Various: The Men From U.N.K.L.E. - Future Music October 1998
Psyence Fiction is the latest offering from Mo’ Wax’s ultra cool, beatnik musical collective, U.N.K.L.E. Danny Scott meets the men in charge, Mo’ Wax label boss James Lavelle and sampling icon DJ Shadow...
"I was asked to do this album twice - in 1995 and 1996. Both times I walked away from it. Both times I swore that I would never work on it ever again. Both times I came back. I’m a sucker!"
It’s unlikely that DJ Shadow will ever forget those early sessions for the U.N.K.L.E. album, Psyence Fiction. "It was chaos, complete chaos. There were people dropping by to smoke, to chat, to play on the drumkit, to mess with the synths, to play on the piano, make tea. If I’d spent the last eight hours programming a drum loop, I’d be running short of patience, you know. In the end, I locked myself in the drum booth!"
Three years in the making Psyence Fiction is the brainchild of Mo Was label-boss and U.N.K.L.E. mainman James Lavelle, and features a ludicrously glamorous guest list: Radiohead’sThom Yorke, the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, Mike from the Beastie Boys and Metallica bassist Jason Newstead and that’s just for starters! As you’d expect from Lavelle, it’s an album that pushed the old skool envelope - plenty of breaks and big, phat scratches - but it’s also a surprisingly complex and mature piece of work. Flipping easily between trip-hop, hip-hop, electro, punk and melancholic ballads. Some are already calling it the album of 1998.
Shadow Play
As a non-muso, though, Lavelle needed someone to help put his grand musical ideas into practice and DJ Shadow was the man. The 26-year-old Californian - real name Josh Davis - was one of the first signings to the fledging Mo’ Wax label and provided one of its biggest success stories with his stunning Entroducing.... album. Lavelle and Davis were also good friends, sharing a passion for movies, sci-fi and the b-boy lifestyle. Unfortunately, when it came to recording the album, the duo discovered some serious differences of opinion.
"I do not believe that you can just throw a bunch of people into a studio, let them mess around for the day and get results," says Shadow, defiantly. "The kind of music I listen to aren’t just happy accidents, even though they might sound like it. There’s always somebody in control. You have to be able to concentrate."
James Lavelle contradicts with a wry smile. "I work in a very different way. I surround myself with madness. We might be working on a track, but I’ll be sorting out art work and talking to managers at the same time. That’s where I get most of my ideas and energy from: madness and chaos."
Where’s There’s Chaos...
He’s not joking, y’know. Mo’ Wax’s West London offices look like they’ve tumbled straight out of Lavelle’s topsy-turvy mind. Shelves littered with 12-inch singles, record bags and, bizarrely, some pictures of Tom Selleck, dressed as Magnum. Elsewhere there are arcade games - not a mere Playstation but the full-size, six-foot pub version - life size Star Wars cutouts, model spaceships, videos, a TV, a Technics SL1200 desk and a cooly expensive looking hi-fi. Shadow has commandeered the Technics, bobbing his head to a looping breakbeattune while Lavelle takes the opportunity to explain some of the original ideas behind U.N.K.L.E.’s debut.
"Originally, I wanted it to be the archetypal trip-hop album. After all, that’s what I was known for. It was meant to be quite entertaining, y’know - fun in a beatsy kind of way. As time went on and more people got involved, it turned into something completely different. Quite intricate and heavy.
"All the tracks evolved out of discussions we had about films and hip-hop and people that we knew. They were mood conversations. I didn’t say to Shadow, ‘Oh, I want the bass to be in Aminor.’ I don’t play any instruments and I don’t know how to operate all the machinery so I just told him how I wanted it to feel. And because we know each other so well, he was able to express my mad ideas in a musical sense."
