Crazy Peeps

"It's just gone past nine in the morning so I'm just throwing shitloads of coffee down my throat to try and get my eyes open.” So begins Crazy P co-founder Jim Baron from his home in Nottingham, UK – fair enough too, given that the night before our chat the group played the final day of the Joe Strummer ten-year anniversary festival, Strummer Of Love.

So it's been for the group since they released their most recent album, 2011's When We On – plenty of touring in both the live format, in their other guises of Crazy P Soundsystem and of course the DJ sets. “Yeah, it's been full-on touring really since last September. And I think with the Harvest tour, we're bringing it to a close with that. We haven't really done a full tour in Australia with the album.”

Regular visitors to our shores for a number of years, Baron first joined Chris Todd around 1995 to form Crazy Penis – the “enis” would later be dropped as the group matured – and they've since crafted five studio albums that delve into downtempo disco, house, jazz and soul. And while it's never seen them explode into the mainstream, their popularity around the globe cannot be denied on the back of cracking live shows featuring five members including vocalist Danielle Moore. Moore also joins them under the Soundsystem guise, singing and tinkering with keyboards and samples while Baron and Todd jump around synthesisers and drum machines.

As if this isn't enough to keep the collective busy, Baron and Todd also help out other bands. “Me and Chris have been producing a few other bands at the same time so it's been really difficult because you get back from a weekend and invariably you should really have a day off,” he laughs, wearily. “But we've had to crack straight on with stuff. So it's been Monday to Thursday in the studio and then on the road generally for the weekend. But we've taken October out of the diary completely, we're not doing any gigs in October, so we're gonna sit in the studio for a month and start the Crazy P record then and hopefully we'll have made good headway in that month.”

After Baron and Todd recorded 2008's Stop Space Return with the full band, When We On saw them return to just Baron, Todd and Moore, and they're sticking with this same format for the next album. “Myself and Chris and Danielle certainly. We'll definitely get the lads involved, we always do,” Baron begins. “It's just a question of where we see the sound developing and I think we're all feeling generally a little bit more electronic these days. And I think that we may be keen to look at the live show and make sure that when we do change it for the next album it'll be something quite remarkably different. Something that makes people go, 'Oh hello, they've changed things about here'.”

But before you get up in arms – 'First no Penis, now a different sound?!' – Baron assures they don't necessarily want to scare anyone, just explore some new avenues in the evolution of Crazy P. “It also helps when you're out on the road and you're seeing lots of new music and you're seeing how people are doing things and it does give you a kick up the arse. I think that we've run the band in its current format for something like nine years and myself, Chris and Dani feel like we wanna do something different for the next record. Obviously we don't wanna scare our fans, and I don't think we will, but I think we're really keen to look at some technology and start using it.”

Baron – as any DJ-producer worth their salt should be – has keenly followed the changes in musical technology over the past 15-plus years. “It's scary,” he reflects. “I mean the way that things – the speed that things have moved [at] is mental,” he chuckles. “When myself and Chris started working we were using an Atari S3 and a sampler, effectively. And all the live stuff we could record was what we had on the sampler, which wasn't that much. You're amazingly limited to what you could do… We're talking late '90s, which wasn't that long ago really.”

Since then the upsurge in the amount of technology available to wannabe producers has increased tenfold, and Baron's not afraid to say that this comes with pros, and cons. “Since then the world and his wife's got a computer with some form of software on it, and I think that's great in some respects – it's really brought forward some amazing new artists. But at the same time it allows everybody to have a go and sell music digitally and just stick it online to sell. This means you're getting a lot of people having a go at it, which I think is brilliant, but as much as there are brilliant people coming through maybe there are some people who should think about doing something else,” he laughs.

Over that period, and as Baron touches upon, the digital age has also forced people to re-think how they sell their music. When you can just pick and choose what singles you want instead of having to get the full album, what's the point? “We love the concept of the album. I don't think we'd stop that. And I don't think it affects the way people buy it. But I know in terms of that sort of thing, we're pretty hopeless,” he admits. “We're best when we're sat at musical instruments; we're not best when we're sitting about thinking about tactics for selling our music – we're hopeless at that. So fortunately we've got a brilliant manager who takes the ideas for how we should approach things and how we should put things out… I love buying an album though – it's something, it's a body of work, it's a moment in time. I'm pro-albums certainly.”

And with any luck, their new one will be with us before too long. “We're gonna try and get a new album sorted out hopefully by spring next year… I thought we could have a period after Christmas just working on music and I dare say we'll be back on the road, say [UK] summertime.”