DJ Shadow: Moving Shadow - Jockey Slut, 05.02
By: Steve Yates
In the six years since Endtroducing…. Catapulted him into hip-hop’s premier league, DJ Shadow has been a busy boy. He’s managed to stay cool with Lavelle, send trainspotters into paroxysms of delight with his Brainfreeze mix tapes and develop a beef with Dan the Automator. But on the eve of his second album, he has but one concern. “Have you got anything on Pama?” the producer asks Steve Yates…
Have you ever seen the proverbial pig in shit? Under the guidance (and watchful eye) of curator Andy Linehan, DJ Shadow has been allowed into the National Sound Archive – home to almost a million records – and boy, is he happy. Even Shadow, one of the world’s most renowned collectors, has never seen anything like this: racks of records piled ten high reach for the ceiling, dusty old 78s sit protected by cardboard sleeves and nearby there are tapes of old BBC radio shows to send your granny round the nostalgia bend.
“Where are the 45s?” asks Shadow. “Have you got anything on Pama?” And he’s off.
He’s certainly a lot happier than the last time we met, nearly three years ago. Then, while touring with the Quannum collective (his friends and partners since college days, Blackalicious and Latryx), he’d been persistently beaten with a stick called UNKLE by the British press, and seemed suspicious, if not a little resentful. “It was embarrassing,” he recalls of that visit. “The other guys were all shifting in their seats going ‘Here we go again.’”
His former self was a shadow of the man I meet today. With my path eased by a rare funk 45, dug up by fellow excavator Baldbeats and passed on by me (give a dog a bone, yo), Josh Davis/DJ Shadow is pleasantness personified. No sooner has the interview begun than he’s apologizing for any perceived discourtesy.
“I hope you don’t mind if I watch the road, otherwise I get sick,” he explains as Universal’s plush people-carrier stutters its way through London’s rush-hour. In fact Shadow is feeling so fragile he’s been treated for exhaustion during his stay, blowing a hole in his sardined schedule and forcing our planned two hour interview to stagger over two days and three sittings. “I try and avoid attracting too much attention to these things because it’s not very hip-hop,” he smiles. “The problem is I wanna please everybody and just go, go, go. I need to learn to do five days and then have a day off but I can’t bring myself to do that. Eventually my body forces me to do that anyway, but if I could just plan that in the first place everything would be fine.”
Fatigue aside, everything is fine with Shadow at the moment. He has a new album, The Private Press, of which he’s immensely proud (although he’s too self-effacing to put it like that). Although it’s the first album credited to DJ Shadow since 1996’s Endtroducing…., he’s kept himself busy with numerous projects including the aforementioned UNKLE and Quannum LPs and two “breaks tapes” CDs (Brainfreeze and Product Placement) with Jurassic 5’s Cut Chemist. Motivation wouldn’t appear to be a problem, but it’s clear that The Private Press has rekindled his thirst for exploration.
“Sorry to sound corny, but when I started working on this album I realised that the fire still burns. It won’t be so long before the next one. I made 85 minutes of music which is the most I’ve ever made in one time. I’ve even got B-sides ready for the first time in my life. There’s a ton more stuff I’d like to do.”
If Endtroducing…. Was a summation of his first three to four years in music, its successor sounds like it just came out of nowhere. Although still 100 per cent sampled (bar Lateef’s vocals on the fabulous “Mashin’ on the Motorway”), The Private Press draws on influences far more varied, specifically psychedelic rock and electronic sounds.
Whereas Endtroducing…. Was clearly the work of a hip-hop obsessive, filtered through a different perspective, Shadow is not going to be restricted by tags, and if “they” want to call it something else then so be it.
“People asked me how I would describe my album. I said, ‘Well, I’ve been listening to hip-hop for 20 years now so if it’s not that then you tell me.’ On the flipside I can also understand it because ‘6 Day War’ doesn’t sound like a hip-hop record. To me, it’s about manifesting my original understanding of hip-hop, which was taking what’s around you, subverting it and spitting it back out through a hip-hop paradigm.
