Music > Interviews

The Qemists

25/11/15

If you’re a fan of The Prodigy, Chase and Status or Pendulum, you ought to check out The Qemists from Brighton. They make the most incredibly energetic, full on music, a melting pot of belting rock and dance music with a shiny polish to it. If you can stand still when you hear their tunes, you’re probably Lot’s wife (look it up). I spoke to Leon, drummer and founding member of the band, about how to go about making a remix, doing stretches backstage and their brand new album. 

You’re playing The Owl Sanctuary here in Norwich in December. It’s got a capacity of 150. How do you think that’s gonna go down? It looks like your gigs sometimes get pretty hectic!

We’ve had people crowd surfing so quickly they land on the drum kit when they get over the barrier! We really wanted to go around the UK and do a tour of smaller cities because we hit a lot of the bigger places early in the year and not everyone can travel to the larger cities. We’ve got some wicked venues booked across the UK, like The Owl Sanctuary, and we’re very excited to do this tour before the end of the year.

You used to be live sound engineers. Is that how you met Liam and Dan originally?

We met a long time ago and started playing in a rock band together. Because of that we all started getting jobs in music, so I was touring as a sound engineer, Liam was working as a sound engineer and Dan was a music technology lecturer. So we’ve always worked in music, it’s been our love and passion since we were young.

How come you ended up adding Bruno and Olly to your line up?

When we started DJing and getting proper sets in Brighton in 2004 we had MC’s working with us as well, so Bruno was often down there, we liked how he sounded and he ended up on our DJ sets. Since then he’s been a part of The Qemists and when we get our live show together for our Join The Q  album we asked him to come on tour with us. Olly is a recent addition to the band. For the new album we wanted some really strong songwriting this time around and we were really going down the rock influence route with our sound. I mean it’s still very dancey and drum n bassy but we needed a good songwriter. Olly was writing for us and we got him in the studio and heard his voice and we ended up doing so much stuff together on the album that he joined the band full time!  I think The Qemists have always been moving towards being a rock band rather than being a behind the scenes studio producers and Olly really completed that cycle.

So you started off as a more traditional rock band. How did your current sound develop from this and how come you changed?

After we learnt how to play instruments we really got interested in building our own studio and all the technical stuff, and we did that more and more. When we were a bit older and started going clubbing and stuff we got really into the DJing and production stuff, which went together well. It wasn’t until a couple years after that in 2005 when we started thinking that we could do the two things together, the rock band which is produced like a dance act. That was really when The Qemists were born..we called ourselves that because of our experimental nature. That’s what it is now, is a fusion of the two.

Which bands and acts have influenced The Qemists’ sound?

The first band that really blew us away with their totally different production value was Rage Against The Machine’s first album. You know how it just sounds amazing on a soundsystem? A DJ can play those tracks and it’ll go down so well because it’s so clean and beautifully produced. It was a huge influence as were Queens of the Stone Age for the same reason, this sound which was so different. We listen to a lot of drum n bass and dance records, there are a lot of sampled sound in our music as well, and we feel that gives us that really close, well produced sound that you can play live or you can DJ.

How did you come to get signed to the legendary Ninja Tune label?

Well Liam was working with Coldcut on an album, and they needed a remix of the first single for this album and Liam asked if we could have a crack at it for free. They liked the remix we did, sent it out and Zane Lowe loved it so much he played it every night on Radio 1. So at that point I think the record label thought “Oh hang on there might be something in this sound!” It was right when Pendulum were just emerging and Chase and Status were breaking out from drum n bass to a rockier live band feel. So we ended up being signed and making two albums with Ninja Tune, although we’ve now completed our deal with them and are moving on to another international label.

You’ve toured loads as a band. What’s been your most memorable gig so far and why?

So many great gigs! Woodstock on the border of Poland and Germany was amazing; we had a crowd of 250,000! That was great, there’s footage of that on Youtube. Our first time at Summersonic Festival in Japan was amazing – we had a dressing room between Lady Gaga and Beyonce! We had the number one foreign album in Japan at that time. It’s a funny thing, you have to put in a lot of ground work with fans, engaging with them and showing them your music. We’re never afraid to put in that hard work. Everything else is a gloss put on the industry and the press, that musicians deserve some kind of special treatment. We really don’t! If you met us you’d understand, we don’t deserve any special treatment, we just like to get up and play music to people who appreciate it so we’ll play wherever that is!

Your latest album Warrior Sound is about to come out. Can you tell me what we can expect from it?

We’ve been working on it for some time, over two years. Songwriting is something that’s really neglected by dance music producers and we wanted to try to understand what it is that makes people feel emotions in a track as well as refining our sound so it was really recognisable as our sound, the way everything fits together, we wanted it to be the definitive statement of what it is that we’ve been trying to do over the last 10 years. I think everything comes together quite nicely and if you look at the new single’s video we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback about it. People get confused as to whether we’re a dance act or a live band, but this video for Run You has seemed to explain who we really are. Every song has undergone such scrutiny and there are no fillers on this album.

You’ve done several remixes for other people including Roots Manuva, Dr Octagon and Coldcut . What’s the first step you take when starting to remix a track?

We like to approach it in a way that that fits out own songwriting. We listen through and find the hooks of the track or the most important musical parts and see how they fit together as well as how they could fit together in a different way. From that we decide on what to focus on and then we work out how to heavy it up or make it in a drum n bass style. And from there we have a bank of drum and guitar sounds that we use, so it’s about writing a song around that. Some songs you can pretty much use the entirety of the song and others you can only use a couple of seconds as it doesn’t sit with the style that you’re trying to make. You have to pick out what makes a song great and then create something around that.

What do you guys do right before you go onstage? Listen to some whale songs and enjoy a camomile tea?

Well, we’re not as young as we used to be, so we do some neck exercises. Olly and Bruno do their vocal warm ups’. I normally annoy everyone by tapping on a chair, and yeah, we have to stretch or else we’re in the bus the next day complaining about aching from jumping up and down! The thing is about being onstage is you have to exaggerate your movements even more so people can see you. So we just go completely mental, even if we’re in a bad mood or we think the gig’s not going to be a good one. You don’t get up there and act like that, you start going crazy from the minute you hit the stage, no matter if there’s only three people watching you.

What’s next for The Qemists?

We’ve done so much and we’re so proud of our career up until now, but there are some things on the list still to do. We want this record to be a proper release; when I’ve got the vinyl in my hand that’ll be a good moment. We want to finally show everyone what The Qemists are all about. We’re hoping to go to America as well.

The Qemists play The Owl Sanctuary on 2nd December. Tickets from theowlsanctuary.net.