NOVEMBER_DECEMBER 2007/INTERVIEW/LUKE UNABOMBER

You (Luke) and Justin started the now legendary Electric Chair club night 12 years ago, what prompted you to start your own night? What other stuff was going on in Manchester at the time?

Manchester had obviously had a real revolution in music from the mid 80s to the early 90s with acid house and underground music had just exploded and Manchester became a real capital of music in the UK; me and Justin had both gone there as students in the 80s, but by about ’94 a mixture of gangster-ism and commercialism had come in and kind of killed the city’s original vibe so it became really insipid, flat, lifeless, and commercial and it really changed a lot, so me and Justin decided to start our own party, and decided to do it in the most horrible and dirty underground basement we could find so that the only people that came there were there for the music, which is a bit of a strange psychology really! That’s how it all started anyway in June 1995, in an old rock club.


December 29th will see your penultimate Electric Chair party which will feature a number of your friends from the music world playing five records each. Tell us a bit about that.

Well the club has been on every month for the last twelve years and a lot of people have played there from Francois Kevorkian and Danny Krivit to local DJs like Chris Duckenfield and James Holroyd, so a real mixture of music from quite big DJs to total unknowns and local heroes, so we just felt that the penultimate Electric Chair should kind of be a celebration of everybody that’s played there because the club has never been about one sound, or one dimensional bpms for 6 hours, it’s always been a real mixture of music that we love and appreciate so we wanted to reflect that in one of the penultimate nights before we lay the club to rest really. The list is mad, I can’t even remember all the names, there’s Mr. Scruff, Gilles Peterson, Winston Hazel, Chris Duckenfield, there’s so many people all playing 5 records each, I think there’s about 20-odd DJs playing. It’s a bit of fun and a celebration of all those years and a celebration of the fact that we want people to listen to everything from hip-hop to disco to soul to house; there were no real boundaries to the music that we played although Billy Joel would be pushing it obviously!


How do you feel the music has changed at your night over the years? How does a playlist from the first year of the club compare to a playlist from now?

They are probably remarkably similar if you compare them actually. I think at the first Electric Chair that we did in June ’95 we were badly mixing records we all knew, so it was a lot more naïve, and there’s probably a few less hits now than there were back then but the philosophy is still very similar. I think it’s like anything if you were a chef, you develop and mature and you refine your style or your sound and it’s at a better level than it was then but I think the same philosophy was there because we really do play music across a real eclectic foundation and sometimes it’s funny because it raises eyebrows, because a Blondie track or a Talking Heads track or even a Beyonce track – outsider pop music – is something that we love and we didn’t have any snobbery against that, so when we first did the club we did that and we still do it now. It’s changed and become more refined but the philosophy and the vibe are exactly the same.


Do you ever get people coming up to you in the club asking you to play their music – giving you CDR demos etc..?
Yeah and funnily enough it can be quite difficult because I’ll only discover them three weeks later at the bottom of my bag with a random phone number on them! But yeah, there’s a lot of music that comes out from the underground and that’s one of the ways that we break new stuff at the club, and we also do radio so people are constantly dropping off CDRs for us to hear; there was a guy in Manchester called Trusme who’s stuff we’ve been playing. Sometimes the standard varies but we get some interesting stuff.


So what do you think of the Trusme stuff? His debut album has just come out to quite a lot of acclaim hasn’t it?

Yeah, I love it, he came up to us at the club and that’s how we got to know his stuff and we’ve been playing it out. He’s been getting a lot of attention obviously on places like Benji B and a whole host of underground radio shows and in the clubs. It’s good, it’s got a quintessentially Detroit vibe about it but it’s very much a Manchester thing in terms of the influences he’s taken. It’s quite strange because people like Moodymann and Theo Parrish are a big influence in Manchester and the musical development of the city particularly over the past 15 years so there’s lots of people coming through now who were heavily influenced by that stripped down Detroit sound and in London it’s probably a bit different; bizarrely that sound is really big here despite Manchester being a much, much smaller city so people like Trusme have that heritage and are now making their own little take on that which is really good.


Do you think an artist like that has the potential to develop his own sound from that as well?

I think he has to because otherwise you end up just being a derivative or influenced sound if you don’t take it further yourself, but he’s young and he’s got the time to do that. When you’re young you should be militant and you should be into one sound and then as you get older you can branch out and combine your influences with your own philosophy and your own art form, whatever that is.


