Rogue Traders are James Ash and Steve Davis, two affable English chaps seemingly out of their natural environment in Australia. The pair, who now like to call Melbourne home, are riding a wave of success on the back of their two accomplished singles, Give In To Me, release late last year reached #1 on the ARIA Club & Dance Chart, and most recently One Of My Kind, which peaked in the ARIA top 10 in March (known for its distinctive Michael Hutchence/INXS vocal sample). They’re now ready to unleash We Know What You’re Up To, their debut long player heavy on the groove and as cheeky as the boys themselves. ITM’s i_have_ADD spoke with the pair about pushy American MCs, taking their time with record companies, and the prospect of covering Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face.

The name Rogue Traders is likely to be a familiar one, if not for their infectious singles then from the 1995 incident where the duo found inspiration for the title. Nick Leeson single handedly brought down Britain’s Barings International Bank, managing to lose $1.3 billion in the process, and finding himself with the impish label of Rogue Trader. Disastrous? Yes. Cheeky? I guess it could be construed that way… Regardless, James and Steve obviously saw it as a fitting title. The humour is carried over to their album title We Know What You’re Up To, with Ash laughing, “We just wanted to have something that was nice and cheeky, that would fit our cockney-Guy-Ritchie-stereotyped image. 15 years ago my mother used to say when Steve and I were working away on tracks, ‘We know what you’re up to in there!’, we wanted something that sounded a little dodgy and a little comical!”

More often than not when asking an artist or group the question ‘how long did you spend working on the album’, you’re likely to elicit a fairly straightforward response. Although in the case of Rogue Traders, unsurprisingly the reply was somewhat akin to their cheeky name, James explaining “The album really should be called ‘version 3’, because it’s been worked on for about 2 years. We thought we had it finished twice before, in fact it was mastered and ready to go into production but basically Steve and I are perfectionists in what we do and were continually reevaluating what we’d written, taking tracks off and writing more.” Ash went on to describe the eventual outcome for their record label, “It was an absolute nightmare for the record company because they didn’t know what was going on half the time. We had to have the album the way we wanted it to be, so it was a process of reinvention. The writing took about 2 years, we wrote about 30 songs, and obviously threw most of those out and ended up with what we have!”

The more discerning listeners amongst you would have noticed the difference in overall sound between the Rogue Traders first two singles, their debut a disco tinged floor filler and their most recent a slamming house number heavy on the bass. After listening to the album in its entirety, it seems that this diversity has found itself manifest in the duos production, with each track taking a step away from the over-abundance of ‘ouse moozik’ taking over dance floors and radio waves, “As DJs we’ve got our ears to the ground and know what’s working on the dance floor. There’s been a strong trend over the last 6 months to a year where that disco house sound has become very boring. It didn’t sound quite exciting enough, and a lot of the tracks we’d originally written were straight up house because that’s our background. We didn’t feel that it was exciting enough, and we weren’t able to express any of our own ideas within that framework. So that’s part of the reason why we took a step back and decided to go off on our own tangent.” On We Know What You’re Up To the pair enlist the expertise of several guest vocalists, with James even taking a rather expert stab at a number of tracks himself, “The principle male vocalist is myself actually, which is a relatively new addition to our sound. Originally on Stay, our next single, I did the vocals and it was only meant to be a demo. The demo was presented to the record company and they loved it so much they went with it!” Melinda Richards, whose sultry style featured on Give In To Me, makes a welcome return, along with guest appearances from Bobby Mileage on the track Evolution, “We met him in a nightclub, he’s an American, quite a pushy chap but a nice guy! He came up to us when we were DJing and said, ‘Man you’ve got to let me on the mic man, c’mon man’, and he just busted it out, it sounded brilliant! We asked him how long he was here for and it was only 2 weeks so we dragged him in the studio straight away!”

After two successful singles the path has been light, so to speak, for the duos album. I asked James how he felt surrounding the reaction to their singles, “The first single, Give In To Me, was a massive club track. It wasn’t a commercial hit, but it ended up being a great crossover record for us. It was the sort of record that introduced more people to our music, although it isn’t really indicative of the feel of the whole album. We’re absolutely delighted with the response to One Of My Kind. It’s our first top 10 hit, Steve and I have been involved in over 27 releases over the years so it’s been a long time coming!” Thanks in part to the unique vocals of Michael Hutchence, One Of My Kind has been received extremely well by clubs and radio stations alike. Ash gave an insight into the process behind the song’s production, “Technically it is a sample. What happened was Steve and I were working on the track as an instrumental, and we just had this really good slamming groove, something that was potentially pretty special. We tried a number of different vocals over the top, and nothing lit our wick so to speak.” James then went on to reveal the pairs somewhat unorthodox approach, “A number of years ago back in the UK Steve and I used to play this game for inspiration where one of us would shut our eyes, run our hand across his record collection, and just pull a tune out and we would try and gain some inspiration from it. And I remember all these years ago saying to Steve, ‘I’m going to shut my eyes and whatever tune I pull out we’re going to remix this track and make it a hit’. I pulled out the INXS original Need You Tonight. We were quite lucky because it was right next to Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce, so things could have been very different!”

The Rogue Traders debut album, We Know What You’re Up To, is out now through Vicious Vinyl / FMR.

Catch the lovable rogues at Friction (Lot 33, Canberra) on Friday May 9.