NU NEWS FEATURE - BYRD IS THE WORD

BYRD IS THE WORD

SINCE 1996 Hospital Records have been responsible for showcasing some of the most exciting artists in Drum and bass. The year 2000 saw none other than Danny Byrd join the label producing an array of high-energy anthems resulting in his debut album Supersized in 2008 and the rest is history.

Now embarking on his third studio album the Byrdman of Bath is back on the road and hits Northampton in October playing Subrockerz at the Roadmender alongside Shy Fx and Mistajam. Many DJs have passed through Northampton without leaving a trace but be prepared for a firm Byrd shaped imprint as he redefines the meaning of energetic.

I caught up with Danny, discussing his year so far and the highly anticipated forthcoming album.

How’s 2012 been treating you so far?

It’s been good so far. It’s been lots of work, I’ve been working on my third album basically. The first six months of the year I took off from DJing. That was a first for me! I’ve never taken six months off before to just concentrate on studio work. It was nice but a bit strange at the same time. You see everybody else going off and doing gigs on a Friday and Saturday night and you’re just stuck in. It’s weird, you get to re connect with your old mates at the weekend, people you wouldn’t normally see because you’re on the road. That was a weird thing but a good thing as well at the beginning of the year. Now I’m back on the road and just trying to finish this album off at the moment so it’s a lot of stress. It always goes like this. There’ll be one year where you’re really putting in the work, the next year you’re reaping the rewards of your hard work and then you’ve got to go back to it all again! (laughs) It’s a constant cycle, you ask any musician! That’s why you get an album every two years. One year to write it, the next year to tour it and then the next year to write again. It never ends really!

I was going to ask you about the gap you’ve taken out of DJing. So the new album was the primary reason for your absence behind the decks then!

Yeah I just needed a break really from DJing and wanted to get my head down and really focus on music production.  In hindsight it was a good thing but I don’t think I’d do it again, not for a few years now. There’s something about when you’re DJing. You can test tunes out. You feel like you’re a bit more in the hot seat. You’re in the scene, in the pulse. In a good way it’s made the music a little bit different and I’ve experimented and done some different things. You make tunes with a DJ mind set sometimes and that’s a good thing and a bad thing. Hopefully taking this time off but also finishing the album with being back on the road gives it a good mixture of the two.

How would you describe the Drum and bass you make to people that haven’t heard your work before?

My style I’d say is party style drum and bass. My DJ sets are high energy and lots of fun. What I try to do is do lots of little bootlegs for when I’m playing out, like a well known tune. I’ve got a Jay-Z and Kanye bootleg of the Paris tune. I’ve done little things like that but I don’t give them to anyone else, I just keep them for myself. They’re perfect for playing at a student event where you may have people there who haven’t heard the underground tunes in Drum and bass but they’ll recognise that tune. It’s almost like trying to convert people to what you’re doing and it’s also a bit of fun. I often play on a lot of line-ups like the big Hospitality nights where they’ll be eight Hospital DJs and we’re all essentially playing the same stuff, so it’s good to have these little fun party tricks in your set to make it a little bit more original. So I’d say like fun party and yeah energetic! (laughs)

Your new single Blaze The Fire (Rah!) featuring General Levy came out on the 24^th September. It carries many of the now trademark Danny Byrd sounds but it’s also considerably different to a lot of your previous releases. What was your influence behind the new track?

My thing has always been about variety. On all my albums I’ve had different sounding tunes. I’ve put different influences in. Originally I got the General Levy vocals and I was going to do a jungle track with it but I felt like that was too similar to stuff that I’d done in the past like Shock Out. Basically I had the vocals first so I was working the track out and then I thought oh let me try and move the kick and snare to the right or left and come up with a more dancehall style beat and not a standard Drum and bass beat. I wanted to do something as if Major Lazer was making Drum and bass and just kind of challenge things. I’m glad we went with that as the first single because there’d be nothing worse than releasing something that’s been done before. Sometimes people want to hear the same stuff from you but it’s good to kind of divide opinion sometimes as well and shake things up.

