Trevor Jackson

Todd L. Burns

Obviously, this is the Red Bull Music Academy, but one of the biggest things that lead you into music, I think, was art and graphic design in the beginning. You are showing up here one of the first covers that you ever did, Todd Terry, “Royal House.”

Trevor Jackson

I should explain to people that I do many different things. I’m going to have to juggle between a few different programs to show visual art and music and movie stuff, so bear with me if I seem a bit unprofessional about it.

Todd L. Burns

What drew you to do doing album covers in the first place?

Trevor Jackson

I was just a music lover as a kid and I used to work in a record shop every Sunday. So, for about four or five years, I worked in a local record shop, and I just pretty much knew that I wanted to design record covers as soon as I left college. I was very fortunate because I left college in the late ’80s and London club culture was really coming into its own. So, I was going out pretty much every single night, every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, going to a club until the early hours, hearing amazing new music coming out, and noticing that most of the record covers for these records were really awful. So, I went to see all of the record companies and said, “Look, I’ve just come out of college,” actually, I was still at college, and I was like, “I will do a record sleeve for free and if you like it, then give me some more work.” And that is how it started. There was a record label called Champion Records and they put out loads of early Todd Terry records and Frankie Bones, tons of very early house and techno releases, and I was doing all this kind of stuff. I was doing two or three sleeves a week for these records.

Todd L. Burns

So, you contacted Champion Records and you said, “I want to work for you, I will do it for free”?

Trevor Jackson

Yes, simple as that. And then people liked my work and I started getting more work. S’Express, I was at the Wag club [in London] one night and Mark Moore, the guy who made the record, I went up to him when he was DJing and I said, “I know you have got a record coming out.” I had a white label of the record someone gave me, and I said, “I want to do a sleeve for you.” And the next day I met him in the club with my portfolio. I remember him sitting there in the club and I showed him my work, and he said, “I love your stuff, do some work for me.” So, all these early things I did when I was just kind of 19 or 20 years old, just doing record covers. I did everyone from Derrick May and Juan Atkins, Todd Terry, really amazing people. The I started doing hip-hop stuff like the Jungle Brothers, and De La Soul, Queen Latifah – this was before I was making music. At the time, I was just doing record sleeves and DJing.

Todd L. Burns

And these record covers, how were you making them? I read that you were not using a computer.

Trevor Jackson

I can’t remember, this is maybe, well, no, the late ’80s, I think Macintoshes had just started coming in. All the big design companies had Macs, and I couldn’t afford it, so I made a real effort to try and do things which were more specific. Like this sleeve [points to computer screen] – it was meant to be very, very early 8-bit, simple, arcade graphics, and there was a bit of a kind of fingers-up at all the bigger companies that could do these amazing 3-D graphics and stuff. And also, these kinds of things represented the music. Everything here is done by hand, pre-computer, pretty much all the sleeves I’m showing you are all just cut-out paper and then photocopied. It is a completely different process to how things are made now.

Todd L. Burns

And eventually, you started a company, which was basically yourself, correct? A design studio?

Trevor Jackson

I have never worked for anyone in my entire life. I left college and I started doing my own thing and I’ve never worked for anyone. When I say a company, it was just me. At the very beginning, it was kind of cool to go and see people by myself, but then I realized it was better to give people the impression I was a company, even though it was just me.

Todd L. Burns

Tell us a little bit about the influences on your design. Because I think, obviously, big album cover junkies love Factory Records, Peter Saville, all these people, The Face, which is a UK magazine around at that time, was very beautiful. But I read that these people weren’t the people that were influential to you.

Trevor Jackson

At this time, I was really an arrogant – can I swear? – I was an arrogant little fucker and I hated anyone that was deemed as the establishment. I remember meeting Peter Saville and being really rude to him, because I just I didn’t appreciate what he was doing. I just thought I was the bee’s knees – this little kid going out every night, hanging out with all these famous producers doing record sleeves with them. At the time, most record sleeves were really just a photograph with a bit of type on it. I was a bit like, “This is a piss-take, people are getting paid thousands of pounds just to take a photograph and put a bit of type on the sides?” So, I always worked really hard to try and create something that was more a visual representation of what the music was about. I was influenced more by comic books, videogames and stuff like that. That was more my influence than classical forms of design and typography.

