Tony Colman

Torsten Schmidt

The whole Hospital thing is kind of striking because for a label, which is actually functioning in the drum & bass arena, it’s pretty open. And openness is not naturally associated with drum & bass these days. So how do you get away with it?

Tony Colman

I mean, it’s like every label I’ve ever been involved with. I’ve always had my own labels, simply because no one else would ever release my music.

Torsten Schmidt

What do you mean with always?

Tony Colman

I started my first label in 1988, it was called Pig & Trumpet. And again, I was writing music, I was recording music, I was too impatient to send demos to people and just wait around. And I became very paranoid because people were telling me you cannot trust the majors and I also I just thought, “Fuck it, let’s just get on with it, let’s do it on ourselves.” Press up 500 7"s, drive around in my old car, go to shops and see if anyone would buy it. I didn’t know what I was doing at all, I had no idea about business. For me it was just, this is the music and I wanna get it to people, so this is how we do it. And originally the first 7" that we pressed up was simply to trying get a gig for the band, because we thought that if we pretend that we’ve got a record deal and we go into a club in London and we give them this record and say, “Hey, we’ve got a record out,” they’ll actually give us a gig instead of charging us to play. Because that’s what it is like in London, you have to pay 50 quid if you are unknown, just for the honour of playing in someone’s club. So this was simply like, maybe we can play for nothing instead of having to pay. So we pressed up this records and it was a cover version of a rare groove tune, called “Stories,” which was recorded in 1971 by a band called the Chakachas. They were kind of one hit wonder on the rare groove tip. So we did this and it became quite successful, I think probably because we weren’t trying to actually make a record, we were just trying to have something to prove to people that we existed. And the record itself took off, and it went Top 40 in the end. And for me, that was really where I got the bug because it was so exciting to have your own record on your own label and people want it, it’s in demand. And the whole kind of cottage industry thing, which is you put all your money into pressing up 500 7" records, maybe it cost about £200 or something, but that was everything that we had. And from there people bought it and they said, “Why didn’t you do a 12" mix?” So I did a 12", we sold 1,000 of those and then we repressed it and we sold another 1,000. This was in the days, it was in 1988...

Torsten Schmidt

How old were you by then? Because, I mean, nowadays people seem to feel kind of minor if they don’t have a label by the age of 21 or something.

Tony Colman

I know it’s a bit of owning a pair of trainers now. You have your pitbull terrier, you have your label and you have the latest kind of trainers. Then it was a little bit different, there were a few independent labels, but the whole structure, the whole infrastructure wasn’t really there. It was just about setting up. The whole DIY ethos was really getting started around that time.

Torsten Schmidt

DIY meaning?

Tony Colman

“Do it yourself.” At that time I wasn’t young, I wasn’t a spring chicken, I was actually 27 in 1988.

Torsten Schmidt

What have you been doing up until then?

Tony Colman

I’d been just making music. I was really unfocused, I was really aimless and I made a lot of music. A lot of it was pretty terrible, but I knew that it was what I always wanted to do. So for me, it was just like this was the first time I actually had the confidence to release something and bring it to people. That was the very first release, going into nightclubs and just to get into the clubs for free I had to give the records to the bouncer on the door and I’m going to go to DJs and give them the record and just be a pain in the arse. That’s one of the big lessons I learned then, is that you really have to be a pain in the arse sometimes. It didn’t come easy.

Torsten Schmidt

But how does that get together with being a nice bloke?

Tony Colman

That’s kind of hard when you are running a label because you put a lot of love into it and you are doing it for the love of music. And I think most of the artists I’ve worked with hopefully would say that they feel some love for me. And that’s more important than anything else at the end of the day. Because I’ve made mistakes in the past where I was falling out with the people for the wrong reasons. I totally regret that, because now I can look back on those situations and think, well... For me the most important thing is it’s all about spreading the love. And that sounds like a little bit of a cliche, but at the end of the day, it’s one thing making music, but it’s quite another thing when you are in the position of responsibility helping other people to make music. And the emotion behind it all is the most important factor. That is more important than how much money you make out of the music. It’s more important than how many people listen to your music. It’s how you feel emotionally throughout the whole process. And that includes making the music. And that includes how the people listening to your music feel about your music. So, at the end of the day, being a nice bloke has nothing to do with it – it’s the feeling that you put into it.

