Basement Jaxx: Check Your Head

Just when it seemed Basement Jazz, brainchild of eccentric professors Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Bunton, couldn’t get much bigger, along comes Rooty, the Bristol-based duo’s second LP. How hot is hot? Well, the track Do Your Thing was recently chosen by Levi’s as the soundtrack for the ad Up & Down which will be shown during the Superbowl with a clip to be directed by Aphex Twin videologist Chris Cunningham; the massively influential Carson Daly from the MTV propaganda show Total Request Live recently demanded an airing of current single Where’s Your Head At, forcing the track to be added to the MTV roster, a move which almost guarantees a massive US hit.

“In September we toured the States for about a month and it went really well, then we toured Europe for as couple of weeks, we got back just before Christmas and we’ve been in the studio doing a remix for Missy Elliot for a track called For My People off her album,” says Simon in such a deadpan manner that it’s hard to believe he’s referring to THE Missy Elliott. In the circles that BJ move in these days, maybe Missy is just another blip on the celeb landscape.

“We haven’t met her yet but, you get to meet some people but not as many as you’d think. The whole thing is not as glamorous as people think, but it’s a lot of fun. We got to meet David Byrne in New York. One of the tracks we play when we come offstage is Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads and lo and behold he was at the New York gig so he came backstage afterwards and that was exciting. Sadly and maybe it’s my age, but I don’t have that many heroes anymore. Maybe if I was 18 and I was in this business I’d probably be going for it a lot more and would be a lot more excited about meeting all these people, but I’d probably have a terrible drug habit and I’d probably be smashing cars up. But with Dave Byrne I definitely felt there’s a master in our presence.”

Despite Simon bemoaning his lack of youth, it is the duo’s maturity and experience that has got them where they are today. It’s pretty easy to right a killer track and be the toast of clubland. It’s pretty frigging difficult to write whole albums that are not only critiqued by punters and DJ’s, but by the popular music press as well. To evolve from DJ’s who produce to producers who DJ is the current aspiration, and BJ have proved they are here for the long haul. The current album Rooty would have been rough to make, the expectations following Remedy with readymade club classics Red Alert, Jump ‘n’ Shout and Bingo Bango were huge. Simon admits that the hype that surrounded Basement Jaxx could have thrown them off the track at one point.

“We started working together in ‘93, we developed our own style and developed a confidence over those years, in ‘97 we got signed to XL to do a proper album and in that year from ‘98 to ‘99 with Remedy we very quickly saw the workings of the music industry. It was like a crash course in how it all works, suddenly we were doing videos, which we had not done before, we were doing lots of interviews, we were touring doing live shows, like we were in the States for almost a year, suddenly we had to confront all these things. Like it’s cool, it’s a nice job to have, but it definitely strips away some of the magic that I associated with the music biz when I was younger, when I used to be a music listener,” he says somewhat sadly.

“I saw how it evolved and all the hype and the spin. You learn not to trust hype about other people and hype about yourselves as well. You have to become more cautious I think.”

Rooty sounds like the recordings of people who have thrown self-awareness to the wind and adopted the mantra ‘must have more fun’. Where Remedy solemnly told you to dance, Rooty giggles and asks you to boogie. From the Bollywood naivety of Romeo to the frantic screeches of Where’s Your Head At and right through to the porn queen breathiness of Get Me Off, Felix and Simon sound like they’re just trying to be themselves.

“I think we’re learning to enjoy ourselves no matter what happens. W used to worry a lot about how Basement Jaxx were perceived and what we were doing and what direction we were going in. Bt these days we’re just thinking ‘We’re enjoying making music and we’re really privileged to be in this position, lets just enjoy it’. Also I think neither of us really want to be pop stars, like I did when I was younger, I wanted to be Prince when I was 16, I wanted to be that man, and Felix had his heroes; But the reality is we know we’re producers, we’re kind of musical directors and that’s kind of why we invite other people with us. Like in the live show, we have some wicked characters that we’ve met. They’re just normal characters who live in the same area where we record but they are people full of life and they’re wicked on stage. We like to have this collective, neither me or Felix are they type of people to want to snatch the limelight.”