The Filthy Dukes of London’s indie dance scene

The Filthy Dukes of London’s indie dance scene

26 October, 2009 | 7.04AM

• Written by: Caleb Rakes
• Filed under: Music News: filthy dukes, kill em all

Before Justice and Simian Mobile Disco were famous, they played at the Filthy Dukes’ quirky Kill ‘Em All And Let God Sort Them Out club night.

The party began life six years ago as a poorly attended bash in the basement of a pub in London, but soon grew to become one of London’s most popular club events, helping to create the indie dance hysteria that later swept the globe.

The success of their parties soon led to Olly Dixon and Tim Lawton being asked to remix famous bands, even though they had never produced a single track.

After a string of remixes, the Filthy Dukes dropped their debut album ‘Nonsense In The Dark’, and this month saw the release of a new set of club remixes of their LP.

We caught up with the Dukes’ Olly Dixon to find out more about the beginning of their indie dance empire.

Would you mind going back and telling us how it all began for the Filthy Dukes?

It all started about six years ago. At the time, I was working at a venue called the Lock Tavern in Camden Town, London, doing their bookings and graphic design.

I decided to start a night called ‘Kill ‘Em All And Let God Sort Them Out’, where I booked people from bands to DJ the kind of music they liked.

It was a Sunday night and we had Zongamin and Simian Mobile Disco DJing, back when they were just called Simian.

Where were the first Kill Em All parties held?

It was first held at The Embassy bar on Essex Road, Islington. We used to have the guys come down and DJ. All the nights there were a disaster and no one ever came, but for some reason I really got into it and thought I’d quite like to run a club night.

So I moved it to Barfly in Camden, and we used to hold pre-parties at the Lock Tavern.

Musically, the scene was just starting. ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ had just been released by The Rapture and ‘Losing My Edge’ by LCD Soundsystem. DFA was just starting and Output Records was releasing some really cool stuff.

Where did your inspiration for Kill ‘Em All’ come from?

I was really into the electroclash scene and used to visit ‘Return to New York’ and other nights like that.

Musically, the scene was just starting. ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ had just been released by The Rapture and ‘Losing My Edge’ by LCD Soundsystem. DFA was just starting and Output Records was releasing some really cool stuff.

We kind of wanted to do something a bit different, so we played a lot of DFA, Daft Punk, and Talking Heads records and wanted to do a night with an equal emphasis on live bands and DJs.

We ended up giving Bloc Party their second ever gig and had bands like Late of the Pier and We Are Scientists play. Simian Mobile Disco became our residents.

And it became a success?

Yeah, suddenly we went from having people moaning that we weren’t playing enough indie records to massive queues going around the block every time we did a night.

Then Fabric came along and asked us to do a party for them in Room 2 of the club. At our second party at Fabric we had Test:Icicles, Cut Copy, and White Rose Movement, and on the DJ side we had Simian Mobile Disco, Justice, who at that point had never released anything, and us.

Justice became our residents as well. That second night at Fabric really took off, and it felt like the beginning of London’s indie dance scene, at least for us.

So you spurred the indie dance scene in London through Kill ‘Em All, but didn’t Erol Alkan’s night Trash at The End club come first?

Trash was first. The difference is Kill ‘Em All had more live stuff and Trash didn’t have live stuff, or only had live stuff once a month. We were more about having an equal balance between live acts and DJs. I used to go to Trash, so we were heavily influenced by it. Trash was really cool.

Our party became a monthly Fabric party. First we did just one room, and then it became busier and busier, until they gave us the whole club. Over the years we’ve had Justice, Simian, Erol Alkan, The Chemical Brothers, James Murphy, the list goes on.

When did you start producing?

Because of the success of Kill ‘Em All, we started to get booked for lots of other parties. And then bands started offering us remixes.

Bands approached you for remixes, even though you weren’t producers?

Yes. The first band that approached us were The Rakes. We’d been booked to go an NME tour with them, and we were one the first DJ acts to booked for an NME tour.

The band asked us to do a remix, and we said ‘ok’, but we had no idea how we were going to do it!

Isnt’ that a bit risky? How did you even know where to begin?

We had a rough idea of how we wanted it to sound. I had a friend called Mark who was a producer and he had his own studio. He was doing all kinds of stuff, so I persuaded him to let us go in and try some stuff out. It worked out really well.

From there, we got offered more remixes and the three of us ended up working together a lot. We started learning more about how a studio works and how to craft a remix.

One of the bands we remixed was The Macabees. Their record label called us in after we did the remix, which was bit odd as normally you never really hear anything back from the label.

So they called us in and asked, ‘If you guys are making any music, we’d really like to hear it’. So we spent a bit of time making some of our own tracks.