How did the collaboration with General Levy come about?

I approached him because I had done a bootleg of his original tune Incredible and that was getting a lot of love on the radio and stuff. Again that was just one of those tunes I made to play out. Hospital tried to license it but in the end we couldn’t do it so I thought right okay if we can’t license it why not make an original tune with him? He lives in London and I knew someone who had his number, it was as simple as that really! It was just trying to build on that bootleg that never came out (laughs) and do an original tune. No one has really heard of him in the Jungle scene since that tune. He’s done the odd thing but no one’s heard him on a drum and bass track for years.

So have you got a release date for your forthcoming third album?

It should be at some point within the first six months of next year. It depends how quickly I can get it done! (laughs) Hospital will probably want it within the first half/ first quarter of next year but I’ll probably try and push the deadline a bit further as I always do and somewhere we’ll meet in the middle! (laughs)

Is there a specific style to your new album? You mentioned you liked to keep your style varied on each one. Any particular theme to it?

It’s a bit more garage-y. There’s some Garage on there. There’s a little bit more of a UK Urban feel to it. The last one, Rave Digger was kind of rave-y. This one’s kind of a bit more Urban. There’s more Black music influence on this one. I’ve been working with other kind of emcees and people in the Grime scene. It’s still me and I’ve still got my kind of electro-y sounding tunes. It’s all about mixture. In the same way as Rave Digger. Although it was Rave influenced it wasn’t 100% all Rave tunes on there at the same time. This one gives a little hint to the Garage scene and Urban scene. I wish I could have the balls to do an album like that where it was all one concept but I always find I want to write many different styles and it kind of ends up kind of having a theme, but it’s not overall that concept.

The Danny Byrd trademark as mentioned earlier is present as ever despite the influences behind a tune then.

Yeah.

By now you are no stranger to writing an album. Do you feel the same pressure today as you did when you were writing your debut Supersized?

Yeah it’s always the same pressure really. It goes in stages. You never write a big tune and then it’s finished and you wonder if it’s a big tune. They all start off in a sketch form, in a very rough form. Then I’ll play those to Hospital and they’ll go right good work on that one, leave that one because that one’s not strong but work on this one these are good ideas and they develop from there. It’s like a kind of evolution process that alleviates the pressure in a way. The pressure is just trying to get it finished under the deadlines and amongst all the DJing. I push myself quite hard. When a tune comes out I’m genuinely happy with it because it’s gone through many stages of critique either by me or Hospital. I’ve got a good team around me. On a third album it is kind of harder. You don’t run out of ideas but you’ve already done stuff that you wanted to do in the past. Hence with the General Levy track I didn’t want to do a Jungle tune with it because that’s too obvious. There are so many different styles of music that can be incorporated into Drum and bass. There’s a track that I’m working on for the new album that’s kind of Hip-hop influenced but it’s more influenced by the southern Trap sort of music that’s going on now. There are so many influences you can include in music. If you run out of ideas it just means you’re not listening to enough outside influences.

How do you approach making a tune?

Get up. Make a cup of tea. (laughs) I use Logic on an IMac. I’m all in the box. I’m all software. I don’t think I’d ever change to a hardware set up. As tempting as it is when you see all these big mixing desks, it’s hard to get mixes as loud in the hardware domain. You can get stuff a lot louder in the software. I think everybody’s moved to software, even the die-hard hardware people. Also the turnaround in music is a lot quicker and people want music quicker. Music is cheaper to produce and it’s easier to consume which means you need to be more prolific. You need to write quicker and software allows you to do that. I generally start in a number of different ways. Sometimes I might start off with an acapella and try and write around that. When I’ve got the basis of the track I might get rid of the acapella and write an original vocal around it. I find it quite hard to write an instrumental and then just get a vocal on it. You need something there to begin with sometimes. Sometimes it’ll just start with a beat. So I’ll just start layering chords and a bass line. It never really works the same way twice. I know that most of the times when you want to bang your head against the wall that’s when the break through comes and the bass line works or you do something different and it all starts to work. You’ve just got to sit there and hit buttons really! I know that’s not very useful but you’ve just got to stick with it.