My band around that time was a kind of acid-jazz band, which at the time was quite a cool thing to be involved in, but is a dirty word now. I don’t really know why but it just become a little bit, “Oh yeah, I used to be in an acid-jazz band.” It’s like, a few years ago it was a crime to admit that you used to like heavy metal, but now it’s cool to admit that you used to like heavy metal. But it’s still not cool to admit that you used to make acid-jazz.

Torsten Schmidt

So is it already cool to admit that you’ve being remixed by Paul Oakenfold?

Tony Colman

Yeah, that’s still alright, I don’t mind that one.

Torsten Schmidt

But probably for those who...

Tony Colman

That was when he was good, by the way.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you keep focused? I mean, you saw obviously a lot of people going on a lot of different roads, how did you keep your own focus in not making too many pacts with the devil?

Tony Colman

It’s chaos theory, really. I’m 42 years old now and the time is gone really, really quickly. And I’m making drum & bass, I suddenly find myself in charge in one of the biggest drum & bass labels. And it was never intended to be that way. It’s just kind of happened, really. I mean, when I was in my acid-jazz band Izit, I kept writing music that was fast, but the band would go like, “No, we only play downtempo or midtempo.” I was writing all these tunes on 140 or 150 BPM and I had no idea what to do with them. I was living in Tottenham. And some of my mates in Tottenham were people like Shut Up And Dance and they were making very early breakbeat, early kind of rave music and hardcore. I really wanted to do it, I was feeling it but I was on the road with my band. We were playing around Japan, around Europe and it was really I had to split the band up and dissolve it before I could give myself the time and space to actually get into the studio and start making this music that I was feeling. And the experience that really upset me on the road was listening to Goldie’s album Timeless. That really took me from one thing to do this, to knowing that I needed to do it. And that to me still remains the finest drum & bass artist album to this day. There was never any intention to do this, but I find myself here and it’s just been a long process. And you have no real control over your destiny, it just kind of happens to you. All you got to do is just to turn up, work really hard and be open-minded and there are times where you just got to go with the flow, you just have to go with the little lucky breaks that you get. You’ve just gotta dive in there and take an advantage of them.

Torsten Schmidt

So what lucky break did get you into this strict inner circle, big boys club?

Tony Colman

It’s not a strict inner circle, I’ve got to say that’s complete bollocks. People have this idea of drum & bass and jungle that it’s run by about four people all in London and they are not interested in anybody else outside of their circle. I’ve got to say that’s totally untrue. On Hospital, we have about 12 artists that are signed to the label, and one of those artists comes from London and that’s me. And everybody else comes from either different parts of the UK or different parts of the world. And at the moment, the most exciting place for drum & bass is Eastern Europe. A couple of years ago it was Brazil. That’s going to change. There’s people in different parts of the world who are making drum & bass and jungle. And the important thing is that people have learned the skills, they have learned the techniques, but now importantly they are bringing their own sense of excitement through in the music, with their own ingredients and their own lack of prejudice in their music as well.

Torsten Schmidt

Could you explain what you mean with lack of prejudice?

Tony Colman

A lot of people who make drum & bass in the UK are fixated on a certain type of structure, and this isn’t unique to drum & bass. This applies to every form of dance music in many ways. People who produce house, people who produce trance, people who produce hip-hop... If they’re busy DJing in certain clubs, they get fixated on a certain structure. And it’s very, very important to step outside of that. Which is why when we get people making music from a different part of the world, who haven’t got those kinds of structural prejudices. In other words, it’s that thing where you have 64 bars for the drum intro, then you have a breakdown, and then you have the main body, it’s maybe 128 bars long, and then there’s another breakdown. And then there’s a mixout point, and then there’s the outro. That’s boring. So that’s why, from different parts of the world, people have different ideas of structure and different ideas of using different chord sequences, or just breaking the rules, which is what it’s all about.

