Left of centre, bang on the bass
Unique 3 stormed the warehouses of the late 80’s with a torrid cocktail of Soul, Hip Hop, early Break-Beat, and the Bleep driven abstractions they became notorious for with seminal anthems like ‘The Theme’ and ‘Rhythm Takes Control’. Fast forward to today and Unique 3 have carved themselves a place in every connoisseurs heart with a genre bending fusion of warm, enveloping basses, heady melodics, haunting atmospherics, shimmering textures and a sense of everything that made the birth of dance music truly special. Nostalgia free and gloriously unformulaic, it’s effortlessly soulful and utterly mesmerising stuff. Completely current yet firmly rooted in the original spirit of a musical movement, Unique 3 dances through styles, vibes, and flavours with the occasional ode to heartbreak thrown in to tweak the mix soulside. This is pure dance music laced with the ethereal. Champion of urban art since the start, total wrong-un in the finest sense of the word, old school reprobate, and a musician through and through, we caught up with Edzy for a word through the mists of mutual hangover. What a total diamond…..
Interview by Sirius 23 – LSD (London Street Art Design Magazine) http://www.londonstreetartdesign.com/
How empowered were you by the DIY nature of electronic music?
“Very much so! When & where I was growing up, pretty much every little area had some kind of reggae yard band. EVERY KID in the neighbourhood wanted to make music, every kid in the neighbourhood wanted to play guitar …. Imagine THAT kids! everyone wanted guitars NOT audio controllers (notice I refrained from using that now passé word: turntables …) but while my ‘band’, like so many others, was rammed full of talent, we were also all lazy bastards with hardly any instruments, not much ‘get up & go’ and no real idea how to break out so nothing really ever came of it. I had missed the Punk wave by a couple of years which always pissed me off (and still does!). The Ska Revival thing arrived, dressed up to the nines and with a musical score that struck a massive chord with me, the fashion, the ethics and THE MUSIC were everything I was looking for and needed at the time but that too came and became ‘overground’ so very quickly that even getting on the coat tails of THAT movement wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t going to happen for us. Not this time. But another layer of music had washed over me and had taken a more than firm root, mixing up the already overflowing bucket that my musical taste resided in. By the end of the UK Ska Revival, music had got me, well and truly and it wasn’t going to let go.
I suppose that we were lucky. The guitar shop, 4 towns over in the sleepy town of Bingley, was obviously doing well and doing it’s very best to stay at the cutting edge of music technology. One, then two keyboards appeared in the shop. My attention was quickly drawn from my first love: Bass Guitars to the new synths that were arriving into the shop. Synths and early drum machines too quickly took centre stage. Before you could say ‘Telharmonium’, there was a new ‘electronic’ area set aside in the shop, filled with wonderful bits of kit that we could hardly afford and could only ever dream of owning. On the days my pals and I accidentally forgot to go to school, we would catch 4 buses over to the shop and hide the day away inside big can headphones, tweaking nobs & fading faders until our empty bellies told us, hours later, that it was time to go home.. And there it was…a brand new world. We’d lose days on end in there, school, quite easily slipping our minds. Fiddling, playing, twiddling – it was a very empowering experience.”
“Well we’ve moved on a few years now. School had crashed and burned, I’d left the north & ran away to London to live and had soaked up everything the city could give me. It was here that I got the bug for deejaying, having worked the doors at a couple of illegal raves (I use the word rave in it’s original London form – it would be hijacked a few years later and become something slightly different) Poor & penniless I’d had to return north 2 years later but took back with me a rich culture of pirate radio, train & street art, unlicensed clubbing and a thousand other life changing scenes.
So getting back to your question! Ultimately, our first forays into Hip-hop came down to what we were DJing – and that in turn was driven by what you could get hold of. At the time, what was available was 80’s Funk, Electro, Rare Groove and the more raw strains of Hip Hop that started coming through. There was a plane that flew into Manchester Airport once a week laden with fresh cut imports, and we’d make sure we did a bit of strategic loitering with intent around the stall that the imports ended up at. So while a lot of this stuff was like gold dust, we did have access to it, so our sets and our influences had some really broad, genuinely brilliant stuff running through them. And of course it’s only natural that the music you start out making is a reflection of what you’re playing and what you’ve grown up with. And we had grown up with diversity hardwired in. We came from a very racially mixed area where you’d walk down a back street and hear Reggae blaring out of one house, Ska out of another, 60’s Pop, Elvis Presley or Country & Western out of the next. So it was a combination of those factors rather than any real grand plan that dictated Unique 3’s early output.”
