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DJ Format Interview
RnB/Hip Hop | Friday 3rd February 2012 | Osh
It was when I received information that DJ Format had a new album coming out I knew I had to talk to him. I had many things to ask him, firstly “Why so long dudeeeeeeee?!”, so I met up with Format, poured a brew and asked him some questions! His new album is called ‘Statement of Intent’, cop that and watch out for his live performances coming soon!
How was your 2011?
Yeah, it was really good in a lot of ways because I finally finished the album that I’ve been working on all this time!
How long did it take?
It’s really hard to sort of pinpoint it, I would say I’ve been intensely working on the album for two years and I’ve also been working on it on and off for probably five or six years but like I say it’s hard to really even cap it at that because of the songs that I started so long ago...
You’ve worked a lot of with Nostalgia 77, have they been an instrumental part of this album?
No, there’s only really the two songs, those two songs were actually recorded about four years ago. It was at a time when I was really quite struggling to decide what way to go with what MC’s I might work with. I was quite bored of rap stuff and I really felt like I didn’t want to do another load of songs with Abdominal because we’d both kind of...we just both felt we needed a little change of pace, a change of scenery, do some stuff without each other and then hey, I’m sure we’ll get back together in the future.
Do you think a lot of people have instantly presumed that you and Abdominal have fallen out?
I don’t think so, I don't know, I mean people do obviously still say “Hey where’s Abdominal?”
But that’s the beauty of me as a solo artist, DJ, producer, whatever you want to describe me as, I’m not tied to one particular person you know.
I was reading the album liner notes and you wrote ‘Thanks to Sure Shot for making me love hip hop again...” Did you fall out of love with hip hop?
As I said I was going through this very transitional period with hip hop thinking “Okay, what rap songs am I going to make?” and I was very uninspired. I wasn’t really hearing too many people that I wanted to work with. I wasn’t even sure what kind of things I was going to loop up and sort of work towards. It was when I met Sure Shot, we were working on a project together, it’s like a collective called ‘DWG’ which is ‘Diggers With Gratitude’, and we managed to get the rights to all these really rare unreleased classic hip hop recordings by Marley Marl and the Juice Crew and we’d also gained the rights to some really incredible unreleased demos by Main Source; another kind of epic early 90’s group that were influential to so many people, especially me! We got together to do a mixtape so that we could do like a radio show. Sure Shot was the host of the show and I was the DJ sort of putting all the music together, so that’s how we met, doing this DWG mix called ‘Lung Butters’. We just hit it off and he said he used to write rhymes and he had all these good things going on. Then I guess he just met his wife and just went down a different path and the rap thing was very much just sort of a hobby and he just thought “okay, maybe it’s not going to ever happen for me” and it was like we sort of reignited that passion in each other...
How was your 2011?
Yeah, it was really good in a lot of ways because I finally finished the album that I’ve been working on all this time!
How long did it take?
It’s really hard to sort of pinpoint it, I would say I’ve been intensely working on the album for two years and I’ve also been working on it on and off for probably five or six years but like I say it’s hard to really even cap it at that because of the songs that I started so long ago...
You’ve worked a lot of with Nostalgia 77, have they been an instrumental part of this album?
No, there’s only really the two songs, those two songs were actually recorded about four years ago. It was at a time when I was really quite struggling to decide what way to go with what MC’s I might work with. I was quite bored of rap stuff and I really felt like I didn’t want to do another load of songs with Abdominal because we’d both kind of...we just both felt we needed a little change of pace, a change of scenery, do some stuff without each other and then hey, I’m sure we’ll get back together in the future.
Do you think a lot of people have instantly presumed that you and Abdominal have fallen out?
I don’t think so, I don't know, I mean people do obviously still say “Hey where’s Abdominal?”
But that’s the beauty of me as a solo artist, DJ, producer, whatever you want to describe me as, I’m not tied to one particular person you know.
I was reading the album liner notes and you wrote ‘Thanks to Sure Shot for making me love hip hop again...” Did you fall out of love with hip hop?
