Deep, Down and Dirty with the Stereo MC’s

(originally published August 10, 2001, TheVIEWmagazine.com, revised 10-6-17)

story by Josh Humble, photo by Steve Double

After a seven-year hiatus from the public eye, The Stereo MC’s are back with a vengeance, showing the world the deep down and dirty side of life. Stereo MC’s, led by Rob Birch and music partner Nick ‘The Head’ Hallam, elevated our minds and got us connected, but they’re on a renewed mission — both personally and professionally — to produce the familiar mind-boggling integration of sonic loops, rhythms, melodies and trippy rhymes that established their formidable reputation.

Josh Humble: Hey Rob, what are you guys up to?

Rob Birch: We’re out there playing and we’ve got a new album out, and we’re just starting to look at doing another one. We’re doing the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, and then we’ve got some festivals in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. We’ve already done a lot of festivals in England.

JH: You’ve been known to put on an astounding live show — I’m sure that’s in part due to your use of acoustic sounding drum loops and samples.

RB: Well we’re just into playing, you know. We just try to take what we do live, and up-it a couple of gears from what’s on the record. There’s no way you can really get around the fact that our music is made out of samples. So we don’t try to change that. We don’t want bass players to come and play our bass lines; we just augment what we already are and make it live.

JH: The hip-hop industry seems to have moved away from that grooving acoustic sound, to where you still use it in your samples.

RB: We’ve never tried to make it out that we’re a hip-hop group; that’s not what we are. We’ve been inspired by a lot of early hip-hop music. It gave us a great sense of energy, and I think it really helped us to form our own path of where we wanted to go with our own music. Commercial hip-hop, these days, very much follows a formula and we try not to follow too much of a formula. I think that when music gets too much financial involvement, it tends to slow down its creative progress. I think there’s still a lot of interesting stuff on the left-field independent labels. I look back at some of them funk groups from the seventies and I think, “Oh, they used to make really rough-sounding records.” Then suddenly, in the eighties, they all went synthetic. It seems to me like they really lost their identity and their direction. For us, it’s important to make it sound dirty and rough, and we can use the modern technology to our advantage by keeping it rough and ready. The possibilities within this technology is quite incredible, and as long as you put something dirty in there, it’s still going to be dirty — and we love it like that.

JH: What inspired your style of music?

RB: My partner, Nick, used to get a lot of music and he introduced me to a lot of electro stuff from Yello and Kraftwerk – the more noisy stuff that you were getting in Europe. It was like a whole new music scene to be involved in; it just made you want to forget everything you ever learned about music. In those days, nobody knew what a sampler was. We just had a reel-to-reel and a belt-driven turntable with a cassette deck on it and a radio. You’d make scratching noises on the tape, passing it over the heads and you’d record bits of drum beats onto the recording machine, five seconds at a time. We didn’t have money to buy samplers and it wasn’t easy for us to do that. So you kind of learned a lot about rhythm and the feel of it, because you had to learn the hard way. For us, in those days, it was like music that had never been on the planet before. It’s like the first time you heard Public Enemy — there had never been a sound like that on planet earth before and it was very exciting.

JH: Most American rappers rap about their street and the life. Where’s your street?

RB: I’d say it’s ‘The Frontline’ street. We just talk about where we live and where we work and what we see when we work. It’s what life’s about to us. To me, that’s all you can talk about with your music. We wouldn’t feel right talking about things we didn’t know about. For a while, in Europe, a lot of people were copying gangsta rap and really, it was just totally false because it just wasn’t their lifestyle. You’d even see guys in Germany, walking around with fake guns (laughter). They wanted so hard to imitate a lifestyle they weren’t actually living.

JH: You’ve been hailed as ‘the kings of British rap’. What do you think of that?

RB: Honestly, I’ve got to say something about that; that is total bullocks. That is not what we are. You know, there’s a lot of people in England who are straight-up rap groups and they’re good. I don’t think people in England think of us as a rap group, and that’s not how we want to be perceived; we just want to make our own sound.

JH: You mention of a whole genre of British rappers. Tell me more about them vs American gangsta rap.

RB: I think they’re all talking about their own environment and they’re speaking in their own tongue. They’re not talking like American rappers would talk; they’re really coming from the perspective of people who live in England. And they’re talking in voices that originate from here, which often comes from Jamaica and the West Indies.

JH: The Stereo MC’s went through a ’blank’ era, in terms of producing their own albums; what was going on during that time period?

RB: People say, “Ah, you took a long break.” We were working on music all of the time; we didn’t take a long break. How would we be able to do mixes? We’ve done remixes for everyone from Tricky to Madonna — stuff that we were into. We didn’t just do any old mix. When we finished touring Connected, we had people offering us stupid amounts of money to do a remix — I mean stupid, man. We did mixes we wanted to do and we kept working on music, constantly.

JH: What happened with yourself during that time?

RB: I think that if you get too deeply into the business, it can remove you from where your soul is, and once you loose that, you’re kind of dead. We just toured for so long, and when you’re touring, you come into contact with a lot of ideas and a lot of different ways of living. We did it for two years, pretty much non-stop. And when you get home, you realize that you’re a bit of a self-made outcast. You get lost in it all, and I think for me, I just lost my way. I thought religion would sort me out, but I soon realized that it wasn’t the right thing for me. I think I forgot that music is my religion. Luckily, I had strong friends and family around me. My family wasn’t really strictly religious, but they just tried to give me a rough idea of what was wrong or right and stuff about God, you know. They just made me understand, somehow. I got married in 1998 and I got a bit more serious about my own life. I know this all sounds a bit ’artsy-fartsy,’ but it is a bit freaky, the way you can almost not notice getting too deeply into the business. You end up doing so much stuff which has got nothing to do with making music. The only reason you got into doing it was because you love making music. That’s the only reason I used to wash dishes; that’s the only reason I used to clean toilets — I mean, it’s the only reason I used to do demolition jobs and drive po#$@* vans for po$#@* clothes firms, and it’s the only reason I did any po#$@* thing in my life, was so I could afford to do music. So at the end of the day, you’ve got to still keep in touch with making music.

After remixing for and working with the likes of U2 and Madonna, as well as their recent mix album, released in early 2000, under the K7 label’s DJ Kicks series, The Stereo MC’s are definitely back with Deep Down And Dirty, which can be picked up at your local record store or by visiting Amazon.com, by clicking on the album cover(s), below. The album is a delightful mix of funk, soul and acoustic grooves, not as commonly heard of in today’s groove music.

“You know, there’s a lot of people in England who are straight-up rap groups and they’re good. I don’t think people in England think of us as a rap group, and that’s not how we want to be perceived; we just want to make our own sound…”
—Rob Birch