• Interviews

• All
• Music
• Cinema
• TV
• Comic Books

Dec 17, 2024 Issue #72 - The ‘90s Issue with The Cardigans and Thurston Moore By Celine Teo-Blockey Photography by @mark.j.allen81

Rob Birch of Stereo MC’s remembers a love for rap and sampling fueling him and fellow member, DJ Nick Hallam’s excitement about starting a band together. Albums by Public Enemy and other hip-hop artists saw them set aside all they had learnt about making music via guitars to become disciples of breaks and loops. By the time the ’90s came along, they were carving a space for themselves making what would soon be called dance music, with their third album, 1992’s Connected, achieving a high water mark in their discography.

A success internationally, the Mercury Prize-nominated album boasted four Top 20 UK singles: the title track, “Creation,” “Ground Level,” and “Step It Up.” The gloriously irresistible “Connected”—which would appear in the 1995 film Hackers, starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller—was the biggest of the four hit singles.

It kicked off with a purposefully indistinguishable sample that Birch reveals was from a Pink Floyd song that they went to great lengths to obscure by recording and re-recording on different synthesizers. Then the unmistakable “aye aye aye” before the hypnotic loop holds sway rendering it impossible to not move if you weren’t already on the dancefloor.

“I remember it so well,” Birch says of how they came up with that loop. “It was a nice bright Saturday morning…we still lived in Battersea [in London] at that time. We had our gear set up in front of our living room windows and I was looking out the window just skipping through this Jimmy ‘Bo’ Horne record.

“And there’s one small area where there’s no horns, there’s no vocals, and it just went, ‘boom cha, boom cha,’ like that, and I just thought, ‘Wow!’” Birch explains that after a few years of experimenting with making music this way, he had picked up an ear for finding a good loop. “It’s like a radar…it wasn’t saying too much. It was just a nice groove.”

The Brixton-based group led by longtime friends Hallam and Birch, who were both originally from Nottingham, also included most notably vocalist Cath Coffey and late drummer, Owen If.

“In the very beginning, we’d hear these tracks by Schoolly D, Run DMC, Beastie Boys…or early electro, Yello, and Kraftwerk and wonder, ‘How did they make that music?’” Birch says. “There were no computers, programs, YouTube tutorials you could follow.”

So, they started experimenting with tape loops, literally opening up a cassette with a screwdriver, cutting the tape then using scotch tape to paste two ends together to form a loop—which would be played while another machine recorded it.

“Then Owen gave us a radiogram,” remembers Birch of the device that was a boxed cabinet that usually had a combination of AM/FM radio, cassette player, and turntable, “which had had a belt-driven turntable, and that’s how we made our first album. I would get the record on and at just the right bit, press play/record on the cassette.”

He would do this repeatedly, taking all night to make a drum track that could be made with the click of a button today. There was no read of tempo or speed and it was an imperfect way to work but Birch misses it. “We did every thing by ear. Sometimes, we would slow it right down just to see what it sounded like. You just went with what felt good.”

The two years between their 1990-released sophomore album, Supernatural, and Connected were an incredibly fecund time for the band. They toured America and won legions of new fans. Supernatural’s “Elevate My Mind” was the first UK hip-hop track to break into the American R&B charts. They were constantly at work on new loops and ideas. Collaborators were in and out of their living room studio, jamming and recording with them.

Birch recalls a version of “Step It Up” with a trumpet solo. “This dude came in, heard the tune, went straight into the live room and blasted out this trumpet solo…he came in like some red hot asteroid and then went. There was so much energy in the air. It was incredible.”

The “aye aye aye” refrain Birch thinks came from one of these freestyle sessions. “I remember chopping up an ad lib that someone had made for another song, and making it into a melody, and I started singing ‘aye aye aye’ over the tune, and Nick said, ‘Let’s loop that up and run it through the whole tune.’”

They had the “Connected” groove for almost two years and over time they had come up with a chorus line. There was anticipation that it was a “really good tune” but it remained unfinished. “We just couldn’t fill the verses,” recalls Birch who was at the time at a loss. “I tried rapping and all these different ideas but Nick was like, ‘Nah, nah, it’s not right.’”

Their sun-dazed Battersea days were now charged with the political frisson of their new home in Brixton. And it showed up in much of the record’s lyricism. Finally, in the studio and committed to completing “Connected,” Birch was sent to the vocal booth to “just jam on the mic.”

“The social climate in London was very agitated,” says Birch, of the era of the poll tax riots in Central London in 1990 and a few years after the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985. “And it was also the time of the Rodney King beating in America,” he adds, referencing the catalyst for the 1992 Los Angeles race riots

“Something ain’t right,” you hear Birch sing on the first verse. “Although it isn’t directly talking about the riots—it was a feeling in the air and it inspired the vocal,” confirms Birch, who says that as much as they were influenced by Public Enemy and rap, they were also inspired by Sly & the Family Stone, a lot of ’70s disco and boogie music. “Although we were trying to say things about what was going on in the world,” explains Birch, “it was also about putting out good feelings…. I think music should still be about love. And you know, there’s a lot of love on that record.”

www.stereomcs.com

[Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 72 of our print magazine, The ’90s Issue, which can be bought directly from us here. This is the article’s debut online.]

Stereo MC’s 2025 U.S. Tour dates:

January 23 Philadelphia, PA Union Transfer
January 24 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
January 25 Boston, MA The Sinclair
May 17 Pasadena, CA Cruel World festival

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.