I’m always searching for something that surprises me, searching for something that I wouldn’t predict or I wouldn’t expect in the music because then that excites me and I know that I can get behind it. If it sounds really compentent and very well-engineered and very well produced, but it sounds like something that I’ve heard before, it goes in the bin. It’s as simple as that. It has to have something unique about it.

Torsten Schmidt

So you are looking for these own personal mistakes, which then turned into an own style.

Tony Colman

Yes, totally. It’s all about those little mistakes that you then turn into a lump of gold. Making tunes is alchemy, it really is. Your fuck-ups are your biggest fucking asset. This is some Norwegians making absolutely crazy drum & bass.

(music: Unknown)

Torsten Schmidt

You are talking about ignorance in crowds, and being the ignorant person I am, I am always kind of surprised listening to your music in the record stores, like what is this futuristic thing? What are these grimy strings? That’s rather something for me than for the drum & bass crowd. What’s going on there? How do you get away with these sort of things and how did they come on your label in the first place?

Tony Colman

We have always released other things apart from drum & bass on Hospital and I think that’s really to keep in touch with reality and not get carried away. And it feeds back into the drum & bass that what we do. We got two main artists called Landslide and the Phuturistix and J [Da Flex] played some of their stuff in his chat. I’m not actually going to play any of that material, but basically we’ve got an open mind about Hospital, we happen to be mainly drum & bass at the moment. It doesn’t mean that we always going to be a drum & bass label at all.

Torsten Schmidt

But having an open mind is one thing and it’s fine and it looks good on a calendar and if you put it on a wall, but when you have a label and you want to have some sort of an identity that people can relate to, how do you get to that point that people will get to your stuff and grab it, no matter what?

Tony Colman

It can be a struggle because people know it is a drum & bass thing. It’s like in shops, whatever we release, it tends to get racked in the drum & bass section, which can be annoying for Landslide and for the Phuturistix. And it’s a constant battle for us, to kind of educate the shops as well. It’s more about the people in the stores than the actual people who buy the music. You know, if you hear a tune on the radio or in the internet or whatever then, you’re going to seek it out if you like it. The way I feel about downloading music is, I believe, that what comes around, goes around. And I’m a great believer in karma.

Torsten Schmidt

So you are a real big fan of that recent thing, where they ask people to send back all the MP3s they have downloaded to the majors?

Tony Colman

Yes, you told me about that. That sounds funny.

Torsten Schmidt

So will you be happy when you get a lot of your MP3s in your mailbox then?

Tony Colman

No, that will be a pain in the arse. All I feel is each and every one of us here, who is involved in producing music or bringing music to people in some way – whether that’s performing or administrating or whatever, and if you want to make a living out of making music, then you need to think about what you are doing when you are downloading someone’s tune without asking them. If you don’t want to make a living out of it and you are not interested in that, then you don’t really need to think about it because you don’t have a responsibility. But, if you are hoping to have some kind of a career in some kind of financial reward for what you are doing, then you are already in a position of responsibility right now. That’s all I’m saying about that.

Torsten Schmidt

And where does the whole live thing come into this? You see a lot of more gigs these days and what is your experience, I mean, you have been on the tour for what now...

