Music > Interviews

Interview with Slipmatt

by Emma R. Garwood

04/11/13

The term legend gets bandied around a little too freely these days. Your mate can come back from the shop with a Wispa Gold and a packet of Squares and be deemed a legend. Actually, that’s fairly deserved. But one man has consistently been referred to as such, and also carries the weighty title of The Godfather of Old Skool. It’s been a four-decade spanning career in the dance music industry that has earnt him this stature and one song we’ll never tire of, ‘On a Ragga Tip’. As half of SL2, and latterly as DJ extraordinaire, Slipmatt, the legend continues…

Well, it’s cold here today Matt, but you’ve certainly warmed me up - I've just been listening to your Bestival set on SoundCloud. I've had my headphones on all afternoon, ignoring everyone, so I'm warmed up a bit. That set’s indicative of a good summer, I’m imagining. Yeah, it’s been a nice year, actually. I haven’t been away so much this year. I did every week in Ibiza last year - seventeen, eighteen weeks on the trot, just going over for a day at a time, which becomes quite hard work actually. You get very, very tired, especially when you're getting home on a Friday afternoon without any sleep, then you’ve got to go out working all weekend on the road. So this one’s been quite a chilled one; I’ve still been nice and busy back at home - I’ve been to Ibiza a few times. I did a World of Rave gig there the other month and I've done a few other abroad gigs, but it's been nice.

You obviously have a huge following but I wondered, you know, in the case of things like Bestival – is it nice to sometimes play festivals where you might get the uninitiated stumbling into the tent and have their minds blown? Yeah, totally. Every festival I’ve done over the last couple of years – and I've done Glastonbury this year and Bestival the last couple of years, Boomtown as well – there’s these people who pop up and say, “Oh, I haven’t seen you for years. Not since ’92, or whenever.” They’ve been walking along, they’ve heard the music and come in and it was amazing. There’s still loads and loads of ravers around, although the festival crowds seem to be a bit older now, you know, than the average sort of club crowds. Their kids have grown up and they’re sort of like, ‘time to go out again! Relive the old days! I get a lot of that at the festivals, so it’s really nice actually.

You must know that the rave scene in Norfolk is still really strong. I don’t know if it’s just that we’ve got such big fields to put them on in, but it's still huge here! Yeah, Norfolk and Suffolk an’ that has always been really ravey – loads of forest parties and all that, so I’m told. I've not done so many of the free parties, you know, I’ve done a few over the years but nah, it’s very much rave-orientated.

I suppose recording audio, which didn’t really start until the mid-90s I think probably, to your average sort of person, but everyone uses audio now rather than midi. If we could have done that... I mean, we were sampling stuff and you could only really sample a couple of seconds of anything when we first started! You know, computer memories weren’t tiny; at the time we was working off of floppy discs and stuff! And if we could have had some sort of audio recording then that would have been great, I suppose.

How important do you think it was that you were developing tastes outside of any type of dance music? You had an extensive reggae and two-tone collection, didn’t you?

I did, yeah. I was into reggae from an early age; I used to listen to David Rodigan on Capital Radio in the early 80s, sort of early to mid-80s and that was a massive influence obviously if you know ‘On a Ragga Tip’ and ‘Way in My Brain’. They were sort of borne out of that as well. Lime was into his reggae as well, probably not quite as much as me though. With ‘Ragga Tip’, we actually had an idea from a totally different reggae track, which had a similar sort of vocal hook but we couldn’t sample it – it had too much underneath it, so we actually went on the hunt and eventually we found the Jah Screechy track, which we sampled, and that became ‘On a Ragga Tip’.

And do you think that is important, that people who are in dance production now actually broaden their horizons wider than their own genre; that they get to know other types of music?

