Interview – London Elektricity

From an incredible live act that helped shape the face of live electronic music, to running one of the most prestigious record labels in the drum’n'bass world, to producing his own successful and game-changing music, Tony Coleman, aka London Elektricity, is considered a stalwart amongst the greats. Having invigorated a new direction in sound with his own output, as well as helping to discover artists on the seminal Hospital records label that he helps run, Coleman has, over the years, offered a distilled essence of creativity and work ethic that in many eyes has helped keep d’n'b from becoming a mere backwater of electronic music.

For many, it was the vibrant and genre-expanding live act put together by Coleman and that grabbed the headlines and attention of a wider range of audiences from his traditional fan base, yet the progression from live act back to a production zeitgeist was not only always on the cards, but was, in his eyes, an almost necessary evolution after the single-minded determination put into the live arena.

“It was two and a half years of touring, and in the middle I wrote an album, right between the tour, and it was fantastic,” Coleman says, enthusiastically talking of his time on tour with the live act. “We stopped doing it at our peak, which is the best thing to do, and the lessons I’ve learnt from it? Its not the first time I’ve done a band, I don’t know if I learnt any lessons from it really, it was fucking amazing, and I’m not going to do it again!”

“If you are going to do a live act properly and put your heart and soul into it,” he embellishes with a more serious tone, “then you put your entire life into it and everything else goes on hold, you cant just do it in a half assed way. a lot of electronic artists do that, they think we’ll do a week of rehearsals and then well do a couple of shows and were real live artists, and you have to literally dedicate years of your life to doing it and everything else suffers as a result – otherwise, you’re not doing it properly, and its partially because of that attitude as to why we actually did it, and partly why it was so good. The other reason it was so good was the collision of industries and the people in the band, it was a proper car crash experience, and there were a lot of morbid onlookers!”

With the release last year of the acclaimed fourth London Elektricity album, Syncopated City, he has shown that not only has he been able to maintain so many fingers in so many pies, he has demonstrated that his dedication to his craft is so encompassing solid, that it is often an all or nothing approach.

“When I go to the studio to make an album,” Coleman explains of his creative drive. “It’s such a deep and intense experience. I can only do it if I stop DJing and all that, and I get thoroughly into it. For me, now, making music doesn’t run parallel to where my life is, and as I get older I get deeper entrenched in that way of working. I don’t just dabble anymore and think ‘oh I’m going to make a tune now.’”

Whereas this singular dedication may be from the outside view an unwieldy proposition, to drop any other involvement or work within the DJing realm, it is at once also possible that this one-track plan has driven his work in a cyclic manner, by both pushing the boundaries and striking a chord with listeners outside the traditional boundaries of d’n’b. As such, Coleman is possibly a modern incarnation of the everyman within electronic music – a point reinforced by the nature of Syncopated City, with its robust mix of diverse styles and directions.

“I made the album in the way that I wanted to hear it, not to play it out or anything like that,” he notes, in a humourous and humility wielding voice that seems a Coleman trademark. “A lot of the tunes are stuff I’d listen to rather than DJing. There were a few risks I took on it. I threw a lot of guitars in the mix and did some vocals myself and kind of pushed the envelope a bit further in terms of actual song structures, and yeah, the reception was great. I’m, really pleased at the way the album has been received. Looking back on it, normally when I make an album there maybe two or three tunes that I’m really proud of, and about eight tunes I think I could do better. This one I think there’s about five tunes that I’m really happy with and just couldn’t have done any better.”

These risks and his willingness to at times change the whole structure and feel of traditional d’n’b is very much in evidence in tracks such as Just One Second, an anthemic theme tune that many consider to be a vocalised masterpiece of the album.

“Just One Second turned out really, really well, it came about in a quite fortuitous circuitous route,” Coleman explains of the tracks inception. “It started out as a remix for a band in Japan and they had this fairly simple electro pop song. Even before I started making the album that was a remix I was working on, and I experimented on that with a lot of guitars and live bass and just kind of made a wall of sound approach, and once id finished it I thought, right, I’m going to write a tune that uses this technique and i got a backing track together. The vocalist, Esmerelda, I’ve been aware of for many years, with her work in soul section and I thought that she had the right sound for it. I sent it over and a few days later she had done a song, and then off we went.”

With such a grounded outlook to producing, it is also no surprise that his creativity helps to cross over into the music he promotes with the rest of the Hospital Records crew. Once a niche market in d’n'b, over the last several years Hospital has grown into such a unique entity that its output often traverses through genres, giving aficionados a much more “music” orientated fare than more traditional d’n'b labels produce, and yet this has always been a direction that Coleman and the rest of the Hospital crew have looked towards.

