Ministry of Sound Radio is very proud to present Nu Disco, a weekly show for all you disco lovers. We’ve got some very special DJs working on rotation to bring you the finest in Disco, Balearica and re-edits that will take you on a smooth journey into your Thursday evening. DJs on rotation will include The Idjut Boys, Future Disco, Cosmodelica, Crazy P, Toby Tobias and The Cosmic Truth.
Nu Disco. Every Thursday 9-11pm on Ministry of Sound Radio.
Latest show: 3rd May featuring The Idjut Boys.
Claremont 56 have tapped UK duo Idjut Boys to compile their fifth anniversary compilation, due for release in June. In his 2010 Label of the Month feature on Claremont 56, Andy Beta summed up their trademark sound thusly: “Almost every release of this British cottage label… imparts a distinct feeling of environment, of ease, of vacationing in beatific climes.” Their already robust catalog includes a number of debuts from obscure groups and artists like Torn Sail, Almunia and Bison, plus numerous records from Holger Czukay, founding member of krautrock legends Can, and label head Paul Murphy (under the name Mudd).
Though they’ve never put out a record on the label, Idjut Boys have long been close to Claremont 56: they have contributed remixes over the years, and released some of Mudd’s early records on their own label, Noid. 5 Years of Claremont 56 shows them picking a few dozen of their favorite tracks from the imprint. They throw in seven exclusive productions as well, including a few of their own edits and a new song from Bison, a five-person ensemble featuring Mudd, Czukay and Salvatore Principato of ’80s post-punk outfit Liquid Liquid. Disc three is a mix by Idjut Boys; the first two are unmixed.
Tracklist
CD1:
01. Bison – Way To La (Day)
02. Fist Of Facts – Fugitive Vesco (Idjut Work Out)
03. Mudd & Pollard – Vincent
04. Mudd & Ahmed Fakroun – Drago (Idjut Edit)
05. Smith & Mudd – Le Suivant
06. Smith & Mudd – Hvala (Version Idjut)
07. Mudd & Pollard – Scaffold
08. Smith & Mudd – Shulme
09. The Popes – Bastards (Idjut Edit)
10. Bison – Mandy (Power Boy Mix)
11. Holger Czukay & U-She – La Premiere/deux (Mudd’s Garden Mix)
12. Almunia – Dos Estrellas
13. Four Hands – Hizou
CD2:
01. Smith & Mudd – The Surveyor
02. Bison – The Traveler Almunia – L&G Psychedelic (Wes Coats Holy Sashito Dub – Idjut Edit)
03. Dog Eat Dog – Rollover Almunia – Travel (felix Dickinson’s Passport Control Mix)
04. Mudd & Pollard – Dub Stavros
05. Smith & Mudd – 24/7
06. Smith & Mudd – Wem (Idjut Edit)
07. Holger Czukay – Music Is A Miracle
08. Torn Sail – Birds (Frankie Valentine’s -air Sign Mix)
CD3: Mixed Live By The Idjut Boys
01. Holger Czukay – Music Is A Miracle
02. Smith & Mudd – Enos
03. Smith & Mudd – The Surveyor
04. Smith & Mudd – Wem (Idjut Edit)
05. Mudd & Pollard – Vincent
06. Mudd & Pollard – Scaffold (Coyote Mix)
07. Mudd & Pollard – Dub Stavros
08. Almunia – Travel (felix Dickinson’s Passport Control Mix)
09. Bison – The TRaveler
10. Almunia – L&G Psychedelic (Wes Coats Holy Sashito Dub – Idjut Edit)
11. Fist Of Facts – Fugitive VEsco (Idjut Work Out)
12. Dog Eat Dog – Rollover
13. Holger Czukay – Good Morning Story
14. Holger Czukay & U-She La Premiere/deux (Mudd’s GarDen Mix)
15. Almunia – Dos Estrellas
16. Torn Sail – Birds (Frankie Valentine’s Air Sign Mix)
Claremont 56 will release 5 Years of Claremont 56: Compiled, Edited and Mixed by the Idjut Boys on June 1st, 2012.
Read the full article on R.A
Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell are the Idjut Boys, lendary proponents of deep disco. The guys prepared this wonderful tree-hour piece of rolling dance music packed of cosmic, dubby and balearic sounds for their recent gig in London @ Bad Passion Project. Check it on the player below. Downloads are on!