It comes back to the pressure thing. Yeah you can feel the pressure but all you’ve got to do is sit down there and hit buttons and something will happen.

The problem I find now is… I never used to have this problem but I was talking to the Brookes Brothers and they have the same thing as well now. You’ll find you write a tune in different stages. You’ll have the drop but then you’ll work on the intro kind of separately to that. Then you have to mix the intro with the drop and the levels between the intro are different with drop. It’s crazy! I find myself specifically mixing down an intro and then trying to join that to a drop. Those are the little things you need to do to keep up with the modern production.

You smashed Global Gathering this year! How was that for you? It was amazing our side of the decks.

Oh wicked. Yeah Global was good fun. I think I played quite late this year. Global is always wicked. Global is a club atmosphere in a festival if that makes sense? People know the tunes and that’s quite refreshing because a lot of festivals you play at they won’t know certain tunes so you can’t play certain things. You can go a little bit deeper at Global. You just generally feel a bit more appreciated there too. I always remember you’ll hear the roar on drops of tunes if it goes down well. You don’t always hear that at festivals but generally I have my monitor so loud I can’t tell anyway! (laughs)

Do you have a planned set list for events like Global or do you mainly improvise your tune selection based on the crowd?

It’s always a mixture. I always kind of know what I’m going to be playing for like the first ten/ fifteen minutes because that’s where you need to be on the ball. It gets your confidence up if you know what you’re doing. If you go in totally unprepared it’s going to be a total mess. There are points where you freestyle it and some mixes might sound terrible. Others might work and you’ll go ahh I’ll remember that! I’ll remember that for next time and they get cemented into the set. It kind of works like that. The set just changes with the kind of music that’s around really. So if there’s a lot of good music around then the set will change a lot and if there’s not then it will stay the same. I do find it hard to find good Drum and bass that represents what I want to give to people. You can’t just play a set of the newest tunes because that wouldn’t wholly represent me. That’s why I do little sections or bootlegs and stuff like that. There are always some good tunes floating around that get put in the mix but the sets always as good as the music that’s out there.

Your sets are massively varied. You’re not afraid to drop something completely opposite to drum and bass for a few minutes. Some DJs have almost a theme for their whole set. Do you purposely steer away from that?

Yeah that’s how I like to do it! I’m a fan of all different types of music and I think most people are at club nights. You can get away with playing different tunes. People that are into Drum and bass know Hip-hop classics. They’re going to react to that. There are some people that just want pure Drum and bass all night long. They want to hear you play a set that is all Drum and bass but that to me doesn’t represent me as a person. I like to have fun with things like that. I would never play something that I didn’t like. You know there was that phase a few years ago where people would play thirty minutes of Dubstep in a Drum and bass set. I hate Dubstep so I would never play Dubstep in a set. Also I know if I’m going to play something different that I’m never going to play it for too long. If I’m going to play some Hip-hop tunes it’s never going to last more than about three or four minutes because we have to kind of get back to the programme! I find if you play a selection of Hip-hop classics and then you play a Drum and bass tune from the top it has a lot more atmosphere than just if you were to have mixed it. I can’t quite put it into words but I know my sets kind of have to have that slow section.

Another thing I like to do is play classics. Somewhere like Global you can get away with tunes like that. It’s other places you can’t sometimes. I was playing Belgium the other weekend and no disrespect to Belgium they were a wicked young crowd but it comes down to the age. You’ve got to remember a tune like Warhead is a fifteen year old tune almost now. It doesn’t hold the same. They’re just taking it as a new tune and of course it’s not going to have that same weight of the modern production but I sort of like to think well if you don’t like that it’s only one minute out of your life!

You’re headlining the big Hospitality at Brixton on the 28^th September!

