With nine musicians making up the group you’d wonder how anything gets done at all in the collective known as Bugz in the Attic. But as Mikey Stirton (one of the nine Bugz) explains from Bugz HQ in London, being part of Bugz in the Attic doesn’t always mean you’re part of everything Bugz in the Attic do. Rather than the group being nine muso’s who always play together, Bugz in the Attic are a collective of nine like minded (from varied backgrounds and influences) souls who pool their talent under the one name so as to ensure no matter what they do they can always field the best team.
The folk at Fabric couldn’t help but agree that the Bugz in the Attic were something special when they first heard a mix. So much so that they sought and signed them immediately for the next in what has proved to be a varied yet consistently outstanding series of releases. ITM managed to catch a few minutes with Bugz in the Attic’s Mikey Stirton and find out exactly who Bugz in the Attic are and how their mix CD Fabriclive 12 came about.
One of the things that first interested me about you was that you’ve got nine members involved. Can you tell me a little about how you got together and what Bugz is all about?
It came together when one of the guys, a guy called Orin Walters, met Seiji and he had a studio in Richmond (London) in his attic (hence the attic) and everybody just started coming together, through whatever tenuous links, and a couple of folk did a couple of tracks for Orin’s label (Mousetrap). Gradually they became a tighter group and became Bugz in the Attic. Originally there were six members and since then there’s been three more.
So if you’re getting a Bugz in the Attic track or remix does that mean all nine of you have been involved in that or that any given combination were involved.
Yeah any given combination. Basically it’s like a football team in that we’ll always field the best team for that job. There’s certain people that will be involved in every single one like Kaidi, he’s the main musician. There’s usually four or five people involved each time. The whole idea being that whilst no one has completely different skills, different people come from different scenes and bring different vibes. They come together and it means you can use the best bits of everybody for a certain job.
Between the group of you, you cover quite a range of influences don’t you?
Definitely. A couple of guys come from the drum’n’bass and hardcore scene. A few guys through US Garage and house. Daz has come from pretty much everything to do with black music. Kaidi is just an incredible musician, I’m not exaggerating when I say he’s probably one of the best keyboard players around. And he can play anything and is just an incredible composer. You’ve got all these different skills. Then a couple of the guys are real studio geniuses. I mean some of the guys are good programmers but they’re not good all round studio geniues but a couple of the guys are just great all round studio wizards.
Is Bugz a full-time thing for all of you or do you have side things as well?
One of the guys has a part-time job separate from music. Other than that everyone else are full-time music but not exclusively working as Bugz in the Attic. They all do their own separate solo productions and most of the guys DJ. A couple of the guys are making most of their living through DJing.
What happens when you guys play at Fabriclive on a Friday night?
At the moment it’s two DJ’s and an MC. It’s a bit different DJing at Fabric to do DJing at other clubs. Usually when we DJ at a place the people are there exclusively to see us. But at Fabric you’re sharing the bill, for example last Friday we were with UNKLE and Groove Armada and in the other room there was a massive drum’n’bass line up. You’ve got a real mixture and as people aren’t there just to see you there’s a bit more of them not knowing your music as well and having to win them over.
How do you find the difference in reactions?
You just have to play a certain way depending on where you are. Maybe don’t go as hardcore into our music as say you would do at Fabric. Certainly at Fabric we might play a little bit tougher because you’re in the main room.
Is it always the same guys doing the Fabric thing when you play there?
We’ve only done it a couple of times so far – we do it two at a time and three of us have done it. There’s really four main DJ’s in Bugz. Everyone can DJ and they all do DJ but of the Bugz DJ’s there’s primarily four of us. For example we’re doing a North American tour next month and four of us are going to go and DJ in two different groups.
So there can be two Bugz in the Attics shows going on at the same time on opposite sides of the country?
Yeah there is. I think over the space of three weeks there’s 25 gigs and there’s quite a few off nights so it means there’s often going to be two gigs on the same night on the nights we’re playing.
So it’s like the Moscow Circus….
Yeah exactly (laughing). But the whole idea is that we never water anything down. We would never ever send anyone out to DJ under the Bugz name unless they were genuinely good DJ’s. It’s the same with production. Whenever it’s a Bugz production or gig we make sure we’re providing our best possible team.
The whole idea is that we’re all representing the same thing. Obviously different DJ’s have a slightly different feel, we don’t send people out with a set they have to play. But we are representing the same thing so as much as everyone’s got their own slight different flavour your not going to get a completely different show just because you’ve got different DJ’s. You’ll get the same vibe but with that person’s flavour.
So how did the Fabric CD come about seeing as though you’ve only played there a few times?
We’d actually played there on a Saturday. We do a club called Co-Op and they do a thing every other month on a Saturday in one of the smaller rooms there. So a couple of the guys had played there before. But we were always really keen to play the Friday night in the main room. It’s been something we’ve been wanting to do for along time. We did a cover mount mix CD for magazine in the UK called Breaking Point Magazine and the guys from Fabric heard the mix and really liked it and they called us up. I’d actually phoned them up in the past and let them know we’d be really keen to play there on a Friday. We usually play small clubs and to be honest I prefer small clubs but Fabric is by a mile the best big club I’ve ever been to. We’ve done a lot of big festivals this year and we wanted to follow that by playing Fabric. So they approached us about the compilations and it went from there.
It’s always interesting talking to people who’ve played Fabric as it’s talked about with such high regard…
A lot of the big clubs can be a bit soulless but there’s something about Fabric that’s a lot better. It’s still a big club but the sound system’s excellent. It’s just got a much nicer vibe than any of the other big clubs. 
Is the mix CD an attempt to capture the feel of your Friday night sets there?
The idea was that it was meant to be a DJ mix. We could have done something that was a compilation of all different music that we like but we’ve done a mix of music that we play in clubs. Not necessarily exactly as we’d play at Fabric but it’s certainly not far from it. We’d probably play a little less vocal at Fabric because the crowd down there seem to be a little into the tougher darker side of things but it’s a representation of how we DJ.
Was it a long time in the making?
It was very last minute and the whole thing was very rushed. We didn’t have a lot of time to ponder it. So it was actually done quite quickly and there’s probably all sorts of things we could have done with the mix if we’d gone deep into it with the computer. But we didn’t really want to do that. We wanted to have a human element to it, we didn’t want it to feel so seamless and cold that it was just a perfect mix of one track after another. We wanted it to feel like it was someone DJing. So it was probably a good thing we didn’t have too much time to get too perfectionist with it.
To read Calico’s review of Fabriclive 12 – Bugz in the Attic click HERE
It’s available now through DMC Distribution.