As I said I was going through this very transitional period with hip hop thinking “Okay, what rap songs am I going to make?” and I was very uninspired. I wasn’t really hearing too many people that I wanted to work with. I wasn’t even sure what kind of things I was going to loop up and sort of work towards. It was when I met Sure Shot, we were working on a project together, it’s like a collective called ‘DWG’ which is ‘Diggers With Gratitude’, and we managed to get the rights to all these really rare unreleased classic hip hop recordings by Marley Marl and the Juice Crew and we’d also gained the rights to some really incredible unreleased demos by Main Source; another kind of epic early 90’s group that were influential to so many people, especially me! We got together to do a mixtape so that we could do like a radio show. Sure Shot was the host of the show and I was the DJ sort of putting all the music together, so that’s how we met, doing this DWG mix called ‘Lung Butters’. We just hit it off and he said he used to write rhymes and he had all these good things going on. Then I guess he just met his wife and just went down a different path and the rap thing was very much just sort of a hobby and he just thought “okay, maybe it’s not going to ever happen for me” and it was like we sort of reignited that passion in each other...
It’s great when you find someone who you share the love of music with..
Yeah, you just feel like you’ve met someone just like you! He wanted to make exactly the same stuff as I did, we were influenced by almost exactly the same hip hop and we both didn’t care too much for what people were doing nowadays. We just wanted to do hip hop the way we wanted to hear it made. It was a beautiful thing working with Sure Shot.
Tell me about the ‘Statement of Intent’ video. Was Mr Krum involved in that?
He wasn’t involved directly in the video, that was painted by Paintshop Studio and filmed and edited by Jeff Metal, but they did obviously work off of the design of the album cover by Mr Krum. As the pieces unfolds, it eventually is like a very toned down version of Krum’s art work.
Are you happy with the video?
I can’t thank those guys enough. It’s the most incredible thing, it’s just made such a difference to me breaking the news of my new album. If I had just broken the news and said “Yeah I’ve got a new album, here's a little snippet” because I did the sampler mix, it was a four and a half minute mix where I managed to get about eight of the key songs sort of all into a nice concise little mix. If I’d had just released that and put it out there on the net without any images to really accompany it, I’m sure people would have checked it out but nowhere near the amount of people who have, the video just captures the imagination!
It definitely complements the music. A lot of effort has gone into it!
I’m so proud of that.
Do you have a set of shows coming up?
I’ve got what I would call a live tour coming up. The thing is, things are very different now when it comes to the music industry and touring, they were very different to when I had my first two albums out in so much as I can’t do two or three weeks in one block where we do shows every night. All I can do...it’s very hard to find the right venues and promoters that want to put things on mid week because it’s quite a gamble. So you could be playing in quite a desolate town for not much money and it’s just not really financially viable. As a result of that, the majority of our shows are going to be on Friday’s and Saturday’s because that’s the night people want to go out and party. As a result, I’m not able to bring over MC’s, for example Sure Shot because he’s got a life in America, he’s got a wife and kid’s and he needs to be there with them. If he was coming over for two weeks then that’s great, but that’s not the way the tour is going to unfold. It’s going to be over a series of weekends. I’m actually developing the live show with Simon who is from The Simonsound, my other group. Simon will be playing Moog ynthesizer and other electronic effects and I’ll be on turntables and on a couple of songs, we’ve actually got a vocoder because we’re kind of doing old school electro b-boy shit. We’re very much making it an audio/visual show. Simon has been touring and I was just so impressed with the show that he put together musically and visually that I thought it would work really well bringing the more dance floor b-boy elements of the Simonsound show and sort of marrying that with one of my DJ sets, adding the visuals and I can put my hand on my heart and say I’m very confident it’s going to be good. I know a lot of people will always say “Why are there no MC’s?” or “Where’s Abdominal?” but it’s not possible to do that for this album tour but where still going to make this a great live audio/visual show. We’re still working on it right now, it takes so much work, we’ve got the music pretty much sorted, it’s just like trying to do all the visual stuff, it takes days and days and days!
It’s a bit mental. It’s a new area that some people are stepping into, the A/V shows now, it’s a new dimension.
It’s so much fun to me! It really appeals to my OCD nature, it’s very similar to when you’re piecing together samples, the way that I make hip hop or other music, it’s kind of like that with these bits of visuals, to try and fit these visuals to certain bits of music.
We are entering the silly question realm. If you fill a swimming pool with anything but water, what would it be?
Probably caramel and apple betty with custard! I know the most obvious would be to say vinyl records, but it would just hurt me to see all those records grinding together getting scratched up and basically ruined but...I’ve got such a sweet tooth, so caramel apple betty with custard.
If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only invite three famous people, who would you choose?