Todd L. Burns

We were talking a little bit earlier about feedback from artists and, obviously, you went and showed your portfolio to some people who were living near you, but Todd Terry was in New York. Were you getting many people talking to you and saying, “I love this cover”?

Trevor Jackson

Most of the American producers I never spoke to, and the records were being just licensed to UK labels. Todd Terry was making five records a week, so I don’t really think it bothered him what was on his record sleeve. When I did get to see them… I spoke to Derrick May once, and all we spoke about was comic books and X-Men, it was a weird conversation. We never even spoke about design. I was speaking to him for an hour about comic books. I rarely got to speak to the bigger producers about work. But people like Mark Moore from S’Express, he lived in London. A lot of them, we didn’t have that kind of connection. I was actually free to do whatever the hell I wanted to, which was a really good thing actually, because the more involved an artist gets, the more of a pain in the arse it becomes. So, it was quite nice to be given a free reign to do my own visual representation of what I thought the music was about.

Todd L. Burns

Were you listening to all of these records at the time?

Trevor Jackson

This is the thing, if you imagine – and not all of you being visual designers, but if you imagine going to a club and hearing a record and then having the chance to put your hands on that record and do something with it… And these are anthems, these records I’m showing you, maybe you don’t know these records, because a lot of you are a lot younger than me, but they were big records. They were like the anthems of the time. So, I was super-fortunate, and I think the work benefited wholly from the fact that I loved these records. This wasn’t a joke to me; this was my life. I really was passionate about what I was doing.

Todd L. Burns

And you were working in a record store around this time?

Trevor Jackson

Maybe a bit earlier.

Todd L. Burns

And you were building up your record collection?

Trevor Jackson

I was stealing as many records as I could. I had a boss of mine who was a complete thief, and I used to work there every Sunday. He would force me to try and take advantage of old people with bad eyesight. And this is totally true, old women would come in and say, “How much is that?” He would say [whispers], “Just charge them an extra few pounds.” So, every Sunday I stole as many records [from him] as I could. He had no stock-taking whatsoever, so I would happily steal record tokens and go to HMV. Basically, I would order any records I wanted, and they would come every Saturday and I would just take them or take record vouchers. So, records he couldn’t order I would go to shops in the West End and buy the records I wanted. My record collection, I’ve got like 50-60,000 records at home and I must owe 10,000 records to him.

Todd L. Burns

So, you don’t have any problems with downloading these days… You were listening to quite a bit of hip-hop at the time, which was one of your first sort of major influences.

Trevor Jackson

I haven’t had time to organize these images properly, so they are not really in chronological order. I mean, electronic music, like new romantic music or electro, that is what I listened to. I listened to the Human League and Soft Cell and Kraftwerk, that’s really what I grew up on.

Todd L. Burns

And when did you decide to start making music? What was the impetus to make that jump from making the record covers and listening to records?

Trevor Jackson

I think it was things like the Art of Noise and listening to early sample-based music, because I would never have claimed at the time to even be into that music. It is hard for me, this is quite a long time ago, but I never wanted to be a musician and being this anarchic little kid I was like, “I don’t like music. I hate the Beatles, I hate anything melodic.” I used to listen to Run-DMC records that just had a beat and a guy rhyming on it. I remember the first time I heard the first Run DMC album – the first import record I ever bought in a record shop called Groove Records in the West End – and the excitement of listening to that record, which had no musical elements whatsoever, it was just a drum machine and a guy rhyming on top of it. That to me was so revolutionary. So, there was those records and at the same time you had Art of Noise making very experimental kind of records, they were inspiring, so it was in parallel. And that was what was really interesting to me because these things were running in parallel, but I started to hear them coming together. I was going to London clubs, listening to these weird European dance records. And then at the same time there was this whole scene going on in New York, and you could hear the cross-pollination, because you had the [Art of Noise, “Beatbox”] Art of Noise, “Beatbox”) – I don’t know if I’ve got it here but you people probably know the record. Have I got it here? Let’s have a look. No, I haven’t got it here, actually. But a record like that is obviously inspired by New York records and New York hip-hop. And then you started to hear those things in New York hip-hop records as well, so I was kind of feeding off those things coming from both sides, if you know what I mean.

