DJ Food & DK: Sit Up, Pay Attention, and Listen!

DJ Food, who many thought was just one man outputting high-standard wide-ranging material over a seventeen year period, are both right and wrong. DJ Food began as Food for DJs - records for other DJs to make records with. Think of a living sample unit with access to a plethora of material, and a high-powered filtration and mixing system, backed with the hard-earned experiences of DJing and producing, and you have something close.

His: "Studio collective project... went in many directions, and sometimes didn't have any focus," says present-day DJ Food, Strictly Kev. Coldcut were the original masterminds behind DJ Food back in 1990, followed by Patrick Carpenter, Paul Brook, Paul Rabiger, Isaac Elliston, and the sole heir of the legacy, Strictly Kev. "With me being the sole inheritor, I think I can stamp a bit more personality on it - because it's not a sound made up of various personalities, it's more of a sound made up of one - it's a bit easier to personalise." He saw the parameters for previous DJ Food work as slightly narrow, and for a while, the name was mainly affiliated with jazz breaks: now drum and bass, electro, 80s pop, hip hop, surfer pop, and the cut-up style are more familiar aspects.

The next album on the horizon has a lot to live up to - it will be Kev's sole creation, and comes in the distant wake of the Boom Selection server crash of recent years when Food's popular bootleg, Raiding the 20th Century - A History of the Cut-Up, was downloaded so much that it brought the system to a grinding halt. Could we expect similar things from this LP? "I'm not sure about that so much, but the whole mash-up thing I was into a few years back, to a certain extent, won't be a basis for the next album. I've very much got it firmly in my head what the record's going to be, and it's maybe not going to be like anything you've previously heard from Food. Although there's lot of things that I have been doing in the meantime that have pointed towards it." He hints at dashes of modern day psychedelia, and being "more out there than any previous Food record."

What were the influences for this mix with DK (Darren), the follow-up to Now, Listen? The debut included the likes of Mr Scruff, The Commodores, Fourtet, The Art of Noise and Cinematic Orchestra, while Now, Listen Again! moves into definite hip-hop and d&b territory. "We were listening to ourselves really, because the jumping off point for that mix was DJ sets from the time we toured with the last Steel mix in 2001-2002. Occasional bits of this mix actually started back that far, and they lasted a lot longer, becoming little staples of mixed sets. They seemed to always work with the crowd - you could put the same three records in the same way everytime, and you'd always get a good response." It was a gradual build then? "What we did was sat down and made a list of little nuggets from sets that have gone past and played them to each other and said, 'look check this out, it always works, I'm still not bored of it', and narrowed that selection down to the best of the best, and weaved them together with other newly created bits that didn't just all fit together. It was like adding to a puzzle."

Were these records taken from your own expensive and expansive collection then, or was there an element of record shop scouring? "We already had them, that's why there isn't too much contemporary stuff on the mix CD. To us it was classic, and we were attempting to make something that was meant to be listened to, and listened to, and re-listened to. In the sense that we've heard these mixes hundreds of times before we even put them down on tape, and then we heard them hundreds of times again putting the thing together - we're still not bored with it. We hope thats gonna rub off on the listeners."

It's been getting a play on the Skinny CD player at least once a day for the past three weeks, and we're still not tired of it! The range of artists deployed, who would not normally meet each other in a mixed set, has certainly sparked interest. "We've done our job then - thats the person we're aiming at. There's no one generic listener we're aiming at, we wanted to making something that would just require and initiate repeat listens from any listeners. The type of stuff that's in there is not all super rare, and some of it's ridculously well-known, but the way we've put it together we hope that it makes you wanna go back and listen again."

Previously unheard/unnoticed snippets of spoken word and song fragments bubble to the surface on each play, due in part to the complexity of the arrangement - was this intended? "There's more layers than people initially get - everything you hear on there is there for a reason, whether it's a piece of spoken word or the choice of tracks that are put next to each other. When the final album comes out, there are reasonably extensive sleeve notes that go with it that point out further things that people wouldn't have necessarily have known about why certain tracks - why they're on there, what they mean, so I'm hoping people get even more out of it when it finally comes out." It sounds like you're giving birth to a generation of musos! "Oh god yeah, we're so muso it's ridiculous!"