That’s not like a quick fire thing because people that maybe I admire for their musical achievements might not necessarily be the same people that I would wish to spend my time on a desert island with! I have so much love and respect for the music of James Brown, but I think he might be a little bit of a handful! I would invite Sean Lock, Sean Lock to me is naturally hilarious and just some sort of genius without even making any effort. If you watch 15 stories high, he co-wrote and starred in two series of that and it’s just a work of absolute genius! So Sean Lock would be there because I would never get bored hanging out with him. Then maybe someone like Marilyn Monroe, she’s quite unimposing and I don’t think you could ever get annoyed with her she’s so lovely. The last one has to be Ray Mears! Because if you are on a desert island, you’ve gotta have your survival guy. That guy, every single episode of his show, he comes up with a new way to show off his fire-making skills, he’s like “okay, this week we’re going to make a fire out of two goldfish in a plastic bag that I’ve just won from the fairground and a pot of yogurt!” It gets more ridiculous every time! Ray Mears has to be on board!
I think you might survive!
I’m trying to cover all angles, you’ve got the sexy female company, the guy that’s going to take care of you all and the guy that’s gonna make you laugh no matter what!
What do you think of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). They are removing file sharing websites, which means sensoring information. What do you think of this?
I’ve got really mixed feelings because I can respect the feelings of people that may not wish to have their stuff shared on these sites but it’s mostly, like everything in life, it boils down to money. I can understand that if someone is putting someone else's work and art onto their site and directly profiting from that and stopping that artist from directly profiting from their own work because this other person has just come along and stolen it. Of course that’s wrong, but I do have mixed feelings because it’s not just like a black and white issue, there’s alot of shades of grey in the middle. For example, I think it’s fantastic that you can just go on Youtube and look up random stuff, from like an old film. you know you don’t want to sit there and watch the whole film, you don’t want to go out and buy it, you just want to watch that scene because it came up in a conversation and you just want to see it! It’s great that you can do that, or you can just look up a record just to share, that’s the thing, alot of the time it is just people sharing a passion...
If you really enjoy it, you will buy it.
I think that people just need to be...certainly younger people that have been born into a generation where all they know is digital uploading and they don’t know about vinyl and CD’s because everything is MP3’s and they kind of get it for free. It’s good to educate people, and say “Look, if you download my new album instead of going out and buying a copy, I can’t control that and I can’t complain too much because hey, when I was a kid at school I used to tape things on cassette!” I couldn’t afford at 15 years old to go out and buy records because I was still at school, I didn’t have money. So I taped off of cassettes, that’s the part of the process, you discover music, you tape all these tapes, you build up your collection, but as soon as I left school and got a job, all I wanted to spend my money on was actually going and buying these original records that I just had the tapes of. I want to own the original vinyl because to me that was like the holy grail, that was the most important thing, I want to own the original thing, I want to read the sleeve notes, I want to read about the other people in their crew who they’ve sent shout outs to and I want to find out who the DJ was who did the scratches and who produced that song because that’s interesting to me. I thunk you can lose that obviously with downloads and people just aren’t interested, they just get the song. If you want to hear more music from me in the future, if I’ve put all my money into making this record, recording, manufacturing and promoting, you know I pay a PR company as well to do the press and the radio plugging. I’ve had to use the last of my own money to do that, so without starting to sound like a whingeing crusade, I’ve put myself in debt because I wanted to invest in myself, now if people download my record instead of buying it, they just have to understand, fine if you can’t afford to buy it, but if you really like what you hear and you want to hear more from me, you’ve just got to understand the bigger picture which is that if I lose all money because not enough people have bought my album, I can’t continue to make music as a full time thing and I will never put out another record myself because I wont be able to afford to take the risk. I would have to go out and get a regular job, obviously work a nine to five and make music in my spare time, hey I’m not saying that’s not the end of the world, alot of people do that, but I’m just saying it will make things completely different and it will be a hell of a long time before you even hear another single from me let alone another album because I’m the kind of guy that takes my time and I’m a bit of a perfectionist. It’s not about being greedy, like “give me all the money”, you’ve got to kind of give something back if you want to hear some more from that artist. Equally, while I’m saying that I’m also completely happy to acknowledge that I make the majority of my music by sampling/stealing, creatively stealing other people’s music that they may not wish for me to steal and they may say “where’s my slice of the money?” from the fact that I made my records from the music I stole from them. My defense there is that I’m only taking bits from records....