“Hip-hop is the music that taught me socially, musically, politically, ideologically, but I’ve been influenced by other music as well, increasingly over the years. Otherwise it becomes a little incestuous. You get hip-hop records now that are sampling hip-hop records from 1988. So in ten years are they gonna be sampling the record that’s sampled from the record that’s sampled? You need to refresh the gene pool and I do that through other music these days.”
The most noticeable (if not the best) example of this broader sweep is “Monosylabik”. Though still sample-based – it’s constructed entirely from one rearranged two-bar loop – this seven minute electronic twiddle would find a more natural home on Warp.
“I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Aphex twin in the last two weeks because of that,” he admits. “Warp sends records to me and I flick through them just to make sure that anything I’m doing doesn’t sound comically out of date, but it’s like when I did ‘High Noon’, the first interview I did someone was telling me I’d been influenced by Skint and Wall of Sound.
“I’m not snobbish about it, but I’d never heard it and he was telling me I’d set out to make a big beat smash. Things just move so quickly out here. I wasn’t listening to that stuff (Aphex, etc.), but it’s nice to know that it fits into something else that’s going on.”
A more welcome change – at least for those of us who like our music to make some sort of sense – is the variation in the drum sounds (Shadow’s old records were always characterised by their aggressive percussion, putting him at odds with trip-hop’s stoned potatoes) and the inclusion of some proper vocal tracks.
“I don’t like wimpy music,” he explains of his old method. “I like hard music and having hard drums is a way for me to put some rage in. But I definitely didn’t want to resort to my old drum histrionics. I’m not trying to show off with them this time. With ‘6 Day War’ (for which he sampled large vocal parts from an old British psychedelic record, took the drums from some Scottish bagpipe music and created the impression of a newly constructed song), I wanted to do something unique. That was the most complicated thing I’ve ever done because I had to slow the drums down 120 per cent. I’m still waiting for the piece of paper saying it’s cleared so I can’t tell you who the vocal is by.”
Aahh, sample clearance – that thorn in hip-hop’s side ever since De La Soul tried their hand at Turtles soup and Biz Markie tripped over a git called Gilbert. Now that Shadow’s records sell in six figure sums rather than four it’s something he has to deal with, even though these days you’re left wondering who’s zooming who.
“When I started getting in touch with people who’d made the records it gave me a bit of a conscience,” he admits. “As a result I have no problem clearing big uses. But I feel that I’m a collage artist and if I use 60 songs on a record I can’t have 60 different lawyers claiming 75 per cent. It'’ just another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot. I’m on Universal and the hardest samples for me to clear have been Universal’s. But I’ve never let it affect the way I make music. When the door shuts on the studio I’m just trying to make the best music I can and sort it out later.
“The thing that matters to me now, is that once it’s out it’s out. It can go into everybody’s homes and nobody can go in there and take the CDs back. They can chuck me in jail if they want (laughs at his rebel posturing). This is the most stressful time for me. I get more and more concerned that it will go down as one of those records where time says ‘It only ever got leaked out on promo, but then something happened and it was never released. As a result the artist’s mind imploded and they carted him off.’ I’ve studied music history enough to know that these things are always possible.”
One way around the perennial problem is to release records privately, as Shadow and Cut Chemist did with the now legendary Brainfreeze CD. Done for fun rather than money, it took the form of a hip-hop mixtape but was made entirely from old funk, soul, rock and pop seven-inch singles. More than a trainspotter’s delight, it was genuinely exhilarating listening experience rather than a way of showing off one’s record collection. It also anticipated (and accelerated) the current fashion for 45s, solidifying Shadow’s reputation as one of those rare artists who leads, not follows.
“Luke (Cut Chemist) and I wanted something to sell at shows that was exclusive, but we had no idea if people were even going to want this thing,” he reveals.
