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Above and Beyond Interview
Tuesday 14th February 2012 | Osh
Poised to bring their full Group Therapy live production tour to the UK for the first time this April, Above and Beyond are the house act of the moment. Currently ranked fifth in DJ Mag’s top 100 poll, we asked Tony McGuinness about the group’s beginnings, what they have in store for us in 2012 and how it feels to be so widely loved across the globe.
How did Above and Beyond come about? How did you all meet?
We got together to do a remix 12 years ago. We were all doing other things at the time. We met through social circles really. The remix was for Warner and Chakra, Home was the track. It was something we did in our spare time but we got something good together and the record got to No.1 in the club chart. We started getting a lot more work. So we got together accidentally really. Since then, we’ve written our own material which is what above and beyond are known for today.
So where did the name Above and Beyond come from?
Well, one of the guys in the group, Jono Grant, put his name into an Internet search engine a long time ago and discovered a man in America called John O’ Grant. He was a motivational trainer for the police- one of those people who would get a lot of people in a room and make them feel good about working for a big company. His slogan was Above and Beyond… that was his kind of his corporate message. Jono printed the page from this man’s website and stuck it on the wall. And when we finished the remix we needed a name for it. We looked around the room and I saw above and beyond on the printed page and I thought ‘that’s great, let’s use that!’
Wow, cool. So you guys are really busy with your DJ- ing, performing, tours, producing and remixing. What does a life in a day of Above and Beyond consist of?
Well, every day is always different. If you’re on the road, it’s very much travelling during the day, getting to the venue, doing sound checks, visual checks, having some dinner and then doing the show. Then we’ll try to get some sleep and move on to the next venue before doing the same again. When you’re in the studio, like I have been this week, it’s a bit more relaxed. We tend to meet up in the middle of the day and then work on producing or remixing whatever we are doing at the time. Then in the evening, one day a week, one of us is doing our Trance Around the World radio show, which goes out every week. I was doing that yesterday… pre-recording it. It takes about ten hours! You have to go through an awful lot of tracks to find some good ones for the show. Then you need to place it all together and do the speech and make sure it all flows. We used to do it live. Obviously we needed to do some preparation and then it would just happen with whatever mistakes are in it. But these days, with so much of it being syndicated, the show now goes out to around 70 different FM radio stations around the world and they all expect a reasonable level of production, so we have to pre- record it now.
Yeah, sounds really interesting and hectic at the same time. You have done a lot of travelling. I’ve actually been to a couple of your events in Beirut. How does your music speak to the Arab world?
It’s a universal thing. Wherever we go and play, we see and hear people who like our music and people who have connected with our music. Beirut, or any of the other countries we have played in the Middle East, seems to be just the same as other countries. I think one of the things you learn when you travel through different countries and go to different places, especially in the Middle East were they are restricted in parts, is that people are the same everywhere. We all share the same sun. People ask me, ‘what’s it like over there?’ and you say ‘it’s the same as it is over here.’ So whether you are in America, Lebanon, China or Australia, it’s a universal truth that we’re all human beings, that we all pretty much worry about similar things, look forward to the same things and enjoy music in exactly the same way.
Yes, this music has been growing rapidly in Beirut and Syria as well. So are you the one who writes the lyrics?
I write a lot of them. The songs that Richard Bedford sings are songs we have written for him and Zoe, who we also write with. Most of her lyrics are her own, but we tend to contribute ideas. But yeah, I am kind of the lyrical one. That has always interested me… the story of the song, the structure of it. The arrangement of it is hugely important to me. One of the great things about working with Joe Harver is that he can listen to a track and hear all of the frequencies at once and enable me to do the thing I am most centred on - the lyrics. I’ve always been a fan of song writing and songwriters, so it’s great fun to be able to that within what we do. When we started out I don’t think any of us thought we would be doing this, but it’s turned out great actually.
It seems as if you collaborate a lot with Zoe. What other kinds of artists would you like to work with in the future?
We’re actually pretty happy with the people we are working with now. I think in the last five years we have got people who can express what we want in our music, so we are not really looking to work or collaborate with anyone else right now. There’s always the tendency for DJ’s to collaborate with people who are hugely famous. Whilst this might give you a short- term spike, I don’t think these collaborations lead to anything long- term. We are very happy doing our own thing for our own fans. I am open- minded to the prospect of collaborations from those who want to do something with us. We did a track with a guy called Miguel Bose, a very famous Spanish singer. He’s been around for a long time. He’s genuinely a Latin superstar in Latin speaking countries. We discovered he was a big Above and Beyond fan, and we actually managed to get him to translate our songs into Spanish and change bits so it would make more sense to him. Effectively he was singing our songs and adding his own thing to it so that was a really nice thing to do because, we don’t speak Spanish and we don’t really understand Spanish either.
So where does the name of your record label come from? Anjuna Beats?
In the late eighties and early nineties, a lot of people from Europe were going to Goa in India. And one of the towns in Goa is called Anjuna. Anjuna Beach was one of the places where trance music found its birth with people coming out from Germany, Holland and the UK and experimenting with different sounds. Goa Trance, as it’s known to this day, is one of the earliest forms of trance music, and so it’s a bit of a pun on Anjuna beach.
What artists and tracks should we look out for in 2012?
On the label we have a number of releases. We have so many that it’s difficult to pick selected tracks but, we’re very much looking forward to Mat Zo’s album which is very close to being finished. Mat’s a very un-precocious talent on the label. His album is out in the summer and we are all very much looking forward to doing that.
What’s your most memorable gig to date and why?
If I had to pick one, it would probably be the first time we played the LA Coliseum at the EEC. It was about four or five years ago. I mean this is where they held the Olympics so it’s a huge venue. I can’t think of another venue that compares. I think for the performer it is a very enjoyable sight. But there have been so many great shows. The gigs we have done in Beirut have always been very special. I don’t quite know why, but the people in Beirut seem to party hard. We have, to date, played our only proper live gig in Beirut. That was pretty special too.
So you have the Group Therapy UK tour coming up. What will it be like to play on home turf?
It’s always nice to come home. We’ve been delighted by the way the fans have taken our music into their hearts. I think when we started out there was a feeling that the guys from Holland and Germany were the real McCoy. There wasn’t anyone doing what we were doing at a higher level in the UK. Now we’ve got huge shows in Brixton and big UK tours coming up. It’s going to be really nice to get a big injection of home fans because obviously they are a unique bunch.
We also love the Above and Beyond TV episodes on your website. Can you tell us about the idea behind them?
We did a similar thing in Australia a year or so ago. I think one of the things we felt with the Above and Beyond TV idea was that it was a good way to show what we do, and I think we have done an awful lot of that with the channel. If you’re coming from an audience’s perspective, you understand much more about what Group Therapy is all about. It was nice to turn the metaphorical mirror to reflect one of our shows from the audience’s perspective. I think it ended up being a very moving and touching little film for all the right reasons. I think the people we followed around and filmed and interviewed were just normal people going about their everyday lives. In everyone’s life there is some magic, something special as well as things they have to deal with. I think it was fantastic. I wish we were able to do more of that… but it’s complicated stuff to do. Yeah, it was lovely.
Is there a message you would like to deliver to all of your loyal fans?
I’m not sure if I have anything brief that I can condense into a short message. Our message is our music, and I think our overall feeling is that there are people all over the world that love music and love each other, and if we can bring that together in a small way then we’re happy.
It was great talking to you. We’re looking forward to seeing you here for your UK tour in April.
Look out for the full Group Therapy live UK tour this April and the next single, Love Is Not Enough, is out on 19th March!