IDJUT BOYS-DISCOLIMONE MIX by BAD PASSION PROJECT
Daniel Tyler and Conrad McConnell will release a full-length as Idjut Boys in July. The pair have been DJing and making music together for almost 20 years. In that time they’ve become known as crate-digging purveyors of deep disco and house, while founding several imprints—U-Star, Noid, Discfunction, Cottage—to house their productions and those of others. Although Cellar Door is being billed as their debut album, The Idjuts’ discography does include examples of the form: In 2009 they put-out Desire Lines as Meanderthals (alongside Rune Lindbæk) while releases like Noid Long Player and Life the Shoeing You Deserve have previously collected their material.
The album will be preceded by a one-sided 12-inch on April 16th featuring album track “One for Kenny.”
Idjut Boys – One For Kenny (Extended LP Version) by smalltownsupersound
Idjut Boys One For Kenny news via RA.
Where are you right now?
I’m sitting in my record room at home. I have a studio at home, as well as a studio in Hackney with dan. We’ve been doing nights there as Dan’s better at getting up in the morning.
We’ve actually been talking on the phone all day because we’re doing a mix for Prins Thomas and we’ve got about (god I’m scared to think) maybe an hour and a half us doing our Lee Scratch Perry impersonation. We’ve both been working from home and we need to be able to edit it down to fit on a 12” so I’ve been calling him up and saying things like “this bit from 48 to 48 ½ minutes is really great”.
Do you normally work like that?
Not always. We like our equipment and we’re grumpy old fuckers, so we need our slippers there and our Horlicks warm. A computer is more like a tape recorder to us. We try to do most things from box and through the desk. We get things rolling like that and then mix things live.
Fuck knows what comes out. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s awful. We just try to get through it.
So would you say a major strength is being able to self edit?
Yeah. You can do that really well first thing in the morning, but late at night, especially if you’ve had a beer and some kind of “relaxant” vibes, then it all sounds brilliant. Especially if you turn the bass up.
It’s amazing what you can achieve when you think you’re achieving nothing, and vice versa is totally true. You can think you’ve done something brilliant by just adding one new thing and you get home and just think “this is awful”.
Do you think that if you regiment yourself to set times, rather than just working when you’re inspired, you’re more likely to come up with something worthwhile?
In a perfect world we’d be in the late 70’s and we’d be in a studio paid for by a label with an engineer and tape ops. When you’re doing everything yourself there is so much technical stuff that takes up so much of your head, especially if you’re a small brained man like myself, that while you’re thinking about stuff like the sound of the hi hat you can’t be the producer or the writer because you’re actually being the engineer. Even though we’ve got amazing speakers in our studio, I need to go home and listen to things through my computer or on a walkman to get an actual picture of what it is we’re doing.
I can’t have too many heads if you get what I mean.
So if the option was available to you, would you just exist as the artist / producer and have somebody else doing the engineering for you. Or would you rather maintain that degree of control over your work?
I think if you were working with somebody who intrinsically knew what you were talking about, then having them there would be a really fabulous thing.
With me and Dan we get to a point we’re you don’t just want to try your idea out. You actually want to discuss it and having the ability to stop and discuss and then work out a way of making what you want happen is kind of groovy.
There’s an amazing story about Kate Bush where she supposedly sacked something like 11 engineers in a row because she wanted to do a specific thing and they kept on saying it couldn’t be done, and the guy who got the job didn’t have anything like the CV of the other guys, but he just said “yeah, we could try this”. I’d love to work with engineers, but you do enjoy being in charge of everything you do, although you can get caught up in the satisfaction of creating a bloody 4 on 4 kick drum or a simple hi hat pattern and ignore the fact that it’s actually really irrelevant.
Are you referring to the “artistic” point of the track?
Well yeah, the feel I guess. We’ve just done an album for a lovely man in Norway (Smalltown Supersound). One of the tracks on the albums changed quite a bit from the Demo we sent. He still can’t get over the demo and he’s telling us the new version we sent since is not as good. We’re like “fuck off mate, it’s 3 times as good” but he’s saying it isn’t. It may be sonically better, but it doesn’t have that thing that he’s heard in the Demo. We can’t get that back. We’ve got that mix and we’ve tried to do it again, but we can’t because we do it live and we don’t have an SSl, so it doesn’t record our movements. You just capture the moment.