Suitcase Studio
The way that DJ Shadow expressed those musical ideas is the same way he’s always expressed musical ideas...with samples. He doesn’t bother with the Trinity, the Supernova or the Juno. And there’s no 48-channel desk or vast racks of outboard either. DJ Shadow’s entire set-up consists of one MPC3000, one Technics SL1200, one $100 DJ Mixer, a pair of headphones and his collection of battered singles. That’s it. That’s what he made Entroducing.... on and that’s what he made most of Psyence Fiction on. Jealous?
Entroducing.... was 100 per cent sampled. No mixing...nothing." Shadow explains. "It was always a dream of mine to make a completely sampled album. Ironically, the only live bit was the scratching!
"The U.N.K.L.E. album is probably about 90 per cent samples, with all the original tracks done at my house, although we went to a bigger studio to mix everything down. There are live vocals, Mark Hollis from Talk Talk plays some piano and strings on a couple of tracks and Jason Newstead plays bass on another but that’s it. The rest is the MPC.
It’s surprising therefore to learn that Shadow’s never been sued! "It’s one thing sampling 16 bars of a Donna Summer track but I’m talking about a 1974 high school jazz band album of which there were only 300 pressings. I’m very proud of the time and effort I put into finding samples. You hear something and you think, ‘Great, I’ll have that.’ And I just don’t sample obscure stuff. If I want to sample Björk, then I do it. To me, there’s no question about sampling; if it’s right or wrong. It’s a moot point. The question is how you use it. And if you use it in the right way, make your own rules, then the possibilities are endless.
"I know everybody uses samples but I try to offer something different to the sampler. The way I sample is...well, it’s like playing. It’s an instrument. I don’t use a mother keyboard and I don’t use Cubase. Just the sampler and its onboard sequencer. I tried using Cubase but it didn’t work for me. I met this guy once who showed me how to use it. He was making a sad song, so he’d created the pattern of a frown on the screen. That scares me!"
Sampling is Art
Most FM readers would probably agree. But wouldn’t it be easier to cut n’ paste those loops on a crusty old Atari using a program like Cubase? "Cubase has definitely helped form the sounds and styles of something like drum n’ bass, but the MPC3000 has helped form my style. I don’t just sample a bit of bassline, add a drum loop from Vinylistics and call that anU.N.K.L.E. track. In fact, I’m strongly opposed to that way of working. It’s like all those bad acid jazz records. Somebody wailing over the top of some old James Brown samples. It’s an injustice to the art of sampling.
"What I do is find a bassline with the right feel then I sample individual notes of that bassline, assign them to different pads on the MPC and restructure them to play a different tune. Same with the loops. I sample a kick, a snare and some hats, maybe from different places. Then I build up the loop on the sequencer. There’s no screen to look at and no figures to check. It’s either right or not. Sometimes it doesn’t have the right vibe, so I might sample some atmosphere and drop that in between the kicks and snares just to make it feel live."
Shadow doesn’t even own a compressor or a reverb unit. Every sample just goes through that ten-year-old, $100 mixer, "That mixer is the warmest sounding piece of kit I’ve ever heard. I’d be worried if I had too much gear. You start reading manuals because you think they’re going to tell you how to make music. It’s like you’re trying to figure out how to make music when you should actually be making music. It becomes about what’s up here," he says, pointing to a rather fetching Kangol hat, "instead of what’s in here," he gushes, slapping his chest with pride.
Third U.N.K.L.E.
The success of Entroducing.... is proof positive that Shadow’s style can and does work. Having said that, the Pysence Fiction sessions did alert him to a few potential problems. "For a track like ‘Nursery rhyme’ I pulled most of the samples from my old 70s punk singles. We were after this kind of raw feel, so I was looking for a bit of sampling inspiration.
"Now, you have to understand that I don’t even have monitors at home, so I never get the chance to crank things up. When I eventually turned up at the studio to mix and we put my samples through the desk they all sounded completely shit. That’s where Jim Abbiss [credited with mixing the album] came in. I just turned to him and said, ‘Have you got a de-shitter?’ He was great. He knew loads of little tricks. Like on the track ‘Bloodstain,’ we were trying to get rid of some vinyl static from a loop and he ended up putting the sample through a speaker which he lowered on to the wires of a piano. Then we mic’d it up while holding down the damping pedal."
