After 24 years, pioneering British hip-hop/electronic dance band Stereo MC’s are finally returning to US stages with a tour and appearance at the Cruel World festival. And while they have been consistently releasing singles and EPs on their own connected label, Stereo MC’s are hoping to finish a new album this year (their last being 2011’s excellent Emperor’s Nightingale).
Inspired by their love of early hip-hop, funk and electronic music, Rob Birch (Rob B) and Nick Hallam formed Stereo MC’s and released their first album, 33-45-78, in 1989. They had their biggest hit with 1992’s Connected, from the album of the same name. In 2015, they started their own label, connected, to release their own music and the work of others.
Over Zoom, Rob B talked about the upcoming tour and the long career of Stereo MC’s.
You’ve toured regularly over the years, but why has it taken you so long to come back to America?
Rob B: That’s a good question. I guess I don’t really know, to be honest. I don’t actually know why we haven’t been there. In all honesty, maybe there wasn’t a demand for us to go back. It just seems that in recent times there’s been interest in getting us to come over, and it seems like it can be worthwhile now. We’ve been touring so much in Europe and England and other parts of the world. That’s the reality of working live. It is very difficult to strike a balance when you’re in a group and you’ve got a crew and there’s a lot of people to travel with. It’s expensive. And I read a lot about artists, and a lot of the time people don’t want to say, ‘Oh, well, it wouldn’t have worked out financially’, because it’s a bit of a negative. But that’s the truth at the end of the day, that if you want to go and play somewhere, you’ve got to at least break even because you just can’t afford to go out on the road and lose money. And that’s possibly another reason; there’s got to be enough gigs for you to do to actually get you out there and pay for the airfares and the hotels and the van hire and stuff like that. So right now, what we’re looking at is hopefully this opening a door in America for us so that we can come out there and do more touring later on in the year.
Given that it’s been quite a long time since you’ve toured America, does that affect anything about your show in terms of your song choices versus playing in England and Europe?
Rob B: To be honest, I don’t think so. No, I don’t think that’s the kind of thing we’d really look at. We pretty much treat audiences equally. We don’t really look at an audience and say, ‘Oh, we are going to just play like this for this crowd’. We just kind of go, ‘This is what we do, this is what we’re about right now, and let’s just take whatever’s out there and make the best of it’. That’s the sort of vibe of what we do.
With your long career, I’m curious about how you decide on a set list. Obviously, there are hits that people expect, but in terms of the album tracks or the other material, what kind of factors go into deciding what to play on a given tour?
Rob B: Well, we’ve got quite a lot of music to choose from over the years, so we try to play a selection that works. We’ve reworked some of the old tracks as well—not so that you don’t recognize them, but just to make them work better on a dance floor. And because we’ve done a lot of music recently, including collaborations with artists in the electronic area of music, we’ve got a selection where we can pull music from 1989 and also find music from five years ago. So we try to make a selection that dips into all our different eras. We’ll be playing music from ‘33, 45, 78’, and then we’ll be playing a collaboration we made with Adam Port from Keinemusik a few years ago. So that’s sort of our process—just to play with energy. We try to come across with an energy.
You mentioned having reworked some older material. Are there any particular older songs that you feel you approach differently or that have really taken on a different life?
Rob B: Well, I guess with the really old material, if you listen to it compared to the modern era, it is very rough-sounding. In those days, recordings were very rough. They were made in a very rough manner. So when we come to doing the older tracks, we just try to look at the bottom end and make the bottom end a bit clearer, because the bottom end in our earlier recordings was very muddy. And I think we just wanted to make some of the older tracks have a bit more pressure in the bottom end, so we re-looked at them and reworked them just so that they’d be able to sit with our more modern tunes a bit easier.
I’ve read in a few interviews where you’ve talked about the limited equipment available when you were starting out and needing to be creative in how you used what you had. Did that mentality shape your overall creative process? Does it continue to impact how you work?
Rob B: Yeah, actually, that really was a beautiful way to work. Not having much is actually a really beautiful way to work because it limits the possibilities, and sometimes you can have so many possibilities that it can just mess with your head. I quite like the idea of not really having too many possibilities. So the main ingredient is the creativity, and having limited access to gear means that your brain power doesn’t have to stress out about too much technology, if you like. And that’s what I loved about the old days. The technology was very untechnical, whereas these days technology is very technical, and I’m not that technical a guy. So sometimes, to do something quite easy can take me hours.
How do you manage that, given that you have newer tools to work with? Do you try to get yourself back into that mindset?
Rob B: I sort of try to have one foot in the old school and one foot in the new school. I still like to use our old samplers, and I still like to use turntables, but at the same time, we use a lot of analog gear. I guess because I come from a few generations back down the line, I sort of need to touch something physical and twiddle a button rather than just looking at the laptop and kind of going like that. I need something big to get my hands on. And I like the dirt and the grit that you get with old gear and the fact that it can be a little bit loose. Sometimes, I find when you’re doing stuff on a laptop and you’re programming stuff and you’re not using so much sampled beats, it all becomes a bit linear and a little bit almost feel-less.
And so I strive to actually loosen things up. I put a bunch of stuff together, and it’s all quantized and all of that, and then I’ll look at it and go, “Let’s just ease that out a bit and sort of push that out of time,” because back in the day, you didn’t look at anything. You just did everything with your ears. There was no screen to look at. And so these days, I look at it and I go, “Well, Yeah, but how does it feel?” It’s all feeling a bit uptight, like you’re pinching a little seed between your fingers. So I just try to push it out of time a bit and see how it feels. Making music in these environments can be a bit of a head fog, and I try to loosen myself up.
