Longterm fans of drum n’ bass heavyweight Andy C, arguably one of the genre’s most polished, powerful and consistent DJ veterans, received a different kind of surprise from his "Haunting" single this year. He might be enjoying, in his own words, some of “the most defining, amazing moments of my DJ career,” after more than 20 years in the game. However, "Haunting" definitely showcases a different side of his musical personality that has been percolating in recent years.
While the tune’s drop is a characteristic tearout slice of Dn'B savagery, the harmonic chords and arpeggio that inhabit the breakdown are emotive and euphoric enough to be lifted straight off a trance record. For a man known for his particularly brutal approach to his DJ sets, "Haunting" represents somewhat of a new creative direction. It’s an evolution that has also been showcased to full effect on his new Nightlife 6 mix. It’s been extended into a three-disc format for the first time, and importantly, he’s also taken the opportunity to stretch his legs creatively across the extended format; something evident on the second ‘Green Mix’ in particular. It’s brimming with more mellow moments, softer vocal cuts, as well as a fair swag of expertly timed euphoric breakdowns.
Andy C tells Pulse that it’s a reflection of how at this later stage of his career, he’s being granted the luxury of expressing his versatility more via the longer sets he’s playing; and it’s a creative side that we’ll likely see him indulging more in the future. Pulse finds out more…
How’s your DJ schedule at the moment? We have a RAM Records at fabric, then we’ll have the RAM Records Christmas party, and then we’re in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and then Dubai. And then back for New Years, so it’s all on the go. Nightlife 6 is finally out now, so I’m going to be focusing on the DJing for the rest of the year.
I imagine a massive three-disc project like that would have taken a lot of work? The project started to come together back in April and May. It’s a long process, and we kept it under wraps for a while. We’ve been doing the Nightlife series for ten years, and I wanted to get to the right point where it really felt like I wanted to do another one. And all of a sudden, I was so inundated by amazing tracks that I decided to turn the compilation into three mixes. And there was the usual absolute chaos in terms of the guys in the office getting the whole thing together, licensing all the tracks and so forth. It’s a really big job, so I’m really glad that it’s finished. And the response to it so far has been phenomenal, I couldn’t be happier. It’s nice to have something out there, something exciting to shout about, to spread the word of drum n’ bass.
Like you say, it’s not like you put out a Nightlife release annually. What were the factors that convinced you the time was right to do another one? You’re always dictated by the music. I’m not going to do a Nightlife if there’s no good music out there. I kind of felt in April that I had enough in my bag then, and I knew what was coming later in the year in terms of other artist projects and stuff. So it felt like the right time, it felt like three years had gone by and there was a lot of tunes to express; and I also wanted to put a few old tunes on this one. And once you get that vibe for it, it takes over and becomes all-consuming. I basically spent the whole summer getting the tracklisting right.
The tracklist is pretty crazy. There’s over 80 singles packaged with the release? There’s 80 individual tracks bundled with the release, but the actual mix encompasses 110 tracks. We were licensing tracks right up until the last minute, and I was pretty much well past my deadline. But I was calling up the office and trying to get them to license new tracks in because, you know, I’m a DJ and I always want the latest and greatest. I would have done more, I would have done 210 tracks if I could have, but the powers that be stopped me. You do have to stop somewhere though. The irony was that as soon as I’d finished it, my inbox was inundated with brand new tunes. But that’s the beauty of it too.
But it really feels that drum n’ bass is on an upward curve. It’s been an incredibly positive year, with the festivals and the club shows. We’ve done our biggest ever RAM shows, RAM takeovers of festival stages, played to 8,000 people at Glastonbury, the American tours. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I know that music is cyclical, but it really feels that Dn’B is on an upward path right now. I really wanted to cap the end of the year with a project where I could look back at 2013 and what a great year it was, and going into 2014 taking it higher hopefully.
Drum n’ bass probably is one of the most consistent genres across the whole of dance music, and it matured quite a while ago. In my experience in the scene, there’s been a lot of fads come and go very quickly, while drum n’ bass has been one of the constants. There’s something unique about the tone, the vibe, the energy. This year, not only has there been a new influx of people who are inspired by the music that comes around, but you’ve also had a resurgence of the people that may have gotten into it a few years ago, and drifted away for whatever reason, but then they’ve turned around and gone, ‘you know what, I actually really bloody like that.’ For me, looking out on the crowds, at the different festivals and the different countries I’ve been to, it’s been noticeably larger this year. So that’s my theory; you’ve got your old people coming back to it, and you’ve got your new people coming into it. And it’s all swelling together.
