RS: I heard you guys got a big award from Radio One, Essential
Mix of the Year. Where were you when you found out about that?
A&B: I think we were in the studio. To be honest, still to this
day it's one of the nicest things that's every happed to us because
living in the UK, the Essential Mix is one of those things that's been
around for a long time and it's been going long enough for there to
have been some really seminal mixes. The one that Paul Oakenfold did
all those years ago that had bits of film music and everything else
was very, very influential to us both in terms of how we play in clubs
and then when we got the opportunity to do the Essential Mix, the kind
of thing that we wanted to do. The thing that would kind of not just
be another Essential Mix, but to try and do something that was
markedly different. So we put a lot of effort into it and we were
very, very happy with the records that we got. I think we hit a raw
nerve with the vocal bit, the spoken vocal thing that we put on which
was kind of about the futility of war and the root of that and what's
wrong with the world at the moment. It just seemed to be something
that people wanted to hear and people weren't already hearing it. I
think when it comes to things like religion, any kind of media tends
to be so safe because you've got to be politically correct and the
great thing about that Essential Mix is it had loads of different
views on it, including some that you don't hear on the radio. So we
had great music and the timing was right, we were a little bit more
adventurous with what we put on it and so I think it did stand out.
There were sixty thousand playback requests from the BBC site, so we
already knew that it was making a bit of a wave. Then we heard that
they were doing these awards for the first time, and I don't know how
long the Essential Mix has been going now, fifteen years or so, so the
first ever award, to win the first ever Essential Mix of the Year
Award is just, it's amazing, it's fantastic.
RS: I want to ask you about the song "Alone Tonight" which was a
radio hit over here in the US. Was that about a specific situation or
is that a more general song?
A&B: It was written when I was going out with a Canadian girl who
I'd known for a long, long time, and she was very, very beautiful
model. I was in a kind of relationship where I really wanted to be in
it because I'd invested so much emotional energy in it but yet there
was something at the core of it which wasn't really working and we had
another big bust up. I drove all the way back from Devon and that's
when the words came to me and I literally in the studio on Monday
wrote it. It's a kind of stream of vitriol about the very unhappy
situation and relationship that I was in at at the time. The same
girl in a very similar situation that led to "Faster in Love" which
is a similar sort of vibe.
We had lots of discussions when we first started doing these kinds of
heartbreak trance songs as to whether sad, emotional lyrics had any
place in a party atmosphere. There were lots of concerns that maybe
trance needs to be happy but actually what you find is there's a lot
more emotional energy at the bad end of the spectrum than there is at
the happy end of the spectrum. A lot more people remember those
situations more intensely than the times that they're happy in their
life. The one thing that's absolutely true in terms of "Alone
Tonight" is that loneliness is part of the human condition and even if
you're in a relationship like I was at the time when I wrote that
song, you can still feel like you're not really connected with that
person. The proof of the pudding really is the amazing reaction this
record gets in clubs. It's rather ironic fot a bunch of people on a
night out to sing along at the top of their voices to such a sad and
tragic story, but believe me they do.
We've got some footage that my girlfriend filmed of the crowd in that
NY club that used to by Twilo and you can actually hear people singing
on top of the record which is just something. As musicians what we're
trying to do is to put stuff out that hits a chord and it gives people
something to sing. It gives them words that maybe they want to sing
but they hadn't thought of them before. That's the beauty of what we
do.
RS: Where do you see electronic music going right now?
A&B: It's difficult to tell. I'm a firm believer that the future
is totally unpredictable, and so I'm not really sure where trance is
going in terms of its sound. I think the rejuvenation of house music
with that kind of darker baseline-driven sound has eclipsed electro as
being the next big thing in house music. It's starting to filter into
trance and add a kind of baseline-driven almost house influenced vibe
to it. I think that's a very fresh and a good thing that's coming in,
because there's an awful lot of kind of copycat and what we call VST
trance stuff that made on a computer that sound like old trance
records we made from five years ago. This is particularly annoying as
we're obviously trying to develop our sound. The VST trance we get go
straight in the bin for us.
Ten years ago, in order to get a record released you had to get it signed to a label that was prepared to invest enough money in you as an artist to pay your advance, to pay for a piece of vinyl to be mastered, to pay for that piece of vinyl to be pressed up and distributed and that obviously it's an expensive business. There was a degree of quality control which has almost evaporated now. It's the easiest thing in the world to make a track on your computer using Reason or Fruity Loops which are relatively inexpensive and in some respects, do a lot of the thinking for you.