Have there ever been older tracks that you’ve looked back on and been surprised by what you were able to accomplish with what you had?
Rob B: Yeah, I’m always surprised by it, but I think that’s part of being young. It’s like when you’re young, you’re so brave and you’ve got nothing to lose at all. I think about it often. I think, “Boy, when I was younger, I didn’t care where I lived.” I’d have lived in any old place as long as I could make music in the living room. It was like I really didn’t give a shit. Whereas now, I’m older, and I’ve got kids and grandkids and all of that. I guess I’ve become a bit conservative. I like to have my spot, and I love to sleep in my own bed. I’m a little bit more choosy about where I live and where I put my roots down.
And I think that’s something I keep trying to rekindle — that youthful feeling of just like you’ve got nothing to lose. In those days, you were so loose and not uptight about shit. And I think that led to just mistakes being made. And that’s when nice things happen in music — the unexpected. You listen to things and think, “How did we do that?” It was all just done on the fly. You were putting your beats down, triggering them as you recorded them, and there was no arranging. Whereas these days, everything’s really thought about. It was all just like, “Is that how you’re going to run the beat and you’re going to trigger it like that?” and just kind of going, “Yeah, I’m just going to fly in the drum fills when I feel like it.”
And it was all done on the fly. And I think that led to you looking back at it going, “How did we do that? How was that made?” And it’s just that it was done on the fly. I try, in a way, to go back to that mindset of just not being too rigid about everything, because that’s what computer music is — it’s all in boxes, and it is like that. I’ve been listening to a bit of Moodman and that music out of Detroit, and I love the way it kind of sounds so loose. It’s like, “Oh, it’s not really working on how many bars of this and how many bars of that.” It just seems to sort of wander along with these funny sounds, very earthy sounds happening. And I really like that aspect of music.
And that’s something I’d like to get back to. I find that in older music we made before computers were about, there used to be a lot more of that feeling of “It just happened.” That’s what I love in music, really.
I was a really big fan of the Emperor’s Nightingale album. I know you’ve done a lot of EPs and singles since then, but I’m curious as to why there hasn’t been an album since?
Rob B: Well, we’ve been running a label for the last 10 years. Well, Nick really runs the label. He really deals with the label, which just organically became an Afro House label. And so that’s been quite a big part of what we’ve been doing. Also, because we’ve been out playing live every year pretty much, it is quite difficult to get a continuous stream of time when you’re just going for the next six months, staying in the studio to make an LP, because that’s kind of what you need. And it’s difficult to find a stretch of time like that.
So we’ve been doing a lot more collaborations with people where you just go, “All right, we’ll do a tune with them,” and, “Oh yeah, it’d be nice to do a tune with them.” And that’s just how it’s worked. But we do have a lot of tracks that are sort of on the belt, just waiting to get finished. I’m kind of hoping that this year we can actually get a body of work finished and maybe put a record out — a record of our own. That’s what I’d really love to do this year.
When you are writing and coming up with musical ideas, is it usually obvious if it is something that would be suitable as a club-oriented single versus an album track?
Rob B: I’m not very good at deciding what’s an album track and what’s a single track. It’s not really something I like to think about. I’m the kind of person who just likes to feel a creative energy, follow that energy, plant the seeds, and develop it to see where it goes. For instance, a lot of the tunes of ours that I really like are album tracks, and some of them are more instrumental tracks. I find it very difficult to listen to my own voice once it’s been recorded. I listen back, and I listen to Connected, and I think, “Oh, I can’t get over how bad my vocals sound,” that kind of thing. But that’s how it is for a lot of vocalists. I think it’s quite difficult to listen to your own voice. It’s lovely doing it, but listening back to it is, for me, a little bit painful.
I think music sort of finds its own path. Some tracks seem great in the beginning, but they don’t always end up going where you hoped they’d go. And then other things, they start as a little idea, and you kind of go, “Dunno what that is.” But then you work on it a bit, and it suddenly turns into something where you think, “Wow, wow. I never thought that would happen.” That’s the magic of music, though, really — it is.
I’m not really into all that sample pack stuff so much, where people just drag out loops that already have the arrangements and it’s almost like you don’t have to really do anything anymore. I don’t really get it because the whole enjoyment for me is the journey of actually doing it. When you reach the goal, it’s like, “Well, is that what it was all about?” It’s like, “No, it’s the journey of getting there that was the beautiful part of it.” So I’m not really into shortcuts that take out the creative shaping of your music. I kind of like to shape it, even though I’m not a very good craftsman. I admit it — I’m not a great instrumentalist or anything like that, but I love doing it. I love making things.
So I guess the fact that I haven’t really mastered technology means I sort of have to stick it together with bits of sellotape and band-aids. And so I’ve got this sort of slightly modern-sounding groove, but it looks like it’s held together with bits of string. So it’s not very perfect. But then perfection isn’t something I strive for.
Are there any particular ways that the label or the various collaborations have influenced you musically?
Rob B: Yeah, definitely. Because there is always a stream of new music coming in by people who are fairly innovative in what they’re doing. And it makes you look at the way you make music and how you vocal a track. Especially with a lot of these Afro tunes, you look at how people are addressing the vocal side of things, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a really different way of looking at how to do a vocal on a track.” And it makes me slightly rethink maybe how I want to come across as a vocalist and also how I want to put beats together.
US Tour Dates
January 23 Philadelphia, PA Union Transfer
January 24 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
January 25 Boston, MA The Sinclair
May 17 Pasadena, CA Cruel World festival
Tickets for all dates are available from www.stereomcs.com
Check out the connected label at https://connected.co.com/
Also be sure to check out our 2015 interview with Stereo MC’s.