“We’ve been doing this for thirteen years now. The success of Hospital and the kind of sound we’ve put forward we have has been so gradual thing, that it hasn’t been a shock or anything; it’s just kind of crept up. At the start we were right on the outside of d’n’b, in some weird little bubble, but a nice place to be, but there’s been this kind of osmosis over time, and now we find ourselves smack ban in the centre of things. We are just doing what we do, and trying to do it better and better every year.”

Having such a huge following around the world, Hospital has also never been afraid of embracing new media aspects, as evidenced by their award winning weekly podcast. From multiple websites for the label, sub label Med School and many of their artists, Coleman and crew have engendered a much sought after niche with the burgeoning online world. This has in turn enabled Hospital to continue to push the boundaries of its music, and further promote artists of such a high calibre.

“It’s a multi strand approach, we just believe in attacking things on all fronts and having fun with it at the same time. Everything we do we try to do in as creative a way as possible, and we generally enjoy it. The podcast, it’s a lot of work to do it, and at the moment we work on a new one every weekend. It’s a lot of fun and I really love it, and knowing that a lot of people download it and get so much feedback. Its not just about the positive feedback, the negative feedback is quite funny as well. There will always be people out there that don’t like what someone else is doing, and, if the profile is quite high and all the channels are open and we welcome the feedback, then we have to take the rough with the smooth, and its pretty funny some of the things. We try to work on all levels without burning ourselves out so we work on twitter, Myspace – not forgetting the websites.”

“Over the last year we’ve started doing individual sites,” he continues, breaking down the multilayered approach that Hospital has to their new media presence. “They’re little mini blogs for people. We just launched a new one called iambop.com which is for Bop, a new artist that we just signed – his album will be out in July, and its a little wicked site. We have the London Elektricity site and the Mistabishi site, so yeah, we are constantly looking for new ways – we’re looking to get people to also develop iPhone applications for us and we might end up with three different applications.”

With such a modern day approach to the promotion of their music, it is little wonder that along with their cutting edge media presence, that Coleman and Hospital have a similar and calmly optimistic outlook to the bug bear of other music labels, file sharing.

Being scared of file sharing is like being scared of the wind, its not going to go away,” he explains, pointing out the inanity of the fear behind the seeming evil of the trend. “I’m old enough and ugly enough to have been around when the whole tape thing in the 7p0-s happened, home taping was killing music and obviously it didn’t kill music, and its the same with file sharing, It didn’t kill music at all, it actually enables music to be heard by a much greater number of people, at a certain stage in their lives where they cant afford to buy music.”

“The stance that we take is if you can afford to buy music and you file share it, then shame on you, and you’re a complete twat, but if you have no money, or you cant access paid downloads, then we’d rather you listened to it than didn’t. There are a percentage of people who are honest and it’s a high enough percentage that it lets us make a living. So you cant put your head in the sand, you have to take an objective view and also look at the promotional benefit. I think its working, and the main file sharing market is young people anyways, some who cant always afford to buy music, so they might file share the music, share it around, then move on in their lives, get jobs, and then go for iTunes and they have some money, buy it, and feel good about it. I just cant see how it can actually kill the music industry.”

With such a hefty range of projects and such a broad canvas on which to paint, it is little wonder that Coleman is enthusiastic about many of Hospitals upcoming releases.

“We’ve just had High Contrast confidential released,” he espouses. “It’s our first ever foray into “the best of” territory, and its a double album of High Contrasts best tracks and the best of his remix work In early June we have an amazing new album called Sick Music, which is kind of like the series Weapons of Mass Creation, and Sick Music is taking over from that. It has such a massive list of music from just about everyone … Agent Alvin, Nu:tone, Cyantific, Apex, Muffler, Danny Byrd, sigma, Mistabishi – were really chuffed about it, and very, very excited.”

“This year looks really healthy for us, everything is going well. We’re also having an awful lot of fun with Med School,” he explains of Hospitals sub-label foray into genre-crossing, experimental music. “We’ve got an artist on there, a 19 years old from St Petersburg called Bop, who makes the most gentle, gentle music. It’s so delicate and beautiful that it’s completely different and amazing, and we have an album out by him in July.”

As it stands for many Hospital fans, seeing a London Elektricity performance is often tantamount to a pilgrimage, and each and every time Coleman tours down to these shores, his fans are left wondering when, or if, they will have a chance to see him again, as Colemans priorities constantly, and understandably, shift towards an more personal aspect of life.

“I hate being away from my family and my wife, basically,” he replies without a hint of regret when asked about rumours that even this latest tour was a surprise to those who had heard that he may not tour Australia again.

“What made this tour possible is that at the same time I’m down there, my wife is going back to Japan to see her mum and dad with my little boy. It was just a nice coincidence that lets me come down there, and, honestly, I’m just really excited to have this chance to be going back to Australia.”