RS: Just about every song has a video, how important do you think having a video is for the success of your music?
Pete: Well a video doesn’t help you get in to the club charts, The club charts are way up front of any kind of visual thing or any kind of sort of record sales or radio play. So in those terms which is a really important part of what we do, it doesn’t matter at all. But in terms of marketing and promotion, it’s obviously pretty influential. It brings your music to a wider audience. People see you when they're watching music TV who would never see or hear from you usually. It’s bound to reach people who just would never even know you existed and in that sense it’s a good thing.
RS: Has the album coming out and singles before and after, has that led to more remix work do you think?
Pete: Yes, actually it has, which has been very good. People who weren’t aware of us before, they’ve become aware of us because of it, so it’s quite interesting in that respect. I think we’ve also had more work as Love to Infinity remixing as well because I think that people maybe kind of get used to us being around, because we’ve been doing it now for God knows how long...
RS: I’ve been spinning your remixes for more than ten years.
Pete: Yes, it must be twelve, fourteen years, I can’t even remember, I’ve been doing it ever since I can remember. When you're doing it, people get used to you being around and hearing the mixes. The all the young people who come in, like fifteen or sixteen years old, who are just starting mixing, become aware of what you’ve done and then they get into you. So it’s kind of a perpetual thing I suppose, but it doesn’t harm to remind people that you're around, every now and then.
RS: There’s David, there’s Pete, and there's Andy and the three of you are brothers. Did you all grow up in a really musical family?
Pete: Oh, it was like the Partridge Family <laughing> No, it was nothing like the Partridge Family. It wasn’t a particularly musical family, my parents, they aren’t great musicians or anything. My dad can play the radio and that’s about it. My mum had piano lessons when she was young. We were very fortunate and very encouraged when we were young to explore what we wanted. We did all find our own way into music though, it was something that I’ve always played. I started on guitar when I was seven, keyboards when I was eleven, and by the time I was fourteen or fifteen I was working full-time in a studio. I’ve actually not stopped, I’ve hardly stepped outside that studio since then until now. I think that Andy’s the same and Dave started a little later. David’s our younger brother, Andrew’s the oldest and I am the middle. David started a little later, he sort of went out and was crazy for a bit and then came back and did music.
RS: How do you approach remixing differently than production?
Pete: I’m not sure that you do. If you're given a song with vocals to remix, the remixing is all about bringing the best of the song on the vocals out, whether that that’s doing completely new music, messing up the vocals completely and turning them around and rearranging the whole thing, or kind of taking the idea of the original track and vastly improving on it, For me it’s all about bringing out the best of the vocals and the best of the song, I want to make it as good as possible. For me, when I hear something when it comes into the studio, it’s usually sort of plainly obvious where the improvements need to be made, what needs to be improved, what needs to be messed with and what should be left alone. As a rule, we generally mess with everything, which would probably be our motto, mess with everything.
RS: Sounds like your next remixer name.
Pete: <laughing> Definitely, yes. Production-wise, I suppose the difference is that you're not starting with something that you can mess with, you're building from the ground up. If we’re writing a song and producing it, then we’ve actually got the sort of guts of the song. We bring our songwriting skills into play and once we’ve got a vocal then maybe we’ll take the whole thing and play around with it and try something completely weird with it or maybe we’ll go down the route as we’re going down with the songwriting of it.
If we’re producing another artist and it’s something that we’ve not written then there’ll be a demo so we can feel the vibe of the people who wrote it. Then whether we agree with that or not usually we’ll try and bring the absolutely best out of what's on it. It’s not that different, remixing and producing. It’s all about listening, using your ears and going with your guts on what you feel this song should be, where it should be propelled to.
