NEWS
EVENTS
We sat down with DJ Target to talk about party vibes and Pitched Up
RnB/Hip Hop | Saturday 13th June 2015 | Christina
DJ Target and Danny Weed are both big in the music game in their own right – both have had chart hits, successful independent careers and were part of the foundational grime crew Roll Deep – and now they’ve started new imprint at Sony called Pitched Up. We sat down with DJ Target to talk all about it, with a little interruption from Danny.
Hi, how’s it going?
It’s going good!
What have you been up to recently?
Wow where do I even start? [Danny bursts in and then announces he’s off for a jacket potato]. We’re building the brand Pitched Up, we started the night a little over a year ago now and we’ve also got a label imprint, so that’s taking up a lot of time, doing line-ups for the monthly one we do at Dalston now, we’re about to take it around the country and do some academy shows and put it in some other clubs. And signings to the label, so we’ve just recently signed Bonkaz, he’s got the track ‘We Run The Block’, we signed TC4, a production duo from the Midlands, signed a Dutch producer called Sir OJ, he’s from Amsterdam, another house producer from London called Ellicit. Hannah V as well, she used to be keys player for Rihanna and Jessie J on their world tours and she also produces, she’s got a load of music. So yeah just kinda of building that brand as well as my DJ stuff for Radio 1 and 1Xtra. I’m working on a few documentaries with them and some for outside, I got a hat brand. Yeah just super busy. Back in the studio as well with Danny, who just came bursting in halfway through my first sentence!
In the studio is that just you two or is it Roll Deep stuff?
It’s more me and Danny getting back at it. We’ve had a couple of years out of the studio, we’ve got a couple of studios in Bethnal Green, and where we’ve been so busy doing everything else it kinda took away our creative time. We definitely had a plan to get back in the studio this year, that’s in the middle of happening. There might be some new Roll Deep stuff in the future but at the moment we’re just working on stuff that me and Danny are doing. We’re probably gonna drop another Aim High compilation, work with a few artists from around the UK, so everyone should keep their eyes and ears peeled.
Let’s take it back to Pitched Up. Was it a night first which then grew into the label?
Yeah I had this idea that I wanted to do a night but I didn’t want it to be another replication of things that are already happening. There are lots of showcase type nights, there are a couple of industry led nights, and I always found that they’re really boring, no disrespect to the other nights because I’ve been to lots of them, I’ve seen talent perform, but it just doesn’t have a consistent vibe throughout. So we wanted to start a night that represented what we do, supporting new music, pushing new music, DJs and performers, but we wanted it to firstly be a party rather than a showcase. The word showcase, I could fall asleep now just saying it. We wanted to have a party feel as well as that live performance aspect, so just trying to combine the two was a challenge. We wanted to do it in a venue that was not too small but small enough to create an intimate feel, we needed a good sound system, so we had all these things on our checklist. We ended up with Birthdays in Dalston who wanted to really work with us, we really like their venue, we’d been there for a few events before, their sound system is probably one of the best along that Dalston strip, and that’s kinda where it started. Little Simz headlined the first one, which was like December 2013, and every month since then we’ve been working on getting strong line-ups and strong DJs, new artists who are coming up. We’ve literally had everyone from Stormzy to Oxide & Neutrino, we have old school sets from time to time as well for the party vibe, Logan to Etta Bond to Bonkaz, Skepta, So Solid, Roll Deep, Heartless, My Nu Leng to Tough Love to General Levy, it’s just been like mad. These 18 months it’s been just really fun to see it build. The first few were like “is anyone even gonna turn up?”, but they did, you know when you have a party and it’s like “no ones here yet”, it was one of those things! But it’s been packed every month and the vibe still remains the same. It’s got that party vibe, people can come down and be stood next to Skepta, there’s no VIP section, it’s like everyone’s in it together. We get a load of artists down, we get a load of regular punters, ravers, we get a few industry people down, it’s just a nice mix but yeah it’s been going really well, and we just wanna continue to build it.
And how did that turn into the label?
