Their album Headthrash has been destroying speakers since the summer, but the Plump DJs aren’t resting on their laurels. We find out more about the singles packages that are on the way…
It’s been 10 years since Lee Rous and Andy Gardener first went into the studio together, and in that decade they’ve made some of the best-loved breaks tracks ever. The duo seem to have an uncanny ability to create catchy floor-fillers with every release, so it’s perhaps no surprise that they’re going flat out to keep dropping tracks from their summer longplayer, Headthrash. The boys don’t believe in ‘album tracks’, so every second of Headthrash is ripe for a singles release. But rather than just releasing tunes we’ve already heard, Lee and Andy are remixing them – and getting other big-name breaks producers to do the same. They’ve just released Shifting Gears complete with a Stanton Warriors remix, but we’re told to expect more in the coming months. EQ talks to Lee to find out more…
Has it been difficult picking the singles to take off the album?
Yeah, it has. We really put a lot of time and energy into making every track good enough to stand on its own. Some people talk about album tracks, but that seems a really thing to me – if it’s not good enough, don’t shove it on an album. So we’re really happy with everything on Headthrash but that made it really tough to work out which tracks to attack first as singles. Obviously, a lot of the tracks on there aren’t dancefloor records and will need reworking in some way, and that’s why we commissioned the Stanton Warriors to do Shifting Gears. We’ve just remixed Beat Myself Up too, and that’ll hopefully come out in January.
So it’s a long push for us with the album, but it seems to be working really well. Our fanbase is quite broad at the moment, from seriously underground to quite overground, and we want to make sure everyone gets the music in the right way.
It must be strange having a fanbase like that, because the music you make isn’t commercial but it has crossed over.
We’re still not really part of popular culture or even popular dance culture, but we are playing out alongside some of the most popular DJs on some of the world’s biggest stages. We’ve just come back from Zouk in Singapore where we playing the main room. We played the main room at Space in Ibiza as well this year. But because we’ve been producing so long, we’ve got a long-term following and that’s keeping our heads above water in these testing times.
Your unique sound must have helped too?
Well, Andy and I both grew up with similar types of music. Both our parent were into rock and roll and motown. Then being the same age at university we enjoyed similar music, from hip hop as teenagers to the dance revolution in the 90s. So when you stick the two of us in the studio with the task of creating music, there’s generally a consistent vibe that comes out, even if the tracks are very different. That’s because of musical heritage I suppose.
Do people expect you to come out of the studio with a certain sound now? Are you almost getting pigeonholed in your own genre?
Yeah, it’s a funny one. There’s this thing called churn that my mate Steve Blonde (Fabric’s head of promotions) talked to me about ages ago. It relates to the amount of people each year who get into your sound and the amount each year who go off it. It’s influenced by a number of factors – maybe they’re getting too old for it, maybe they’re not into the new music you’re making… We’re very aware of this, but we’re still always looking for new ways to make people dance and move. So we’ll carry on with our studio experiments just to fulfill our own artistic ideals. It’s held us in good stead so far.
We just want to excite people really. We want to get people to listen. So one of our driving forces is to come up with fresh ideas.
It seems like the pair of you are always locked away in the studio.
Yeah, we’ve been in there for 10 years now. We’re in there together throughout the weekend, then we see each other all weekend DJing, so it’s a pretty bonkers relationship we’ve got. It’s still working though.
It seemed to with the album. Did that get a good response, because it seemed to be a long time coming?
The reaction was really healthy across the board, but it’s hard to know the results of your labours because you’re not selling records so much anymore. We’ll go to Taiwan and have 2000 people singing our chorus and we’ve not sold a single record out there. So we try to gauge how we’re doing through the crowds we pull.
And we’ve given ourselves a bit of a kick up the arse this year by switching to a four-deck thing when we DJ. That’s given us the ability to be a lot more creative with our sets and to put on a better show. Last year we toured Australia playing massive shows, but when I watched film of us back, the reality was that only one of us was on the decks at a time. It didn’t look that good because the other one was sitting behind them smoking cigarettes and having a pint. We were putting so much effort into the music, but our performances were pretty lacklustre. So we’ve injected new life into that.
We’d talked about doing live stuff before, but it always feels like a bit of a pantomime if you’re pretending electronic music is live. So it suddenly dawned on us that we should be DJing at the same time. It’s worked brilliantly.
Shifting Gears (Stanton Warriors Remix)/Rocket Soul is out now on Finger Lickin’ Records. Visit www.plumpdjs.co.uk, www.myspace.com/plumpdjs and www.fingerlickin.co.uk
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