One half of seminal duo Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt has continued to build on his success since their dissolution, establishing the popular Lazy Dog project, and more recently his new record label Buzzin’ Fly. He is now readying himself for a tour of Australia as part of the Good Vibrations Festival: ITM’s franny caught up with the deep house maestro for a chat.
Okay, Ben – I’m a dedicated Lazy Dog fan, so I’ll start by asking you a bit about that: Do you miss it, or do you feel like you’ve really moved on from it?
I have some nostalgic moments, but it was great at its time, and the way I see it is that all good things have to come to an end. It was a fantastic club and a great compilation series, and I really enjoyed it, and it was five great years; but I think when we did end it it seemed right at the time, and I don’t really regret it in retrospect. I think it’s better to end at the top when there are a few reservations creeping in than to go on too long and regret it. People ask me why it happened – you have to understand that Jay and I did it for five years, and we lived in each other’s pockets all that time. We hadn’t really known each other as people before we started: we came together by complete coincidence and started a club together from nowhere. We travelled the world together, and we spent loads of time in airports and hotels…we just got to the end of the five years and it had been an amazing rollercoaster, and we looked at each other and said “we need some space; we need a break from it”. It was quite claustrophobic in a way, and Jay wanted to do something on his own for a while, and I was interested in starting a label and doing something different for a little bit, so it just seemed like “okay – let’s just end at the top and just make it great”, and that was the way we decided to do it.
Do you still do any work with Jay?
Well, no – I mean, Jay now does his own night in London and I’m doing my thing and we’re still both operating within the West London scene, but at the moment Jay’s doing his thing and I’m doing mine, and that’s the way it is.
I had a quick look at your website today, and I was very impressed. It’s a great website.
The Everything But The Girl one is very big, but I think it’s really dated now in terms of its look, so we’re going to give it a complete spring clean and a refurb and a relaunch next month.
Why is it that you are prepared to put so much effort into the website? Are you particularly IT-minded?
I love websites. I guess it goes back to my teenage days in the post-punk years when I always wanted to edit a fanzine: I think for me it’s just a way of doing a mini-magazine – a mini-fanzine, if you like. And I kind of like it because it keeps you in contact with people, and it seems kind of independent-minded, and it’s a great way of getting information to people.
What will Buzzin’ Fly be concentrating on this year? Are there any artists that you’re particularly excited about?
At the moment, the schedule for this first part of the year has us putting out some tracks from artists who are already on the label. We’ve got a new single from Justin Martin, and a new thing from Alex S, who is part of Rodamaal. And then there’s going to be the Buzzin’ Fly Volume Two compilation in March as well: So the first part of the year is established artists from the label, and then come the summer I’m looking to put out some new artists again. So those are the immediate plans.
But do you have any personal favourite artists on the label? Any particularly great finds that we should be watching out for?
It would be a bit unfair for me to say that! (laughs)
A recent interview describes you as a discoverer of “fresh sounds and lost classics” – how does one unearth fresh sounds and lost classics?
“Fresh sounds” just means new records that just sound a little bit different: they just have that edge to them that makes them stand out from everything else. And “lost classics” just means unearthing tracks that people have overlooked or forgotten about, or perhaps that didn’t have attention drawn to them at the beginning.
But do you scour local bars, or hang around in clubs a lot, or approach small-time DJs, or listen to buskers in shopping malls? I mean, how do you actually come across different sounds?
It’s just being out there and about. It’s going to clubs. It’s hearing tracks. It’s buying new stuff all the time. It’s having stuff sent to you. It’s just what I do for a living: I listen to music twelve to 18 hours a day. It’s on my ipod. It’s in my car. It’s when I go out at night. It’s just what I do: I look for new music. It doesn’t seem so very different to me.
So what is it that makes a track really jump out at you?
Your instinct, you know. I don’t have a blueprint for how to do it. It’s just my taste, I guess. It’s something that makes you just stop what you’re doing for a minute and ask “What’s that playing now?”, and that’s how you make your choices. It’s just the way you hear it.
I read that you are managing a club in London called Cherry Jam.
Two clubs, in fact.
Two! Do you run them? Manage them? Own them?
I’m a co-owner of both venues now. Cherry Jam is a tiny club / bar in West London that holds about 150 people, and Neighbourhood is a much bigger space – more of a nightclub – that holds about seven hundred people. I’m also creative director: I oversee a lot of the music programming and the DJs that get booked at the two venues. Neighbourhood is also now the home of Buzzin’ Fly – it’s where I do my label night for the club.
You’d think that managing a club would require a completely different skill base from that required to produce and play music. Do you find that you need different skills to run the clubs?
To be honest, there are three partners, and we all have different skills. One guy is the operations guy who does all the purchasing and the staffing and the running and the budget. The other partner is the real Mr Nothing’s-A-Problem, Mr Contracts, Mr Meet-And-Greet, Mr Let-Me-Shake-Your-Hand, Mr Guestlist. And then I’m the guy who has a lot of the music ideas at the creative end. And as a partnership we work very well together. So I’m the last person to ask about actually running the business: I do take an interest and of course I’m there in the meetings, but that’s not my main strength. I couldn’t have done it on my own.
You won Best Breakthrough Label at the House Music Awards of 2004 – what will that actually mean for Buzzin’ Fly?