And it’s promoting them..
Well possibly, but I’m generally sampling old records that have already...those artists have already..I’m not going to make any difference to their...I’m not going to put them out of business now because I sampled their record, it’s not going to affect their career in a negative way, they’ve already put the records out 25 years ago...I don’t think I’m taking it directly out of their pockets or anything like that.
I really think like sampling is promotion in a way...
The truth is that I mostly sample things that are hopefully quite obscure and unknown and I’ve got no desire to make them known because ultimately...the original way, you know the b-boy way of doings things is going out and discovering things like records that other people haven’t yet used and you want to keep it a secret otherwise hey if you go shouting about it everyone’s going to get onto it. Then you’ve got the same people playing the same records, the same bunch of DJ’s all playing the same records, it’s like you want to be original and have samples and breaks to use that other people don’t have because you’ve got your own little secret discoveries so...
Have you ever looped up a sample that you thought was really good and kept it a secret so other people don’t know about?
Yeah, I’ve had records for years that I’m scared that other people are going to discover that record and sample it before me. I mean I was alot more naive about that kind of thing when I was younger, before the internet was really such a big thing. If you go back to 90’s, back then discovering records, you’d find something and maybe you could really imagine that you’re the only person that has a copy of this record, no one else would think to pick this up, no one else would find it it’s too obscure. I don’t care what you got, someone else is going to have it, 99 times out of 100 someone else is going to have. Whether it’s someone else that’s likely to sample it or do anything with it who knows but someone out there will know about it. Obviously since the internet has become such a big thing in everybody’s life, it’s easy to just get different records from all over the world, just boom right on your door step, by just looking online, buy a copy, boom there you go, other side of the world. A record you wouldn’t have otherwise have access to because the internet has just opened everything up. It’s very hard to be original and find things that other people don’t know about. Sometimes I do find samples and I think “That’s so good! Yet, it’s not on a record that I would really consider to be that rare. Why hasn't anyone used it!” Then I use it and I’m nervous!
That’s the reason! People have been killed by using certain samples! (laughs) I’ve really been hammering the ‘Stealin James’ songs. Which are small mixes of James Brown songs as a tribute to him. Have you tried to do a tribute mix for any other artists?
Yeah, I kind of started to map out a similar tribute mix to Kool and the gang, with their old music. I just wasn’t able to quite make it as good as I would’ve like to so I kind of abandoned it. With James Brown he’s just go so much, you just don’t realise that the guy’s got so much material! Not just as under the name of James Brown, but obviously the JB’s and then all the singers and artists that he produced and wrote for, like Lyn Collins and Marva Whitney and Hank Ballard, Bobby Byrd, there’s so much material, so when you’re doing a James Brown mix you’ve just got so much...and he just did so many different styles as well. Whereas with Kool and The Gang, they did some phenomenal music and I’m sure a lot of people, especially younger people now will think of “Celebrate” and “Ladies Night” which are not bad 80’s pop songs, but they are kind of cheesy! Before that, they did some really really fantastic music. For me mapping out this mix, it was hard for me to make it the standard that I wanted it to be so I kind of abandoned it. I also looked into trying to do it with The Meters, I tried to do a similar thing with The Meters and again, it’s just not enough, also with The Meters, they very much had a sound, it wasn’t varied enough...with the James Brown stuff he just had such an array of different sounds!
What’s your favourite song by James Brown?
‘Get up, Get into it, Get involved’. It’s been sampled by a million hip hop records and so for that reason I love it, but just as a raw funk record, soul record whatever you want to call it, it’s just so exciting! Even now when I hear that record, it’s just so exciting and exhilarating, every time I hear it it’s like “God! How did they capture that sound, it’s amazing!”.
It’s crazy. I listened to the live JB’s record and the intro is like nine minutes long and it just sounds like they’re in a room or something and everything he is saying is just so on point and it feels like it should be scripted, it’s just a beautiful moment captured!
They were just the best. They were just the best you know, and James Brown was a crazy genius that had his band just so well oiled. There’s a famous story that he was doing on the spot fines for anyone that made a mistake, you know slightly out of time or bum note, anything like that. He’s giving the little signals that they’re getting fined because his band was tight, he wanted everything to be the best, and hey, you know what, I think he managed it. Fair play to him!
Thanks for talking to me DJ Format!
Cheers!
