In the fast moving and ever changing world of dance music it’s unusual to see an artist releasing more than a few albums before the styles and sounds of their day have moved on but the British group Stereo MCs are going strong with their seventh album Emperor’s Nightingale.
Emperor’s Nightingale has a distinctly different sound to the dance hits of the bands best known ’90s work like Connected and Step it Up. Birch explains that the way the duo approached this new record was different to previous efforts.
‘Normally we’d write a bunch of backing tracks and then try to think of vocals for them, with this one we went about it in the opposite direction, we jammed with a lot of people in the studio… we’d come up with an idea for a song, then take that embryo of a song idea and turn it into a track.’
Check out the Stereo MC’s track, Connected.
Birch first met cofounder of the band Nick Hallam when the two were housemates in mid ’80s.
‘We ended up living in the same house and he was doing music, and I was doing music. Nick was really into electro, stuff like Yello and Kraftwork and some of the more leftfield European electro. One day we just decided to do a track together – really for a laugh more than anything… we were experimenting with tape loops and samples and turntables.’
Together with entrepreneur Jon Baker and scratch DJ Ritchie Rich the duo formed Gee Street Records a label that released their own recordings and later included artists like PM Dawn and Jungle Brothers. Birch recalls the bands DIY approach extended not only to recording and distributing their music but also their first live shows.
‘We used to just put it all a bag, a DAT player, a microphone and a cassette player with our backing tracks and then get on the night bus and go around the clubs in London trying to do appearances and then come home again on the night bus.’
Birch’s love of electronic music is undeniable and he cites London radio station Rinse FM as somewhere that has a vibe he really likes, ‘It varies between the grime, the bassline music, the sort of dubstep music and the electronic music, I like the mixture that’s going on… anyone who’s making that kind of indefinable music.’
Emperor’s Nightingale is released on December 2nd
Graeme Watson
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