Tony Colman

We’ve been on the road with the live band since May. And the exciting thing about live music right now in the UK, like club attendances have been really dropping across all genres of music, sales of CDs and sales of vinyl have been dropping. The whole thing is in crisis, but live music, ticket sales have been increasing. And in 2002 people sold more tickets to see live bands than ever before in history. And I think there is a general awareness in the world now that we are not that excited about DJs anymore because almost everybody can DJ to some extent. And the whole thing about iconizing a DJ, putting them out there like a god, that’s all going now. Thank God. I feel extremely lucky to be able to go to other side of the world, and get paid good money to play for two hours. And part of me always feels like, “I can’t really work out why this is happening. Why on earth is someone paying me to do this when there is bound to be about 30 better DJs in that town on the other side of the world who are technically better than me and a lot hungrier?” So, I think a lot of people are realizing that and they are starting to think, “Right, we actually want to see people playing live again. We want to see the people play the music live, we want to see them, give me something unique.” Anyway, that’s where my head was at the beginning of this year. So we put the band together and we’ve been playing drum & bass completely live. With no playback and no click track and no computers, no sequencing, just 100% in-your-face liveness. It’s very exciting, and it is a lot of fun to do as well.

Torsten Schmidt

As exciting as it is, isn’t that one form of a big backlash against the whole DIY ethos? Someone like your man SKC, would he be able to pull it off live?

Tony Colman

If he wanted to. I mean, if he was hungry to do it. And if he made that his objective, then he could do it.

Torsten Schmidt

But wasn’t part of the beauty of why a lot of the exciting music in the last 20 years came around that you actually did not really have to be a trained musician and could just have like a bunch of crazy ideas to throw them in?

Tony Colman

Yes, totally. But there’s no difference between sitting in your bedroom, making a tune to being in a garage with three mates in a band making a tune. There’s no real difference. It involves more people in it, and it involves a lot more pain, if you are doing it live.

I just want to do a little nerdy bit here, because the way we transfered some of the samples over from the studio to live was a real challenge. Because a lot of the tunes, the way I make some of my tunes, is a little bit like house producers when they use a filtered disco loop or whatever. You know, you take a two-bar loop of an orchestra or a funk band or whatever and you filter it in the studio so you get that real kind of rich [imitates] “whoap whoap” sound. And during the track it becomes more [imitates] “whoap, whoap, whoap” – it will open up, if you open up the filter, and that’s how you can get a rush on the dancefloor. So we do that in our drum & bass quite a bit. And that was a real issue, how do we do that live? Because we want to be totally independent of any time live. We want to be able to speed up and slow down. And basically, we just Recycled everything. Recycle is a little piece of software, I’m sure, some of you use that. Maybe some of you haven’t used it. It’s a little piece of software that is really easy to use, and it just chops a loop up into, say, if it is a bar long, you can chop it up into 16 parts, so you get 16 little slices. Which means, that you can play that sample really fast or really slow, as long as you don’t go too extreme, it’s going to sit well in the groove. So what we did is, we recycled stuff, and we just mapped it out over a keyboard, so you have got this one loop. [imitates loop] So, if that’s the loop, you sliced it up into slices, each slice on each little key like that. Which means, if you want to slow the tune down, you know, slow down to half tempo, you are just kind of… The keyboard doesn’t represent like C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, it’s just triggerpoints. But it means that you can take like a musical sample that you have got, and if the crowd is up there have fun and they are really going crazy, you naturally want to speed up when you are playing. That’s the way it works with a band. So it means we can all do that, even if I will playing all these samples. So that was kind of how we got away from being harnessed to the original tempo of the recording.

I’m going to deconstruct a tune, called “Billion Dollar Gravy,” that was the title track on my album, which was made in Reason and I wrote it on the road. The best thing about Reason is that it takes out very little CPU power, so you can have it on your laptop. My laptop is a G3, it’s an old one, it’s not very powerful, but I made the entire tune within it, kind of in airplanes and in hotels. I have slagged off Reason in the past. A lot of people do, because it does have something funny in it that it compromises your sound. Some kind of weird data compression, I’m not quite sure how it works. It can be a little bit hard to get really good sound with Reason. But at the end of the day, it’s extremely creative, it’s quick to use and the people who wrote it are geniuses, I believe. It’s a phenomenal piece of software.