Todd L. Burns

Was there a big scene in the UK for hip-hop lovers? Or was it people buying imports and getting stuff shipped in?

Trevor Jackson

Before hip-hop there was electro. So, yes, there was a huge electro and hip-hop culture. Well I won’t say huge, but it was a big underground culture, and I think especially from a visual point of view. I remember seeing Malcolm McLaren, “Buffalo Gals,” and thinking, “I can do this.” And, for the first time, I heard music that I thought I was capable of making myself, because, up until now I can’t play an instrument. More so, because as I said, I wasn’t into music, I was into noise. I was listening to producers at the time that I really loved, who were making more noisy records, and I got a little sampler for my computer. I plugged it into my computer, a C-64 – it had three seconds of sampling, and I started to just make beats with that. You could sample a little bit of a hi-hat, a little bit of a kick and a snare and that was it. I could just sit there all day making a track with just a snare, a kick and a hi-hat, and it was so exciting to do that. Hip-hop was quite a punk aesthetic of doing it yourself – that was what really got me into making music.

Todd L. Burns

And was this the Brotherhood alias?

Trevor Jackson

The first music I made was, we were discussing before this interview, a hip-hop reggae remix and I called myself Underdog, and I started doing remixes as the Underdog. Then I started working with this local hip-hop crew, The Brotherhood.

Todd L. Burns

Do you want to play a Brotherhood track?

Trevor Jackson

Let’s see what I’ve got. I would rather skip, some of those tracks are pretty embarrassing. To give an example, let me see. If we skip forward a little bit from that.

Todd L. Burns

When did you stop being embarrassed about the music that you made?

Trevor Jackson

The truth is, I find all this very embarrassing. I have done a lot of stuff, but I’ve got a playlist here of music that I love, and if I play the music that I love, and then I play the music I do afterwards, it is going to be a bit weird. Because you can be really inspired and love music and then you always compare your own things to music you love. So, I’m always quite embarrassed – it’s not about ego to me. I’d like to think I’ve been on the periphery of a lot of music scenes and cultures, internationally maybe, but I don’t want to shout about it too much. I’ve been doing it for two decades, and I would rather be underground.

Todd L. Burns

Is there a record in the list that perhaps inspired you to start making beats?

Trevor Jackson

There is a guy called Adrian Sherwood, who had a label called On-U Soundsystem. Originally, it was like a dub and reggae label, but then he started to work with the Sugarhill Gang, the people who made “Rapper’s Delight.” There was Keith LeBlanc, the drummer, Doug Wimbish, the bass player and Skip McDonald, the guitar player, and he started doing stuff with them and making this really weird fusion. This was a really big record for me at the time.

(music: Tackhead – “DJ Programme”)

Trevor Jackson

I was listening to music like that, and then I was listening to music like more hip-hop kind of stuff, electronic records like that. That kind of gives you a rough idea of where I started from. My music, I wouldn’t say is directly influenced by that, but that was the music that I loved.

Todd L. Burns

And you were working with The Brotherhood. I was reading in an interview that the people in the UK who were doing hip-hop were taking very obvious James Brown and Parliament samples, but you were looking a little bit outside of that. I guess, bringing the idea of this European sort of cosmopolitan attitude, maybe?

