COLDCUT

The trouble is with me and Matt,’ Jonathon More quips dryly, ‘Is we go back too far really. We must have DJed in every club in London.’

Since the early 80s, Jonathon and co-conspirator Matt Black have been part of the fabric of British club culture and dance music, doggedly fixed on their own eccentric path - defiantly old school, absurdist, surreal, but thankfully free from pretention. In their time they’ve pretty much seen it all - they’ve had a no.1 single, presided over Sleuth (questionably London’s greatest eclectic club night ever), produced four albums and a mix CD which rates alongside Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on The Wheels of Steel, Shep Pettibone’s legendary mastermix radio broadcasts and Double D & Steinski’s Lessons as one of the greatest examples of ‘mixology’ ever: 1995's Journey By DJ.

But to get to where this journey began, you have to go back quite some time - to 1979, in fact, when Jonathon began DJing during his art school days at Goldsmith’s, mixing ‘old and new music with a funk edge’ at very early warehouse parties like Meltdown - ‘I called it eclectro,’ he jests, commenting on his DJ style. Meanwhile Matt had given up a career as a biochemist and was playing out in Spain, years before the Ibiza phenomenon was underway, only returning to England as the first house music - Farley "Jackmaster" Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ - broke through to the charts.

By this time Jonathon had secured a job behind the counter at Reckless Records in London’s Berwick St., still to this day one of the capital’s premier second-hand record stores, and it was here that he encountered fellow vinyl junkie Matt, who passed on a tape he’d been making. The tape sealed the start of their musical partnership. Coldcut was born.

The early pop history of the duo is well-documented - the collaborations with Lisa Stansfield (‘This Is The Right Time’ and ‘People Hold On’), and before that the no. 1 smash-hit with Yazz (‘The Only Way Is Up’), and a host of other singles including ‘Doctorin’ The House’. They even did a live PA with Yazz at Shoom - Danny and Jenni Rampling’s legendary London Balearic club night, a turning point in the history of the British acid house scene.

However, it was the records that preceded these hits that in retrospect demonstrate the cut-and-paste ethic on which Coldcut have always worked. Their debut single from 1987 ‘Say Kids What Time Is It?’ was actually the first sample-based record produced in the UK, paving the way for their own ‘Beats and Pieces’ as well as other hits such as M/A/R/R/S’s ‘Pump Up The Volume’ (which in fact sampled ‘Say Kids’ itself!) and Bomb The Bass’s ‘Beat Dis’. Both these early tunes display the fact that Coldcut are first and foremost DJs. They’re selectors, beatnuts, headz, rather than the out and out hit-factory producers that many of the industry insiders supposed they were at the time. In fact, during this period of chart success, Coldcut were continuing to prove their old school cut-and-paste credentials with their show on London’s Kiss FM, with whom they’d been broadcasting since the station’s pirate era. In fact, it was only up until a few years ago that Coldcut’s ‘Solid Steel’ show was a regular Saturday night/Sunday morning slot on Kiss FM, a legendary two hours of turntable wizardry which won the Best Specialist Show at the Sony Awards in ‘96.

The fact that Coldcut’s musical objectives differed so drastically from the major labels to which they were signed (Arista and Big Life), resulted in a breakaway in ‘93 and the founding of their own Ninja Tune label (with its ‘funkjazzticaltricknology’ remit): ‘The music had gone from a project of love to a project of financial consideration and our eclecticism got pushed to the side. It was the classic scenario of the independent artist suddenly caught in the major label trap. We were being told "You can’t put this out because it’s not music" when that was the whole basis of what we were doing - because we weren’t musicians, we were DJs. We started Ninja Tune because we needed multi-coloured escape pods to enable us to get out of the swamp.’

And why call it Ninja you might ask? ‘We found a book about cut-out-and-keep Ninjas in Japan. They build these amazing houses where they have special traps so they can disappear down and reappear somewhere else. They were all about artifice and hidden identity.’ Quite.

It was the start of a new chapter, Ninja Tune quickly progressing from strength to strength. A host of top quality artists released material on the label - Funky Porcini, The London Funk Allstars, The Herbaliser, Up, Bustle & Out, DJ Vadim, Mixmaster Morris as well as Coldcut’s own DJ Food’s Jazz Brakes series, one of the cornerstones of so-called ‘trip hop’.
During the early Ninja years, the duo also branched out into the world of multimedia, working with Rob Pepperell under the name of Hex. With Hex, they took their first steps of combining video cut and paste with DJing, debuting ‘VJing’ at parties like Telepathic Fish, Sabresonic and The Big Chill.

A regular DJ residency didn’t happen until 1996 however, when a one-off launch party for DJ Food’s ‘Recipe For Disaster’ LP led to the creation of a monthly night at the old Blue Note in Hoxton Square. Here, Squarepusher and DJ Food played regularly with Coldcut, all pushing the night’s genre-bending style. Hip hop, old school, ambient, drum & bass - all could be heard under the one roof of what became known as ‘Stealth’. The response was massive, the queues even before the club had opened its doors were the stuff of legend. ‘The people really made it,’ Jonathon points out, ‘The music was just there to oil the wheels.’ To this day the duo are still surprised by the massive success of the night: ‘For quite a long while we’d only done one-off appearances at nights like The Big Chill and Megatripolis - we’d always kept things pretty underground, doing a lot of work abroad and developing the Ninja knife to its finest cutting edge, with its sharpest.’