So only 2,000 were made. A slight miscalculation. Within a matter of months, internet auctioneers eBay were knocking them out for up to $100 (before the bootleggers moved in in numbers) and absurd rumours were circulating that Shadow and Chemist had deliberately held some back to take advantage of the inflated prices.
“That rumour was a joke,” he scoffs. “I wrote to my fansite saying ‘Yeah, you caught us. We have nothing better to do than sit around making an extra $50 here and there.’ By the time 7/11 told us we couldn’t use them anymore (the infamous ‘Slurp Song’ was taken from an old advert of theirs and the two DJs appeared on the cover in 7/11 uniforms) we’d already shipped about 1,700. The bootlegs must have done 15,000 at least (this is another gross underestimate – you could quite probably double that and double that again). I’ve seen them in Tower Records in Japan.”
Brainfreeze is not the only Shadow product of which the unscrupulous have taken advantage. In 2000 Bombay the Hard Way, a pastiche of Bollywood soundtracks, appeared, credited to him and Dan The Automator (Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School). Shadow was definitely not gruntled.
“I was messing around learning drums and he asked me to play with him, because he always likes his records to be like (Rowan & Martin’s) Laugh-In – packed with guest stars. I was using his studio and eating his snacks so I said OK. The next thing you know this expletive record company (Motel) was marketing it as DJ Shadow and Automator. It was really wack. I called him personally, real polite, asking him not [to] do it and he just gave me all this attitude back. You reach a certain point in your life where you have to go ‘OK, it’s not worth it’. That always bugs me out but you don’t want to waste your life on it.”
If Shadow has fallen out with Automator, one person with whom he’s still cool, despite rumours to the contrary, is James Lavelle. He admits to differences over the marketing of UNKLE (Apocalypse What the Fuck!?) and Quannum recently decamped to Ninja [Tune], but the Mo’ Wax logo appears on The Private Press sleeve and Lavelle had a “loose A&R role” in the album.
“James told me to do something with ‘Blood on the Motorway’ – make it awesome, make it as big as you can. I know it’s not cool for an artist to say this about his own music but I always get chills when the bassline comes back in and he’s singing ‘your eyes will not close’. It’s an anguished performance.”
Their enduring relationship shouldn’t, perhaps, come as such a surprise. Lavelle, after all, provided hope and encouragement when Shadow’s work was deemed to outre for hip-hop’s formulaic world. After his early success – being featured in Source magazine’s coveted Unsigned Hype column, the odd remix for Hollywood Basic – Shadow and hip-hop found their respective paths diverging.
“People like The Source and Stretch Armstrong were encouraging me to do these things, to go off,” he recalls. “But then I remember Funkmaster Flex, who was doing A&R for Profile, saying (of his ‘Poor Righteous Teachers’ remix) ‘Yeah, it was cool for a minute but then you just started getting nervous and throwing in all that weird shit.’”
Even his early mentor, Hollywood Basic’s late, lamented Dave “Funken” Klein, said “Influx” was “good, but kind of boring”. Shadow was baffled but undeterred by hip-hop’s sudden cold shoulder.
“When I made ‘Entropy’ and ‘Influx’ I was existing on a diet of nothing but hip-hop, with a little soul and funk thrown in, so I thought what I was doing was still hip-hop. I never wanted to be like Pete Rock, Large Professor or Premier, even though they were my heroes. If I was just gonna imitate them then what’s the point?”
It’s this desire to be different, to follow his own path (he attributes this to his mother, who instilled in him a cynicism for mainstream showbiz ethics), that makes Shadow so special, elevating him to a level of stardom few have attained in his field, and with which he’s not entirely comfortable. He recounts a recent incident with undisguised glee, because for him it represents the ideal – respect coupled with personal anonymity.
“I was in the record store from the cover of Endtroducing…. And I was behind the counter looking htrough the rarer stuff. I must have looked like I worked there because this kid came up to me and said, ‘Is this where DJ Shadow shot his record cover?’ I said, ‘Yeah,I’m pretty sure it is.’ That’s perfect for me, that’s why I chose the name DJ Shadow, so I could stay in the background and let the music speak for itself. I don’t believe in the cult of celebrity.”
