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Underwolves

After the release of their first album 'Under Your Sky' last year, the Underwolves are preparing to start work on their second album. The British drum 'n' bass collective conquered national radio waves with their single 'Shaken,' and their blend of jazzy drum 'n' bass, catchy vocals and slim basslines made the album one of the highlights of last year's output from Compost Records. When the Underwolves DJ team, with co-founder Professor Stretch and partner-in-crime Marc, hit town, they found time to talk about drum 'n' bass, vocals, underdogs and Underwolves.

Tekst: Koen Mariën

Publicatiedatum: 30 maart 2002

Who are the Underwolves?
Professor Stretch: "There are three main producers: myself, Ned Kelly, Jules Evans; three singers, a guy called Squidly, Ghetto Priest African Headcharge), Jeb Loy Nichols, who is also one of the songwriters and sang on two tracks on the album; and then there is Paula (Crawford), the duchess. She's the female singer now. Marc and I do the DJing together. Marc also helps out with the samples and anything else. Underwolves is really like a small collective."

You used a lot of vocals on your album, and you work together with songwriters. That's a bit unusual for electronic music artists. Was it very important to do it that way?
Professor Stretch: "It's very important for us, because we felt that making an album of dance music is a very difficult thing to do. We wanted to make an album that lasts longer than two years, something that people would really want to put back on again and play it. We think that has to do with having good songs, because songs last in time. So it was really important for us, and we were lucky to meet Jeb through Adrian Sherwood and the On-U-Sound people. He's a great songwriter and has been writing for fifteen to twenty years. He's a soul, reggae, and funk collector, so he has great history of those kinds of influences."

There seems to be a dub/reggae connection, because you've already mentioned Adrian Sherwood, but you also did a remix for Bim Sherman.
Professor Stretch: "Yes, that's right. Originally I worked with Doug Wimbish and did a drum 'n' bass track for Green Tea Records, a small label that's connected with On-U-Sound. Through that, Adrian Sherwood heard the Underwolves music. We had also done a remix of 'Can I Be Free From Crying' for Bim Sherman. Later on we also did the 'Heaven' remix for him. I also did a remix album for Adrian Sherwood of African Headcharge material, so it was a big collaboration time. Still, even today we still collaborate with On-U-Sound people."

Was it also an influence on your own music?
Professor Stretch: "Influences come from everywhere, but from the reggae side, yeah, production techniques especially. Adrian is a great ,what's the word..."

Marc: "...knob twiddler [laughs]."

Professor Stretch: "Yeah, knob twiddler. No, he's like a pioneer, that's the word, a pioneer, of what he does, and I like pioneers... always have done."

How would you describe your own music? Is it drum 'n' bass, or do you see it more as part of the whole German nujazz scene?
Professor Stretch: "I think it's like a melting pot. My background comes from beats and drum 'n' bass. I still make drum 'n' bass today, but there are also the influences coming in from Jeb and from Marc or from the history of music, like the way that in earlier jazz and reggae you hear what drum 'n' bass becomes. It was a case of showing this and showing people where it comes from, and by doing so you link together jazz, reggae, and the beats."

The Underwolves had lots of problems with Island or Universal. Now you are working with Compost Records. Was that an improvement?
Professor Stretch: "It's so much better. The person at Island that signed us did understand everything we were doing and wanted us to develop, not push us to make a very commercial record. But that was only one person, and in the end, when you go to someone like Compost the whole of the higher end of the company feels the same way as that one person did. So instead of you having one person who understands you, you have ten to fifteen people. And the Compost attitude toward the music is the same as ours, so it's really much better."

Marc: "The majors just wait for things to drop on their doorstep, in a finished form. But as an artist you spend years learning and developing. To be honest, it takes a lot of money to develop and become an artist and to carry on doing your music. I think the majors put too much pressure on you. That's not the case with Compost."

Professor Stretch: "I think the A&R men at major record labels are just too scared. They fear for their jobs, because there is such a high turn-over of staff within record labels these days. They'd rather have a guarantee and license something rather than sign anything that's different from pop."

But isn't there something changing with the bedroom producers and the computer technology which makes it easier and cheaper to make your own music? With the internet you have a distribution channel that could possibly make record labels obsolete.
Marc: "But there is more to development than that. It's not only the money involved, it's also the actual time it takes. When you've got all that stuff at home you have to learn how to use it before you can make brilliant music on it. So again, we need that time to develop. It's very relative, I think. The technology has helped, but it has also given you a lot more to think about, so it's also taking more of your time."