Trevor Jackson

Relating back to this, I was listening to records like this, but I didn’t know to make them. But I knew how to make a hip-hop record. These records were there and were a bit musical, and I had no idea how to pick up an instrument or play anything. So, I had this little sampler, and I knew that I could make hip-hop. Hip-hop at the time was maybe finding a great loop, digging through, getting a fantastic loop that no one had ever heard before and trying to do something creative with it. All the hip-hop I listened to at the time – we’re talking about the early ’90s – was all based around using typical American R&B loops, James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic. I just thought because I’m British I want to be using European music, so I went on a crazy digging beat mission. I used to travel around Europe finding crazy weird European records, so that was my dogma – to only use European records. I didn’t want to be replicating. I appreciated the American hip-hop, the way the records were being made, but the content of them… I wanted to do something different. I did this album with the Brotherhood and somewhere here I have got a track you can hear to get a rough idea.

(music: The Brotherhood – “Alphabetical Response (Instrumental)”)

Trevor Jackson

And that was sampling ECM Records and kind of ambient records and weird electronic records, and that was from 1994 or ’95, I think.

Todd L. Burns

And then it eventually led you to do remix work, labels picking up on what you did for The Brotherhood?

Trevor Jackson

I had a hip-hop label. I started my own hip-hop label called Bite It!, and I wanted to be putting out records which were uniquely British records. And also at the time a lot of British hip-hop, the sleeves were terrible, the artists looked terrible. They had good records, but I was looking at things like Def Jam and Tommy Boy in America and thinking, “Why can’t the British labels have the same kind of unique visual identity as one of these big American labels?” So, I started Bite It! and I started putting out records by local British crews, and these are the kind of sleeves we were doing [gestures to slideshow], which were fairly revolutionary for the time. They weren’t using typical hip-hop imagery and I was trying to do something far more interesting, both visually and musically. I think through doing the Brotherhood album and doing the label, I started to get remix work, and I got the chance to do some remixes for some really great people.

Todd L. Burns

Massive Attack…

Trevor Jackson

I did four mixes of Massive Attack, did things for The Cure, U2, tons of different people.

Todd L. Burns

Obviously, one of the best-known remixes is “Protection” by Massive Attack. I don’t know if you have it, but maybe you could play it, and then walk us through what you did to the track?

Trevor Jackson

I haven't got the original here, but I think people know Massive Attack and the original.

(music: Massive Attack – “Protection (Underdog Remix)”)

So, the thing was, at that time, there weren’t so many people making beats in the UK. Tony is sitting there, there was my man Tony. Maybe me, Pogo and Biznizz, not that many people were making good hip-hop-based music. The interesting thing for me was that even though I wasn’t this musical guy, I think I had good ears for songs. I think I could do things that a lot of the American hip-hop producers couldn’t do, which is really take a good song and build a landscape around a song. So, I think I got well known for doing that. Most of the things I did were really great songs and I got the chance to build my own hip-hop landscapes around the songs.

Todd L. Burns

So, what did you specifically do to “Protection”? People know the original…

Trevor Jackson

Pretty much every remix I did, I took every element of the music away and just built my own track. Which is stupid in a way, because I have done maybe 200 remixes with 100% of my own music, which could have been 200 of my tracks.

Todd L. Burns

This is why we haven’t seen an album for a long time.

Trevor Jackson

That is a huge loop of Donovan that I had and to this day they never got sued for it. It was a “Hurdy Gurdy Man” loop that I played around with and programmed and built the whole thing around. But it was interesting, this was kind of pre-trip-hop, really. Me and Tony were quite involved with the Mo’ Wax scene, but I was doing this stuff quite early. It is weird because I remember the first time I heard the Portishead record, I was like, “Fuck, I was just too late.” They did exactly what I wanted to do, and what I had been doing, to be honest with you. Maybe not as good as them, but I had been doing that for a long time before them. But they came up with that record and I was like, “Damn, I might have to just stop what I’m doing and rethink it.” That to me was the epitome of everything I was trying to do, which was using hip-hop with odd European, krautrock and other crazy things and great songs.

