London’s Wookie, aka Jason Chue, may have been swept up by the UK garage phenomenon, but he considers his music to be “new soul” and wants to be known for more than just club tracks.

Indeed, Chue has followed his compatriot MJ Cole with an inherently diverse, musical and soulful debut album that should ensure he enjoys longevity as a producer – even if UK garage suddenly falls out of favour. The man doesn’t use a sampler, he is a musician. So far Wookie has been compared to Stevie Wonder and Larry Heard. Auspicious is the word.

Wookie, 28, is the son of a soundman and, though he was surrounded by music as a kid, he didn’t consider a career in it until he was made redundant by an architectural firm in 1990. Wookie had intended to become an architect. “I was in training,” he says. “I’d just left school, I did my A levels in art, and I didn’t wanna go the route of studying for another seven years without any experience so, because my mum’s in that field – she’s been a PA for architects for 20 years – she got me a job in an architectural firm. I was supposed to work four days and do a one day release course.”

Wookie’s mum was worried when her son acquired a keyboard and started to talk of pursuing music – it reminded her of his father. “My dad is actually a qualified chef,” Wookie explains. “He gave up being a qualified chef, because he wanted to do music, which my mum wasn’t very happy about, because he was giving up a steady income for something that was only promised. The music business isn’t a promised thing, you know – you don’t know what’s gonna happen.” These days mum is much more upbeat, however, as she reads about her baby in the music magazines given to her by the hip young employees at the office.

By the early 90s Wookie had discovered London’s rave scene and was partying to R&B, house, drum ‘n’ bass, anything. In 1994 Wookie produced Wayne Marshall’s R&B joint ‘G-Spot’, an underground hit, and was subsequently taken under the wing of Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B. Wookie has worked at SIIS’s Camden base now for seven years. “I met Jazzie in a barber shop via a mutual friend of ours and I played him some stuff of mine and he got me down to the studio. I did some remixes of some in-house projects he had going on and then about a couple of months later he hired me for his production team and I’ve been there ever since.” Jazzie put out Wookie’s album on the Soul II Soul label and Wookie will contribute to Jazzie’s next SIIS outing.

Wookie was initially attracted to drum ‘n’ bass, but had no interest in producing it. “The best days of drum ‘n’ bass for me were ‘93 to ‘95, when there was a lot of vocal stuff and there was more melody and there was something in it for you to hum along to – you could relate to a track,” he says. “And then drum ‘n’ bass changed a little bit and started getting aggressive-sounding and there were no vocals and it was just moodier – and that’s what kinda turned people away, because, first of all, girls never came to the clubs anymore. It’s like techno in Germany – it’s just predominantly men. But they seem to like that, so there’s no problem with no girls in the club (laughs), but for us there is!”

Unlike drum n’ bass, Wookie, feels that two-step is a more song-based movement, fostering a greater musicality, but, at the same time, it also has those breaks.

Nevertheless, Wookie, an R&B head, would prefer for his own music to be known as “new soul”, pointing out that some of his album tracks – notably ‘Success’ and ‘Time’ – were written back in 1997 and, by contrast to his club remixes, don’t sound like UK garage. Wookie, who admires New Jack Swing auteur Teddy Riley, wants to create a new futuristic R&B style for this decade.

“What I was trying to do was take elements out of drum ‘n’ bass, I didn’t want to do drum ‘n’ bass, ‘cause people were already doing that, I wanted to do my own music,” Wookie explains. “Now, I just slowed it down, elements of it, and brought that to soul, R&B, which I was doing at the time. That’s why I called my music ‘new soul’, because I was trying to reinvent soul music, R&B, as it was – because at that time R&B was pretty stagnant and a bit boring, R Kelly talking about ‘You remind me of my jeep’ and stupid things like that, and it kind of pissed me off. I just think, well, Motown wasn’t all one speed, it was fast, so I was looking for that. Just like ‘Get Enuff’ on my album, the first track, it has the speed and all the elements of garage, but I wasn’t looking at garage when I made that tune. I don’t listen to garage in my car. I was thinking of Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album with tunes like ‘Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough’ – tracks like that I was trying to recreate but, like, in 2000.”

At any rate, Wookie hopes that peeps don’t assume that his album is in the same mould as the singles ‘Battle’ (itself a classic) or ‘Get Enuff’. “The album is kinda an eclectic mix of my influences. It ranges from the straight instrumental tracks without any vocals, just musicality and beats – that’s what I love – and the vocal things, because the soul has always been there, like the New Jack Swing and all that, and the slowed down R&B stuff. It’s just a mix of jazz, funk, reggae and calypso done in the 2000 style, my way.”

Wookie and the single Battle are out through Festival Mushroom.

Read Mr Funky’s review of Wookie’s album
Read ITM’s last interview with Wookie from a couple of months ago by Nardo.
Read Farj’s feature What is 2Step?