Sounds, er, interesting? "The result was incredible. It eliminated some frequencies, enhanced others and made the loop sound like nothing else I’ve ever heard. There’s a crash cymbal on that song that just sounds like this amazing, deep whoosh!
Shadow is the first to admit that he himself has no idea of how to mic up vocalists or guitars or record a 40-piece orchestra. The Richard Ashcroft track, "Lonely Soul" - for many, the best song on the album - provides a perfect example of how the trio of Lavelle, Shadow and Abbiss worked together.
Lavelle had heard an old Verve track, liked Ashcroft’s vocals and talked with Shadow about doing a tune for this guy to sing. While Lavelle started to make a few phone calls, Shadow went back to his MPC and started trying to create something that would suit Ashcroft’s heartbreaking howl and Abbiss linked the vocals and music together. "The whole process took about a year," reckons Shadow. "After my initial piece of music, Richard did a guide a vocal, strings were added by Will Hay [responsible for orchestration on Massive Attack’s "Unfinished Sympathy"], I added extra beats at the end and then Richard came to do backing vocals. We ended up with three different reels of tape, from three different sessions with three different bits of music.
"It took three or four days to mix ‘Lonely Soul.’ It had been such a long process getting it together, but we knew that if we could make that track work then we could make the album work. It was a pretty stressful time, though. I completely messed my back up, three hours after I finished mixing it, I slipped a disc!"
Celebrity Squares
Ashcroft is just one name on a pretty amazing U.N.K.L.E. guest list. Elsewhere you’ll find Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Beastie Boy Mike D, Mark Hollis from Talk Talk, Damon from lo-figroovers Badly Drawn Boy, Metallica’s Jason Newstead and string arranger Wil Malone, who worked with Wil Hay on "Unfinished Sympathy."
As Lavelle explains, getting this lot to appear on your album is easy when you know how. You just ring them up and ask them.
"Well, it wasn’t quite like that. There were a few weird scenarios. Somebody would meet somebody who knew someone, or I’d bump into somebody at a club. And then I’d get on the phone. It’s worth remembering that this was before Urban Hymns or OK Computer, before all the media frenzy started. I think it would be a bit harder now," says Lavelle with a look of genuine relief.
"The main thing I’m worried about," continues a concerned Lavelle, "is that people will think U.N.K.L.E. is jumping on the Verve/Radiohead bandwagon. Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, Mike D and all the others aren’t here because they’re famous, they’re here because they can add something to the album and because I believe in what they do. Musically, they’re amazing people.
And together they’ve helped create an amazing album of music. This is one volume of Psyence Fiction that we can all believe in.
History of Mo’ Wax
The Mo’ Wax story is the stuff of music biz legend. It begins back in the late 80s when 14-year-old Oxford tyke James Lavelle starting bunking off school to go and work at record shops in London. Over the next few years, while passing exams, smoking cigs and doing normal teenager stuff, he also picked up a reputation as a bit of a star-spotter. In fact, he was so good at it that club culture mag Straight No Chaser asked him to start reviewing their demos. The label was a natural next step. He knew what records he wanted to release, borrowed £10,000 from his mate at Honest Jon’s in Portobello Road and promptly set about negotiating a pressing and distribution deal with New York jazz collective, Repercussions. Mo’ Wax was born andLavelle was still only 18.
With the £10,000 Mo’ Wax later made from Federation’s Flower to the Sun album, he started signing all his favorite artists, people like Mark Nishita (Beastie Boys’ keyboard man, Money Mark) and DJ Shadow. Lavelle apparently phoned Shadow - better known at that time as plain old pppreppy student, Josh Davis - talked to him about sci-fi films and video games then proceeded to concoct a 12-inch single called “In/Flux”. It was, say most sane folks, Mo’ Wax’s defining moment.