Todd L. Burns

When you are doing remixes, do you have to like the track, the original, to go and do a remix? Or is it just a project? “Oh, I like that hi-hat.”

Trevor Jackson

I think that to do anything well in life, you have got to love it.

Todd L. Burns

But a remix is a bit of a different thing because you have a basis from which to work, even though you are taking away so much from it.

Trevor Jackson

The things I have done for the money have been the worst things I’ve ever done. Everything I have done, either visually or musically, is because I have loved it. If someone sends you a track and says do a remix and you don’t like the track, you’ve got to listen to that track like a thousand times. If you don’t like it, you are going to have a tough job. Personally, maybe some people can. But if I lose the passion for what I am doing… essentially, I do what I want in life to make me happy. That is the prime reason. If I can make money, then that is a benefit. But ultimately, I just want to be happy and do things I enjoy. That is the prime condition of everything I do.

Todd L. Burns

So, Portishead had made you sad because…

Trevor Jackson

No, it made me happy because it was such a great record. But it made me kind of sad because at that point… yeah, I kind of had this idea in my head that I had to get a vocalist and stop doing remixes for people. I’ve got like 200 remixes I could play you, but I was saying I have got to stop the remixes and find a singer and start doing stuff. I never got around to doing it, because I was busy doing a mix every week. I remember when I heard the first single, “Sour Times,” I think it was, and I was like, “Whoa, this is so good.” And there were eight different versions on the 12" and every one was different musically, and as good as the other one, and it made me rethink what I wanted to do.

Todd L. Burns

Did you stop doing the label then?

Trevor Jackson

The label only lasted for like maybe 12 releases, because working the British hip-hop artists at the time was a nightmare. It was just very difficult, working with difficult personalities. I stopped doing that and I was doing the Underdog remixes more than doing the label at that time.

Todd L. Burns

And eventually, you started Output?

Trevor Jackson

Around the time of hearing the Portishead record, then unfortunately, my manager, one of my best friends, died. Suddenly tragically died. I just had to take a step back and I was pissed off with hip-hop anyway. Pissed off because I’d heard this Portishead album. And I was generally just pissed off. And I get pissed off. Every decade, I get pissed off.

Todd L. Burns

Where are we now exactly?

Trevor Jackson

When I closed the label, that was a pissed off period and now I’m coming out of that. Every decade I try and rejuvenate myself somehow. And then, yeah, I was pissed off and I took about a year off. And then I started thinking, “What do I really love?” I started going back to those records I was sampling, those weird electronic records and those weird jazz records and those weird krautrock records and thinking, “Actually, this is what I love,” because I was getting more and more tied into the industry. Which is something I hated, because I was dealing with wankers every day. I wasn’t dealing with people that really knew anything about music, it was just business, and I hated dealing with the business side of stuff. So, I said to myself, “I just want to start a label and the sole purpose of doing that label is purely put out music that I like. I don’t give a fuck if anyone else likes the music. I don’t care if I don’t even sell records.” I was sharp enough to get a distribution deal with someone and I thought, “Even if the records don’t sell, I’m not going to lose money so I might as well do it.” I set up Output to just put out weird, odd records that no one else wanted to put out that I loved. Fortunately, the first person I met was with [Kieran Hebden, Four Tet. I put out a few of my own records to start off with, but I met Kieran, he had a band called Fridge, and he was making these weird records in his bedroom with his mates. They were like teenagers in a little basement bedroom making weird records.

Todd L. Burns

Do you remember when you first met him?

Trevor Jackson

I met him through someone, I met him in Rough Trade, when it used to be in Covent Garden. And he was just a really sharp kid. We had similar influences, But, at the same time, it’s weird, because he didn’t know anything about hip-hop, and I didn’t know a lot about things like Stereolab and a lot of these kind of more indie, alternative bands, British ones that I didn’t know about. And so, we would spend evenings where I would play him Souls of Mischief and records that were fairly obvious to me and he would play things that I hadn’t heard. It was really a great relationship, musically.