He may not believe in it but he’s going to have to deal with it. The Private Press is such a giant step forward even the British media will have to work overtime to find a hook to hang on it.
“Non-linear was actually the working title but I thought it sounded too academic. It had to be challenging, both for me and the listener. I didn’t want it to be predictable, you know like when you hear one of those dance records with the long drum rolls and you know exactly what it’s going to do. Oh man! So I was trying to avoid anything that would make people think they knew what was coming next.”
Mission accomplished then. There’s an integrity about Shadow’s work which would, in an ideal world, keep everyone else honest. If The Private Press isn’t one of 2002’s best it’s going to be one hell of a year. It takes a nation of sample clearance lawyers to hold him back.
The Private Press is out on May 27 on Island.
Legendary Producer David Axelrod on Shadow
Why are you a fan of Shadow?
“I like the way he puts it together. He’s not a musician, but he’s one of the few guys who does what he does who doesn’t claim he’s a musician. He’s got that ear and he can hear with it. Not many people can do that. 99 per cent of the people who buy records can’t do that. Everybody is born with the ability to listen but very few use it. Josh listens, he has the ability to pick out the nuances.”
And the feeling’s mutual?
“It was Shadow who played my records to James Lavelle – he didn’t know of me till then. I can’t remember half of my records. I always tell people ‘call Shadow’, because he knows my records better than I do. He knows things that I have done that I don’t remember at all.”
I hear you went to Shadow’s wedding.
“He was shocked when I turned up. He walked over and said, ‘My god, you made it.’ I said, ‘Of course I made it – it’s your wedding.’ I live in Hollywood, but my wife and I don’t go out much. What do I want to go out for? I’ve been running the streets all my life. But for Josh’s wedding, of course I would go. Add something for me please, promise me. He’s married to a wonderful girl. Lisa is just wonderful. They’re both honest and if they don’t want you as a friend then you’re not their friend. I’m that way, so when you meet someone else like that there’s no phoneyness going on.”
By: Steve Yates
In the six years since Endtroducing…. Catapulted him into hip-hop’s premier league, DJ Shadow has been a busy boy. He’s managed to stay cool with Lavelle, send trainspotters into paroxysms of delight with his Brainfreeze mix tapes and develop a beef with Dan the Automator. But on the eve of his second album, he has but one concern. “Have you got anything on Pama?” the producer asks Steve Yates…
Have you ever seen the proverbial pig in shit? Under the guidance (and watchful eye) of curator Andy Linehan, DJ Shadow has been allowed into the National Sound Archive – home to almost a million records – and boy, is he happy. Even Shadow, one of the world’s most renowned collectors, has never seen anything like this: racks of records piled ten high reach for the ceiling, dusty old 78s sit protected by cardboard sleeves and nearby there are tapes of old BBC radio shows to send your granny round the nostalgia bend.
“Where are the 45s?” asks Shadow. “Have you got anything on Pama?” And he’s off.
He’s certainly a lot happier than the last time we met, nearly three years ago. Then, while touring with the Quannum collective (his friends and partners since college days, Blackalicious and Latryx), he’d been persistently beaten with a stick called UNKLE by the British press, and seemed suspicious, if not a little resentful. “It was embarrassing,” he recalls of that visit. “The other guys were all shifting in their seats going ‘Here we go again.’”
His former self was a shadow of the man I meet today. With my path eased by a rare funk 45, dug up by fellow excavator Baldbeats and passed on by me (give a dog a bone, yo), Josh Davis/DJ Shadow is pleasantness personified. No sooner has the interview begun than he’s apologizing for any perceived discourtesy.
“I hope you don’t mind if I watch the road, otherwise I get sick,” he explains as Universal’s plush people-carrier stutters its way through London’s rush-hour. In fact Shadow is feeling so fragile he’s been treated for exhaustion during his stay, blowing a hole in his sardined schedule and forcing our planned two hour interview to stagger over two days and three sittings. “I try and avoid attracting too much attention to these things because it’s not very hip-hop,” he smiles. “The problem is I wanna please everybody and just go, go, go. I need to learn to do five days and then have a day off but I can’t bring myself to do that. Eventually my body forces me to do that anyway, but if I could just plan that in the first place everything would be fine.”
