In this in-depth interview, Kiran Sande talks to the consistently trailblazing duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown, Autechre, about how tape-swapping and breakdancing in 1980s Manchester kickstarted their ongoing love affair with “mechanical futurism”.

So, how’s it going?

Sean: Yeah fine, it’s all been pretty relaxed. We didn’t even look at the schedule, it’s just not been hectic.

Was there a time when doing press was particularly stressful?

Rob: Oh yeah, definitely. The worst was the first time we toured the US. We did a lot of interviews and it was awful, the people interviewing us didn’t even know what house music was, didn’t understand…

That’s still the case with a lot of the music press. You have to ask, is it that readers don’t want to read about that kind of music, or that journalists don’t want to write about it? You feel like it’s not a lack of willingness or curiosity, necessarily..

Sean: But then you say, who are your heroes? Surely you really like Joy Division and New Order and I was like, you’ve heard these bands but you don’t know the stuff that they were listening to…

The thing is, a lot of people my age, myself included, spent the 1990s equating techno to 2Unlimited, there was no point of reference really, I wasn’t old enough to go to clubs or take drugs or whathaveyou, so all I the only association I had for techno was cheese.

Sean: I used to go out with this girl I knew who worked in a nursery – this was around ’94 or ’95 – and she was saying that in another ten or fifteen years dance music’s going to go really, really stupid, because she’d go into her school maybe a bit wasted from the weekend and all the kids in her school would be like ‘Have you been out ‘RAAVING, you been out RAVING?’ like that [mimes overexcited children]…

That’s it. When you’re a kid, you don’t know what drugs are, you don’t really know what clubs are, you have no reference or setting to locate dance music in, so it seem pretty cartoonish.

Rob: That was all like the third wave to us.

So what was the first wave?

Rob: Depends if you count your parents and what they played…

Sean: For me personally it was hip-hop. I saw punk from a distance and thought, it’s cool, I thought punks looked cool, but I was just like 11 at the time. It weren’t until I heard electro and saw people breakdancing and scratching that I really got into music. That was a massive turning-point. I think the fact that it was in the street, that they were kids that I knew, they were pulling these amazingly fly moves, I mean, they were ridiculously good dancers, and, the music sounded like it was from the future. I think all that together…I mean, it was pretty ubiquitous at the time, this was 83 or ‘4…

And this was in Manchester and surrounding area?

Rob: Regional Manchester, yeah…

Sean: The first time I ever saw breaking was when three or four kids turned up to school with a ghetto-blaster and started pulling loads of moves, and I just thought “WHAT IS THAT?” , it looks totally futuristic and there’s a crowd around them and everyone was really into it, and I really didn’t know what it was…So I got a kid I knew called Scott to make me a tape, this brilliant tape – it had, like, half of [Street Sounds] Electro 5, a bunch of other tracks, ‘Step Off’ by Grandmaster Flash, erm, Techno-Scratch, people like that…

It was ubiquitous though, all the kids at school were doing it, at lunchtime and breaktimes in the playground…

So it wasn’t an outsider thing as such?

Sean: No, not really.

Rob: I was about a year and a half older than Sean, I mean, I am about a year and a half older than Sean, and my ears perked up when I listened to electronic music generally – it might’ve been, you know, Tears For Fears, or it might’ve been Kraftwerk…

Music with a big synthetic element?

Rob: Yeah, it had to be synthetic. We’d have the school disco every Friday, and it’d be the usual cheese tunes and then they might play something like Kraftwerk, ‘The Model’, and we’d be doing these rudimentary breakdance moves that we’d seen on say, Malcolm McClaren’s videos – that was the leading edge to it, really. And then soon it was ‘Breakdance Electro Boogie’ [by West Street Mob / Junior Cartier] and ‘Mosquito’ [by West Street Mob], and the things that came out on Sugarhill, suddenly it all just became widespread in Manchester and Rochdale and everyone in my little sphere at school were just into tracks and would make cassette mixes and copy each other’s tracks, and then pirate radio came along – to us, anyway, obviously it had been around in some form or other since, whatever, the 60s – suddenly they were playing music we liked and suddenly they were playing records from America. That’s obviously where it [the music] all was coming from, and we thought, “We’ve got a direct line now to this stuff”…

Were there any particular pirate stations that you listened to?

Rob: Yeah absolutely, Southside Radio. We were North West of Manchester and a lot of people in Manchester and Merseyside were probably getting much better broadcast quality than we were, so it would have to be people who were maybe a little older, had jobs, maybe travelled to Liverpool and recorded it. So all the older blokes used to get them and we’d just copy them and copy them. I never bought any until I was about 13 or 14.

Sean: Mike Shaft was good too…

Rob: Yeah…

Sean: On mainstream radio we had, like, Greg Wilson, Mike Shaft, what’s his name, Lee Brown? Sam Brown…

Rob: Sam Brown was pirate though…

Sean: …and Stu Allen…and all those guys were playing this stuff. We had a shop in Manchester called the Spin Inn, which is now a drum ‘n bass shop, but back in the day it was the only import shop in Manchester. I used to go in there when I was, like, twelve, and I’d be surrounded by these massive blokes -

Rob: – big black Manchester dudes!

Sean: It was the first time I’d ever been in a shop like that…a really, really small shop with loads of records and loads of people. Putting on tunes really loud for two minutes at a time, people would buy whatever was playing on their soundsystem ‘cos the sound was so good! Yeah, every record they put on you’d buy, ‘cos they had Technics and the sound was amazing…

Rob: Yeah, you’d just go in and buy everything you could – I mean, there wasn’t much of it around…

Was there much quality control in terms of what they sold?