Yeah that’ll be good. I’m looking forward to it. That’s our flagship night. That’s where I generally do try and go in on the DJ set and play a lot of new music. I think people expect that. When you come on for your intro it’s got to be totally fresh. It’s got to be a new tune or something different. That’s what they want to hear. Generally that’s when I will really go in on a DJ set. I’ll probably spend a good couple of weeks preparing stuff for that event only. It’s lucky it’s not every week aye! (laughs)

Yeah, the events are bigger but not as regular now. I suppose that gives you more time to prepare for them? Not like when you guys played Matter every other month!

That’s it yeah. It was good that was. You couldn’t beat the vibes at Matter. It was a special club. Have you been there since it changed?

No I just can’t do it!

I’ve heard it’s quite different now. I don’t know what they’ve done that’s different though. It was a sick venue but nothing lasts forever! Brixton’s bigger though. Matter felt more like a club and Brixton feels more like a concert if that makes sense? So you have to adjust yourself accordingly to those sort of things but it’s good to do that.

Looking back you must think to yourself Brixton is a far cry from the days of Heaven and Herbal?

Yeah. Well the funny thing is I really miss events like Herbal. I really miss that. It was just like two/ three hundred people and that is the spirit of Drum and bass. In one way it’s great that you can go into a room and have five thousand people. That is amazing. On the other hand I come from an era where that was all we ever knew. To put it in context, in Bristol back at the beginning of the 2000s there was a club called Level and that was the main Drum and bass club for the music. You had Roni Size and the Full Cycle crew at their peak and it was like a five/ six hundred capacity club and that would be rammed out. That would be wicked. Now you go to Bristol and you’ve got a club like Motion which is like a three thousand capacity! So the people who say drum and bass is dead… no it’s huge if you consider that span of ten years ago and how big it is now. There’s something cool that happens in those small clubs, the atmosphere.

You play Northampton Subrockerz at the Roadmender alongside Shy Fx and Mistajam on the 13^th October. What can we expect from you there?

Nothing planned as yet! I’m sure I’m going to be testing lots of new tunes. I’ve started to mix down a lot of the album stuff now so I’ll be creeping more and more new tunes into my set. So by the Roadmender date I’ll be playing at least ten new tunes in the set. Shy Fx is a wicked DJ and Mistajam is wicked. Good line up, it looks exciting that line up. I’m excited!

I think you’ll enjoy Roadmender. It’s one of the intimate venues you were mentioning that you miss playing.

Ahh wicked that’s the kind of night I like! Not too small but not too big with perfect vibes. You get a lot more vibes in a smaller club.

It’s the type of venue where the bass is so loud that there’s sweat on the walls…

Oh I like that. I like that! Remind me not to wear a good shirt or something, I’ll just come out soaking in it!

Any other dates we should know about? Are you jetting off anywhere soon?

I’m off to Canada in a few weeks, which I’m excited about. I haven’t been to Canada for a couple of years. That’s a wicked scene out there. They know the history of the music and they get the tunes. If you play a Ragga Jungle tune they love that kind of stuff. It’s quite unique because you might not be able to play that sort of tune elsewhere.

What is your general view on the scene at the minute? It gets a lot more criticism than it ever used to, now elements of it are exposed to the mainstream.

It is in a good place. It’s a lot better than it was last year. There was a point where it felt like Dubstep was going to take over the world! It’s like stealing our bass sounds. I’m going to get quoted on that aren’t I (laughs) let me clarify. It got to that over saturation point but I think Drum and bass has almost benefitted from Dubstep’s explosion in a weird way. It’s kind of got more people interested. You can’t deny the power of drums at 174 beats per minute and that’s what Dubstep doesn’t have for me which I always loved. I was a drummer when I was younger. I loved drums. That is the essence of the music for me. I think it’s wicked to see people like Fresh going to number one and regardless of what you say, Hot Right Now is a Drum and bass tune. I think it’s in a healthy place. To be honest with you it’s always healthy. There are always good and bad tunes around. The scene is self-sufficient. If more people want to get involved with it that’s great. People don’t need to worry about it getting too mainstream because there’s always that core underground following as well and there always will be. I have no doubt that the mainstream won’t be interested in a few years. They’ll rinse it and we’ll be back to where we were a few years ago but that doesn’t change anything.

