System 7 are one of dance music’s most undefinable outfits, bridging the 70s’ progressive rock and contemporary electronica. The British duo are renowned for their live shows, cutting-edge albums and collaborations with the most innovative artists in dance music. Now Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy are set to headline at Earthcore’s New Year’s Eve fest in Victoria, performing their first-ever Australian gig.
Steve Hillage is an industry veteran, yet he has all the enthusiasm of a newcomer. Back in the 70s he was a member of the progressive rock group Gong. After leaving the band, Hillage recorded as a solo artist and inaugurated his own combo, The Steve Hillage Band, in which Giraudy played keyboards. In the 80s Hillage embarked on a production career, working with Robyn Hitchcock and Simple Minds. Towards the end of the decade Hillage happened to hear his own record ‘Rainbow Dome Musick’ played by DJ Alex Paterson of The Orb in a club and, from there, he started to take an interest in the new electronic music. Hillage was exposed to the fresh sounds coming out of the American cities Chicago and Detroit and, discerning the links between this new music and the likes of Funkadelic and Kraftwerk and even Gong, he formed the ambi-house outfit System 7 with Giraudy. System 7’s eponymous album materialised in 1990 and is today regarded as a classic, encapsulating the Summer of Love ethos.
Looking back, Hillage describes his move into dance music not as a radical transformation but rather as a natural progression. “I’ve been involved with dance music since the 70s, but I was a guitarist, so my natural form of music was rock music – although when I was with Gong we were one of the first groups to experiment with synthesisers, and in fact some of today’s sounds we pioneered, particularly with the synthesiser player in Gong called Tim Blake. I got involved in record production almost exclusively from the beginning of the 80s. I got completely bored with having a rock band by then and it was only really a matter of time before we started doing our own artistic output in a modified form. We started System 7 in 1989, ‘cause we have a lot of good friends who are DJs and who were involved in the initial explosion of house music in the late 80s, and it was just a very natural progression for us.”
While Hillage has emerged as the more familiar member of System 7, Giraudy remains a mystery figure in the background. At any rate, Hillage says that they share an equitable and dynamic creative union. “We’ve been working together for a long time. She collaborated on a lot of the Steve Hillage solo albums in the 70s and we’ve got a really quite unique relationship and, of course, when we play live it’s just Miquette and me and a whole lot of technology – and that’s the show.”
The partnership works, Hillage believes, because the two are so different. “I’m the producer and the organiser and Miquette is a really free spirit. I call her The Radar. We’re very opposite. I’m a Leo and she’s Aquarius and I’m English and she’s French – you can’t get more opposite than that (laughs) – and, of course, I’m a man and she’s a woman. We just enjoy working together and hopefully the fact that we really enjoy what we do, I sincerely believe, helps us give people a good time when we do a live show, because they can really feel that we’re enjoying ourselves.”
System 7’s manifesto, stated on their Web site, is as altruistic as it is unpretentious: “We oppose frontiers and rigid divisions, both within the music scene and in the world at large. We feel part of a musical movement of dance-based rhythms and psychedelic ambience that embraces the whole planet, and through our friends and collaborators we seek a network of highly creative people.”
And, indeed, System 7 have always been open to collaborations, hooking up with a ‘who’s who’ of dance culture: Alex Paterson, Youth, Derrick May, Carl Craig, Paul Oakenfold, Laurent Garnier and Talvin Singh.
Early on System 7 formed ties with members of the Detroit techno community, who are generally not inclined to work with outsiders unless they recognise a special affinity.
Initially Hillage hit it off with Derrick May, one of techno’s triumvirate of godfathers, and he was later introduced to May’s protege, Carl Craig, among others from the Motor City. “It goes back to our roots – we were involved in this European electro-rock movement, but also we were quite interested in certain leftfield aspects of fusion – like Weather Report, Miles Davis and also Funkadelic and George Clinton, who of course comes from Detroit. Bernie Worrell, the keyboard player of Funkadelic, was the first synthesiser player in Detroit. He did definitely influence people like Juan Atkins and Derrick May. So we had a lot of common influences. When I started System 7 our first record was on Ten Records – this is the dance arm of Virgin Records at the time and of course this is the label that also put out the first-ever techno compilation in 1989. Obviously I’d heard this and I was really excited by it and asked the record company if they could arrange a meeting with Derrick May, and he was keen as well, and we met him in 1990. We’ve known him for, like, 10 years.”
Over the last decade May has virtually put his production career on hold, making his 90s work with System 7 a rare commodity, indeed. Hillage considers System 7’s collaborations with May to represent the “only substantial body of recording work he’s done in the last 10 years.” Now Hillage intends to release some of this material on a compilation via System 7’s new label A-Wave. “At some stage we’re gonna put out a compilation of all the tracks we’ve done with him and do some more with him.”
Hillage is hardly surprised by the rise of the dance scene in recent years. At this stage, he looks on the US as the new frontier, while noting the irony that both house and techno music have their roots in African-American culture. Nevertheless, Hillage is likewise curious to see how the scene has evolved in these parts. “You’re dealing with something that is just a complete new sound and new approach in music and it has rendered rock music, which was once regarded as a ‘progressive’ force, as a very conservative force,” he says. “You’ve now got second and third generation clubbers – what we refer to in the UK as the ‘’Crasher Kids’ – and all they’ve grown up with is dance music; that’s all they’ve ever known.”
This year System 7 launched their own imprint, A-Wave, re-issuing the Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) remix of Alphawave from 1995 (the duo’s most successful track to date), together with their seminal album Power Of Seven and the compilation System Express, which features remixes by Plastikman, Marshall Jefferson, David Holmes, Doc Scott and Jacob’s Optical Stairway (aka 4 Hero).
System 7 have also been recording a new LP – their eighth – in their London studio and hope that this will see the light in the New Year. “It’s still in its formative stages,” Hillage reveals. “We recorded quite a lot of material last year, but we didn’t actually complete an album. Unfortunately, in dance music your ideas keep changing – and that’s one thing I like about dance music: every six months it’s like Year Zero. At the moment the material we’re working on is more solidly dancefloor than the last album, Golden Section, which was quite diverse and had a lot of breakbeats. So it’s more 4/4 kick patterns rather than left. We’ve got our own sound, our own style, we’re not part of any particular tightly-defined subdivision. In fact, what really interests me at the moment is the point where trance and house meet; where trance and house meet is a good place for us.”