When you came down to Greece and played what struck us was that it was a real party, about you guys having a nice time as much as the people at the club having a nice time and the music being based around that, which should be one of the most basic things when you have a party but sometimes it’s not:

It’s funny you should say that because me and Justin have always firmly believed that an underground club night doesn’t need to equate with loads of men, with beards and green jackets, discussing dub plates in a small salubrious pub in East London. The idea that that’s underground is a funny one because an underground movement should be all about a celebration of what you love, and music is to move to ultimately, dance music is a very dirty word, but that’s what it is and me and Justin have always felt that’s the core of what we do. I think if you’re very self conscious about what you do the music ends up being the least important part of what you do, but for us its central; it sound a bit obvious and crass but the best clubs have always had the party element as the central theme yet some people see that as selling out like: ‘ooh you’ve got women dancing in your club, you can’t have that!’, but for us the best clubs in the world always had a gay element, a female element, were multi-racial and brought together a real mixture of people, the music should obviously then be very honest and the moment you get self-conscious and too conscious of what an underground is then you lose that very basic thing – a party is a carnival it’s about enjoyment and fun.


It’s interesting that you use the word carnival, we like that:

Well, that’s the thing, we’re very influenced by the British sound from the Wild Bunch and Massive Attack to Soul II Soul who started off in the African Centre in London, and Warp records – all of those things came out of underground parties and basements in the UK where there was a real melting pot of music. There’s always been a real influence of black American music in the UK, as well as Jamaican music and European electronica that somehow merge and what results is a very strange mutation. All the best things in the UK in my opinion came from that philosophy where they were influenced by all the musical styles from all over the world, but then gave it their own quintessentially British take on that, the sound systems of the Wild Bunch made Massive Attack and the same with Soul II Soul and that’s what we’ve always been influenced by and why the carnival element is so important. The moment there’s too many men at your party who are all just stood there with notebooks discussing jazz then you lose the fundamental guts of the party and that should be at the heart of any underground movement.


You are also responsible for the groundbreaking Electric Souls compilations; was the concept of those to document the music you were playing at the club night at the time?

Yeah they were just a reflection of the music we were playing, there’d be some stuff that was more vocal and then some stuff that was more heavy and stripped down and instrumental that didn’t necessarily do a lot, so they were a really honest reflection of what we were doing not just at Electric Chair but at our underground party Electric Souls, which was our sort of illegal, hush-hush thing that we held in various strange places around Manchester, and the compilations reflect that time for us. We’ll also be doing another one in January to commemorate the end of Electric Chair.


Why did you decide to end the Electric Chair parties after more than a decade and what's next for the Unabombers?

We never set about starting the club to make money and we believe that everything’s got a shelf life and you have to be very honest with yourself, and me and Justin have always said that the moment the club became like a pair of ‘velvet handcuffs’ (we always use that strange expression!) that was the moment that we’d stop, and what we meant by that was once it became comfortable and a form of income and we just did it every month, like on autopilot and the moment the passion left from ourselves was the moment to move on, and we felt this year that the time was right. It could sound a little bit pompous but it isn’t meant to be we just felt you have to move forward and have change, without that you just become stagnant and relying on what you’ve done in the past and we’ve never been interested in that – it all ends up a bit Spinal Tap in a way so we knew that the moment that felt right to kill it, we would. Electric Chair is only part of what we do anyway so we will still be doing parties; we just want to take it forward and take more risks and not become reliant on the past.


Even though you've decided to wind down the regular Electric Chair event will you still be doing one off specials?

Yeah, I think in many ways if you get too comfortable with a regular event it stops you doing new things and taking risks, so we’ve already planned to do parties in Manchester, in London, and there’s an amazing party in Croatia that’s just incredible, it’s like people across Europe all congregate there in the summer so we’re going to be doing about 7 or 8 parties throughout the year as well as some stuff in Manchester, so it’s definitely not the end, it’s just the end of that chapter and that club. It’s a bit like moving house really, we’ve been in the same house for 13 years nearly and it’s time to move out! We’re also doing live stuff now with The Electrons so it’s probably going to get busier if anything.


Any plans to come back out to Athens, maybe even for a live event?
I think so yeah, I’ve spoken to Kostas (B Bluz promoter) who’s been such a great support over the years and so we’re definitely coming out there again, we even spoke about trying to do something before Christmas although that’s probably not possible now! Playing abroad is usually the most exciting thing really, traveling from Manchester and three hours later being in a different city, different culture, a whole other country and then you meet like-minded people, which is exciting, the best bit of the job really. That’s when it really feels worth it, especially when you are playing at some random bar on a Sunday night in the middle of nowhere, it’s great! Athens is definitely on the agenda.