Yeah, totally; I mean, the rave scene was borne out of sampling really. There was a lot of hip hop influence in the early 90s, people like Shut Up and Dance as well, with their beats, as well as us – even Prodigy had a big hip-hop influence as well as the reggae thing as well. But yeah, the rave scene tended to bring all sorts of different genres together into making a rave tune, which is good. The thing is, these days there’s so much… so many tracks being produced that maybe there’s not as much imagination going into make a track, possibly. Not everyone, but there’s so much out there; it’s become so accessible to them to make them. I think a lot of them tend to just, ‘right I want to make a track and I want it sound like that’, and you end up with a lot that’s very samey.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame really that everything split so much but I suppose it’s just a natural progression, d’you know what I mean? People will just sort of know what they like and then there becomes so much music out there that people get in to, say, the jungle thing and then they get so into it that don’t want to listen to anything else. You can't blame them for it, but it's just the way it goes. But one of the beauties of the early rave scene was that there could be so many different styles of music being played in one arena, even in the early hardcore years of like ’92, ’93. They tended to like broader styles, even if they tended towards breakbeat, or slightly tougher hardcore beats. Whereas as time moved on, people tended to be like, ‘No, that’s what I want to listen to’ and all the raves became split into different rooms and stuff, or you’d get a jungle DJ come on after a hardcore DJ and they’d all shoot off! It’s a shame, but it’s the way humans are, I suppose; you like what you're in to and if you can get enough, that's the way you’re gonna do it!

I think it makes it harder for promoters, especially regional ones, to put on a good night. You have to have a big enough following, because if you’re that specialist, you have to make sure you have a big enough crowd to put the night on, haven’t you?

Yeah, exactly...

So, when you formed SL2 with Lime, there was a certain magic - you seemed to capture the sound of a generation. I think was 10 when ‘…Ragga Tip’ came out so I just missed out my raving, but it was on all my dance compilations. Were you aware, when you put the tune together that it was going to be a classic?

No, no, not really. They were magical times for us, I mean, back then we were so, so into it. It was, a lot fresher then but we were so into it and we had in our minds what was gonna work. I think it’s probably harder now because most music production now is so good… I mean, there’s a lot of crap out there, but there’s a lot of good, well-produced dance music. When it was still new, there wasn’t half as many producers out there. It was sort of – not a clean slate, but there was more chance to do something exciting. But with ‘DJs Take Control’ we were at Raindance and it was like, ‘Blimey, listen to all these tunes. Certain tunes are going off!’ We thought we could do a tune like that and choose the sample, and we just sort of knew it would go off. We had in our minds that it was gonna work and it did. And then we ended getting signed by XL. But going back to ‘…Ragga Tip’, that was still a fairly new style again, really. We actually planned that to be the B-side, or the Double A side of that release, but when we got it back and took it down to XL we were like, ‘hold on a minute. This is a bit special.’ Like you were saying, there’s just that little bit of magic to it. I think that we captured - not by mistake, but we didn’t realise how magical it was at that time. And then we thought, ‘right, let’s not take the easy route. Let's go for it and work on the rest.’ But like you were saying, it still gets played today. It’s still the biggest tune in a lot of my sets, even now that it’s like 20, 21 years later. I’ve heard Shy FX and even Rodigan’s played it. I get calls nearly every week from people saying, ‘Matt, Matt, your tune’s on the radio!’

It must have been such a heady time for you in those days. You must have been doing so much traveling. Did you cope well with it as a younger man?

Yeah, we used to go out on the piss loads after gigs and all that, play up as you do when you’re younger; ruined a few hotel rooms and stuff! We got into trouble, but nah, we coped and it’s been 22 years of traveling now as a DJ, so even now at 46 years old, I’m still coping with it!

Emma R. Garwood

Slipmatt comes to the Waterfront as part of the line up for REUNION, along with The Prodigy tribute, Jilted Generation. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the uncut version online at Outlineonline.co.uk

Are you having a good day Matt?

Yeah, a busy one, yeah. I’ve just been working on a new blog at the moment, but I’ve just been trying to work out how to do it. I’m getting there…

What are you struggling with, the writing or the tech side?

Nah, just the format; just putting it all together. I’ve never actually done a full blog before, so… It’ll be done by tonight though.

Yeah, it’s loved by everyone, that.

It gets under your skin, that one, doesn’t it? That set’s indicative of a good summer, I’m imagining.