Within a year or so of setting up Mo’ Wax, London Records offered Lavelle a £25,000 incentive to jump into bed with them. He refused. Within a year of that, the Headz compilation album sold a highly respectable 40,000 copies and made an equally respectable profit. Not long after that, Lavelle signed a deal with A&M Records. A deal reputedly worth £350,000.
The likes of Richard Ashcroft and Thom Yorke - both on the new U.N.K.L.E. album - may bbbring the label mainstream attention, as will the article on U.N.K.L.E. in a recent Sunday Times, but they’re by no means the first names on Mo’ Wax guest list. Roni Size, Luke Vibert (Wagon Christ), Ashley Beedle (The Ballistic Brothers), Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Howie B and Air are just a handful of people who’ve released on or remixed for Mo’ Wax.
Mind you, before you start addressing hatemail to Lavelle’s family home, you should remember that it’s not all gone Lavelle’s own way. He had early talks with both Portishead and Tricky but lost on both counts. Let’s hope the 24-year-old owner of one of the world’s coolest labels isn’t looking for sympathy.
Mo’ Wax Essentials
Headz or Headz 2 - Both compilations are the perfect introddduction to the Mo’ Wax vibe. Headz 2 just about clinches it with Air’s "Modulator," Peshay’s "The Real Thing," and the delicious instrumental version of the Stereo MCs’ "What is Soul."
Entroducing.... - This is DJ Shadow’s immense and incrediibbble journey, made entirely on an Akai MPC3000. Standout tracks are "Midnight in a Perfect World," the druggy funk of "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)," and the untitled "Track 6," which gave the world the soundbite: "One of ‘em has eyes as big as Jolly Ranchers."
Psyence Fiction – The latest addition to the discography from the U.N.K.L.E. collective. An inspirational album, one that makes you want to rush back to your room, switch on the 950 and sit there till next Saturday. All you need to do is persuade Richard and Thom to pay a visit and you’re made.
U.N.K.L.E. Kit List
As mentioned in the main text of the profile, DJ Shadow likes to work with minimal amounts of gear. So this isn’t going to take that long…
Akai MPC3000
DJ Mixer (worth $100)
Headphones
Technics SL1200
Into the Abbiss
Jim Abbiss originally expected to spend just a couple of weeks mixing Psyence Fiction. In the end he spent the best part of a year on the project and became the unofficial third member of U.N.K.L.E. He’s got an impressive CV that includes Björk, Fluke, The Verve, Money Mark, All Saints, Sneaker Pimps, Mono, Massive Attack, and Lavelle himself.
His main role on this album was just to keep the lo-fi vibe of the original U.N.K.L.E. idea.
"I’m not talking about the NME version of lo-fi; some dodgy rock band who don’t know where the EQ knob are. I’m talking about taking stuff from any source. It was just common sense. There was no point putting Josh’s [DJ Shadow] 70s’ punk singles samples through a Lexicon. Most of it would have been recorded through a tatty old spring reverb so that’s what we used.
"When we initially recorded Damon’s [from Badly Drawn Boy] vocals for the track ‘Nursery Rhyme’ you could hear every nuance of his voice over a drum track that sounded like it was recorded through a sock! So I put him on a hand-held mic and stuck it through a Sansamp fuzzbox, then through a tape machine on a delay. The result sounded horrendous but it was what we were after.
Abbiss and Shadow didn’t always see eye to eye. Their first meeting was tense and unproductive and ended with Shadow removing all of Abbiss’s contributions to the track they were working on. "As far as Shadow was concerned," Abbiss recalls, "I was just like all the other studio bods he’d met. But after a few days he dropped his guard and we were really firing off each other. Now I rate him as one of the most creative people I’ve ever worked with. I mean, he made Entroducing.... on an Akai MPC3000! He’s a genius."
