LOW FIDELITY ALL STARS

Rip It Up, Issue 250, 1 June 1998, Page 33

LOW FIDELITY ALL STARS

“A few years ago in England it was pure dance, but last year the big guitar bands came back with big albums, the Verve, Radiohead, and Oasis. It goes round in circles, you should never be stupid enough to say that guitar music or rock music is dying because it’s always going to be there. Every now and then you’ll get a band that will come along and do something really exciting.

With his last sentence, Phil (aka the Albino Priest), songwriter, keyboardist and the man behind the decks for the Brighton born outfit LoFidelity Allstars, inadvertently sums up the modus operand! of his band and their debut album, How to Operate With a Blown Mind. Released on the highly credible UK dance label Skint, the sample-laden How t 0..., with its unashamedly cheap production, and cut and paste fusion of hip hop, big beat, punk, techno, funk, and dub, is a thrilling breath of fresh air — akin to discovering DJ Shadow or Dr. Octagon for the very first time. Shortly after they emerged in the UK midway through last year, the Allstars were promptly crowned The Best New Band in Britain by the ever predictable music weeklies, NME and Melody Maker. However, unlike the many superficial nobodies (Menswear who?) bestowed the ‘honour’, the Allstars are a band that have the goods to supersede the hype. When RipltUp calls, Phil and the Allstars are holed up in, “another faceless hotel,” this time in Denmark, where the group are rolling through a day of international press interviews. The night before, the Allstars wound up a brief Irish tour with a show at Belfast’s Limelight, and Phil is suffering from a severe lack of sleep. “Ireland’s brilliant and all that,” he says in a croaky Leeds accent, “the crowds are always the best, they get well into it, but I’m a bit ill and I’m tired, we haven’t a day off in quite a while.” And a line of coke or a snifter

of speed won’t do the trick, says Phil. He admits to missing the pep pills the All Stars used to indulge in while on the road. “On our first national tour, our tour manager used to have a big box of Vitamin C and Vitamin E and iron tablets that if we wanted to, we could take in the morning to wake us up. He was one of a kind our old manager, quite a mad fella.” Pausing, Phil then decides that life for himself and his band pals, Dave (aka Wrekked Train), Matt (aka Sheriff Jon Stone), Andy (aka the One Man Crowd Called Gentilee), Martin (aka the Many Tentacles), and Johnny (aka the Slammer) ain’t that shabby after all.

“The jobs we were doing before the band were a lot harder, and although you might be tired, doing an interview in Denmark is amazing. You can’t complain, it’s a lot better than the life we had a year and a half ago.”

The Lo-Fidelity Allstars count amongst their membership, a former butcher, a labourer, and a Moroccobased session musician. Phil and Matt “squeezed out” a living with a DJ residency at a London nightclub, spinning hip hop and dub after the local goth band had finished their set. “The gothic kids hated us,” laughs Phil, “they used to leave en masse after the band and ask for a refund on the way out.”

The duo began messing around with a sampler and a drum machine, roping in friends to help whenever necessary, and from that, the Allstars were born. It was never the band’s intention to go beyond their local club, explains Phil.

“We just wanted to make music that we could DJ with, that was the main thing, we never set out to be a successful band.”

The Allstars debuted live at London’s Dublin Castle and were signed after the “initially never to be repeated” show by Skint boss, Damien Harris, who’d previously heard a rough demo? tape. Phil explains. “We sent off about 1 5 demos to all the dance labels, Skint was the only one to reply. We had the first gig, which was a chaotic mess, and Damian came along and picked us up after that — he must have seen something there. We were really happy ’cause Skint’s a label we’re all really into, we used to buy all their records.”

Skint released the single ‘Kool Roc Bass’, a tune Phil believed would score play in underground clubs only. But it confounded expectations, and the Allstars bowed to pressure and took their genre-jumping sound around the UK. And they confused everybody. “Every time we played a gig the majority of people just stood there not dancing — we’d never have anybody leaving the venue, they’d stay to the very end — but we never got much response. People don’t know how to

respond to our music because it’s different. It’s only been on the last tour that the gigs have been really good, with people going mad from the start. “When we started the music press didn’t know what to make of us either. We got loads of coverage in the indie press but hardly anything in the dance press, now that the dance press have heard the album they’re coming back ■ around and we’re getting good reviews. It’s a lot better now that we’ve got all sorts of people coming i to the gigs. “We’ve always seen ourselves as a dance band so it’s weird that people say we’re breaking down barriers. There’s six different members in the band and six different record collections, and the album is just a case of getting all our influences on there.”

The Allstars have sampled almost 20 of their major influences on H0wT0..., and Skint went to the trouble of clearing and paying for each one after the label was stung when ‘Disco Machine Gun’, the band’s second single, was withdrawn because of an uncleared steal of the Breeders’ ‘Cannonball’.

“You can disguise samples well, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth not clearing them,” says Phil.

The Lo-Fidelity Allstars have a full to overflowing calender for the remainder of 1998. A brief jaunt around England during June precedes the band’s first ever tour across America in July. Dotted about the place are a host of festival dates, including the infamous Mount Fuji Festival in Japan, and somewhere in there the Allstars are pencilled in to remix Underworld’s long overdue next single. By the time Christmas comes, the band will be closeted away, agonising over the sequel to How to Operate With a Blown Mind.

“We’re a really paranoid band about how our music comes out,” says Phil, “we’re real perfectionists with it and we’ll be working hard to come up with something new on the next album. Because there’s so many of us, and so many ideas, I don’t think there’s any chance of us treading water for the next few records anyway. We’ve already starting recording new stuff that sounding quite mad, quite different. We’ve set ourselves up as this band who can do all sorts of styles, and we’ve got a lot of freedom to do what we want.”

JOHN RUSSELL