How much of the mix is you, and how much is DK when it came to song selection - which tracks out and out represent you? "It was 50-50 I have to say, we haven't really totted up who did what and what not... It was very colloborative; there are no ten minute segments that you could say are all me, without any of Darren in it, and vice versa. We work incredibly well together in that sense, we're very good at coming to a happy compromise when there's a point that one of doesn't agree with. We were also incredibly lucky with what we got to use - it's all legally licensed and you just can't take all that for granted. You can give them a list of 30 tracks, and then they'll come back and say you can have these 25." Is it a minefield getting ahold of songs for the mixes then? "Everytime - the last mix we did in 2001 was only 75% of what we really wanted on there, while this one was 90-95%. It really was an amazingly high success rate. We were incredibly lucky on a couple of tracks, the Human League one for instance, which plays a pivotal part of the intro section. We nearly didn't get, because the guy who owns it has bought the early Human League catalogue and is selling it onto an American publisher, and didn't want to damage the sale. They thought that if it came out on something else the buyer was not going to want it, it's going to be invaluable. We said, 'look lets send you the piece; the Human League is so buried, overlaid, looped and edited, there's no way its gonna appear like this anywhere else, and it might actually help your sales when people want to find the full unedited original when you've done your sale of Human League rarities or whatever.' He was into it, and luckily he'd heard the first mix and was a fan."

If you had to choose one of the tracks from the mix as your post-apocalyptic comforter, what would it be and why? Food pauses to think: "I'm just mentally flicking through the album in my head. I'm pretty sure it would be Food For My Soul by The Dragons, for me personally, Darren's choice would be different. This is the jewel in the crown of the mix. The Dragons were three brothers: Doug, Darren and Dennis Dragon who lived on the West Coast throughout the 60s and 70s as session players. They played with The Birds, Phil Spectre and all that lot, and they resurfaced and did a soundtrack called A Sea For Yourself with a bunch of other musicians, which is very rare and hard to find, and also where Food For My Soul is from, back in the 60s. I got that soundtrack and managed to find a copy of it, and because I'm DJ Food, it had a certain resonance when I heard it originally because it's such a positive record. I mean the lyrics are fantastic; it's hippy, but it's beautiful. It's uncynical and talks about trying to be a good person and I thought this was just a blueprint to how to live your life. I tracked down Dennis Dragon, who was the drummer and owned the copyright, and said 'will you licence this to us? Because this is the last track on the mix, it's the one we want to go out with.' Amazingly he said yes because previous contacts that I'd had, had said 'oh yeah we tried to licence from him, he's a weirdo, he won't do it, and all the rest of it'! And he actually said yes, but not only did he say yes, he sent us a whole album of unreleased Dragon's stuff made at the same time as Food For Your Soul, which we're gonna release on Ninja Tunes later on this year. It's all the same sort of thing: tripped-out, West Coast surf pop from the 60s and it's absolutely fabulous. It's a lovely postscript to this mix, and that track is gonna prime people for this album."

Other little gems include the Are You Being Served film theme tune, and Jo Ann Garrett's It's No Secret nestled against throbbing d&b. The build into d&b is a bit of a trademark in Food's DJ sets, raising the tempo as the music speeds on through to its conclusion. Why use d&b as the link between dancehall and soul? "We love d&b, as much as we love hip-hop and funk and soundtracks, so we always try to include something like that in the live set. In the live version of this mix we expand it quite a bit, as we do with all the sections, as it's one of the most powerful dance music elements bar something like gabba, or terrorcore industrial stuff. It's a furious, more palatable, dance medium if you like, and it's always good to have something like that, and save it for later rather than have it at the beginning. You lose a a lot of energy if you play your ace cards early on. That was another thing - you were speaking earlier about the arrangement - we were very conscious of how the mix flowed, not playing all your good hands at the beginning and saving up some decent tracks, and also very fast tracks for later. The whole thing was meticulously thought out in terms of tempo and push and pull."

Would you be recreating the mix and including the dragons track? "I think the Dragons track will be the last track we play - I've sort of adopted that as my DJ Food anthem almost, 'cos it's the ultimate end track and it's about Food as well, of a sort! I'd like that track to basically be my last track, and when people come to my gigs and they hear that they know, this is it, this is the last one, we're really going to enjoy this one, and then that's it, and the lights go up and everyone goes home happy."

The Now, Listen Again! tour kicks off this month, and if the American tour goes to plan, DK and DJ Food will be gigging through till the end of June, and onwards into summer and a raft of European dates! In between these Food intends to start fitting in work for the new album, so hats off to his productiveness.