Fatigue aside, everything is fine with Shadow at the moment. He has a new album, The Private Press, of which he’s immensely proud (although he’s too self-effacing to put it like that). Although it’s the first album credited to DJ Shadow since 1996’s Endtroducing…., he’s kept himself busy with numerous projects including the aforementioned UNKLE and Quannum LPs and two “breaks tapes” CDs (Brainfreeze and Product Placement) with Jurassic 5’s Cut Chemist. Motivation wouldn’t appear to be a problem, but it’s clear that The Private Press has rekindled his thirst for exploration.
“Sorry to sound corny, but when I started working on this album I realised that the fire still burns. It won’t be so long before the next one. I made 85 minutes of music which is the most I’ve ever made in one time. I’ve even got B-sides ready for the first time in my life. There’s a ton more stuff I’d like to do.”
If Endtroducing…. Was a summation of his first three to four years in music, its successor sounds like it just came out of nowhere. Although still 100 per cent sampled (bar Lateef’s vocals on the fabulous “Mashin’ on the Motorway”), The Private Press draws on influences far more varied, specifically psychedelic rock and electronic sounds.
Whereas Endtroducing…. Was clearly the work of a hip-hop obsessive, filtered through a different perspective, Shadow is not going to be restricted by tags, and if “they” want to call it something else then so be it.
“People asked me how I would describe my album. I said, ‘Well, I’ve been listening to hip-hop for 20 years now so if it’s not that then you tell me.’ On the flipside I can also understand it because ‘6 Day War’ doesn’t sound like a hip-hop record. To me, it’s about manifesting my original understanding of hip-hop, which was taking what’s around you, subverting it and spitting it back out through a hip-hop paradigm.
“Hip-hop is the music that taught me socially, musically, politically, ideologically, but I’ve been influenced by other music as well, increasingly over the years. Otherwise it becomes a little incestuous. You get hip-hop records now that are sampling hip-hop records from 1988. So in ten years are they gonna be sampling the record that’s sampled from the record that’s sampled? You need to refresh the gene pool and I do that through other music these days.”
The most noticeable (if not the best) example of this broader sweep is “Monosylabik”. Though still sample-based – it’s constructed entirely from one rearranged two-bar loop – this seven minute electronic twiddle would find a more natural home on Warp.
“I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Aphex twin in the last two weeks because of that,” he admits. “Warp sends records to me and I flick through them just to make sure that anything I’m doing doesn’t sound comically out of date, but it’s like when I did ‘High Noon’, the first interview I did someone was telling me I’d been influenced by Skint and Wall of Sound.
“I’m not snobbish about it, but I’d never heard it and he was telling me I’d set out to make a big beat smash. Things just move so quickly out here. I wasn’t listening to that stuff (Aphex, etc.), but it’s nice to know that it fits into something else that’s going on.”
A more welcome change – at least for those of us who like our music to make some sort of sense – is the variation in the drum sounds (Shadow’s old records were always characterised by their aggressive percussion, putting him at odds with trip-hop’s stoned potatoes) and the inclusion of some proper vocal tracks.
“I don’t like wimpy music,” he explains of his old method. “I like hard music and having hard drums is a way for me to put some rage in. But I definitely didn’t want to resort to my old drum histrionics. I’m not trying to show off with them this time. With ‘6 Day War’ (for which he sampled large vocal parts from an old British psychedelic record, took the drums from some Scottish bagpipe music and created the impression of a newly constructed song), I wanted to do something unique. That was the most complicated thing I’ve ever done because I had to slow the drums down 120 per cent. I’m still waiting for the piece of paper saying it’s cleared so I can’t tell you who the vocal is by.”