87 hits 88 and acid house starts dropping hard all over the country and of course especially in Manchester. Looking back – how do you see that movement – that moment?
“I have to say – it probably wasn’t as transformational or as valuable to us as perhaps it was to a lot of other people. Don’t forget, we’d been playing what we considered underground music for a fair few years before that, and I suppose that one of the principal effects of Acid House was to open underground music up to a wider and ….. I suppose….whiter audience. I know that must sound odd coming from someone with a big white face like mine, but almost all the underground music up until that point was quite frankly black and really hadn’t penetrated ‘Middle England’ at all. And again, while before there was about 3 cool clubs in the whole country that you had to travel to, within a few months, they were popping up everywhere, so it was suddenly far more accessible…..and then of course the drugs came with it. Acid house is heavily romanticized these days, but when push came to shove – 80% of the kids in any given warehouse or club weren’t there for the music – they were there for the pills and the tabs. And so while it was a great thing in many respects and it gave underground music a massive boost on a number of levels, it also killed a lot of the reason why me and people like me were already on the scene.”
That’s a really interesting take – so you didn’t see it is an electronically laced evolution of Funk, Soul and Disco – but as the downfall of a lot of it?
“Well in some respects it was. I know things have to change, but it’s an open question as to whether it changed for the better. There was a pretty lengthy period during that time when I was absolutely disgusted by the music – both the dance stuff and the Hip Hop stuff as it seemed to move from something with intrinsic value to a flood of throwaway tunes. And I suppose that there was an element of resentment that everyone was into it whereas it had been ‘our little secret’, and as soon as it went mass market, it did leave a bit of a bad taste …. Ahhhhh …. ‘The good Ol’ Days !”
Totally understand that…. But look, as you said – your roots were in black music and all the earthyness, soul and funk that made it what it was. And then suddenly you’re doing all these very abstract, out there bleeps. Was that a conscious change in musical direction or a result of experimentation with new technology?
“It was basically down to the sounds that started spilling out of the synths. But some of the most interesting creative breakthroughs happen entirely by accident. And it got picked up on and shaped into something tangible. Rudimentary sounds being put together by people who weren’t musicians to be honest.”
“Well the progression of our DJ sets was really defined by the bpm’s. So we’d have a lot of deeply soulful and melodic stuff that had been fantastically well produced and then move into this industrial bleep house zone. You have to bear in mind that just getting into a studio was difficult back then. I remember going down to The Who’s old studio – the Town House (which Virgin had bought off The Who I think a few years previously) for a cut, and all the sound engineers were actually in white lab coats. So you can imagine how they reacted to cutting our stuff – I doubt they even classed it as music let alone had any kind of feel for it. And in the middle of this slightly surreal, predominantly white scene was a young guy called Geoff Pesche, in many respects different from the 1950’s stereotypes in lab coats who were working there, supposedly shining up the cutting edge of music.
Anyway – I think he probably got the job because he was young and the bespectacled cast of white coats probably figured he’d have a better handle on it than them – and they obviously didn’t want to know anyway…. Virgin was paying so that was probably good enough! Geoff did an amazing job with the cut. I remember walking into the cutting room one morning to find him on his hands and knees behind the whacking great big mixing desk with this massive glass valve in his hand. ‘Oh hello’ he says. ‘I just thought I’d take this limiter out so we can get a bit more bass’. He’d probably have been sacked on the spot if ‘the management’ had caught him taking out one of the pieces obviously there to stop everything blowing up, but you know, he’s now one of the chief cutters at Abbey Road Studios and one of the best sound engineers in the UK. It was just one of those moments where generations clashed, both culturally and technologically that really defined the late 80’s for me and the music coming through.”
“It had only been a few years since I’d been watching Top of the Pops with my Dad and then before you know it, you’re stood up there doing it. Once you get your head round the shattering of any romantic notions of what it actually was by being fully behind the scenes – honestly – it filmed 2 days previous and the label locked you in a hotel room until after the broadcast – we knew that it was an amazing thing to have done. But by that time, our wave was already peaking and we’d played a few massive stages, so it wasn’t as big a shock as it could’ve been. It was something that we just had to take on board.”
Was management entering the equation by this point or did you have control over your own destinies?
