Living the Nightmare: Nightmares on Wax Turns 25

Eight years ago, a boat carrying George Evelyn, his wife Amanda and all their belongings pulled into an Ibizan port to begin the latest phase of the Nightmares on Wax odyssey. “It was weird,” Evelyn remembers, calling from his renovated farmhouse on the island. “The sun was beating down on the boat as we came in, there was an announcement on the tannoy and then this song started pumping out. It turned out to be one of mine! Morse, off Carboot Soul – not even a single. Right then I knew it was meant to be. I was home, and it didn’t feel like I’d left anywhere.”

For somebody who deals primarily in positive vibrations, Evelyn saw the sun-kissed beaches and pine-clad hills of the White Isle as the idyllic backdrop for his musical vocation. Having frequented the island on numerous occasions as a youth, he also saw a niche for feel-good downtempo grooves, picking up where Balearic architects like José Padilla had left off the previous decade. Thus Evelyn’s clubnight Wax Da Jam was born back in 2009, and this year marks the fifth season of what locals quickly came to term as ‘the people’s party’.

“When I arrived, I was amazed at what wasn’t here,” he admits. “I didn’t understand it: the sun’s out in full force, so why isn’t this music being played? It was pretty much a blank canvas for me. We started out in a restaurant called Aura, which was totally illegal because it didn’t have a license and we couldn’t advertise at all. Word of mouth got the name around and we eventually had guys like DJ Shadow, Roots Manuva and Nickodemus down in the early days. The concept was to be able to DJ with loops, and have scope to improvise with samples live.”

You can imagine that, as Warp’s longest serving producer, Evelyn has been chopping up records for quite a long time. His forthcoming N.O.W. IS THE TIME compilation marks 25 years in the game; but that’s not quite the full picture. The story of Nightmares on Wax actually begins five years prior to 1989’s Let It Roll, in the midst of Yorkshire’s mid-80s B-boy scene. As part of Bradford’s Soul City Rockers, Evelyn first learned to scratch with a little help from a fellow crew member – Kevin ‘Boy Wonder’ Harper.

“At that point I was already sampling too,” Evelyn adds, “But I didn’t know that’s what it was called. I’d record an intro of a track on the tape deck, then record snippets from another track to make a megamix. Eventually, a friend of mine introduced me to this landscape gardener called John Halmon, who had two turntables, a double cassette deck, and a reel-to-reel! We started mixing together and that turned me on to a lot of other styles of music. One scenario was that he introduced me to using dialogue from films, soundtracks and special effects. I was about 15 at the time and didn’t know anything about catalogues and all that.

“We ended up with this amalgamation of weirdly different styles. John turned round one day and said ‘This stuff sounds like your worst nightmare,’ to which I said ‘Yeah, it’s like a nightmare on wax!’ After debating whether it sounded too negative or not, we decided it was a good representation of our wildest dreams on vinyl – and it stuck. After a year or so, John decided to pack it in, so I joined a DJ collective with Kevin [Harper] called Unit Three. There were actually four of us, but whatever.”

“It’s what I’ve been trying to say all along, my expression of happiness” – George Evelyn

After finding himself homeless at the age of 16, Evelyn moved into a hostel with Kevin and their mates and started charging people into parties on the weekend. From the end of ’86 to the end of ’88, the pair were playing all around Yorkshire, running a night called Downbeat and developing a thirst for making their own tunes. “I managed to convince my mum to lend us the money for a Fostex 4-track, a Casio SK-1 – which had about 1.6 seconds sampling time – and a knocked off Roland SH-101. The Roland changed everything.”

With their slew of new gear, Evelyn and Harper started putting together a few demos, and eventually decided to sample Big Daddy Kane’s Set It Off on their track Let It Roll. “I remember the first time we played it at Downbeat: the place went ballistic. Kevin and I were kneeling down behind the decks because we couldn’t stop laughing. We felt excited, nervous, just every emotion rushing through our bodies. That was the first experience of having… that! We must’ve rewound the track about eight times,” he chuckles.

Despite the positive crowd reactions, and shopping around to a whole host of UK imprints, the pair failed to secure an initial deal. This led Evelyn and Harper on a quest to New York to buy music, buy trainers and get a record deal. “We didn’t get the latter,” Evelyn explains. “So, on the way back, we decided to put it out ourselves. I borrowed £400 off my brother and pressed 2000 copies of the record. We hired a car, borrowed a driver’s license from my mate and started pitching to record stores up and down the country. We ended up selling the 2000 copies in two weeks. That was July ’89.”

Follow-up single Dextrous caught the attention of Warp founder Steve Beckett, who got in touch a few months later to ask if they wanted to remix the track for his fledgling label. By the end of the year, Dextrous had gone to number 75 in the charts, and the pair had well and truly infiltrated the nation’s musical bloodstream. “Rave culture was kicking off at that point too,” Evelyn recalls. “It was a social revolution. I remember going down the M62 to this warehouse rave in Blackburn and there was three speed cop cars trying to block all the lanes to slow down the convoy. There was a copper in the street trying to stop cars going past and people were just bombing past – they couldn’t give a shit. I remember looking out the back window at the copper and thinking, ‘This is what the 60s must’ve been like!’ There was a detachment from the system, which forced people to look within themselves. I still believe that’s why some of the most profound pieces of music can come out of the bleakest situations.”

Time has since moved on from those halcyon days, but that sense of fearlessness and experimentation has remained fixed in the Nightmares on Wax psyche. Seven albums later and Evelyn has pushed the envelope at every turn, never content to rest on his laurels or to give in to the easy option of churning out biennial imitations of Smoker’s Delight. This is what makes the process of putting together a concise assessment of the entire N.O.W. journey a very tough challenge.

“There are so many ways to approach a best of,” explains Evelyn. “You can go chronologically, but you soon realise that doesn’t work. You have to think about what each album represents, and the different stages of the journey. Each one has its own stamp, and one album can’t be more prominent than another.

“It’s been very, very emotional. There are certain tracks I listen back to now and, because I’m in such a different mental state to when I made it, it sounds completely different to me. It’s amazing having that detachment from a piece of music you’ve made because you start to hear it from an objective point of view – in a good way. You care less about being egotistical about your own stuff, and you start to fully acknowledge what you’ve created. I really dig stuff now that ten years ago I thought wasn’t up to scratch at all.”

For Evelyn, the key lies in “getting out of your own way.” The deeper you go into your own productions, the more observant you become, and the more questions you introduce in analysis, which allows doubt and fear to come into the equation. “My last LP, Feelin’ Good, wasn’t about what I thought, or how loud the hi-hats were; it was about what I felt. It’s what I’ve been trying to say all along, my expression of happiness. This journey has taken me everywhere, and I’ve been off the beaten track so many times out of curiosity, just to ask ‘What’s down there?’ It feels like I’ve come full circle, back to the frame of mind where I started out. Ibiza has helped me to unravel, so now I can say things, musically, without having to search for my voice – and I know it’s the truth that’s coming through.”