Aahh, sample clearance – that thorn in hip-hop’s side ever since De La Soul tried their hand at Turtles soup and Biz Markie tripped over a git called Gilbert. Now that Shadow’s records sell in six figure sums rather than four it’s something he has to deal with, even though these days you’re left wondering who’s zooming who.
“When I started getting in touch with people who’d made the records it gave me a bit of a conscience,” he admits. “As a result I have no problem clearing big uses. But I feel that I’m a collage artist and if I use 60 songs on a record I can’t have 60 different lawyers claiming 75 per cent. It'’ just another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot. I’m on Universal and the hardest samples for me to clear have been Universal’s. But I’ve never let it affect the way I make music. When the door shuts on the studio I’m just trying to make the best music I can and sort it out later.
“The thing that matters to me now, is that once it’s out it’s out. It can go into everybody’s homes and nobody can go in there and take the CDs back. They can chuck me in jail if they want (laughs at his rebel posturing). This is the most stressful time for me. I get more and more concerned that it will go down as one of those records where time says ‘It only ever got leaked out on promo, but then something happened and it was never released. As a result the artist’s mind imploded and they carted him off.’ I’ve studied music history enough to know that these things are always possible.”
One way around the perennial problem is to release records privately, as Shadow and Cut Chemist did with the now legendary Brainfreeze CD. Done for fun rather than money, it took the form of a hip-hop mixtape but was made entirely from old funk, soul, rock and pop seven-inch singles. More than a trainspotter’s delight, it was genuinely exhilarating listening experience rather than a way of showing off one’s record collection. It also anticipated (and accelerated) the current fashion for 45s, solidifying Shadow’s reputation as one of those rare artists who leads, not follows.
“Luke (Cut Chemist) and I wanted something to sell at shows that was exclusive, but we had no idea if people were even going to want this thing,” he reveals.
So only 2,000 were made. A slight miscalculation. Within a matter of months, internet auctioneers eBay were knocking them out for up to $100 (before the bootleggers moved in in numbers) and absurd rumours were circulating that Shadow and Chemist had deliberately held some back to take advantage of the inflated prices.
“That rumour was a joke,” he scoffs. “I wrote to my fansite saying ‘Yeah, you caught us. We have nothing better to do than sit around making an extra $50 here and there.’ By the time 7/11 told us we couldn’t use them anymore (the infamous ‘Slurp Song’ was taken from an old advert of theirs and the two DJs appeared on the cover in 7/11 uniforms) we’d already shipped about 1,700. The bootlegs must have done 15,000 at least (this is another gross underestimate – you could quite probably double that and double that again). I’ve seen them in Tower Records in Japan.”
Brainfreeze is not the only Shadow product of which the unscrupulous have taken advantage. In 2000 Bombay the Hard Way, a pastiche of Bollywood soundtracks, appeared, credited to him and Dan The Automator (Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School). Shadow was definitely not gruntled.
“I was messing around learning drums and he asked me to play with him, because he always likes his records to be like (Rowan & Martin’s) Laugh-In – packed with guest stars. I was using his studio and eating his snacks so I said OK. The next thing you know this expletive record company (Motel) was marketing it as DJ Shadow and Automator. It was really wack. I called him personally, real polite, asking him not [to] do it and he just gave me all this attitude back. You reach a certain point in your life where you have to go ‘OK, it’s not worth it’. That always bugs me out but you don’t want to waste your life on it.”
If Shadow has fallen out with Automator, one person with whom he’s still cool, despite rumours to the contrary, is James Lavelle. He admits to differences over the marketing of UNKLE (Apocalypse What the Fuck!?) and Quannum recently decamped to Ninja [Tune], but the Mo’ Wax logo appears on The Private Press sleeve and Lavelle had a “loose A&R role” in the album.
“James told me to do something with ‘Blood on the Motorway’ – make it awesome, make it as big as you can. I know it’s not cool for an artist to say this about his own music but I always get chills when the bassline comes back in and he’s singing ‘your eyes will not close’. It’s an anguished performance.”