Yeah, it’s been a nice year, actually. I haven’t been away so much this year. I did every week in Ibiza last year - seventeen, eighteen weeks on the trot, just going over for a day at a time, which becomes quite hard work actually. You get very, very tired, especially when you're getting home on a Friday afternoon without any sleep, then you’ve got to go out working all weekend on the road. So this one’s been quite a chilled one; I’ve still been nice and busy back at home - I’ve been to Ibiza a few times. I did a World of Rave gig there the other month and I've done a few other abroad gigs, but it's been nice.

Yeah, totally. Every festival I’ve done over the last couple of years – and I've done Glastonbury this year and Bestival the last couple of years, Boomtown as well – there’s these people who pop up and say, “Oh, I haven’t seen you for years. Not since ’92, or whenever.” They’ve been walking along, they’ve heard the music and come in and it was amazing. There’s still loads and loads of ravers around, although the festival crowds seem to be a bit older now, you know, than the average sort of club crowds. Their kids have grown up and they’re sort of like, ‘time to go out again! Relive the old days! I get a lot of that at the festivals, so it’s really nice actually.

You must know that the rave scene in Norfolk is still really strong. I don’t know if it’s just that we’ve got such big fields to put them on in, but it's still huge here!

Yeah, Norfolk and Suffolk an’ that has always been really ravey – loads of forest parties and all that, so I’m told. I've not done so many of the free parties, you know, I’ve done a few over the years but nah, it’s very much rave-orientated.

So if I was to take you back a long, long time ago now, there were loads of DJs who were really good at what they do, and did well at it, but how did you make that step into production?

It was always something that I wanted to do, the production thing. I actually had my first tune out in 1989, believe it or not. I was messing around with music from probably about 13 or 14. My dad had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, quite a snazzy one actually - I think he got it cheap from work or something! And I used to splice the tape and mix tracks together - and this is before Technik 1200s were common in clubs; around that time they were still using Soundlabs and stuff like that. It was before mixing became really big, I was mixing stuff up at home on an old reel-to-reel and stuff like that and it always fascinated me, so as soon as I could mix tracks on record decks in any way I would do, but that also got me into thinking that I wanted to put some stuff together myself.

It was a hard job that, compared to now. It seems a bit of a ball ache like, you know, splicing tapes and stuff, doesn’t it?

Yeah, well we was so determined to do it. Then me and John Lime, who I started out with, bought a drum machine in about 1986 or ’87. We’d sit all night in our bedrooms programming that. It took over my life really, took over my teenage years anyway. I was just absolutely fascinated by it. And then as soon as we could afford to, we found a studio - a place called North Gate - back in about ‘88. And it was when they started becoming affordable for someone, you know, who wasn’t a well-known producer. So we took the plunge with that and we were down the studio every other week. Or whenever we could afford it. We were putting stuff together and experimenting, then we come up with and acid tune in ’89, which we got a release on and that was the start of SL2.

So if I was to take you back a long, long time ago now, there were loads of DJs who were really good at what they do, and did well at it, but how did you make that step into production?It was always something that I wanted to do, the production thing. I actually had my first tune out in 1989, believe it or not. I was messing around with music from probably about 13 or 14. My dad had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, quite a snazzy one actually - I think he got it cheap from work or something! And I used to splice the tape and mix tracks together - and this is before Technik 1200s were common in clubs; around that time they were still using Soundlabs and stuff like that. Then me and John Lime, who I started out with, bought a drum machine in about 1986 or ’87. We’d sit all night in our bedrooms programming that. It took over my life really, took over my teenage years anyway. I was just absolutely fascinated by it. And then as soon as we could afford to, we found a studio - a place called North Gate - back in about ‘88. And it was when they started becoming affordable for someone, you know, who wasn’t a well-known producer. So we took the plunge with that and we were down the studio every other week. Or whenever we could afford it. We were putting stuff together and experimenting, then we come up with and acid tune in ’89, which we got a release on and that was the start of SL2.

