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20th CENTURY FOX DON'T LIKE THEIR FILMS TURNED INTO RAP VIDEOS

There are a lot of lists summarising the last decade doing the rounds, but I don't know if anyone's done Best Lyrics yet. In my book, there's been nothing more evocative than: "Now Arnie's not a man with who you should trifle/ I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." That's from this Terminator 2 rap video that appeared on YouTube recently, written and produced by a gentleman named DJ Mayhem, with vocals by his chum Mouthmaster Murf. They're from Hereford, in the Midlands, and some time ago they came up with the idea of doing these rap/video cut-ups, sampling dialogue and visuals from their favourite films. So far they've done Predator, T2, and Robocop, the latter providing the runner-up prize in my Best Lyrics of the 00s list: "Lewis finds the first one pissing off a ledge/ He distracts her with his cock and then punches her off the edge." Beautiful. I emailed an interview request to Mayhem and he told me to call him after noon. I did.

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Vice: Good afternoon, DJ Mayhem. What do you do till noon?
DJ Mayhem: The guy I do the raps with, Murphy, we've got a nightclub, so I have a funny sleeping pattern. I get up about eleven and go to bed about four in the morning.

What's the club?
Underground music. Dubstep, drum and bass, hip-hop, techno, hardcore house, stuff like that.

What's the club scene like in Hereford?
It's not great. It's a pretty small town, in between Bristol and Cardiff. We've got the only underground club here. There's only three other clubs and they're all meat markets. Ours is the only place that plays anything different.

So where did this rap video business come from?
I don't know. I'm a big fan of the films and got the Predator soundtrack and put it into a tune. Originally, I did it without the vocals, just the soundtrack, then I spoke to Murf, and we decided to make it into the story of the film, rather than just singing about the Predator, which would have been a bit weird. Originally, we were gonna do impressions of the actors, then we just thought, fuck it, we'll take samples. And we watched Predator and just worked out what lines to sample and worked out what rapping we could squeeze in. So we did the video and I put it on Break.com and it got 200 views, and I thought, fucking hell, that's amazing! Then I put it on YouTube and it went crazy – 20,000 views in a week. But Fox took it down.

Why?
Copyright infringement. They took it down about a month ago. We were gutted because it was at about 750,000 views and they took it down before it got to a million.

Did you try to talk to them about it?
No, I had a look on the internet about how to go about it, and because it was taken down by an automated service it wasn't drawn to anyone's attention. If you speak to a person about it, they could take you to court. It's really shit. We wanted to do Die Hard as well but that's Fox too.

What feedback have you got from it all? Are you looking to get some work from it?
I'd like to. A lot of people really like it. We did have an offer from Big Brother asking if we could do something live on the show, but we didn't want to do anything live, it would be rubbish. We asked them to give us some lines from it and a plot, but nothing happened. The best thing that happened was the bloke who wrote Robocop sent me a message on YouTube saying that he fuckin' loved it, and he got me to send him a copy of it.

I was thinking you should do this with a different genre. Maybe with Vera Drake. Or Schindler's List.
I've got to be a real fan to do it. I've got to know it inside out. And there's got to be a recognisable soundtrack. Everyone wants us to do Total Recall, but there's no soundtrack that stands out. I'd like to do a comedy, but you can't do a parody of a parody, it would be a double negative.

ALEX GODFREY