Moving on to your history, your biography says that you and Dan met in Cambridge. What were you doing in Cambridge, as you’re originally from Sunderland?
I moved to Cambridge because my mate was at Waterbridge Army Barracks and there was nothing happening in Sunderland and Newcastle music wise.
What year was this?
The mid eighties.
My mate just said “it’s really cool there”, so I went. He was corporal PT instructor and I lived with him on the Barracks for the first 3 weeks, which was quite amusing. We ended up going to America, supposedly for 3 weeks, and stayed 7 months.
Was there much of a “scene” in Cambridge at that time?
Yeah, there was a great scene. When I first got there, there was nothing for me, I was just checking it out. Then around maybe 86/87 I started find out about these parties in grain barns and stuff like that, and I started going out to those.
The scene itself was like Hip Hop, but not with Hip Hop music. People were playing Disco Breaks and soul records. You’d hear stuff like Soul2Soul, Chicago Music, New York Music and Disco Music… but mixed up. It was fucking brilliant! I don’t know when it was that everybody moved from studios to bedrooms, but I think that was when everything went South.
Through the people I started meeting at these parties I met Dan and his circle of friends. A few years later me and another mate moved to London where Dan was already living. Then Dan moved in with us.
Was that the start of the U-Star parties?
Yeah. Basically there was a guy living below our flat and we used to beat him every day, because we had turntables. We used to beat him with “4/4 Justice”! He ended up coming upstairs and saying “If you give me a break one weekend I’ll give you a couple of days in a studio”. He was an A&R man for Hollywood records.
We were true to our word and so was he. We got 2 days in a place called Eastcote studios in West London which was an amazing place. I wish I’d know at the time, but was owned by a guy called Size B Held, who was a fucking monster producer man. You need to check him out. So we got 2 days in this studio, with one of the engineers from there, and we made the Idjut Boys Ep. We went straight to the ministry and Francois played it twice! This was around 1991 or 1992.
Do you think your musical tastes have changed in the time since you did your U-Star parties and the present day?
I’d say it’s changed, but also I’d say I’ve been educated and I think if you’re interested in music then that’s something that continually happens.
Fuck me, I thought I knew something and then you realise that the more you know, the more you realise that you haven’t got a clue.
Do you play much new music?
Yeah, I try to play as much new music as I can. As much as I think that a re-edit is great if it’s done right, I try to find new music. People just doing it, that’s what excites me the most. I’m an old git and Disco music has been part of my life for more than half of it, so I know all of those records really well and what excites me is what people are doing without that knowledge. I hear producers like Todd Terje and I just think “wow, what a brilliantly talented young man” and I really hope he gets to work with some serious people, because back in the day (if I can use that ridiculous term) when there was actually money from major labels supporting dance music, he would have got to work with some great Artists. That stuff he did with Jose Gonzalez (Killing for Love) was like “Wow”, seriously “Fucking wow”. I just think there’s definitely people now who totally have it and are giving it up and that list is endless. I know it’s all changing and we have to accept that and move on, but you can’t forget what’s good and new isn’t necessarily always good.
“Good” is good.
It’s fair to say that re-edits are experiencing a bit of a backlash at the moment. There is definitely a style of edit that follows a formula now. Would you say that those edits are an extension of what you’ve been doing, or do you regard them as something different?
There’s been people who’ve edited a lot of records that don’t need editing, but a good job is a good job, regardless of whether you just add a kick drum or whether you’ve created an entire track around it.
It’s weird because I’m totally guilty as charged, which I accept, but with the noid thing we were taking stuff from records that couldn’t get played. We were taking the moment that worked, which was kind of the original thing of “Just extend the break”, or “Just grab the bit that worked”. It was fun. It was the stuff that we played out. We did it to use in our sets. We still continue to make that, but Dan and I made a decision a while ago that , while it is all good and I’ll still continue to make edits that I play out, we wont make them available for sale because we don’t need to. Well, maybe we need to for our wallets, but I’d rather spend my time making sure my “Tsh” was right with my “Boom“ , because then it’s my “Tsh” and my “Boom” and people from Sony, who we have our publishing deal with, will collect money for me for that. It’s a slow creeping thing on my mind that as more and more of the industry that I’ve been involved with for most of my life is disappearing I just think that there actually needs to be something left for the people who create this stuff.
