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Sharps & flats
Everything But the Girl marry the lonely pop romance of Frank Sinatra to the dance-floor sounds of house and drum 'n' bass.
By Charles Taylor
[09/28/99]

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I got depressed as darkcore drum 'n' bass stifled the soulful drum 'n' bass sounds of '95-96, but it came about because many of the main players in the scene were scared of it going overground too early and they pulled it back under a stone. That move has dominated the past couple of years. However, many of them are now realizing that this is a dead end. I have spoken with key players like Grooverider and Roni [Size] and I can tell from their latest plans that the funk and the soul is coming back into the scene.

Also Today Sharps & flats Everything But the Girl marry the lonely romance that Frank Sinatra and Dusty Springfield distilled into pop with the dance floor sounds of house and drum 'n' bass. By Charles Taylor

The "Missing" track helped propel house music into the mainstream. Do you want house to go mainstream? A lot of people in the underground are snotty as fuck about that.

I would say that much of house music goes mainstream on a fairly regular basis this side of the Atlantic. The charts in Europe are dominated by house music, albeit mostly of the hard trancey variety. This is because Europe got used to house with the acid house and rave explosion in the late '80s. In America, meanwhile, house music still suffers ghettoization because of its origins in disco, and gay and black subculture, and this keeps it marginalized. But a good song is a good song and house tracks will break through onto radio with good songs. Broadly speaking though, the genre itself will stay underground in America as long as clubbing remains underground. Everyone in the U.K. goes clubbing at weekends. I can't see Midwestern and rural America dancing their boots off to Danny Tenaglia just yet!

One of the things Everything But the Girl have is the power to introduce new forms of music to listeners on a broader level than most electronic music producers. You can put jungle beats and house vibes all in the same album, and very few producers would try that.

I feel that a solely genre-based appreciation of dance music is utterly destructive. No one ever expected Stevie Wonder or James Brown to only play at one rigid tempo! Songs either swing and rock or they don't, regardless of tempo. In the end, I look for soul and drama and groove whether it is DJ Krust, Deep Dish or Massive Attack.

How can musicians in electronic music avoid getting stuck into that annoying "genre" trap?

By breaking out of it with good music at other tempos and by keeping their projects under one name -- not hiding say, their downtempo tracks under one pseudonym and their Detroit techno experiments under another. We could easily have ditched the name Everything But the Girl at various points in our career because of its negative connotations, but in the end I feel we have garnered respect for sticking with it and simply moving with the times.

I think the aggressiveness in drum 'n' bass is a needed component to dance music. How does drum 'n' bass make you feel spiritually?

Aggression is a necessary component in all music. Dark, nihilistic music has its place too. But in the end I want to go to a club to be filled up in a soulful and spiritual way, and darkcore jungle and drum 'n' bass don't do it for me in that context. Sometimes I will drop in at a drum 'n' bass club on my way home from a deep house night, just for a quick blast of dark, chilly air!

Here's the $10 cheeseball question: If you two were on a boat, sailing clear into the sea with nothing more than some beer and a fat sound system, what would you play?

Tomb Raider.
salon.com | Sept. 28, 1999

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