Home
sign up| features / music interview |
 content by: editor |
 simian mobile disco
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Champion chimps. “Bad songs are actually much, much easier to remix than good ones,” says James Ford, one half of zeitgeist-defining electro duo Simian Mobile Disco (alongside James Shaw), and a man who knows a fair bit about turning water into wine, musically speaking. “We’ve recently been asked to remix [Detroit techno classic] Big Fun by Inner City. It was so great to get all the separate parts to the track, and to be able to open it up and see how it was all put together, but when it actually comes down to remixing it, it’s kind of nerve-racking. It’s such a classic tune and so important to so many people, so you don’t want to mess it up. But if the song’s bad to begin with, it’s like, well this can only be improved [laughs].”It’s SMD’s pace-setting remix work for the likes of Klaxons, The Presets and The Go! Team that’s seen their dancefloor stock rise over the last couple of years. But it’s been the unstoppable Justice reworking of the now-defunct Simian’s We Are Your Friends that’s acted as a neat bookend between the Jameses’ two incarnations. “We don’t really see Simian Mobile Disco as an extension of Simian; it’s something completely different,” says Ford. “It wouldn’t be fair on [ex-Simian members] Simon and Alex to say otherwise. Simian Mobile Disco came about when James and me would go straight from playing a gig to DJ-ing mad electro in a tiny club somewhere, and we needed a funny name to go under. To be honest, if we’d have known how things were going to pan out, we’d have used a different name. It’s just ended up confusing people.”  The effervescent original material currently being collated for the debut Simian Mobile Disco album – due early summer – ought to bang the final nail in the coffin of Simian and see Ford and Shaw heralded as the prime movers in the indie-electro soundclash movement that’s helping to breathe fresh new life into Britain’s stale clubland. “There is definitely more of a willingness to experiment and mess about with genre boundaries than there was five years ago,” says Ford. “Back then you had all the back-to-basics rock’n’roll over here, and then all the house and techno purists over here. Simian Mobile Disco are definitely against pigeonholing, and we’re definitely against purists.”
Joe Madden
Simian Mobile Disco – It’s The Beat, released 26 March 07 on Wichita.
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
music  music archive Watch music sessions and interviews from 2002 to 2008. books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
simian
ed banger
access 1000s of articles