In 2001 every British magazine used big headlines to claim that drum 'n' bass was dead. But there are still a lot of good releases proving exactly the opposite.
Professor Stretch: "It's typical for the British press. They've never really liked drum 'n' bass. They've tried to kill it on every opportunity they had. But it just won't go away. There are too many experienced producers who ignore them, who just don't care what they say, who will just try to make good music, and therefore, we will always have a stack of good tunes, and they will always have to come back on themselves. They started doing this in '92 & '93 when Mixmag had this huge article saying that rave and breakbeat was dead. It's also in The Prodigy videoclip of 'Sending Outta Space.' At the end, they are all sitting around a fire, burning these Mixmags."

Drum 'n' bass is also becoming more and more vocal, with tracks like your single 'Shaken' or John B's 'Love Is Not A Game.' It seems like drum 'n' bass is incorporating more and more pop elements.
Professor Stretch: "Yeah, but it's still got a toughness underneath to it, and it's exactly that which was the problem last time when drum 'n' bass was becoming vocal. The drum 'n' bass elements were not the most important things back then. Now you get tracks like 'Hide U,' and John B, and that's good."

Vocals: Is that also the future for the Underwolves?
Professor Stretch: "I think there will be some more vocal drum 'n' bass from the Underwolves. What's important to us, though, is to take what we do live in the end. We had [the] opportunity when we were with Island to get a band together and rehearse, but they dropped us and cut all the budgets, so we had to go back to basics: a DJ and a singer. Hopefully in 2002 with the new album, we'll be able to go live. We would like to make the new album more live-based so we can play it live, but there will be drum 'n' bass elements in the album, of course. In the first album, I wouldn't go past three tracks that aren't directly drum 'n' bass, because it's part of a whole soundscape of influences. When we're DJing, we change the mood and the tempo while we're playing. And to find natural ways of going from 170 bpm down to 90, and then build it back up: That's part of what we do, it's finding those links."

Marc: "Another thing that's very important is the influence of jazz. It's such an encompassing musical style that you can play things in almost whatever style and make it jazzy."

What can people expect from an Underwolves DJ set?
Professor Stretch: "Pretty much anything: Jazz, soul, funk, drum 'n' bass, some housy stuff but not too much, it's really a bit of everything. Hopefully we make people dance."

Marc: "It's a bit of a soundscape."

Professor Stretch: "It's a bit of a worldbeatmeltdown (laughs)."

Stretch, you were heavily involved in the fight against the Criminal Justice Act, a law that was designed to crack down on illegal party raves and bans most forms of protest in the UK. That's also where the name 'Underwolves' comes from. Can you tell a bit about that?
Professor Stretch: "There hasn't been a law like this in the UK since, like, three or four hundred years, since they've tried to stop a free expression of people's emotions. It didn't go down very well at all, and there was a lot of comment from the main papers. The name 'Underwolves' came from an article in The Independent about a class of people that had been created out of this society and the fact that they were rebelling against the government. But they weren't underdogs; they were 'underwolves,' because they were intelligent and they would bite back.

"I was very heavily involved because I was with Spinal Tribe, one of the main groups who were holding the illegal parties. They were very much within the public eye, because there were some very intelligent people who wanted to show and promote what this was about. The police had no way of stopping the illegal raves, because there were far too many people there. Because they realised they had no control, they panicked and thought, 'We must ban this, because we can't have 100 percent control.' It showed the young people how much control the government is trying to have over their lives. Although, I don't know... The new generation doesn't worry as much, which is a worrying thing in itself. It's like they don't care, while for us it was so important. It was like a way of life that we had been protecting and enjoying for about four years before the bill came around."

The bill passed in 1994. Many years have passed. What kind of effect did it have on the British party scene?
Professor Stretch: "It did have an effect for a couple of years, until people found ways to get 'round the laws [laughs]."

Marc: "The funny thing about the Criminal Justice Bill is that, now, big business rules the club scene."

Professor Stretch: "Exactly. Only big companies could get permissions to do raves and stuff."

Marc: "It almost seems like that bill only stopped all of the surviving people who had organised the early raves and hand it over to big business and say 'Here — you make a lot of money out of this instead of those guys.' It was that kinda attitude, and I thought it stunk. I mean, it's like a page of a fantasy book: a bill to stop people from dancing."

Is there any new Underwolves output that we can look forward to?
Professor Stretch: "We've got remixes coming out in February, with a remix from Fauna Flash. And hopefully by September of 2002, the new album will be out."

So, quite an exciting year then?
Professor Stretch: "Yeah, hopefully. The DJ side is also getting more busy as well, and that's good for finding what people are liking, which is good for the next album, I think."

(photography by Manu De Brauwer)

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Meer The Underwolves op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/the-underwolves