Doing a project as broad as Nightlife 6 would have been a great chance to showcase the versatility of drum n’ bass. I’d say this is one of the really defining characteristics of the genre, though not necessarily one that people would always associate with it. It’s massively versatile. The good thing about Nightlife 6 is although there’s three different mixes, and the link with my style of DJing across them, they’re each different in their nature. If you look further afield in our genre, there’s people doing all sorts of stuff. The most beautiful and epic stuff, to the mellow stuff, across to the hard-as-nails driller stuff, and everything in-between. There’s something in there that everybody can find to have an affinity with in drum n’ bass.
I’ve always known you as a DJ that’s really worked with that versatility, but at the same time, you’ve always brought a particularly hard, brutal energy to your performances, it’s something that has defined your approach as a DJ. Listening to the different mixes on Nightlife 6 though, you’ve really opened it up in the past few years to stuff with perhaps a little more melody and other similar elements. That’s particularly true with the ‘Green Mix.’ The simple fact of the matter is I’ve been doing a lot of longer sets. Like I’ve always said, I love every single part of our music. If I’m at home having a mix, I’ll mix in all of it. If I’m in the studio, I sometimes can be mixing for six hours own my own, just enjoying the music. So it’s a beautiful thing that in recent years I’ve been able to express myself in the club environment, where I’ve been able to play the longer sets and show people what else I’m about, because you can only do so much in one hour. Don’t get me wrong, you can really smash it out and have a party, but there’s not a lot of room for expression. Because of the way that I DJ, I might need a few tunes to get from one place to another, and I want to go on a journey, I don’t want to just play one tune out of the blue for no reason. There’s got to be a rhyme and a reason for why I get somewhere. But I’ve been doing a tour of four-hour sets for the past two months, and I’ve been doing the occasional six-hour set, and they really afford you the ability to express yourself more. So that’s why on Nightlife 6 I decided to showcase that side. On previous Nightlife releases, I’ve maybe had sections where I showcased that side in amongst a one-hour mix, but this time I wanted to use a whole mix to express that side. But then you’ve also got the ‘Blue Mix,’ which is very techy and hard as nails. That’s not me broadening my sound, it’s just a matter of me showing who I am in my heart.
Maybe now I’m afforded the opportunity to express that as I grow older, as the promoters are up for letting me play for longer. And maybe that is part of growing into DJing. You have more experienced, and the confidence to wander off for half an hour. When you’re younger, you’re not that confident to express yourself, to take half an hour to go super mellow, or to go super old school. I played a longer set last week, and I think I played tracks from ‘91 to ‘93 for 25 minutes. That’s really cool, and the crowd went with it because it was in the context of a longer set, and you have the confidence to go there because you know you can dive in, pull it back out and then come back on yourself. That’s a confidence of expression thing. You don’t have as much to prove in terms of playing the latest and greatest. When you’re starting out, you only want to play the most upfront, uncompromising drum n’ bass, because you feel you have to prove a point.
Your single "Haunting" is definitely a strong example of that. You could even say it has really strong elements of trance in there; and that’s coming from a trance fan. I’m really glad that people liked that tune, a big cross-section of people talked to me about it. And it’s because I do feel the emotion in music. I was on a drive to Barcelona between gigs late last year, and I just wrote it on my laptop then. They must have wondered what they hell I was up to, I had my headphones on and my eyes shut, blissing out on the music, chord progression and the arpeggio line. It was just really special, and it kind of hung around on my laptop for a while, and I was like, I really want to turn this into a tune. It drops with some pretty uncompromising Dn’B – but I like to think that it gets the emotions going. My favourite parts are the breakdowns and the intro, there’s just something special about it. I’m always working on new tunes, so hopefully that’s an avenue that I’ll explore further in the future.
The fact that you were breaking to a degree from what people expected from you, did you feel any apprehension at all? I did actually feel apprehension playing it the first few times. I was road-testing a few different versions to get it right, and like you say it does a bit of a trance element to, in the breakdown. But for me, there’s a natural apprehension that comes in playing any of my new stuff. When one of my artists on RAM Records sends me a demo, I’ve got no apprehension whatsoever to play it in a club. But when it’s your own music, for some reason, even though nobody knows what it is, you just assume the audience knows it’s yours [laughs]. But with Haunting, I was very happy with the final result. It grew throughout the year, and I was seeing the response more and more.