|
Ashley Beedle Any Good or What? by Clinton Smiley
Here I am standing outside the hotel door of one of the most influential DJs and recording artists to come out of the UK since 1988 thinking "what the fuck is this going to be like?" First thing when I walk in it's like "awww fuck, I'm hungry, can't this wait?" Drrrrrrrr, good start man. I assure him I'm not mental or anything and that there's a good Malaysian restaurant down the road - this gets things back on track a bit. So we (Ashley, his lovely wife who's name I can't remember and Sydney-based promoter Lorna) stomp off down Willis Street to Kopi, and by the time the roti and chicken Payngang have arrived I'm starting to get a feel for the man like Ashley Beedle. He tells me he's been gobsmacked by the reaction of people in Wellington to having him play tonight, at which point I inform him people 'round these parts have been into the music he and his various collaborators have done since Cian first brought the Ballistic Brothers vs Eccentric Afros Vol.1 into The Soul Mine back in 1993, the same year Andy Weatherall dropped the seminal "De Niro" by The Disco Evangelists at his now-legenday Church gig.
So back to the hotel for a quick spliff anna chinwag after dinner. I hope you don't mind, we don't fuck up our weed with tobacco in this country man. "Yeah I'd heard that ." So you started out working on local sound systems in North London what - ten years ago? "Yeah, no hang on, it'd be further back than that even, more like '82 or '83 really. In terms of what I'm doing now it was a real learning experience, you figure out how to develop a rapport with the crowd and respond to what they want, but you also learn how to educate them at the same time and find a balance betwen the two." What sort of music were you into when you were growing up?
Musically it was a great household to grow up in, I had a lot of strange music thrown at me." And your teenage years in the 70s? "All sorts man. North London where I grew up, and West London to a degree, has always had a sort of cross-cultural thing going on between the West Indian community and the younger English kids, especially in music - we all sort of met in the middle with The Clash via the Anti-Nazi League in the late 70s (laughs)." So how long did you work on the sound systems? "About four or five years really, from about '83 onwards. I hooked up with a sound system called Shock in about 1985 and started taking it a bit more seriously from then." When did you first hear house being played? "(laughs) In about '86 when these two blokes Noel and Maurice Watson started mixing it with hip-hop at this club called Delerium." How did that go down? "Very badly at that stage.
You didn't feel the urge to rush across the Atlantic then? "No, this is pretty well documented, but that period '86 to '88 was a mad time in English clubbing in terms of the whole music and drug culture colliding. I was quite happy working in London with Shock." What were you and your crew playing then in the late 80s? "We were playing very Trax orientated stuff." Eh? "Trax y'know, jacking music. It was a lot less vocal than many of the other sound systems were playing so we developed quite a big following on the warehouse circuit. To us, that style of house music was an extension of reggae, the Shaka and Steppers sort of sound, that's how we were checking it." So was '88 a big year for you then? Acieeeeed an' all that? "Funnily enough no. By the end of '88 I wasn't even going out, I'd had enough because in the years leading up to then I'd been out caning it, taking too many drugs, so by the time the media got a hold of it I was at home chilling out. I'd done my dash as far as all that was concerned by early 1989." What got you back out of your lounge then? "Probably a combination of starting to make music and hooking up with the Boys Own and Queens people on reflection. I'd done a track with the Shock crew in late '88 but we'd been fucked over for cash, so that put me off the whole thing initially, but then this darker vein of house came out via this club called Confusion at the end of '89, that caught my ear, then I met this bloke Phil Perry who used to run this club called Queens on Sunday afternoons." How'd you meet him? "He'd seen me DJ with Shock and liked that sound I had, so he asked me to play at Queens one weekend." How was that? "Wierd. Coming from North London we'd always percieved those people as being blokes from the suburbs y'know, the culture they came from was a soul boy kind of thing, cruising around in their Cortinas listening to jazz funk." Were they that cliched? "Fuck yeah, totally. Thing was they'd slowed things down out there in the suburbs 'cause they'd all been caning E for so many years, by early '90 the DJs like Terry Farley and Andy Weatherall were all playing that chugging music, 110 or 115bpm y'know, chug-chug-chug." How did you find meeting them in the end? "Well it was pretty wierd to start with, they had all these reggae influences which I liked but they were combining them with rock guitars and that chug-chug beat, I guess I was intrigued to say the least. I met Rocky and Diesel (Ashley's partners in X Press 2 and the Ballistic Brothers) at that first Queens gig, so I sort of fell in with them and started buying those sorts of records. I kept up with the house as well, but by mixing it with the soul and reggae which I was already into they related to me a bit more and the bookings started to come