Psyence Fiction is the latest offering from Mo’ Wax’s ultra cool, beatnik musical collective, U.N.K.L.E. Danny Scott meets the men in charge, Mo’ Wax label boss James Lavelle and sampling icon DJ Shadow...
"I was asked to do this album twice - in 1995 and 1996. Both times I walked away from it. Both times I swore that I would never work on it ever again. Both times I came back. I’m a sucker!"
It’s unlikely that DJ Shadow will ever forget those early sessions for the U.N.K.L.E. album, Psyence Fiction. "It was chaos, complete chaos. There were people dropping by to smoke, to chat, to play on the drumkit, to mess with the synths, to play on the piano, make tea. If I’d spent the last eight hours programming a drum loop, I’d be running short of patience, you know. In the end, I locked myself in the drum booth!"
Three years in the making Psyence Fiction is the brainchild of Mo Was label-boss and U.N.K.L.E. mainman James Lavelle, and features a ludicrously glamorous guest list: Radiohead’sThom Yorke, the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, Mike from the Beastie Boys and Metallica bassist Jason Newstead and that’s just for starters! As you’d expect from Lavelle, it’s an album that pushed the old skool envelope - plenty of breaks and big, phat scratches - but it’s also a surprisingly complex and mature piece of work. Flipping easily between trip-hop, hip-hop, electro, punk and melancholic ballads. Some are already calling it the album of 1998.
Shadow Play
As a non-muso, though, Lavelle needed someone to help put his grand musical ideas into practice and DJ Shadow was the man. The 26-year-old Californian - real name Josh Davis - was one of the first signings to the fledging Mo’ Wax label and provided one of its biggest success stories with his stunning Entroducing.... album. Lavelle and Davis were also good friends, sharing a passion for movies, sci-fi and the b-boy lifestyle. Unfortunately, when it came to recording the album, the duo discovered some serious differences of opinion.
"I do not believe that you can just throw a bunch of people into a studio, let them mess around for the day and get results," says Shadow, defiantly. "The kind of music I listen to aren’t just happy accidents, even though they might sound like it. There’s always somebody in control. You have to be able to concentrate."
James Lavelle contradicts with a wry smile. "I work in a very different way. I surround myself with madness. We might be working on a track, but I’ll be sorting out art work and talking to managers at the same time. That’s where I get most of my ideas and energy from: madness and chaos."
Where’s There’s Chaos...
He’s not joking, y’know. Mo’ Wax’s West London offices look like they’ve tumbled straight out of Lavelle’s topsy-turvy mind. Shelves littered with 12-inch singles, record bags and, bizarrely, some pictures of Tom Selleck, dressed as Magnum. Elsewhere there are arcade games - not a mere Playstation but the full-size, six-foot pub version - life size Star Wars cutouts, model spaceships, videos, a TV, a Technics SL1200 desk and a cooly expensive looking hi-fi. Shadow has commandeered the Technics, bobbing his head to a looping breakbeattune while Lavelle takes the opportunity to explain some of the original ideas behind U.N.K.L.E.’s debut.
"Originally, I wanted it to be the archetypal trip-hop album. After all, that’s what I was known for. It was meant to be quite entertaining, y’know - fun in a beatsy kind of way. As time went on and more people got involved, it turned into something completely different. Quite intricate and heavy.
"All the tracks evolved out of discussions we had about films and hip-hop and people that we knew. They were mood conversations. I didn’t say to Shadow, ‘Oh, I want the bass to be in Aminor.’ I don’t play any instruments and I don’t know how to operate all the machinery so I just told him how I wanted it to feel. And because we know each other so well, he was able to express my mad ideas in a musical sense."