Rob: Yeah, what you were getting was high quality…

Sean: It was a specialist shop..

Rob: They were making an effort to get good stuff…

Sean: Yeah, it was a specialist shop – they were importing all kinds of music. Bit of rare groove and breaks…

Rob: …to the latest Schoolly D or…

Sean: The buyer at Spin Inn at the time was a guy called Kenny Brogan, there was another guy there called Ross and they both really knew their shit. But they were still at the whim of the distributor, they’d still have to get their shipment once a month from the distributors – and then that Sunday on the Stu Allen show or Lee Brown show you’d hear a bunch of the tunes, so on the Monday you’d go into town and you’d get ‘em. So, it wasn’t like there was a massive review policy going on, it was just a case of, we put the tunes on and bang them out…

I’m guessing that along with the radio, the record store was the only place you were hearing stuff like this. Was there anywhere you could read about electro or the music you liked?

Sean: No, though there was one magazine called Streetscene, which was one of a kind. When I was in college Melody Maker would come out once in a while with something, NME might too. There was another one that was smaller…

Rob: Record Mirror?

Sean: Yeah…That used to be really good. And Lime Lizard as well, before that went off…These were mags I’d buy because they’d have, like, Mantronik on the cover…

Rob: It would just be one small feature, never anything big. I was getting off it radio, really…

Sean: I mean, by sort of ’86-’87, I was still wearing tracksuit bottoms – and I was massively unfashionable, it wasn’t cool anymore, everybody else had got into James or whathaveyou…Yeah, even in ’86 I was getting dissed…

Rob: You know, as soon as something’s become saturated, you have to move on. But if you’re affected by that something, saturation or not, you’re just moulded for life. All your criteria, all the moves you make…

Sean: I used to think [of other people], “How can you not be into it anymore?” I was competitive about it, you know? I was like, it’s so futuristic-sounding, what does fashion have to do with it?

I guess that “futuristic” element was particularly appealing to you as youngsters…

Rob: Yeah, but then if you only preach futurism, you can only let go of the past. The further we got from ’83 and ’84, where the intersection for me and Sean was, it was all becoming more retro…

Sean: I know it doesn’t sound like a long time, but to us at the time it was an eternity. By ’87, it started to go mainstream, because of Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and the sampler really took over – everyone was suddenly very aware of the sampling. But those three years, 85-87, to me personally were the most productive years of hip-hop…That’s when all the amazing production happened -

Rob: – it’s when everything was laid out.

Sean: And that was the time when I used to cut the most flak for being into it! So for that brief period, it was an outsider thing. And yeah, by about ’87 it started to become cool again, but I was massively into house by then…

Rob: Yeah, but that was when the music had been watered-down when it came back again, you’d get people like Lakim Shabazz , and then ‘The Power’ by Snap would come out, and it was basically the same record, and you’d be like, “That came out too years ago! No!”

When house arrived, did you see it as a natural extension or continuation of your love of hip-hop, or was it something altogether different? Was it disseminated through an entirely different network, or did those same channels that brought you the hip-hop begin to deliver house too?

Rob: At this point, Sean and I were poles apart. I used to listen to the same radio station – it started with soul in the early evening, would go into hip-hop, and then – they used to move the schedule around over the different years, obviously – but at one point it became soul, hip-hop, then acid, then house, though house was obviously first because it was more soul-ly. And the more hard it got, to acid, I think Sean was getting more into it…

Sean: I didn’t like house. When I first heard it, I thought – this is a joke. I mean, I’d like Larry Heard but I’d not heard any; when I first heard house I was hearing, like, Farley records, but not the acid ones – the soully bassline ones with all the singing over the top…

Rob: That’s down to the DJ, innit…

Sean: …and I just didn’t really like anything like that. I didn’t like the singing, I didn’t like the 4×4 beat…

I think that’s a transition lots of people fail to make – that of breakbeat to 4×4…

Sean: I really didn’t like house or 4×4 until I heard acid. It was Armando that did it…

Rob: Yeah, I mean, if it was a basic 4×4 track it would probably get rejected by us, but if it was an acid track…

There’s a real skippy element to those Armando tunes that made them stand out rhythmically from the rest…

Sean: A certain Latin element, yeah. Armando was what I was into: still 4×4, but a bit slower than the rest, and the acid lines were properly funky – you know, they had really good funk on ‘em – and it sounded really weird. They were all on off-beats and I really liked that, ‘cos it was a lot less [impersonates tinny, pedestrian bass and hi-hat house beat]

Rob: Yeah, with most house our immediate reaction was to think how lazy it was to put the same beat on every record…

Sean: For us, house was shit songs made and played by people who couldn’t do good beats, you know, just rubbish…until I heard acid and then I suddenly went, “Oh no! It’s the same but it’s changing!” and I had this weird epiphany where I’m thinking, “OK, it’s the same loop, but they keep changing everything” and I really like that, I really liked the feeling that the track was going somewhere…

Rob: And it’s tuning was different, ‘cos resonance on an acid synth – I’d never heard of such a thing. I’d be, like, “What? It’s going up in tune but it’s going down at the same time?!?”

Sean: Acid’s what got me into Tangerine Dream and all that stuff. I heard those synths and I’d be like, “This is like acid but without the beats.” It was a really big thing. I mean, obviously I was massively into electronic music because that’s what hip-hop came from, but still…

Were you living at home at this point?

Sean: Yeah, I met Rob in ’87, and moved out of my parents’ about ’91.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under Features, Interviews and tagged with Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Techno, Warp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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