Leftfield Sonic Sculptors

Rip It Up, Issue 214, 1 June 1995, Page 8

Leftfield Sonic Sculptors

Things are good for London’s Leftfield right now. With their Rhythm King contract hassles over and their distribution deal with Columbia, they’ve moved away from their image as lazy re-mixers and into the record releasing limelight. Their debut album, Leftism, has just gone gold in the UK (thanks to that stunning collaboration with John Lydon), and Neil Barnes and his wife have just had a baby. “We’re calling it Little Sid,” laughs Paul Daley, the other half of the Leftfield duo. Why? Well they used to be punks, didn’t they? “Well, you know, we’re talking about 20 years ago, when punk was fresh and original and something new. We're talking when I was school, not a couple of years ago.” Which would make them how old? Anyway... How did the Lydon thing come about? “Neil knew John from the early 80s, with Public Image days. He was a friend of his, and then John went off to America and they didn’t talk for ages. Then we sent him over a tape and he really liked it. Then we just had to persuade him to come down and do something in the studio. We did it as a laugh really, and it came out very well." The album has a few collaborators on it, exCurve vocalist Toni Halliday being among them. Do you always create the music first and then give it to the collaborator? “Yeah, well we write with people in mind sometimes, and give them the music and see what they think. We let people write their own lyrics and stuff, ‘cause that’s their trade. You couldn’t get John Lydon down to the studio and say: ‘Sing this,’ you know. He'd just tell you to fuck off.” Was he good to work with? “Yeah, it was wicked. We just had a laugh. He’s really into all types of music. He’s not just this spitting punk, this rude bastard." Well, not all the time. “Not all the time — he can be.” Leftfield started up back in 89. Neil and Paul were both working at the now defunct Eight Dials studio in Covent Garden — Neil as an engineer and Paul as a drummer. “I was a session musician for quite a few years in the mid-80s, working for Brand New Heavies, people like that. Then I met Neil and

we wanted to do our own thing. The house thing was exploding then and we were quite into it. But we wanted to play with our own version of it, and that’s how it all started."

How easy was it to give up your drum kit for a computer? “Well, at about that time, technology, like samplers and computers and that, were becoming more available, and we just decided to go with the flow rather than fight it. That old kind of muso thing, like you can’t make proper music with machines, well that’s just rubbish. I think you’ve got to embrace technology.” So, having made band albums and dance albums, what would be'the main difference? “Well, it’s like with a live band it’s more spontaneous. Like you’ll go in and jam a bit. Whereas, with midi and computer stuff, it’s like you’ve got a sculpture, and you hone it down in the studio and you chip away at it. We'd done a lot of the’tracks on the album at home first, and then we’d take it to mix it and stuff. . “And in dance music, there’s a lot of people that rely on the engineers. But this is our thing, our sounds, our songs. Its a part of us.” The album took four months in the studio, which seems minimal compared to, say, Future Sound of London’s obsessive everyday-of-their-lives-in-the-studio type carry on. “Yeah, well we can’t do that because we’re running the label [Hard Hands] and I DJ at the weekends. We’ve got our fingers in a lot of pies. A lot of people in dance music just do the one thing, but me and Neil do lots of things at once.” Is there a pressure for dance bands to become more visible in the .mainstream mags? You know, the Orb and Aphex Twin seem to sell more records because people know about them and read about them. “I think there is really. But, you know, the thing that attracted me to the dance thing, and house and stuff, was the purity of the music. It was about the music. It wasn’t about the colour socks you wore, or what you had for dinner, or that sort of pop star thing. It was almost anti-star. Most people that make dance music are just normal people that don’t want to be recognised as they walk down the street — they just want to make music.”

JOHN TAITE