in." So where does the Black Science Orchestra come into it? "About early '93 I heard a track on Norman Jay's Kiss FM show called "Where were you when the lights went out?" which was all about the big powercut in New York in the late 70s. It just blew me away right, it was this disco track but it had this wierd spoken vocal. I just freaked, so luckily Norman was a mate and he got me a copy, then I just went straight into the studio and cut it up. Thing was, it came out in the UK and didn't do shit, maybe 1500 or 2000 sold but then it died, then the Amercian DJs like Frankie Knuckles picked up on in New York and started caning it, the UK DJs heard about it through the grapevine and it started selling all over again, that sort of shit happens all the time 'cause British DJs are so fickle. But yeah, everything else I've done sort of came from that single onwards, I did the X Press 2 stuff with Rocky and Diesel, then the Ballistic Brothers with them, Disco Evangelists with David Holmes, more Black Science Orchestra, it's all just snowballed." You've always kept up the DJing though? "Oh yeah, for sure. DJing's very important to me, but now because of my family I try to keep the work to mainly just Friday and Saturday if that. Having two small children means I like to be at home as much as I can so I quite often just do Saturday somewhere and spend the rest of the time in the studio or at home." So what's on for the rest of '96? "Nothing! (laughs). Nah, I've taken a bit of a sabbatical after doing the Black Science LP (the excellent "Walter's Room") and I'm just gonna try and chill for the rest of the year, have a nice family Christmas and then think about the next Ballistic Brothers LP, (looks at his wife) I'll probably end up back in the studio sometime soon though (laughs)." So we split the hotel feeling very irie, I get to carry one of his record bags in to ESC and feel very much the happy nerdy fanboy. The night itself was fucked up with technical difficulties, but the crowd pulled him through, following him upstairs, downstairs and back again, making it a seriously sexy party as several hundred beautiful boys and girls got sweaty and fucked up to some top deep house sounds, yush!
|
Ashley Beedle
"That far back? Really? Fuck I really am blown away by this y'know, it really is very wierd for me."
"Well my mother's West Indian and my father's English, she came out in the
fifties and I was born in '62, so it was a case of having all types of music around when I was growing up - Buddy Holly to James Brown, early ska and reggae, gospel and Al Green.
I first heard house in its proper context later on in '86 at a club in Nottingham where Graeme Park (top UK DJ, resident at Manchester's Hacienda)
was playing - then I got what it was all about."
|
Ashley Beedle Any Good or What? by Clinton Smiley
Here I am standing outside the hotel door of one of the most influential DJs and recording artists to come out of the UK since 1988 thinking "what the fuck is this going to be like?" First thing when I walk in it's like "awww fuck, I'm hungry, can't this wait?" Drrrrrrrr, good start man. I assure him I'm not mental or anything and that there's a good Malaysian restaurant down the road - this gets things back on track a bit. So we (Ashley, his lovely wife who's name I can't remember and Sydney-based promoter Lorna) stomp off down Willis Street to Kopi, and by the time the roti and chicken Payngang have arrived I'm starting to get a feel for the man like Ashley Beedle. He tells me he's been gobsmacked by the reaction of people in Wellington to having him play tonight, at which point I inform him people 'round these parts have been into the music he and his various collaborators have done since Cian first brought the Ballistic Brothers vs Eccentric Afros Vol.1 into The Soul Mine back in 1993, the same year Andy Weatherall dropped the seminal "De Niro" by The Disco Evangelists at his now-legenday Church gig.
So back to the hotel for a quick spliff anna chinwag after dinner. I hope you don't mind, we don't fuck up our weed with tobacco in this country man. "Yeah I'd heard that ." So you started out working on local sound systems in North London what - ten years ago? "Yeah, no hang on, it'd be further back than that even, more like '82 or '83 really. In terms of what I'm doing now it was a real learning experience, you figure out how to develop a rapport with the crowd and respond to what they want, but you also learn how to educate them at the same time and find a balance betwen the two." What sort of music were you into when you were growing up?
Musically it was a great household to grow up in, I had a lot of strange music thrown at me." And your teenage years in the 70s? "All sorts man. North London where I grew up, and West London to a degree, has always had a sort of cross-cultural thing going on between the West Indian community and the younger English kids, especially in music - we all sort of met in the middle with The Clash via the Anti-Nazi League in the late 70s (laughs)." So how long did you work on the sound systems? "About four or five years really, from about '83 onwards. I hooked up with a sound system called Shock in about 1985 and started taking it a bit more seriously from then." When did you first hear house being played? "(laughs) In about '86 when these two blokes Noel and Maurice Watson started mixing it with hip-hop at this club called Delerium." How did that go down? "Very badly at that stage.