We need independent people making music, otherwise Simon Cowell will take it over.
Are you aware that Simon Cowell is allegedly starting a DJ Idol competition?
WHAAAAAT?
Oh my god. First it’s laptop DJs using some program, god knows what it’s called, to mix records. Now this?
I was actually at a party the other day watching somebody DJ and found myself saying “hey mate, you managed to mix that track without using your headphones. How is that fucking possible”. Oh my god.
For me, I thought it was all about being into music, bringing a selection of your stash to a party and delivering it to those people who were standing in front of you, and being together and involved and having some kind of communication, but obviously I was way off.
What are your thoughts on digital only Labels?
It’s that thing called change. For me it’s kind of weird, but having DJ’d in places where record shops literally don’t exist, I think it’s great.
What I think is kind of messed up maybe, and this is only because I make records and I want my pound of flesh, is that they have the technology to watermark stuff and to make things safe and there should be a fair crack of the whip for the person who actually made it, not just to people who have enabled some kind of technological system to get it out to people really cheaply. In fact they should get the small part of the portion and the artist should get the large one. It doesn’t seem to be that way right now and there doesn’t seem to be any way that you get your publishing through these kind of things. I agree with making music accessible and reasonably economical for people to buy. I think that’s essential. But it still needs to filter through to the artist in some kind of fair way. It’s the same as in the bad old days with the big record companies, where the artist would get fuck all and the record company would get everything. It just doesn’t taste right.
It’s a weird thing because it’s super easy to do it, which is great, but I think there needs to be some kind of filter on the releases. Labels used to be run by people who knew what was going on in an independent specialist way. They could recognise something they were really into and get behind it, and push it to the people who were into that. A family affair type of thing. It’s quite disparate now. It’s very democratic, but as a record buyer I can’t spend that much time at my computer finding digital only released music. I have a finite time limit on what I can endure that way, whereas I can spend all day in a record shop.
Do you go record shopping very often anymore?
As much as I can. I mainly buy old music now. I’m a secondhand hound. As I said before, you think you know something, but you’re just fooling yourself. I’m finding old music which is inspirational to me, so I love the thought of some 17 year old finding inspiration from someone like Farley from 1987. That’s just brilliant and natural. I’d rather they were finding from someone like Farley rather than Jam & Spoon. No offence to Jam & Spoon, but I find Farley way more exciting.
You’ve mentioned Todd Terje, are there any other new producers you could mention who you’re particularly into at the moment?
There’s loads of people who are great at the moment. Off the top off my head, a guy from Italy called Mushroom Project. My neighbour and good friend Paul (Mudd) who does all the Claremont 56 stuff – I really like that. I like pretty much all the Norwegian tackle – On their day they can all deliver. I really like old stalwarts like Maurice Fulton who you think you have pinned down and then they go and surprise you. He did that stuff recently for Mim Suleiman on Running back. It sounds really African, but I think she’s from Sheffield. It’s utterly stunning. Super amazing.
Finally, what’s in the immediate and more distant future for the Idjut Boys?
We’ve got the album for Smalltown Supersound which is out this summer. We’re currently trying to work some of the tracks into 12” versions of the tracks as we’ve made the album specifically for vinyl. 4 tracks as side. We’ve figured that we might as well do what the fuck we want for it. We’ve also just done a mix of a track called riding the storm by a Japanese band called Cromagnon, which we were really into when it came out. And we’re finishing off a mix we did for Prins Thomas. We went out and played with him again recently, he such a good old lad. It’s a thing for his international label, he’s asked us to do the remix as it reminds him of old house music, so we’re trying to give him a bit of Farley from Hackney. We plan to do some more stuff with our label too, but the album has taken up so much time recently. We’re at the point now though that any release really has to excite us, because we’ve heard so much good music. If it doesn’t do that, then we’d rather just find something to watch on TV.
Idjut Boys interview via Tourist-Mag.