Suitcase Studio
The way that DJ Shadow expressed those musical ideas is the same way he’s always expressed musical ideas...with samples. He doesn’t bother with the Trinity, the Supernova or the Juno. And there’s no 48-channel desk or vast racks of outboard either. DJ Shadow’s entire set-up consists of one MPC3000, one Technics SL1200, one $100 DJ Mixer, a pair of headphones and his collection of battered singles. That’s it. That’s what he made Entroducing.... on and that’s what he made most of Psyence Fiction on. Jealous?
Entroducing.... was 100 per cent sampled. No mixing...nothing." Shadow explains. "It was always a dream of mine to make a completely sampled album. Ironically, the only live bit was the scratching!
"The U.N.K.L.E. album is probably about 90 per cent samples, with all the original tracks done at my house, although we went to a bigger studio to mix everything down. There are live vocals, Mark Hollis from Talk Talk plays some piano and strings on a couple of tracks and Jason Newstead plays bass on another but that’s it. The rest is the MPC.
It’s surprising therefore to learn that Shadow’s never been sued! "It’s one thing sampling 16 bars of a Donna Summer track but I’m talking about a 1974 high school jazz band album of which there were only 300 pressings. I’m very proud of the time and effort I put into finding samples. You hear something and you think, ‘Great, I’ll have that.’ And I just don’t sample obscure stuff. If I want to sample Björk, then I do it. To me, there’s no question about sampling; if it’s right or wrong. It’s a moot point. The question is how you use it. And if you use it in the right way, make your own rules, then the possibilities are endless.
"I know everybody uses samples but I try to offer something different to the sampler. The way I sample is...well, it’s like playing. It’s an instrument. I don’t use a mother keyboard and I don’t use Cubase. Just the sampler and its onboard sequencer. I tried using Cubase but it didn’t work for me. I met this guy once who showed me how to use it. He was making a sad song, so he’d created the pattern of a frown on the screen. That scares me!"
Sampling is Art
Most FM readers would probably agree. But wouldn’t it be easier to cut n’ paste those loops on a crusty old Atari using a program like Cubase? "Cubase has definitely helped form the sounds and styles of something like drum n’ bass, but the MPC3000 has helped form my style. I don’t just sample a bit of bassline, add a drum loop from Vinylistics and call that anU.N.K.L.E. track. In fact, I’m strongly opposed to that way of working. It’s like all those bad acid jazz records. Somebody wailing over the top of some old James Brown samples. It’s an injustice to the art of sampling.
"What I do is find a bassline with the right feel then I sample individual notes of that bassline, assign them to different pads on the MPC and restructure them to play a different tune. Same with the loops. I sample a kick, a snare and some hats, maybe from different places. Then I build up the loop on the sequencer. There’s no screen to look at and no figures to check. It’s either right or not. Sometimes it doesn’t have the right vibe, so I might sample some atmosphere and drop that in between the kicks and snares just to make it feel live."
Shadow doesn’t even own a compressor or a reverb unit. Every sample just goes through that ten-year-old, $100 mixer, "That mixer is the warmest sounding piece of kit I’ve ever heard. I’d be worried if I had too much gear. You start reading manuals because you think they’re going to tell you how to make music. It’s like you’re trying to figure out how to make music when you should actually be making music. It becomes about what’s up here," he says, pointing to a rather fetching Kangol hat, "instead of what’s in here," he gushes, slapping his chest with pride.
Third U.N.K.L.E.
The success of Entroducing.... is proof positive that Shadow’s style can and does work. Having said that, the Pysence Fiction sessions did alert him to a few potential problems. "For a track like ‘Nursery rhyme’ I pulled most of the samples from my old 70s punk singles. We were after this kind of raw feel, so I was looking for a bit of sampling inspiration.
"Now, you have to understand that I don’t even have monitors at home, so I never get the chance to crank things up. When I eventually turned up at the studio to mix and we put my samples through the desk they all sounded completely shit. That’s where Jim Abbiss [credited with mixing the album] came in. I just turned to him and said, ‘Have you got a de-shitter?’ He was great. He knew loads of little tricks. Like on the track ‘Bloodstain,’ we were trying to get rid of some vinyl static from a loop and he ended up putting the sample through a speaker which he lowered on to the wires of a piano. Then we mic’d it up while holding down the damping pedal."