“We always had control and I always managed the band – which may have been to Unique 3‘s detriment actually. I thought that the plans Virgin A&R had for us were fundamentally wrong – things like insisting on vocals when that really wasn’t what we were about. And that tied back into the TOTP episode – where we went on and did a B-side – Musical Melody – purely because it had a rap on it after we encountered massive resistance to playing The Theme – even though that was the track that was going down massively in the clubs. So I don’t know – maybe if we’d been with a different label or I’d have had a bigger pair of bollocks and stood up to the label a bit stronger – who knows what might have happened, but as young kids – it was a definite life lesson in how the music industry works or doesn’t work.”
How did you cope with the splintering of dance music into highly specific genres as things headed into 93?
“Not very well! That’s always been Unique 3’s problem – we struggled to keep inside the outside lines of a genre. We played what we considered club music and our whole reason for being was to make people dance, when we did a night – there’d be a Hip-Hop crew at one end of the room waiting for us to drop some Hip-Hop and a Soul Crew at the other waiting for the Soul Anthems to drop. So when the ‘Dance Music Industry’ had worked out how to manipulate it, creating pigeon holes in pigeon holes, it all getting very specific, we didn’t really fit into any of the big four dance magazine’s sub genres and promoters had little idea what to do with us. Even as a production unit – there seemed to be too much diversity and too many influences to fit the rigid specifications of the day. Nothing’s changed in the way I approach things – the last album, ‘Invasive Signals’ had all sorts on it and the new one has all sorts on it too … And I’m past the point of caring, I’m not sure anyone is still listening!”
How did you see the transition from hardware to software?
“I was all for it myself. You hear all these people moaning about the demise of vinyl, but I hated it. That’s right! I SAID IT! Obviously I used vinyl, and at the time I had one of the biggest vinyl distribution companies in the north with 6 vans out every week. Vinyl, the finding of it and the storing of it more or less ruled my life for many years. At least 2 flats and one of my houses were bought solely on the fact that they had room enough to house my record collection (I also made sure the kids got a bedroom!) When the vinyl tower eventually fell and all the new technology came along – I was glad to see it come but not as glad as my kids who then got their own bedrooms!”
“I had fallen in love with street art when I’d ran away to London at 15 years old. The very first sleeve that Unique 3 put out was done by System Street Art, Jason McFee. I’d seen some of his work and tracked him down. He and Part 2 had come down to a night we were doing to do some big pieces live while we Deejayed over them. I asked System to do the art for our first sleeve, he was totally up for it. All along the route, Unique 3 has used urban artists, Part 2 remaining a very close friend to this day – he actually did the art for the last album ‘Invasive Signals’. The new album, ‘Picture No Sound’ is more or less done and a guy called Lewis Campbell is working on the art for that album, so urban art has always been important to me, just take a wander around my house & see! It always felt like a natural connection: Urban Art & Unique 3’s music natural – it always felt right.”
How do you feel about how trendy it’s got? – back to this idea of a secret being opened up
“I know how heartbroken a lot of artists are about it, but you know – it’s always going to happen. Some do better than others, some have serious memory lapses, some don’t realize that the ones who are doing well are simply repeating stuff from 20/30 years ago, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter anyway. It is what it is. But there’s no doubt – when I started seeing the big auction houses selling pieces off for silly money, it made me squirm a little and I can see why some brilliantly talented graff artists have diversified into other mediums, a bit of a dash to get back under the rocks to the less commercial, graffiti on a birthday card darkside.”
Onto the current musical side of things – do you feel you’re now writing songs rather than slices of music to be mixed?
“I’ve always written songs, I’m probably writing less dance floor fuelled instrumentals than before – There’s obviously an age factor involved. The last time I was in Ibiza doing a 7 week residency at Space, I remember looking up and thinking ‘you stupid old git – you’re the oldest f*kker in the building’. I have to acknowledge that there are kids younger than MY kids going to the clubs these days and I have to ask myself whether I really know what those kids want to be dancing to. And the simple answer to that is that I probably don’t. So the message is always going to change, but saying that, I still think my ears are good and my musical instincts are sharp, and while I do what everyone’s parents do – namely cringe a bit when I listen to some of the new music coming through, I think my music’s solid. Yes – it is firmly anchored in the past, but I believe it’s got a bloodshot eye on the future as well.”
“I’m not sure that’s the case actually. I think Unique 3 has always been melodious – if you look at tracks like Rhythm Takes Control, No More & Take This Love – it’s always been there, but the tracks that stood out more were probably the more ‘industrial’ ones. I think Unique 3 has always had two sides to its coin and maybe one side has come out and accentuated itself more as time went on … like the grey hairs on my chest.”
Are you a bit of a sentimental old fool?
