For more information on our partnership broadcast with LEAF on Friday [06/03], head over here. For your chance to win a pair of tickets to the whole festival, hit the RSVP button at the top of the page.
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Our collaboration with LEAF – the London Electronic Arts Festival, headed up by Rob Da Bank and Graphite Media – is a testament to techno’s longevity, with a lineup of veterans who each stand as a guarantee of quality and remain on the cutting edge to this day. We have Inigo Kennedy, a producer with over 100 releases under his belt since his debut in 1996, “Evil” Eddie Richards who was one of the very first people to play house and techno in the UK back in the mid eighties, and a Boiler Room debut from Steve Bicknell, the mastermind of London’s greatest techno institution, LOST.
LOST has been going since 1991, throwing notoriously dark and sweaty parties in the best bunkers the capital has to offer, bringing the most important names from Europe and the US to play, and influencing everyone who’s anyone in the UK underground. Just as one example within techno, a discussion about LOST and Steve Bicknell led to the formation of Scottish duo Forward Strategy Group – but the tentacles reach further than that. To explain we called up the man who is the living embodiment of 90s techno’s pervasive influence, the one and only Arthur Smith aka Artwork (pictured below). Aside from his role in the foundations of dubstep, Arthur actually became a key member of the LOST crew, and made some sterling techno records as a result. We’ll let him explain:
JOE MUGGS: So Uncle Arthur, tell us what you did in the techno wars…
ARTWORK: Well it only took one thing to change it all. I was working in a studio, and it turned out this guy in the studio was a friend of Steve [Bicknell]’s, and he said “you should really go along to this night, mate.” It had been going a year or two as LOST at that point I think; they’d been doing Sex parties before that – no, no, not sex parties, but a party called “Sex” – around London, then it changed and they’d started this LOST thing.
I knew that Steve had done a rave tune, so I guess that might’ve been what I expected. So yeah, on this guy’s recommendation, I went along, it was at the Vox in Brixton, it was Steve and a couple of other guys playing – and it completely changed everything I thought about music right there and then. That kind of techno, that took over my entire life after going to that one gig and seeing what they were doing, it really is as simple as that.
So this was early 90s – ’92, ’93 or so… What were you listening to at that point?
Oh I’d been listening to house and techno from early – from very early house really – but then I’d moved on to listening to jungle, drum’n’bass, and I was engineering some drum’n’bass records at this studio in Brixton… then like I say, it got to the middle of the night, the guy said “go down this place”, and everything changed.
It was pretty pounding and relentless, right?
Oh yeah. You’ve got to remember that Steve (pictured above) was one of the first people to ever bring Jeff Mills over, bring Robert Hood over, bring Richie Hawtin over, and and they all played uncompromising stuff. I was there, I think, the first time Jeff Mills played in London. And without that guy bringing those people over, I don’t think the UK techno scene would have been what it became, and I even don’t think the spread into Europe would have been the same. It was a real gateway club.
Can you sum up the LOST atmosphere?
Unbelievable. I went in there and listened to tracks playing where it was a kick, a bassline and some freaky sounds for three or four minutes, then a hi-hat would come in and the club would go ballistic. It was like every single person in the place was zoned in to exactly what was going on in each record: no-one was talking to each other, no-one was distracted, everybody was hanging on every single moment of the music that was being played, and I’d never seen that before.
Did you want to get further involved straight away?
Well because he was a friend of the guy running the studio, at some point after I’d been to a couple of the events, Steve happened to say to him “I’m looking for someone to help me out setting the night up and stuff”. And you’ve got to remember that this wasn’t just a promoter who would just turn up, get music on and not care – Steve was there, I’m not joking, from 7am the day of a LOST do, for the entire day, hanging up his own camo netting that he’d brought in, testing every part of the soundsystem that he’d brought in, checking that everything was dead right, making sure the lights were perfect.
“Why would you want to go down the road to someone who was trying to copy it? There was not much point.”
Right down to what height the decks were: if it was wrong, he’d go down B&Q and come back with a saw and some wood to make sure the decks were the exact right height for a particular guest DJ. He’d spend from seven o’clock on Saturday morning to 11 at night when it opened, setting it up: he was in complete control over how everything looked and worked, and that’s why it was so good. It really felt like walking into a different world when you went in there. So many promoters I’ve seen around the world just don’t care. They go “I’ve got the lineup, names are on the flyer, the punters will come”. This was different. And yeah, he needed a bit of help with that [laughs] so I came in and got involved.
And it must have altered the music that you made yourself…
Yeah absolutely. I started making the Grain records that came out on FatCat just because I hoped they’d be played at LOST. That was it. There was no other club. We went to a few other techno clubs in that time but they weren’t worth going to – there was only one that had the best DJs in the world, the best soundsystems in the world, the best decor in the world, the best lighting in the world, and had Steve Bicknell as a resident too… why would you want to go down the road to someone who was trying to copy it? There was not much point.
I remember Hatcha saying you took him down when he was still basically a kid, and it gave him a different angle on what a club could be – which in turn influenced how dubstep formed…
I think it definitely influenced what was going on. It was garage music, what we were all trying to make at that time, but we had this whole undercurrent of techno. John Kennedy who used to run Big Apple Records used to be the warm-up guy at LOST. We’d all go there all the time, be listening to that stuff and bringing it back to the music we were doing in the garage world. So yeah, I’d say it had a pretty wide reach!
“That filter of who they’re going to have at the club is never, ever about who will sell tickets”
LOST had longevity too – I mean it’s never really stopped! What made it so durable?
When techno is right, when it’s down to its rawest form of being a perfect rhythm track and an amazing sound, there’s nothing better. You cannot beat techno for being the music you want to dance to and not stop. There are different types of course, different strains of how good it is, but the one filter that’s always been important is Steve Bicknell – and Sheree [Bicknell’s partner] who he’s always run it with. They pick the best people to play there, and that filter of who they’re going to have at the club is never, ever about who will sell tickets: they only pick the people they cared about.
It turned out that other people learned that, and went to the club knowing that whatever was going to be on there would be brilliant, purely because they picked that. That’s not common: a lot of clubs go down the road of, after ten years or whatever, going, OK numbers are dwindling, who can we get in just to sell a few more tickets. That never happened with this club: they just put on good music, and trusted people will come.
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For more information on our partnership broadcast with LEAF on Friday [06/03], head over here. For your chance to win a pair of tickets to the whole festival, hit the RSVP button at the top of the page.
