“It was a fascinating learning experience.”

I read somewhere that you have mixed feelings about the first Stateless album?

The Stateless thing was a weird one for me really. Those dudes used to come to my DJ sets when I was Djing in Leeds and they asked me to do some cuts on one of their demos or whatever. I thought it was interesting, it was slightly outside what I normally do but I thought it was good and I thought I could learn something from it as well. Rod from Stateless got me hooked up with Pro Tools- I owe him a lot actually, in terms of musical progression and learning things. I ended up cutting and then they heard my beats so I did some production for them. And then the next thing you know, there’s a 3 album deal from Sony on the table. It took over stuff for a while. It was a fascinating learning experience. Musically I would just chip in ideas and I wasn’t that confident at that time in terms of saying how I thought things should sound. So it was almost like being part of a project and watching it, as well as chipping in. The first album was a major label thing, produced by Jim Abyss who produced for the Arctic Monkeys. The labels just saw me as a token DJ really, even though I’d written quite a lot of the parts.

I like some things about it. Musically I’d say it’s quite accomplished. There’s some stuff I like on there, some stuff I don’t like. It’s super old as well, because of music industry madness. That album was 2 years old by the time it was mixed, 5 years old by the time it came out. And you know yourself, once you’ve made a track you’ve actually outgrown it 3 months later. So imagine bringing out material that’s 5 years old. You don’t even know what you think about it.

It must’ve been hard to tour that?

Yeah. It wasn’t an easy time. But we’re actually just finishing off the second album now which I’m excited about and think it’s really good and really interesting- I don’t quite know what it sounds like. I’ve not heard anything else quite like it- it’s like some weird gypsy music or something.

Stateless were initially signed to Sony. Tell me about that experience.

We won a Radio 1 unsigned bands competition and the track took off and got C-listed. So we got our demo C-listed with no manager, no record label, nothing. So that was for a moment in the music industry it was a story and we got loads of offers off the back of that, got a big shot manager and all that shit…..did the major label traditional way for big bands and experienced that. And….(pauses)….it’s just a crazy world, it’s like…..speaking in general terms, but there’s definitely truth in it, very few people in that world are really there for the right reasons. Most of them are there for the wrong reasons. They tell you what you wanna hear, everybody tells you what you wanna hear, so in that world how do you judge things? You to have put a large team of people together- record label, management, lawyer, this, that, and the other- you have to meet lots of these people. All of them tell you exactly what you wanna hear; all of them have got big bands on their track records. It’s really hard to make decisions.

My role in this period was that I took a step back- I was more observant. For me it was more about learning and experiencing a bizarre side of the music industry that I would never experience on my own terms because my music is so blatantly not of that world. So if you picture it, me in this rare chain of events that’s happened, in a context that I wouldn’t normally be in, for me it was fascinating, and bizarre, and quite funny. I didn’t feel the stakes especially. In a weird way I quite enjoyed it ‘cos it was like a movie, it really was. All the stereotypes about the major label world are completely true; if anything I’d say it’s worse, more extreme. It’s just bizarre, some of the shit that happened.

There was a lot of talk of making an album and not making singles, so not being led by Radio 1 and MTV, which is basically what major labels do. We were talking about reference points like Massive Attack, we wanted to make albums and hopefully grow. We were a young act, we’d not been making music that long- I don’t think we’d even done any gigs at that point. So the whole thing was like ‘we need time to develop, we don’t want to do this like “your first single has to be massive otherwise it’s over”’. And Sony were completely adamant they wanted to nurture us, make something special. Which just was not true, it was a straight-up lie. And I’ve not really experienced people lying in quite the same way- I’ve experienced people bending the truth and bullshitting - but straight up lies were weird to me.