Todd L. Burns

What were some of the other artists that you put out in the early days of Output? I remember a Lisa Germano record?

Trevor Jackson

That was just because I did a remix for her that didn’t come out through 4AD. They didn’t like it so I put it out. But I worked with Four Tet and Fridge early on. Who else did I work with? Let me think. I’ll see if I’ve got the sleeves here that will remind me. I tried to blank this period of my life out of my head for a while, but I think today I’m going to flashbacks. This is the logo for my label, which is just the socket off the back of an 808 drum machine. The other thing was that, as well as putting out records that were weird and I didn’t think anyone else would buy, I also had a chance to design my own covers and do things I wasn’t able to do before. So, I had a field day just designing sleeves, really creative sleeves that kept me satisfied visually as well as it did creatively. This was something I did for a band called Icarus, it had 1,000 covers and every cover was hand-torn and hand-customized.

Todd L. Burns

It seemed like even the promo copies you would send out would be somewhat special.

Trevor Jackson

Yeah, the promos we did… I mean, it was like commercial suicide everything I was doing, but it was exciting. So, every promo we did with a different color, hand screen-printed. That meant two things, it meant A) it made it more special for someone, and B) we could charge a bit more money for it and hopefully not lose as much money. That kind of kept me occupied for a while.

Todd L. Burns

MU was on the label…

Trevor Jackson

I was working at the time with the best producers, Maurice Fulton, Black Strobe, James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem, and The Rapture, and the DFA guys. Mike Silver, who back then was called Midnight Mike. Colder, I worked with, I was very fortunate to work with loads of people. [Phone rings] I’ve got to turn my phone off, I’m sorry about that. This is an artist I’m working with at the moment who I’m doing a record sleeve for, and I don’t want to talk to him. You don’t want to work with artists, they are a pain in the arse.

Todd L. Burns

Obviously, at the same time you were DJing around?

Trevor Jackson

This is a weird thing, up until that point I was never a proper DJ. It wasn’t until I put my own Playgroup record out that I started to have to be a DJ. Again, with Tony here, we used to DJ together in Oxford at this place called Lakota, was it? [No, the] Caribbean Club. We played hip-hop records and house records. But that was fun. When I started to put out my music later on and do the label, I had to DJ professionally, which kind of turned it on its head a little bit.

Todd L. Burns

You were still having fun though when you put out the Party Mix, for example, which was an example of your every single influence.

Trevor Jackson

Basically, if I skip back a little bit to where I was pissed off and all this shit was going on, and I started the Output label. And also, I thought I want to make some new music, but I was a little bit jaded by it all. And a great way of inspiring yourself to make music is by working with other people. So, by starting the label, it meant that I was surrounded by all these creative people that were quite inspiring. So, I decided I wanted to make a new record, and if I give you an example of where my head was at. I’ll just skip through, so musically I’m pissed off… whereas I used to make records for fun, then I started making records, which were complicated and took a long time to do and actually weren’t fun to make. I’m trying to think if I can find something here. I did this UNKLE record…

(music: UNKLE with Thom York– “Rabbit In Your Headlights (With Unkle)”)

Trevor Jackson

Now, this doesn’t sound that revolutionary, but at the time it was really bloody hard to do, especially with very limited equipment. So, I’m doing all these dark things, and I was thinking, “I am sick of doing this.” I was taking a month to do a remix, sitting in front of a computer screen with my eyes bleeding, doing all these kind of little tiny things. I decided I wanted to work on a new project, which would be the complete epitome of all the stuff I have done before. That is why I started doing Playgroup. Because I went back to the records that inspired me and all the records that inspired me were fun records. Tom Tom Club, Grace Jones, Human League, ABC, they were fun, up records, so that is when I decided I was going to make my Playgroup record, which is completely different to that…

(music: Playgroup – “Number 1”)

Todd L. Burns

Was it quite instinctive, the composition of these tracks? Was it faster for you to do and easy?