Sounds, er, interesting? "The result was incredible. It eliminated some frequencies, enhanced others and made the loop sound like nothing else I’ve ever heard. There’s a crash cymbal on that song that just sounds like this amazing, deep whoosh!
Shadow is the first to admit that he himself has no idea of how to mic up vocalists or guitars or record a 40-piece orchestra. The Richard Ashcroft track, "Lonely Soul" - for many, the best song on the album - provides a perfect example of how the trio of Lavelle, Shadow and Abbiss worked together.
Lavelle had heard an old Verve track, liked Ashcroft’s vocals and talked with Shadow about doing a tune for this guy to sing. While Lavelle started to make a few phone calls, Shadow went back to his MPC and started trying to create something that would suit Ashcroft’s heartbreaking howl and Abbiss linked the vocals and music together. "The whole process took about a year," reckons Shadow. "After my initial piece of music, Richard did a guide a vocal, strings were added by Will Hay [responsible for orchestration on Massive Attack’s "Unfinished Sympathy"], I added extra beats at the end and then Richard came to do backing vocals. We ended up with three different reels of tape, from three different sessions with three different bits of music.
"It took three or four days to mix ‘Lonely Soul.’ It had been such a long process getting it together, but we knew that if we could make that track work then we could make the album work. It was a pretty stressful time, though. I completely messed my back up, three hours after I finished mixing it, I slipped a disc!"
Celebrity Squares
Ashcroft is just one name on a pretty amazing U.N.K.L.E. guest list. Elsewhere you’ll find Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Beastie Boy Mike D, Mark Hollis from Talk Talk, Damon from lo-figroovers Badly Drawn Boy, Metallica’s Jason Newstead and string arranger Wil Malone, who worked with Wil Hay on "Unfinished Sympathy."
As Lavelle explains, getting this lot to appear on your album is easy when you know how. You just ring them up and ask them.
"Well, it wasn’t quite like that. There were a few weird scenarios. Somebody would meet somebody who knew someone, or I’d bump into somebody at a club. And then I’d get on the phone. It’s worth remembering that this was before Urban Hymns or OK Computer, before all the media frenzy started. I think it would be a bit harder now," says Lavelle with a look of genuine relief.
"The main thing I’m worried about," continues a concerned Lavelle, "is that people will think U.N.K.L.E. is jumping on the Verve/Radiohead bandwagon. Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, Mike D and all the others aren’t here because they’re famous, they’re here because they can add something to the album and because I believe in what they do. Musically, they’re amazing people.
And together they’ve helped create an amazing album of music. This is one volume of Psyence Fiction that we can all believe in.
History of Mo’ Wax
The Mo’ Wax story is the stuff of music biz legend. It begins back in the late 80s when 14-year-old Oxford tyke James Lavelle starting bunking off school to go and work at record shops in London. Over the next few years, while passing exams, smoking cigs and doing normal teenager stuff, he also picked up a reputation as a bit of a star-spotter. In fact, he was so good at it that club culture mag Straight No Chaser asked him to start reviewing their demos. The label was a natural next step. He knew what records he wanted to release, borrowed £10,000 from his mate at Honest Jon’s in Portobello Road and promptly set about negotiating a pressing and distribution deal with New York jazz collective, Repercussions. Mo’ Wax was born andLavelle was still only 18.
With the £10,000 Mo’ Wax later made from Federation’s Flower to the Sun album, he started signing all his favorite artists, people like Mark Nishita (Beastie Boys’ keyboard man, Money Mark) and DJ Shadow. Lavelle apparently phoned Shadow - better known at that time as plain old pppreppy student, Josh Davis - talked to him about sci-fi films and video games then proceeded to concoct a 12-inch single called “In/Flux”. It was, say most sane folks, Mo’ Wax’s defining moment.