“I’m a broken hearted old fool, aren’t you?! Or at least the songs I write might make you draw that conclusion. My wife tells me that you need to take at least 4 Co-Codamols to listen to any of my songs & funnily enough … we regularly do.”
Way ahead of you – done at least 4 this morning. So look – you’ve seen all the twists and turns in the dance music scene – how do you feel about the demise of the DJ as a role in it’s own right as producers get all the gigs whether they’re any good at working a crowd or not?
“I don’t think it’s something that DJ’s can moan about if I’m being honest. You’ve got some good producers who are taking gear like Native Instrument’s Maschine onto stage with them and creating their stuff live alongside the DJ sets – sort of a live / DJ hybrid, and they’ve got 10,000 people jumping up and down in front of them. And that speaks for itself – you can’t argue with massive crowds jumping up and down. It’s just another aspect of embracing technology. A lot of people moaned when kids started taking Ableton on stage – why?? Dance music’s supposed to be at the forefront of technology, so what are people doing complaining when things change?”
Dance music’s always been a democratic zone – but without things going through the filter of someone actually having to fund a cut and a load of records pressed, and with technology cheaper and more accessible than ever – are we saturated?
“Definitely. Everyone’s got a pal with a digital label – getting digital distribution isn’t that hard, and it was undoubtedly a gamble with vinyl. Do you press 500 or 1000 white labels up? Pressing 1000 records was a big deal back in the day and it needed you and a couple of mates to front money for it, so you had to be sure – you really had to believe in the tracks you were pressing. Now it’s all done in the box – in the computer. It’s getting mastered in the box, and you can finish it, Master it, send it, distribute it and sell it without leaving your seat. If you look at Beatport – there are so many labels and so many tracks on there that it is saturated. You can spend a hundred pounds a day on there without ever buying the same track twice. So from a quality control point of you – yes – it’s shifted pretty dramatically – but whether I see the overall change as a positive or a negative??? It comes down to a bit of both. What it does mean is that the charts are a nonsense and I think that if Unique 3 was doing what we did back then now, we’d have less of a chance, if any. The kids coming up now have that much more to contend with as thousands of other producers flood the internet with new tracks every week, so your track never gets the lifespan it needs to get recognized and really get out there. It becomes more and more throwaway instead of something hanging about for weeks and weeks and getting into everyone’s record box. Labels are suffering. Even the majors are scared to spend money on artists as they know they can never recoup it, choosing to find income streams from their artist’s live tours & merchandise instead. As a small label back then, selling those 500 white labels was great revenue. It paid for your remixes, your bits and bobs to push the record forward and helped you be self sufficient as a music releasing entity. Those income streams have gone and these are trying times for labels big & small. Something’s got to give – not sure where, not sure when and not sure how….but something will have to change.”
Tell us a little about the vibe at your label Mutate – seems like a genuinely tight crew?
“Well it’s basically a collection of talented kids (and older gentlemen!) who are putting stuff out. There’s no major hassle with it, no-one’s under the illusion they’re going to get rich out of it and it’s just a very tidy vehicle to make sure that your stuff’s getting out. There are a few people involved, we try to control the quality as best we can and it’s a joy to be involved with. But then it’s another digital label in a long list of digital labels getting fucked up the arse by idiots who gain some kind of kudos from uploading other peoples music, music that the artist is heavily invested in, along with hi res artwork then offer it for free to the world denying the artist of ever being paid for his industry. Can we un-educate the current generation & teach them that downloading music & film for free is wrong – no.”
How are you feeling about your music right now – more liberated than ever?
“I’m really happy with the new album – it’s not quite finished yet, I actually have more audio than I can physically fit on a CD but I’m yet to start editing down & going through the process of making sure there’s nothing on there that I’ll personally flick past in a week or two. When it IS bagged I wonder if I shouldn’t just give it away for free. Do I upload it with all the trimmings only to find it on a .ru site 3 days later with hi-res original artwork? Well I may as well do that myself. I think a lot of people are starting to reach this same crossroads. So the music’s still flowing – but where it’s flowing to is quite another question … do you have any Co-Co’s left I can borrow pal please, my hangover’s back?
Tell you what – here’s 5, but just to be on the safe side, shall we open this bottle of brandy?”
Check out Unique 3’s worldwide syndicated ‘Left Of Centre’ Radio Show
www.funklabs.com/artists/unique-3
Twitter: edzyunique3
soundcloud.com/unique-3
www.mixcloud.com/Unique_3
www.mutaterecords.co.uk
And his urban art website and gallery
www.prozart.co.uk