| DJ Sets ::Audio Bullys (Simon Franks
& Tom Dinsdale)
What the f***! Audio Bullys in the area:
the sound of two young West Londoners that have grown up raving
to the basslines of hardcore, garage and house. At 22 and
24 they acknowledge the influence of The Specials and The
Beatles as readily as they do Todd Edwards and Masters At
Work.
Simon Franks and Tom Dinsdale's debut
album takes in everything from ska and punk, to funk and UK
garage- this is house music with the easy lad-ish charm of
Squeeze or Madness, sub-bass beats that tell you to do more
than just raise your hands. The raucous energy and streetwise
swagger of tracks like "We Don't Care" and "Ego
War" show a young band that blends the amphetamine dynamism
of The Who with the wry social commentary of The Kinks, and
combines it with the ribcage-bending thump of UK club culture.
The track "Real Life" sums up the same breathless
explosion of urban pop energy The Happy Mondays had with "Wrote
For Luck" or The Specials' had with "Too Much Too
Young"- but wrapped up in the dirty grooves born out
of lives misspent coming up in house and garage raves and
coming down listening to pirate radio stations.
"Hit The Ceiling" heads straight from the bar to
the dancefloor, a mixture of funk with punk attitude, like
Armand van Helden facing off with Jimmy Pursey. "Intro"
brings back the straight up funk, but adds a shuffling boogie
groove. "The Tyson Shuffle" punches like Lennox,
with an off-kilter quasi-ragga riddim announcing a tragi-comic
ambulance chase through deserted city streets. Clash fans
take note: this is Armageddon Time for 2003. In dub.
So why Audio Bullys Tom and Simon had both been making music
for a couple of years- straight up house, garage, and a few
bootlegs they'd prefer to take the fifth on. "We just
decided to spend time working together," they explain,
in a give-it-a-go kind of way. The results of the experiment
were anything but disappointing. ""I Go To Your
House" and "We Don't Care" were both made very
early on and there was definitely a sound there that fitted
the Audio Bullys name so it all rolled from there."
Audio Bullys compel you to rake over the coals of new wave,
ska, and punk for reference points: it seems odd for a band
whose members were both barely born in 1980. But name checking
Bob Dylan and Blondie, Biggie Smalls and Method Man next to
early hardcore and jungle tunes, songwriter Simon has no prejudices
about when and where music has come from. "I've always
been different to my mates in that they don't really listen
to old music," says Simon. "But it's too good innit
You get people who say they only like one type of music, but
I reckon you can't love music that much if you're like that.
The Specials were something I started listening to when I
started to make music and was thinking about how someone like
me could put across stuff in his songs that was relevant to
me and young men and women."
Simon's lyrics tell small-scale tales of young urban life:
micro sagas of street corners and party politics. "We
write songs about everyday life," explains Simon, "just
what you get up to. Try to tell a little story, about what
you see around you."
"We just write songs about the things that have happened
to us at the time," explains Tom. "We Don't Care"
is influenced by our friend who died, but others come from
somewhere when we're in a good mood, jokes, just let it happen.
There's no agenda for any one track - we're not trying to
make a deep house tune just something that goes with the mood."
Hence a track like the searing "The Snow" can sum
up the kind of Suburban coke nightmare that's already an everyday
occurrence in most UK and US cities, but that most artists
prefer to sweep under the carpet. While "I Go To Your
House" and "Hit The Ceiling" might be the nearest
they come to a love song, they both deal with Suburban dating
politics and romance with a refreshingly real straight from
the shoulder honesty.
Simon grew up in a musical household, with a guitar-playing,
song-writing father encouraging him to play piano and drums
from an early age. "It was my drumming teacher who showed
me how easy it was to put together a track out of samples,"
he says. Fuelled by jungle and house, garage pirate radio
stations and raves- he was set on a mission to make beats.
Tom, the DJ half of the Bullys, had his decks at 16 and was
a resident at London club Milk N' 2 Sugars when he was 17.
"I went from house into hardcore and back into house
again," recalls Tom. Tom has more recently been spotted
devastating the dancefloor at the City Rockers club night
in London, mixing The Kinks over Leftfield's 'Phat Planet'.
"I play a lot of my own stuff now," explains the
shy superstar DJ in waiting. "A bootleg of something
here or there, house, hip hop. I'm not too worried about clinical
production as long as it works."
It's the same shouldn't-work-but-does dot-joining exercise
that informs their songwriting. The desire to marry the meaningless
nonsense of George Clinton's early 80s electronic funk sagas
or a Suburban Base record to the wider concerns of a band.
Dance music made without recourse to the rulebook, reflecting
both an ear for a classic hook and an eye for the dilemmas
of life as a young man growing up in London.
When everyone seems to be proclaiming the death of the music
industry, Audio Bullys are two kids still refreshingly hooked
on both buying and making records. On taking a short lifetime's
worth of music and recycling it into the freshest sound we'll
get this year. It don't matter who you know. Cause THIS is
real life.
