Nothing To Do With Roy

Photo by Ben Parks

Back in 2005 when we featured Skream in the Horror Issue of Vice, no one gave a crap about dubstep. If you went to FWD>> at Plastic People on a Thursday there would be 20 people nodding their heads in a corner next to the speakers. Nowadays, what came bubbling out of Croydon in the early 2000s is the nation’s main-room club music. Skream’s remix of La Roux’s “In for the Kill” effectively launched her career and FWD>> got so popular it had to move to Fridays before shifting to Sundays in an attempt to shake off the coked-up, white-shirts-and-shiny-shoes weekend warrior brigade. One consequence of the need to provide big-room peak-time tuneage to the masses is that much of what made dubstep sound good in the first place has been lost. Loefah’s minimal half-step, the swinging two-step of Horsepower Productions and the weird synths that typified Kode9’s tracks have been ditched in favour of dumbed-down mid-range enormo-wobblers by Caspa and Rusko. Praise Todd Edwards, then, for a bunch of kids called Ben UFO, Untold and Ramadanman, who are in thrall to Omar S and Basic Channel, and understand that the roots of the music they make lies in J Da Flex and El-B, not Bad Company and Twisted Individual. Pick up a release on Hessle or 2nd Drop and you’ll get the idea. Earlier this year, Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” came out of nowhere to close Ben UFO’s Fabric promo mix and suddenly this wave of producers had their anthem and the rest of us had a hands-down track of the year. Joy Orbison is a young guy called Pete who has a label, Doldrums, that you should all start getting exited about. Vice: Hello. I feel silly addressing you as Joy. Can I call you Roy?
Joy Orbison: It’s OK, you can call me Pete. I just chose the name because I liked the sound of it. It wasn’t anything to do with Roy Orbison. And how did a skinny white kid called Pete wind up making bass music?
I got into drum ’n’ bass when I was like ten or eleven, mainly because my uncle made it. He’s called Ray Keith. Ray Keith is your uncle?
Yeah. I thought everyone knew that already. He probably only actually listened to my stuff about a month ago, though. For years I was into punk and collecting seven-inches and I’ve always liked bands. It is difficult explaining that you like Josef K to people who just assume you’re a garage kid. I started producing mainly because I was DJing and no one was putting out the kind of stuff I wanted to play. The day you made “Hyph Mngo”, did you feel all inspired like Keats and know that you were about to make this big piece of work?
Not really. It was one of the first things I made on my really basic set-up. No one can believe how crap my speakers are. They’re just kind of PC Workshop ones. It’s really cack-handed. I keep getting offered all these huge amounts to do remixes for people like VV Brown and I don’t think people realise how basic the approach is. So you made everyone’s favourite tune of the year by mistake on some PC Workshop speakers?
Sort of, yes. BUCKEN JERRY
“Hyph Mngo”/“Wet Look” is out now on Hot Flush. “BRKLYN CLLN”/“J Doe” is forthcoming on Doldrums. More at myspace.com/joyorbison.