Well we kinda wanted to do a label situation anyway but we didn’t know how we were gonna go about it and what not. Funnily enough Wiley, who’s a good friend of mine and Danny’s, and Jonathan Monjack, he was our lawyer for the first Roll Deep album, we’ve always remained friends and worked with him on various different business projects, he had mustered up a label situation for Wiley. Wiley called us and was like, “I wanna bring you two into this label situation, let’s do it together”, we’re like “cool let’s do it”, and literally like three days later Wiley was back on the phone like “you know what, I don’t wanna do it, you two just do it, I don’t wanna be a label person”. He kinda just backed out completely, we’re like “are you sure? Cos we’ll do it”, and he was like “just run with it”. That’s where we were like “why don’t we just call this label Pitched Up?” We wanna build that brand anyway, they both do the same thing, it’s all about new music, it’s all about pushing things forward, and it kinda just fell into place really. Since then we’ve just been building it, not going crazy signing everyone, just signing things we wanna get behind and we think are cool and credible.
How do you find people you sign? You mentioned those producers you’ve got but how do you search for them?
Luckily I don’t really have to do that much searching. I know the normal A&R probably wakes up at the crack of dawn and is on SoundCloud, scouring, but I’m lucky that I’m on the radio and I get sent so much music, like hundreds and hundreds of emails every day, so sometimes its off of the back of that. Something might have popped up in an email and I’m like “oooh yeah”, not only will I play it on the radio but try and get it for the label. Just the fact that we’ve got lots of relationships over the years of working in the industry and working with artists and managements, managers hitting us up when they’ve got a new artist, or other artists and producers who we’ve worked with in the past, they’ll hit us up when they’ve got something new. We both also work for Universal Publishing, which is for songwriters and producers, so it kinda comes at us from all angles really, which is lucky. We are out there looking as well but a lot of falls our way anyway, usually before lots of other people hear it which is good.
You mentioned you signed Bonkaz, ‘We Run The Block’, that went crazy. Did you expect the track to do that well?
Kind of. I remember I got sent that track and I’d already been playing Bonkaz’ previous stuff, which didn’t sound like ‘We Run The Block’. He had a couple of tracks that were more for the girls really, and I was playing those kind of tracks and then got sent ‘We Run The Block’, and was like “oooh hang on a minute”. I could hear it straight away, like I knew it was gonna be something that the grime heads were gonna like, and then as I listened to it more and more in the first week, it just felt like it had more to offer. Danny had heard the track as well and was like “trust me, we should sign this one, this one’s got something about it”, plus I’d already been seeing Bonkaz and liked how he was moving and the whole set up. And this is still before any A&R guys, lots of other DJs hadn’t even heard it or were playing it yet, we were really, really early, so we were like let’s not even wait for everyone to start getting involved and bidding for it. We know Anthony who’s looking after Bonkaz, so we just hollered at them and we met with Bonkaz. I actually first met Bonkaz, he came to Pitched Up the night a couple of months previous, just to come down, and I got introduced to him that night. So yeah we just sat down here at Sony and told them what we thought and how we saw the record, and listened to their vision, and we all seemed like we were on the same page, we got the paperwork done and we were off and running. But it’s had just a great reaction, when he performs it live it just goes off. He’s in a really good position, like the first record for him is getting this much love, and I think its just the start for him, I think he’s gonna be big.
With the label do you and Danny do different things, do you divide the workload up?
Danny doesn’t do any work as you’ve just clearly seen, he goes and eats jacket potatoes [laughs.] No he does. We split some stuff but we kind of work on a lot of it together if that makes sense. So we’d be working on something together but Danny might make that phone call to that guy and I might make this phone call to sort this out. We don’t have like a set regimented way of how we work, it just seems to end up working, so if one of us can’t do something or is unavailable the other can do it. Plus we’ve got a great team here at Sony, we kind of make sure everything gets delegated.
Is there anyone you’ve got your eye on to sign?
Erm, yeah.
Can you say who they are?
Oh I can say who they are, yeah. We’re about to sign a couple of things, but I don’t wanna ruin it [pauses].Ok Shakka.
Oh nice! Thanks for talking to us!
