Busy isn’t a word to describe the boys from Blighty’s west, who in the last few years have taken their spot of honor amongst the worlds breakbeat elite, and for Dom and Mark, who make up the DJing and production team Stanton Warriors, the word “holiday” might as well be constrained to a theoretical textbook.
“Its hard to remember my time off – I’ve dedicated my whole fuckin life to music, and its all good and I’m not complaining, but it’d be nice to go for a walk in the fuckin Himalayas or something.”
The Stanton Warrirors are one of those teams that have a misnomer attached to them, whereby their name is not indicative of what people originally think. “We made our first tune in three hours and we sent it to a label, and tried to get it signed off they said sure we’ll sign it, and they said well what’s the name, and Mark had tripped over the manhole cover and we heard that a manhole cover was called a Stanton Warrior and we just thought, well that sounds pretty good,” but for those who are more familiar with the DJing world, the original thought it further from the truth “Stanton, the company which makes needles and decks and shit think we named it after them, so they send us free shit a lot of the time like needles and slip-matts.”
Having traveled to all parts of the world, it seems that obtaining downtime amongst a busy schedule leaves little time for anything other than their chosen path, and the ideal of a regular life seems distant. “You know what, I don’t fuckin think I do anything else, I find it hard – we’re working so hard this year all the time and have international gigs every weekend. I’m coming up to thirty now and I haven’t done much else besides music, not saying that’s a bad thing, doing music – its not, but I haven’t done things like buy a house, settle down, or any of those things.”
Yet from his tone, you know that he probably wouldn’t have it any other way. The unmitigated work ethic, production values and tremendously talented output in both the production and DJing arena have all paid off, and The ‘Warriors have helped turned the tide in the battle for an arena of music that has seen breakbeat leap in popularity over a short span of years. On a continent and world stage where trance and 4/4 beats are king, the pride the boys have in pushing their chosen genre to the forefront of the pack is evident, and they have little room in their ethos for anything that they don’t see as worthy of pushing those boundaries.
“When you do a big festival or something, where there’s 30,000 people and they have all these fucking trance DJs playing their records, and they’re all in the main room, to me it sounds like they’re playing one track all night. When I play sometimes people don’t get it at first, because the beat has changed – but then suddenly they really get into it. I could be a trance DJ and played trance and made a lot of money, and we’ve rocked them anyways, so I think fuck you trance – you know what I mean?
“I’ve had a few moments, I call them Tarantino moments, when I’m in a mental country Moscow or Tel Aviv or somewhere weird and you play to a crowd who’ve never even heard breaks before and they’re like “I fukin love it” – and one of the biggest questions get asked all the time is “what’s this music”, and its like your fuckin converting people.”
For all their success, the ‘Warriors have had their fair share of setbacks, such as in 2003 when thieves descended on their studio and stole equipment, computers and a library of work compiled over several years. In an ironic twist of fate, the theft may have incurred an unusual by-product, and may have actually contributed to their fame. “It wasn’t only the tunes that were lost, but somewhere around a million samples – it was a real bastard, because you can’t really re-make a tune. But you know what, it hasn’t really affected our djing and that’s been intense and big – in the last three years we’ve done that many international gigs without actually having a record out, and that’s quite unusual..
“Maybe that’s been the secret to our success,” Dom remarks, reminiscing over the lack of solid album releases, “Now though, we have fucking shit loads of stuff. In January we have the artist album and Stanton Sessions Volume Two coming out, then we have another artist album coming out in maybe April or something, but we have enough tracks now for another artists album after -that- already as well. Then we’ll put a remix album out, and a cover CD for MixMag, as well as all those we’re thinking of doing a cover album – that’s like, four, five…six albums.”
With such a wealth of material, the artists they have worked with are numerous. From Big Daddy Kane, Twista and Rodney P, to the hopeful “we’re looking for Young MC at the moment” reincarnation, their music continues to bust the edges of its metaphysical box. Yet amongst all of the positive flow, there have been key points of contention. The release of Stanton Sessions volume two, the follow up to the critically acclaimed Stanton Sessions, is somewhat of a sore point to Dom. Having been floating around as a bootleg for some time, at the last minute a problem was found with one of the centerpiece tracks of the album.
“Stanton Sessions volume two would have been out by now. We did a lot of remixes for it – we didn’t use all of it though. One of the biggest mixes on there was Feel Good Inc by the Gorillaz, and at the last minute when we were about to press the CD – Damien Albert from the Gorillaz said “Aww I don’t like it”. It’s a big tune, it’s already been bootlegged and it’s done really well – this mix is a hot mix. It’s a bit unfair because it was at the very last minute, and it held back the whole album.”
Even with such minor setbacks, there’s no stopping the Stanton force. With such big things occurring in the imminent , we are lucky that a tour to our shores is also in the cards, and as always, they will more than likely exceed expectations.
“We have a lot of shit that’s unreleased and it makes for quite an exciting fresh set. The one lucky thing is that as a producer I have a lot of nuggets to throw down, and I’m just looking forward to smashing it.”
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