I don’t know, really: we’ll have to wait and see. It’s very flattering to get it, but I think we should be realistic – Buzzin’ Fly is still very much a boutique label in a niche market, and it’s still very much part of an underground scene. I do think a little bit of attention has been drawn to the label, but I don’t think it’s going to mean we’re suddenly going to turn into a multimillion-selling record label. It’s just very nice to have been respected by your peers – that’s kind of what it means.
So what niche is it that you are catering for? What spectrum does Buzzin’ Fly cover?
Broadly speaking, we’re making twelve-inch records for DJs who are predominantly spinning deep house and all the offshoots of that – electro house, afro beats, Latin, whatever. That’s the area that we’re involved in. And when it comes to the CD market, we make mix compilation albums for people who want to hear that kind of music in their cars and on their ipods and in their homes and in their bars and all that kind of stuff. That’s what we do.
Do you think that that scene – so, deep house, electro-house, afro beats – is gaining or losing popularity?
I think there is a really strong heartbeat, if you like, to the scene. There’s a core of love, if you like, that’s not going to let it go away. And I think it is mutating and it is changing, and there are pressures on the scene from two different areas: I think the whole download issue and what is going to happen to vinyl, and what is going to happen at retail, and what is going to happen to shops is putting a lot of pressure on record labels; and I think the constantly changing musical scene is also contributing to that pressure – there are influences from the eighties, from electro, from minimalism, and from Detroit, and this is also having an interesting kind of pincer effect on the deep house scene. But I do think those two factors are good for the scene – it means you have to stay nimble, you have to be aware, you have to be shrewd, and you have to be inventive. And it means that you can’t stay complacent. You have to have energy and imagination to survive, and I think the deep house labels that do have that – the ones that sell their records in imaginative ways, and that make their records in imaginative ways – will survive.
What makes people have this deep-seated love for deep house?
It’s just your soul. Everybody has one.
But is it anything particular about that genre of music?
I just think deep house has it all. It makes you sad and it makes you happy at the same time; it lifts you up, but it has a bittersweet undercurrent to it. It’s like pathos mixed with disco. It’s like… [beep … “this conference is scheduled to be terminated in five minutes”...]
You’ll be in Brisbane for Good Vibrations next month – what can we expect?
I’m just going to bring a big bag of records and wait until I get up there, because I really don’t know at the moment. I know there’s a huge amount of expectation, because I haven’t been to Australia as a DJ: there are going to be people who are going to want to hear Lazy Dog classics; there are going to be people who are going to want to hear brand new stuff; there are going to be people who are going to want to hear Buzzin’ Fly tracks; there are even going to be people who are going to want to hear old Everything But The Girl remixes. And I think I have to arrive expecting every eventuality, and just look at the people in front of me and take a view once I’m up there – and just hope I can make people’s afternoon. That’s that it’s all about really.
Is that always what you do when you’re playing – you just feed off the crowd in front of you?
You have to. I think you can plan; you can prepare; you can say to yourself, “I’m going to play these tracks in my record bag regardless,”, but in the end when you turn up I think that if you are any good as a DJ, you are immediately hit by the atmosphere that you walk into – and it’s that that you respond to. Are people subdued? Are they buzzing? Are they pissed? Are they sober? All these things come into the equation, because your role as a DJ is really just that of being an ambience coordinator. You’re the guy in the corner with the records, and you’re just second-guessing the mood in front of you. And it you’re any good, you second-guess it correctly, and everybody in the room goes in the direction they want to be going.
Does releasing a retrospective make you feel old?
That’s a good question – I’ve never thought of it like that. I guess they’re so familiar these days – we are surrounded by box sets – that it now just seems part of the scene.
So you don’t feel like it’s a farewell, or a bowing out?
It’s easy to say that. People have always said that about greatest hits albums – that it always seems like a farewell. But I think these days they are so much part of the territory that it’s almost just like an encapsulation of a period of time, and I don’t think it necessarily means the end any more. You look at an artist like David Byrne, for example, from Talking Heads: somebody just sent me an amazing retrospective – an ornately packaged Talking Heads retrospective that was put out last year – and it’s a beautiful historical document, if you like, of a period in time, but it doesn’t make you think that David Byrne is finished as an artist – he’s still an imaginative, creative person who will go on making music until he dies, probably. I do think it means something different these days.
When you mix a track, do you steadily work piece by piece from nothing or something really simple to the finished track, or is it a matter of trial and error and looking around until you find something that inspires you?
Different things affect different things. I could never go into a studio without a big idea in my head. I’m not one of these people who can just turn on a computer and start from scratch and think I’ll come up with something: I usually go in because I’ve thought of something I want to experiment with. And actually the execution of the idea is often quite quick with me – it’s the thinking of it that takes a long time. You know like classical Japanese painting – those black ink drawings and black ink paintings? Well people always say that the whole point about Japanese classical paintings…
You can check Ben Watt out for yourself at the following venues this February:
Sat 12 Feb, Brisbane – Good Vibrations Festival (BUY TICKETS)
Sat 12 Feb, Sydney – Together @ Home
Sun 13 Feb, Melbourne – Good Vibrations Festival (BUY TICKETS)
Sat 19 Feb, Sydney – Good Vibrations Festival (BUY TICKETS)
Sat 19 Feb, Melbourne – Family @ Seven
Sun 20 Feb, Perth – Good Vibrations Festival (BUY TICKETS)
A new Everything But The Girl CD will also be released March 14th, titled ‘Adapt or Die’ it features 10 years of EBTG remixes.