You didn't feel the urge to rush across the Atlantic then? "No, this is pretty well documented, but that period '86 to '88 was a mad time in English clubbing in terms of the whole music and drug culture colliding. I was quite happy working in London with Shock." What were you and your crew playing then in the late 80s? "We were playing very Trax orientated stuff." Eh? "Trax y'know, jacking music. It was a lot less vocal than many of the other sound systems were playing so we developed quite a big following on the warehouse circuit. To us, that style of house music was an extension of reggae, the Shaka and Steppers sort of sound, that's how we were checking it." So was '88 a big year for you then? Acieeeeed an' all that? "Funnily enough no. By the end of '88 I wasn't even going out, I'd had enough because in the years leading up to then I'd been out caning it, taking too many drugs, so by the time the media got a hold of it I was at home chilling out. I'd done my dash as far as all that was concerned by early 1989." What got you back out of your lounge then? "Probably a combination of starting to make music and hooking up with the Boys Own and Queens people on reflection. I'd done a track with the Shock crew in late '88 but we'd been fucked over for cash, so that put me off the whole thing initially, but then this darker vein of house came out via this club called Confusion at the end of '89, that caught my ear, then I met this bloke Phil Perry who used to run this club called Queens on Sunday afternoons." How'd you meet him? "He'd seen me DJ with Shock and liked that sound I had, so he asked me to play at Queens one weekend." How was that? "Wierd. Coming from North London we'd always percieved those people as being blokes from the suburbs y'know, the culture they came from was a soul boy kind of thing, cruising around in their Cortinas listening to jazz funk." Were they that cliched? "Fuck yeah, totally. Thing was they'd slowed things down out there in the suburbs 'cause they'd all been caning E for so many years, by early '90 the DJs like Terry Farley and Andy Weatherall were all playing that chugging music, 110 or 115bpm y'know, chug-chug-chug." How did you find meeting them in the end? "Well it was pretty wierd to start with, they had all these reggae influences which I liked but they were combining them with rock guitars and that chug-chug beat, I guess I was intrigued to say the least. I met Rocky and Diesel (Ashley's partners in X Press 2 and the Ballistic Brothers) at that first Queens gig, so I sort of fell in with them and started buying those sorts of records. I kept up with the house as well, but by mixing it with the soul and reggae which I was already into they related to me a bit more and the bookings started to come in." So where does the Black Science Orchestra come into it? "About early '93 I heard a track on Norman Jay's Kiss FM show called "Where were you when the lights went out?" which was all about the big powercut in New York in the late 70s. It just blew me away right, it was this disco track but it had this wierd spoken vocal. I just freaked, so luckily Norman was a mate and he got me a copy, then I just went straight into the studio and cut it up. Thing was, it came out in the UK and didn't do shit, maybe 1500 or 2000 sold but then it died, then the Amercian DJs like Frankie Knuckles picked up on in New York and started caning it, the UK DJs heard about it through the grapevine and it started selling all over again, that sort of shit happens all the time 'cause British DJs are so fickle. But yeah, everything else I've done sort of came from that single onwards, I did the X Press 2 stuff with Rocky and Diesel, then the Ballistic Brothers with them, Disco Evangelists with David Holmes, more Black Science Orchestra, it's all just snowballed." You've always kept up the DJing though? "Oh yeah, for sure. DJing's very important to me, but now because of my family I try to keep the work to mainly just Friday and Saturday if that. Having two small children means I like to be at home as much as I can so I quite often just do Saturday somewhere and spend the rest of the time in the studio or at home." So what's on for the rest of '96? "Nothing! (laughs). Nah, I've taken a bit of a sabbatical after doing the Black Science LP (the excellent "Walter's Room") and I'm just gonna try and chill for the rest of the year, have a nice family Christmas and then think about the next Ballistic Brothers LP, (looks at his wife) I'll probably end up back in the studio sometime soon though (laughs)." So we split the hotel feeling very irie, I get to carry one of his record bags in to ESC and feel very much the happy nerdy fanboy. The night itself was fucked up with technical difficulties, but the crowd pulled him through, following him upstairs, downstairs and back again, making it a seriously sexy party as several hundred beautiful boys and girls got sweaty and fucked up to some top deep house sounds, yush!
|