1997 saw the fruits of that hibernation, the first release of Coldcut material in over 3 years, with the classic ‘Atomic Moog 2000', swiftly followed by ‘More Beats & Pieces’ (a reworking of the 80s sampler) and the ‘Let Us Play’ LP, featuring collaborations with ex-Dead Kennedy’s vocalist Jello Biafra, Steinski (the old school NY turntablist), Jimspter (aka Jamie Odell, one of the UK’s most promising young producers), Talvin Singh (Anokha DJ, Bjork’s favoured percussionist and Mercury Award Winner) and Bernard Purdie (legendary Motown drummer) - and all topped with a CD-Rom of Coldcut’s very own music creation toys! But Coldcut weren’t finished there - the third single from the album, ‘Timber’, was a unique audiovisual collage, a protest against international logging that synchronised video footage with each separate audio element. It was the next stage in Coldcut’s ongoing affair with VJ techniques, recently culminating in the creation of their own DJamm and VJamm ‘audiovisual jamming’ software, shortly to be distributed by Steinberg (the software company behind Cubase, the world’s most successful computer sequencer) - the very latest proof, if any were needed that after twenty years at the top of their field, Coldcut still remain one step ahead of the game.

Coldcut Trivia

Coldcut’s Pirate TV net broadcast has recently had some very special guests. At Christmas, Radiohead popped in for an unpublicised special, playing some of their favourite tunes and exclusives of new material.

Coldcut’s seminal remix of Eric B & Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’ kick-started the whole remix phenomenon and broke hip hop to a wider mainstream audience, but Coldcut have never met the hip hop duo or had any feedback on what they made of the Coldcut treatment, with its playful samples and snatches of Ofra Haza’s vocals. ‘We’ve only heard rumours that Eric thought it was the sort of record that girls dance round their handbag to. And Rakim has kept a dignified silence. It was meant as a fuck-off - at the time people were so po-faced about what was cool and what wasn’t cool. By banging in all sorts of weird shit we were sticking two fingers up. Btu at the end of the day everybody liked it!’

Coldcut prefigured the current vogue for all things French and easy listening - epitomised most famously by Air - on their last major label album, 1993's Philosophy which included the ambient ballad ‘Autumn Leaves’, a cover version of the French jazz standard.

DJ Food is Coldcut’s collaboration with Strictly Kev and Patrick Carpenter on vinyl. On the decks DJ Food is just the latter duo.

George Michael (yes, that George Michael) has sampled bits of DJ Food’s Jazz Brakes series.


7 Quick-fire Questions - Jonathon Moore braves the DMC hotseat

What changes would you like to see to club culture?

‘I’d like to see parking spaces for zimmer frames. And slippers in every venue so I can put my feet up. And a nice open fire. And toast. And possibly a mug of Horlicks. And tunes, of course - that’d sort me out. Seriously, all the new architectural cool is a bit too uncomfortable on my bum - all the clean lines and postmodernist newness. What happened to interesting, fucked-up places? It’s all very well thinking that you’re in a film all the time and some of these new clubs are very beautiful to look at - but they’re characterless. I like places with a bit of character.’

What would be your all-time favourite DJ line-up?

Mixmaster Morris, Kid Koala, Grandmaster Flash back-to-back with Alan Partridge and, why not, Jimmy Saville. Not forgetting Chris Brown with Bob Jones in the mix - all conducted by Salvador Dali.

If your house were on fire, which three records would you rescue?

It would have to be my silver box set of Music of the 21st Century on Philips. It’s Japanese electronic music from the late 60s. Also, my Money Mark picture disc and bus - it comes with a small plastic model of a VW bus which you put on the record and it goes round and round and plays it! Lastly the Salvador Dali record I’ve got which is pretty funky stuff.

Who else in the world, living or dead, would you like to be?

Clint Eastwood - I’d like to go around looking moody with a cigar in my mouth all the time. I personally haven’t got the chin for it - I’m too rounded.

What’s the best night you’ve had Djing?

Out of adversity, I suppose, it was last year’s eclipse in Cornwall. It was pretty hard work, like a summer fair with no special guests and rain, but the people rallied and we rallied because the people rallied.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done in a club?

I’ve done most of them actually, to be honest. Falling asleep on the decks... Stepping off the stage which wasn’t there - a classic ‘You’ve Been Framed’ moment.

If Coldcut had a motto, what would it be?

‘It only hurts when you stop.’

Jonathon is DJing solo at the moment. DJ appearances as a duo are more rare, though the pair have just completed a UK tour performing their own material, with a tour of the US & Japan to follow later in the year. Meanwhile, Coldcut are currently working on their fifth album and a mix album with all the contributors to Solid Steel. A club night collaboration with Talkin Loud has also been mooted for later in 2000, which will also see the launch of a series of netstations - trance.fm, dub.fm, funk.fm and ambient.fm.
If you want to catch the unique Coldcut sound from the comfort of your own home then you can access their Pirate TV broadcast every Wednesday on the net. Go to www.ninjatune.net and click on ‘Solid Steel’.