Are there any stand out producers or tracks that you are listening to at the minute?

Metric is doing some good stuff. He’s doing a lot of good remixes at the minute. I’ve heard a lot of new Brookes Brothers stuff at their studio and that sounds really good. I kind of miss their tunes at the moment. They haven’t been putting many tunes out for a while so it’s nice to hear that proper Liquid vibe again. They’ve got some big tunes.

Rene LaVice has come a long way. He hasn’t come out of nowhere. He’s come out with some wicked tunes kind of bringing back that steppy vibe. Sub Zero is killing it on the Jump up with the Mampi Swift style steppers. That to me I’m excited about as well. Jump up I think could come back. I think a lot of the silliness has gone. Like the silly bass lines are gone and the groove has come back. Sub Zero and people like Taxman are at the forefront of that. Jump up did lose a bit of its edge but those guys are bringing it back.

Joining Hospital records in 2000 means you must have seen a lot of changes in the music, its output and the music’s following. 12 years is a long time! Hospital are a massively prolific label in drum and bass now.

Yeah but it’s like steady evolution. It started off being very Liquid funk. Well it started off as a label just for London Elektricty when the whole Jazz Funk influence in Drum and bass was big. Then it kind of went to the beginnings of liquid, which was an exciting time with like Swerve and that kind of stuff. Then you had people like Logistics, Nu: Tone and Commix that changed the sound and came with a new take on it. Yeah it just steadily evolved. The label has now got a big roster of artists that are doing different things. I just heard S.P.Y’s album the other day and it’s wicked. I don’t think you can really say there’s a Hospital sound any more. If people say there’s a Hospital sound they’re referring to that classic liquid sound. If you look at what Hospital is putting out it’s very diverse. That is the only way you survive as a label.

Classic question… Any advice for aspiring DJs and producers out there?

Have a strong work ethic. Get up everyday at 8am. 7am if you want to beat the other producers. If you can, then get up an hour earlier than everyone else. Have that competition in your mind. It’s not always a competition but have that competitiveness at the back of your mind. You have to have a strong work ethic and you have to treat it like a job before it is a job. Things started happening for me when I started knuckling down and treated it like a job and turned off the Internet and Twitter and all that kind of stuff.

I suppose it’s hard to be motivated when it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere at the start?

Exactly! Everybody has that. It doesn’t become easier once you become professional. Professional is just sticking at it. It’s like all those classic things you hear the athletes saying, hard work and determination. You’ve got to be bloody determined to do this!

Quick-fire questions.

Favourite ever Drum and bass release?

It changes all the time! It’s Adam F - Circles today.

Favourite release of any other genre?

MJ Cole - Sincere.

Perfect rave line up?

Andy C has got to be there. Shy Fx, me and Mistajam. Sounds like a good night! (laughs) Yeah I’ll say that.

Favourite club to play out?

Brighton Digital. The two Digitals actually. The one in Newcastle and the one in Brighton. They’re two good ones.

Biggest Influence?

Hmm. I don’t really have one. Dr Dre is a big inspiration but maybe not an influence if that makes sense?

Vinyl or digital?

Digital these days!

Thanks Danny.

Nice one!

Danny Byrd’s latest single Blaze the Fire (Rah!) Featuring General Levy is OUT NOW.

Catch Danny at Subrockerz at the Roadmender Saturday October 13^th. Tickets are on sale now here.

Keep up to date with Hospital records and the Byrdman. 

Websites: hospitalrecords.com and byrdfeed.co.uk 

Twitter: @dannybyrd 

Facebook: facebook.com/dannybyrddnb