Is there a bit of tech now, that one bit of tech that you would have loved to have had back in the day to make you job easier, or do you think all those hours that you poured into it was something you needed to do?I suppose recording audio, which didn’t really start until the mid-90s I think probably, to your average sort of person, but everyone uses audio now rather than midi. If we could have done that... I mean, we were sampling stuff and you could only really sample a couple of seconds of anything when we first started! You know, computer memories weren’t tiny; at the time we was working off of floppy discs and stuff! And if we could have had some sort of audio recording then that would have been great, I suppose.

How important do you think it was that you were developing tastes outside of any type of dance music? You had an extensive reggae and two-tone collection, didn’t you?I did, yeah. I was into reggae from an early age; I used to listen to David Rodigan on Capital Radio in the early 80s, sort of early to mid-80s and that was a massive influence obviously if you know ‘On a Ragga Tip’ and ‘Way in My Brain’. They were sort of borne out of that as well. Lime was into his reggae as well, probably not quite as much as me though. With ‘Ragga Tip’, we actually had an idea from a totally different reggae track, which had a similar sort of vocal hook but we couldn’t sample it – it had too much underneath it, so we actually went on the hunt and eventually we found the Jah Screechy track, which we sampled, and that became ‘On a Ragga Tip’.

And do you think that is important, that people who are in dance production now actually broaden their horizons wider than their own genre; that they get to know other types of music?Yeah, totally; I mean, the rave scene was borne out of sampling really. There was a lot of hip hop influence in the early 90s, people like Shut Up and Dance as well, with their beats, as well as us – even Prodigy had a big hip-hop influence as well as the reggae thing as well. But yeah, the rave scene tended to bring all sorts of different genres together into making a rave tune, which is good. The thing is, these days there’s so much… so many tracks being produced that maybe there’s not as much imagination going into make a track, possibly. Not everyone, but there’s so much out there; it’s become so accessible to them to make them. I think a lot of them tend to just, ‘right I want to make a track and I want it sound like that’, and you end up with a lot that’s very samey.

I was going to ask you what you think of the difference fractures in dance music now, because everything that you created then, and were part of and evolved has now got so many subsidiaries, hasn’t it?Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame really that everything split so much but I suppose it’s just a natural progression, d’you know what I mean? People will just sort of know what they like and then there becomes so much music out there that people get in to, say, the jungle thing and then they get so into it that don’t want to listen to anything else. You can't blame them for it, but it's just the way it goes. But one of the beauties of the early rave scene was that there could be so many different styles of music being played in one arena, even in the early hardcore years of like ’92, ’93. They tended to like broader styles, even if they tended towards breakbeat, or slightly tougher hardcore beats. Whereas as time moved on, people tended to be like, ‘No, that’s what I want to listen to’ and all the raves became split into different rooms and stuff, or you’d get a jungle DJ come on after a hardcore DJ and they’d all shoot off! It’s a shame, but it’s the way humans are, I suppose; you like what you're in to and if you can get enough, that's the way you’re gonna do it!

You seemed to capture the sound of a generation. I think was 10 when ‘…Ragga Tip’ came out so I just missed out my raving, but it was on all my dance compilations. Were you aware, when you put the tune together that it was going to be a classic? We actually planned that to be the B-side, or the Double A side of that release, but when we got it back and took it down to XL we were like, ‘hold on a minute. This is a bit special.’ Like you were saying, there’s just that little bit of magic to it. I think that we captured - not by mistake, but we didn’t realise how magical it was at that time. And then we thought, ‘right, let’s not take the easy route. Let's go for it and work on the rest.’ But it still gets played today. It’s still the biggest tune in a lot of my sets, even now that it’s like 20, 21 years later. I’ve heard Shy FX and even Rodigan’s played it. I get calls nearly every week from people saying, ‘Matt, Matt, your tune’s on the radio!’

It must have been such a heady time for you in those days. You must have been doing so much traveling. Did you cope well with it as a younger man?Yeah, we used to go out on the piss loads after gigs and all that, play up as you do when you’re younger; ruined a few hotel rooms and stuff! We got into trouble, but nah, we coped and it’s been 22 years of traveling now as a DJ, so even now at 46 years old, I’m still coping with it!

Emma R. Garwood

InterviewDance MusicOn A Ragga TripSl2The WaterfrontNorwichReunionSlipmatt