Their enduring relationship shouldn’t, perhaps, come as such a surprise. Lavelle, after all, provided hope and encouragement when Shadow’s work was deemed to outre for hip-hop’s formulaic world. After his early success – being featured in Source magazine’s coveted Unsigned Hype column, the odd remix for Hollywood Basic – Shadow and hip-hop found their respective paths diverging.
“People like The Source and Stretch Armstrong were encouraging me to do these things, to go off,” he recalls. “But then I remember Funkmaster Flex, who was doing A&R for Profile, saying (of his ‘Poor Righteous Teachers’ remix) ‘Yeah, it was cool for a minute but then you just started getting nervous and throwing in all that weird shit.’”
Even his early mentor, Hollywood Basic’s late, lamented Dave “Funken” Klein, said “Influx” was “good, but kind of boring”. Shadow was baffled but undeterred by hip-hop’s sudden cold shoulder.
“When I made ‘Entropy’ and ‘Influx’ I was existing on a diet of nothing but hip-hop, with a little soul and funk thrown in, so I thought what I was doing was still hip-hop. I never wanted to be like Pete Rock, Large Professor or Premier, even though they were my heroes. If I was just gonna imitate them then what’s the point?”
It’s this desire to be different, to follow his own path (he attributes this to his mother, who instilled in him a cynicism for mainstream showbiz ethics), that makes Shadow so special, elevating him to a level of stardom few have attained in his field, and with which he’s not entirely comfortable. He recounts a recent incident with undisguised glee, because for him it represents the ideal – respect coupled with personal anonymity.
“I was in the record store from the cover of Endtroducing…. And I was behind the counter looking htrough the rarer stuff. I must have looked like I worked there because this kid came up to me and said, ‘Is this where DJ Shadow shot his record cover?’ I said, ‘Yeah,I’m pretty sure it is.’ That’s perfect for me, that’s why I chose the name DJ Shadow, so I could stay in the background and let the music speak for itself. I don’t believe in the cult of celebrity.”
He may not believe in it but he’s going to have to deal with it. The Private Press is such a giant step forward even the British media will have to work overtime to find a hook to hang on it.
“Non-linear was actually the working title but I thought it sounded too academic. It had to be challenging, both for me and the listener. I didn’t want it to be predictable, you know like when you hear one of those dance records with the long drum rolls and you know exactly what it’s going to do. Oh man! So I was trying to avoid anything that would make people think they knew what was coming next.”
Mission accomplished then. There’s an integrity about Shadow’s work which would, in an ideal world, keep everyone else honest. If The Private Press isn’t one of 2002’s best it’s going to be one hell of a year. It takes a nation of sample clearance lawyers to hold him back.
The Private Press is out on May 27 on Island.
Legendary Producer David Axelrod on Shadow
Why are you a fan of Shadow?
“I like the way he puts it together. He’s not a musician, but he’s one of the few guys who does what he does who doesn’t claim he’s a musician. He’s got that ear and he can hear with it. Not many people can do that. 99 per cent of the people who buy records can’t do that. Everybody is born with the ability to listen but very few use it. Josh listens, he has the ability to pick out the nuances.”
And the feeling’s mutual?
“It was Shadow who played my records to James Lavelle – he didn’t know of me till then. I can’t remember half of my records. I always tell people ‘call Shadow’, because he knows my records better than I do. He knows things that I have done that I don’t remember at all.”
I hear you went to Shadow’s wedding.
“He was shocked when I turned up. He walked over and said, ‘My god, you made it.’ I said, ‘Of course I made it – it’s your wedding.’ I live in Hollywood, but my wife and I don’t go out much. What do I want to go out for? I’ve been running the streets all my life. But for Josh’s wedding, of course I would go. Add something for me please, promise me. He’s married to a wonderful girl. Lisa is just wonderful. They’re both honest and if they don’t want you as a friend then you’re not their friend. I’m that way, so when you meet someone else like that there’s no phoneyness going on.”