump They Say' by one of their heroes, David
Bowie.
"After doing the Bowie remix we had everyone wanting
to work with us - Paul McCartney, U2," Paul grimaces
distastefully. "But everything we've ever done has been
something we wanted to work on, not because we've been offered X amount of
pounds, but because we like the track. We started to feel like a marketing
tool." They gave remixing a rest to concentrate on
their own projects, Paul's new-found success as a DJ and their new independent
label Hard Hands.
By mid-1993, they had already slacked off on their remix workload and while
clubs across the world rocked to the sound they helped create, they turned
their back on all things progressive and released two now classic,
mould-breaking singles: the slow motion inspiration of 'Release The Pressure',
featuring roots reggae singer Earl Sixteen, and the epic cinemascope trance of
'Song Of Life'. Not to mention signing an unknown proto-jungle white label by
Dee Patten called 'Who's The Badman' to Hard Hands and turning it into a huge
anthem on the hardcore and progressive scenes alike.
Then came 'Open Up', shooting John Lydon's unmistakable, electrifying,
whining, snotty vocals back into the Top Ten and truly opening up new
generations of clubbers and rockers alike to the genre-smashing potential of
the Leftfield sound.
"I'd known John since I was 19,
" explains Neil. "We had a
mutual friend who took me round to where he lived. He was a right cunt, even
worse than he is now, he completely took the piss out of me. But he was a
total fucking hero. I mean, how could he not be? We'd wanted to do a track
with him for about two years, but it took all that time to get him to commit
to doing it and to get the track good enough."
Unsurprisingly, the pair have nothing but admiration for the former Sex
Pistol's vocal abilities: "John's basically just really
into his music," they say. Coming from Leftfield,
this is a big compliment.
SINCE 'Open Up', Leftfield have been quiet, sealing a deal between Hard Hands
and the huge Sony corporation, and working on 'Leftism', a collection set to
be the most important British dance record since... well, since the last
Leftfield record was released. All their hits are there - remodelled fresh for
1995 - and in the case of 'Song Of Life' mangled almost unrecognizably into an
awesome, sound effect-laden musical mission. The primary focus is still
squarely on the trancefloor, but tracks like the bassbin-busting 'Inspection',
or the maudlin Detroit-ish techno-hop of 'Space 3000' confirm 'Leftism' as more
than just a DJ tool. It is the sound of the best part of 20 years of clubbing,
partying and making radical, no-compromise music distilled into one glorious
pigeonhole-exploding album.
"We basically made the album up as we were going
along," coughs Paul dismissively.
"We did all the tracks, listened to them and decided
it sounded a fucking mess. But you learn from your mistakes and we went back,
messed around with the running order and chopped a lot of things out.
Hopefully now it sounds complete, something that can be listened to in one go.
"
If he sounds a little uncertain, slightly unconvinced even, you shouldn't be
surprised. Leftfield, total obsessives to the end, are the mothers of all
perfectionists. "I think we're usually pretty hard on
ourselves," Neil mutters.
THE first single planned for release is 'Original', a superbly dreamlike
collaboration with Curve's indie pin-up Toni Halliday that should confirm Neil
and Paul's reputation as musical genre-smashers par excellence.
While most dance producers seem happy enough with an identikit overlunged
diva and a brace of disco acappellas, Leftfield stick to their punky guns,
searching out singers they can relate to - vocal talents with guts and
individuality.
"I love taking people with nothing to do with dance
music, like Toni, or Danny Red, and putting them in a different environment,
" enthuses Neil. "It's
getting back to the original ethic of remixing, taking anything and turning
it into dance music." Having already recorded with
one living legend, they harbour secret desires to get Irish folk singer
Christy Moore and Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant in the studio and bend them to
their musical will. Meanwhile, they've got the album to promote and a whole
brace of new talent signed to Hard Hands.
"People go on about Detroit all the time,
" Paul smiles, "but we've
got some music from places like Glasgow, Maidenhead and Hornchurch that will
just blow people away. Young, fresh musicians with their own style: it's
deep, soulful, jazzy techno. Techno is the new jazz. If the modern jazz
musicians of the 60s were young now, I've no doubt they'd be making techno.
"
And then they're off again, rabbiting enthusiastically about
ambient/techno/jungle experimentalists Global Communications or how Paul is
dropping jazzy jungle tunes at house clubs, the best part of two decades
since they were first blown away by the Sex Pistols. Still on it, still with
a keen nose for the cutting edge. Always enthusiastic, always in the right
place at the right time, Leftfield have lived the life to the full. And as
jungle, techno, house, hip hop and ambient fall into each others arms all
around us, they've lived the life needed to make the perfect record for 1995.
'Leftism' is out January 30th on Hard Hands
