RS: Let’s get a little bit superlative, looking back on the past ten, twelve years, what's been the hardest song to remix?
Andy: The hardest record to remix, that’s a difficult one because we’ve done about three hundred and fifty records over the years.
Pete: There have been many, none of them are hugely easy. One that stands out, purely because of time, was Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us.” We were given a week to do four or five mixes and that was literally no sleep, day and night, constant pressure and it turned out good. We had high expectations because if you’re remixing Michael Jackson, you have a lot of people counting on you, and there was an awful lot of work put into it. Remixing is always enjoyable but there’s always an element of difficulty in every single one.
Andy: On the Michael Jackson, We had to do four different mixes, so it wasn’t just like one job, it was like four separate jobs on top of each other. So there’d be like a radio mix, an R&B mix, a sort of spare dub mix and a club mix, and each one is basically a completely different set of music. There was a lot of long hours on that. I think also when we did Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” that was a similar thing because we had to do four different versions of the chorus, and that took about ten days to do all of it and it had to be done quickly.
RS: On the Madonna, did that get released or is it just a DMC thing or…?
Andy: Apparently she was doing an album called Veronica Electronica and it was in conjunction with DMC. It was all in the pipeline, but it never came out. I heard it was allegedly a project of remixes, I think this was before Ray of Light, and our lot got canned so it never came out.
RS: You do a lot of work with DMC in the UK, how do those remixes come about? Are you approached by DMC or are those projects that don’t get approved on the first round so they're used on this medium?
Pete: They're never rejects, they're always ones that DMC have approached us with, they're never things that kind of we’ve done but aren't being used, it’s always things that are specifically for DMC. It’s because we love the company, and they have been supportive of DJs for years and years. They approach us and say will you do this, there’s no money in it, and we say yes.
RS: Is there a remix that stands out in your mind of something you're really proud of or most proud of?
Pete: That’s a good question, I don’t know. I think that I’m proud of every one to a degree. The ones that stick out are the First Choice tracks “Let No Man Put Asunder” and “Ten Percent” because we’d grown up listening to them and loved. It was a pleasure to do them.
Andy: Probably some of the Gloria Estefan stuff that we did, for me, because it was our first sort of really big records in America. I think when we did Everlasting Love, about 1994, Frank Ceraolo at Sony called us up and we’d never really done much in America and that was our first big break in America. So I would probably say Everlasting Love was one of my favorites to do.
RS: Is there an artist that you have not worked with that you would like to work with?
Andy: We’ve still not done Jennifer Lopez. We waited ages and ages to do a Mariah Carey record, and I think Dave Morales did every Mariah Carey record for years and years when she was at Sony. So we finally got to go a Mariah record about a year ago.
