One of my favourite guilty pleasures is the B-grade but hilarious early 90s ‘teen flick’ Hackers. When it was first released, the antics of Johnny Lee Miller and his high-school gang of accidental ‘corporate cyber criminals’ got mums and dads all over America into a lather about what little Danny was really doing behind his locked bedroom door. The technology is beyond retro, and some of the magic hacking tricks are absolutely hysterical. But the single unbeatable save for this otherwise dodgy flick was its soundtrack, jammed with ‘up and coming’ dance acts like Underworld, Prodigy, Orbital, Carl Cox and Leftfield. Absolute gold to this day. And at about the same time that ‘Acid Burn’ (*Angelina Jolie* in non-nerd bike leathers) was bragging about her elite super-fast 28.8kb dial-up modem, underground sensation Stereo MCs were also smashing it on the soundtrack with Connected.

As you may remember, Connected was the track that escalated the London hip-hop/funk/fusion outfit into global groove-domination in 1992, who had already been recording and smoking it up live since the late 80s. Back in the day scratching and sampling was all about vinyl, Midi sequencing was cheating, loops were literally looped bits of tape, edits were done with a razorblade, and Protools was total sci-fi fantasy. From those retro tech beginnings the Stereo MCs have managed to maintain the groove and stay ‘up with the thang’ for almost 20 years. And they’ve just busted out their sixth album of cool beats Double Bubble. So how have the ‘Godkids of Hip’ managed to ride all the changes in sound and technology and stay on the game for so long? ITM got chatting with the Stereo MCs frontline vocalist Rob Birch to find out exactly what’s involved when you want to keep it realer for longer. Musically speaking.

Has there been lots of pressure on you for the new album? To evolve? To do something different?

No, I think there have been times in a our career when we’ve been feeling pressure, but I think really the pressure you need to feel is just from yourself, to be achieving your best. Our goal is just to keep contemporary, because our music was always contemporary. And to keep people dancing. We want to keep injecting good songs and good lyrics that mean something, and make you feel some kind of inspiration. That’s what our music is supposed to do. That’s our purpose. And as long as we can still achieve that purpose, I think we feel no pressure. I don’t think music business pressure is very healthy. I think the healthy pressure is the one where you go “this aint good enough, we can do better.” It’s the personal pressure you need.

You’ve been spending some serious time over the last few years playing dj sets in clubs. Is that part of what keeps your sound current?

Really yeah! Just by checking what you’re doing, and listening to everything else that’s going on around you. You gotta go “well, am I hitting the market?” You know what I mean? Don’t kid yourself. Go out and bust your own tracks and see how it goes down.

You are working with a new producer Tic Toc, who was born the same year that Stereo MCs released their first album. How has that worked out?

It’s been a creative process. The guy is a young guy who lives locally. He really just came and lived with us in the studio. It was a total commitment sort of vibe. He could learn from what we were doing and we could learn from what he was doing. And he had a fresh way of putting tracks together.

Much different to how you’ve been used to working?

When we started out it was a much different way of making music to the way music is made now. And because Tic Toc grew up on computers and laptops and the more modern essence of making music, he has a different sort of mindset into the way tracks are put together. So we had our songs written and he showed us how to turn ‘em around and make ‘em sound different, and to just get a different take on the whole thing. Really, we’re back on a learning curve. We’re old dogs learning new tricks so we want to break rules and do all of that.

You launched the album in London with a full live show.

Yeah that’s right. We played as a full band in a small club in Hoxton in East London. And I think it was about our seventh show with this new LP. We’ve been doing a few shows already, festivals and stuff like that. It’s all been going really good, it’s really exciting playing the new material. We’re playing a lot of the new album in the set. Yeah a full live show man, that’s the way it is you know.

Are you planning to bring the new show down here soon?

Yeah, we’ve been to Australia a few times and it all seemed to go really well. We’re hoping to come back in the New Year once the LPs out and we’ve done some touring around Europe. We’re hoping that people in Australia will sort of put a bit of demand out there for us [laughs]. You know, start screaming “we want them people back!” And so the promoters will go “yeah, we better book ‘em”.

The new Stereo MC’s Double Bubble is in stores now through Liberator/Warner. Hack the Planet.