At the end of the summer you released your debut album as the Electrons, how did that come about? At what point did you decide to move from DJing as a duo into working on production together?

In the UK in the music industry people use a word all the time – ‘fast tracking’ – you know, to get on in the business you have to do certain things, but me and Justin have always been more about the slow process really and slowly evolving so the Electrons album was almost like a compilation, it was just like the next step, we weren’t trying to be the next brand, the next ‘Ikea’ or the next Fat Boy Slim, that’s not our outlook, this was just a continuation of what we were doing so all the tracks on the album are just vibes, tunes, influences that we’ve taken up over the last 10-15 years and road tested in various underground clubs across Europe, and just put it into an album format and the same with the live really. We wanted to make something that reflected our musical tastes, from the house sound of ‘Joy’ to the more vocal tracks on there; we weren’t trying to be clever it was really just a reflection of what we love. It probably took about a year and a half writing, producing it and mixing down but obviously it was longer than that in a sense as there are lots of ideas there that have been hanging around for a longtime before that. It’s just the result of grafting in underground basements for the last decade and more. The influence we took from that British vibe of sound systems like Soul II Soul and Massive Attack, all those things came from basement parties and then got out onto the pavements and spread the word, so Electrons is in that tradition of taking the thing live, getting a drummer, a keyboardist.. Pete Simpson who’s the singer had already been doing stuff with me and Justin anyway and me, him and Justin had been doing a sound system across the UK so this really was just another mutation of what we’d been doing.


You mentioned ‘Joy’ before, which is one of our favourite tracks from the album along with ‘Be With You’ and ‘Don't Give Up’; what are your particular favourites?

If it was something I was going to take into a time capsule or be on a dessert island with then I think yeah ‘Joy’ and probably ‘Be With You’ as well! They’ve probably got more musicality and a bit of a deeper musical vibe (I hate using that word deeper!). ‘Joy’ is quite a precious track because when we wrote it, it involved people who had passed away and remembering them so a lot of love and soul went into making that. It depends on my mood though, we took a decision that we didn’t want the album to be idiosyncratic just made for 500 people with one sound, we wanted to put all our influences in there so there’s tracks on there that have a completely different vibe like ‘Classic Cliché’, which has got much more of a pop edge to it, although the word pop has become something of a bad word, but we don’t take it like that, then there’s tracks like ‘Joy’ which are deeper, not as much happens, and they’re a bit more sublime and late night and subtle. If I had to put my finger on one track, yeah it’d be 'Joy’ I think.


Be With You has something of Sun Palace about it on the beat

Yeah, it definitely had that influence, me and Justin had written the basis of that track probably about 2 or 3 years ago and it’s just mutated into that. It’s done well actually Benji and Gilles Peterson and some of the jazz and world side of underground radio in Europe have picked up on that one.


Over the years you’ve managed to invite some of the music world's best DJs and producers to join you at your events; who has been you favourite guest?

We get asked this and if I was being honest and talking about the craziest and maddest the club has ever gone it’d probably be Laurent Garnier in terms of the most unbelievable atmosphere where it became completely unhooked. It was during the Gulf war and obviously there was a lot of opposition to the war and there was a real sense in music at that time that the world was horrible and brutal but there was a sense of passion and pride again in music and Laurent Garnier played ‘War’ by Edwin Starr and he combined it with this crazy speech from an army guy out in the Gulf who was condemning the war as atrocious and then he brought the track in underneath it and the whole place just erupted. There’s nobody that’s played at the club though that’s not added something to it, sometimes the more subtle people who’ve not necessarily had the biggest response have still been absolutely awesome, Karizma played for us recently and he was absolutely awesome. It’s a difficult question because it’s been nearly 13 years and every guest has provided a very different sound. I think from the UK it’d probably be Chris Duckenfield who’s normally known for SWAG and his house and techno influenced productions but when he plays in Manchester he really mixes it up dropping in ragga, disco, boogie, everything, he’s incredible and I’ve got a lot of respect for him. Harvey as well, he was originally part of the TONKA sound system in the UK back in the 80s, unfortunately he’s now living in California, but he was incredible at the club too, a completely bizarre, Balearic, weird and sort of cosmic sound when not many other people were doing that, and in Manchester Harvey’s got a huge following, so yeah difficult to say but they are amongst my favourites, as well as Danny Krivit who’s one of my favourite DJs, when he gets it right and he’s on it he’s phenomenal.