Within a year or so of setting up Mo’ Wax, London Records offered Lavelle a £25,000 incentive to jump into bed with them. He refused. Within a year of that, the Headz compilation album sold a highly respectable 40,000 copies and made an equally respectable profit. Not long after that, Lavelle signed a deal with A&M Records. A deal reputedly worth £350,000.
The likes of Richard Ashcroft and Thom Yorke - both on the new U.N.K.L.E. album - may bbbring the label mainstream attention, as will the article on U.N.K.L.E. in a recent Sunday Times, but they’re by no means the first names on Mo’ Wax guest list. Roni Size, Luke Vibert (Wagon Christ), Ashley Beedle (The Ballistic Brothers), Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Howie B and Air are just a handful of people who’ve released on or remixed for Mo’ Wax.
Mind you, before you start addressing hatemail to Lavelle’s family home, you should remember that it’s not all gone Lavelle’s own way. He had early talks with both Portishead and Tricky but lost on both counts. Let’s hope the 24-year-old owner of one of the world’s coolest labels isn’t looking for sympathy.
Mo’ Wax Essentials
Headz or Headz 2 - Both compilations are the perfect introddduction to the Mo’ Wax vibe. Headz 2 just about clinches it with Air’s "Modulator," Peshay’s "The Real Thing," and the delicious instrumental version of the Stereo MCs’ "What is Soul."
Entroducing.... - This is DJ Shadow’s immense and incrediibbble journey, made entirely on an Akai MPC3000. Standout tracks are "Midnight in a Perfect World," the druggy funk of "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)," and the untitled "Track 6," which gave the world the soundbite: "One of ‘em has eyes as big as Jolly Ranchers."
Psyence Fiction – The latest addition to the discography from the U.N.K.L.E. collective. An inspirational album, one that makes you want to rush back to your room, switch on the 950 and sit there till next Saturday. All you need to do is persuade Richard and Thom to pay a visit and you’re made.
U.N.K.L.E. Kit List
As mentioned in the main text of the profile, DJ Shadow likes to work with minimal amounts of gear. So this isn’t going to take that long…
Akai MPC3000
DJ Mixer (worth $100)
Headphones
Technics SL1200
Into the Abbiss
Jim Abbiss originally expected to spend just a couple of weeks mixing Psyence Fiction. In the end he spent the best part of a year on the project and became the unofficial third member of U.N.K.L.E. He’s got an impressive CV that includes Björk, Fluke, The Verve, Money Mark, All Saints, Sneaker Pimps, Mono, Massive Attack, and Lavelle himself.
His main role on this album was just to keep the lo-fi vibe of the original U.N.K.L.E. idea.
"I’m not talking about the NME version of lo-fi; some dodgy rock band who don’t know where the EQ knob are. I’m talking about taking stuff from any source. It was just common sense. There was no point putting Josh’s [DJ Shadow] 70s’ punk singles samples through a Lexicon. Most of it would have been recorded through a tatty old spring reverb so that’s what we used.
"When we initially recorded Damon’s [from Badly Drawn Boy] vocals for the track ‘Nursery Rhyme’ you could hear every nuance of his voice over a drum track that sounded like it was recorded through a sock! So I put him on a hand-held mic and stuck it through a Sansamp fuzzbox, then through a tape machine on a delay. The result sounded horrendous but it was what we were after.
Abbiss and Shadow didn’t always see eye to eye. Their first meeting was tense and unproductive and ended with Shadow removing all of Abbiss’s contributions to the track they were working on. "As far as Shadow was concerned," Abbiss recalls, "I was just like all the other studio bods he’d met. But after a few days he dropped his guard and we were really firing off each other. Now I rate him as one of the most creative people I’ve ever worked with. I mean, he made Entroducing.... on an Akai MPC3000! He’s a genius."