It’s quite interesting that you had bands and labels asking you for music, when you weren’t producing yet.

We knew we always wanted to make music, but we always had full time jobs and never really had the time to do it.

So we made some time, and then spent a month in the studio making lots of tunes. We sent them to the label who said, ‘we don’t like any of it except this one track’, which was ‘This Rhythm’.

After a long period of doing up bits and bobs, we got offered a record deal, and now we’ve spent a year in the studio doing our album. It’s gone quite well.

I suppose I’ve always been massively passionate about music and I think if you’ve got that hunger then by the time it comes to actually making it you have in your mind roughly how you want it to sound and it’s not so much of a blank canvas.

‘This Rhythm’ was an underground hit. Some people spend 20 years in the studio and achieve nothing.

I suppose I’ve always been massively passionate about music and I think if you’ve got that hunger then by the time it comes to actually making it you have in your mind roughly how you want it to sound and it’s not so much of a blank canvas. Plus, Mark is a brilliant musician.

And as we’ve spent more time in the studio, we’ve started playing our own stuff, and we’ve also spent time collecting vintage synths. I think they just make you creative.

Rather than using plug in synths, the sound is so incredible, and with a Juno synth you don’t have to be trained or spend years doing it to come up with something good.

How did your set up progress to what you have now? After seeing you live recently you have mixture of synths, lap tops, guitars and drums?

We were getting to the end of finishing our album and we knew we had to start thinking about playing live and we were quite adamant is wasn’t going to be just me and Tim behind a couple of laptops.

So we took reference from how we made the album, which had a lot of live drums in it, so we had to have a live drummer.

Plus having promoted ‘Kill Em All’ for five years before that and seeing so many acts soundcheck and play, we knew what effect a live drummer has.

I remember seeing Crystal Castles and I thought they were absolutely terrible, but then I ended up really liking them. So I booked them to play Fabric, by which time they had a live drummer and suddenly everything made sense. It really held it together, he kept it flowing and it became an incredible show.

We made the album less like a dance album so it had that energy which made it easier to work out live. The first live booking we had was for Glastonbury, so we had to put some rehearsal into that.

The early shows weren’t great but a year and half in, after doing 33 festivals this year, we really hit our stride.

I used to play the drums when I was young but I had to learn parts of guitar which I’d never done before. It was a very steep learning curve but we got there.

There seems to be more influence in your sound than a lot of contemporary dance music. ‘Messages’ sounds like Erasure, and other tracks are influenced by New Order. Would you say you’re heavily influenced by 80’s electro?

When you’re making electronic dance music and there’s some element of song structure you will automatically sound like 80’s electro.

Having said that it has definitely been an influence on us. Human League to Can, a combination of 80’s music and Krautrock has been an influence on this album definitely.

Does any Krautrock or 80’s electro ever pop into your DJ sets?

It does. That’s how we started off and got popular. ‘Kill Em All’ was more about contemporary dance music. Not trying to be clever, but just playing good music. Krautrock maybe less, unless it was an eclectic set on an early Sunday, but you cant really play it at Fabric.

But we did do a Fabric CD and we put Sparks on it and the Phenomenal Handclap Band, which is contemporary but has that old disco sound to it.

How do you find the time to do everything - touring, writing an album, learning instruments, promoting nights, DJing?

We don’t do a lot of sleeping! To be honest everything kind of ties into each other. When we were making the album we were very strict with ourselves.

Monday to Friday, 10 – 7 and then on the weekends we were DJing. The last year has been pretty heavy with touring and DJing.

But at some point we started releasing records on our ‘Kill Em All’ (label), such as this new band Plugs, but because they came from the night it’s not too much extra work. A lot of the contributors on our album came from our night.

And who takes over the vocal duties live?

Tim. I have a terrible voice. We couldn’t take eight vocalists on the road. But Tim had a great voice and was kind of keeping it a secret. He has become a really good frontman. I think we’ll have less guest vocalists on the next album.

Next album?

Yeah we’ve kind of been working on a few ideas on the last few weeks. We want to just stop playing live for a bit. We’ve got a couple of ideas floating around at the moment and we want to capitalise on them.

What kind of direction would you now say you’re leaning towards?

We were thinking ‘let’s have some fun’. Disco sounds like a bit of a cliché, because everyone talks about it but it is a bit more laid back.

Do you find it weird that your former club nights residents, like Simian Mobile Disco, have blown up to become global superstars?

Yeah totally. It’s amazing. I knew them back when they were just Simian and they’d only just started DJing. They’re both really musically intelligent and really nice. It’s funny that they played rock-a-billy records with us at the Tavern.

A similar thing happened with Justice. When we first booked them, we had no idea of what would happen. We don’t keep in contact anymore but when we see each other, we say ‘hi’.

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