Trevor Jackson

I kind of wanted to go back to how I used to make music. All those crazy UNKLE records were really super, super-complicated, and a chore to make. When I first started making music it was fun. I would pull up a beat, put a loop on, start making music and it was inspiring. But now I had the advantage of having made music for ten years or something. I actually knew a bit about music, so going from that arrogant little fucker who didn’t want anything to do with music, I was thinking now, “I don’t want to use samples anymore.” So, most of the Playgroup records might have a few little bits in, but it was essentially music to me, and that was exciting because I’d given myself a new challenge. Also, my whole thing was at the time that I wanted to be an ironic pop star, because all my contemporaries, I’m thinking of people on Warp, all of those really great producers at that time, were all very serious and very dark. I thought, “You know what? I want to be on the cover of this record. I want to look like Giorgio Moroder or something, I want to be like a pop star.”

Todd L. Burns

This is very “E=MC2” – all you need is a big moustache.

Trevor Jackson

Again, in an anarchic way. It wasn’t like I want to be a pop star, it was more like, “You know what? That is just such an uncool thing to do that I am just going to try it.” This was 2000, 2001.

Todd L. Burns

And the scene around that time, no one was really interested in ’80s music at that time?

Trevor Jackson

You had people interested in cheesy ’80s music. But really, it’s weird to think now how much ’80s music is such a huge part of what is going on now. Or has been done and has been for the last three, four, five years. Then it really wasn’t. I was just disgusted, because when people would talk about the roots of dance music they would talk about Chic, they will talk about ’70s music, but they would never talk about these bands. And to me, as I said as a kid, listening to Soft Cell and Human League… Kraftwerk were always cited as being this amazing band. But someone like ABC, Soft Cell, Human League weren’t being cited as these hugely important bands and I thought that they were. Part of the reason I made the Playgroup album was a homage. Pretty much every track is a homage to a band I was in love with as a teenager.

Todd L. Burns

Were the graphics coming easy as well at the same time or were they belabored, this long, hard process?

Trevor Jackson

Again, I’d gone through that pissed off period and I was coming out of it and feeling fresh and feeling excited, and I wanted to do something colorful and direct and sexy. I didn’t want to do something that was really nerdy and geeky and dark.

Todd L. Burns

And I guess the [Party Mix] thing you did, I don’t know how many tracks are in that DJ mix?

Trevor Jackson

At the time, I was signed to Virgin Records, and they didn’t quite understand what I was trying to do. They didn’t really see the relevance of how important ’80s music was. They signed me, they were into the project, but what I did was to try and translate it to record shops and journalists, I did a one-hour mix with 200 tracks on it. And again, this is before Ableton Live. I mixed live and edited it on a computer, so it’s 200 tracks. I should have brought it with me. I don’t think I have it here, but I did this thing called the Party Mix, people can download it if they want to, because it’s on the internet everywhere. Let’s check and see if I’ve got it, I might have it on here. No, I haven’t got it. Sorry. It’s like a huge mega-mix, a homage to that whole period of time.

Todd L. Burns

You did it to create a context for people to understand where you’re coming from?

Trevor Jackson

It went from hip-hop through to Joe Jackson pop stuff to reggae, it encompassed everything. That is the other thing with the Playgroup album, I didn’t want to do just one type of music, so every track is a different style. For me, it wasn’t weird to like Loose Ends, and like R&B, and Jam & Lewis, and like a punk record. Now, it isn’t weird to like everything but then people were so into different categories, you either like this kind of music or like that kind of music. For me, I didn’t care about categories, I just wanted to make a record that encompassed everything I love. If I love it, then it is a genuine record, it is not contrived in any way.

Todd L. Burns

It is the same with your label, of course. How did you come to do the DJ-Kicks mix for !K7? Did they come and ask you?

Trevor Jackson

After Playgroup, they asked me to do it, but I said I wasn’t a DJ. What do you want me to do DJ-Kicks for? But they were like, “It would be really nice to put some of those influences that inspired you to make the Playgroup album into a mix album.” So, I did a 50-50 mix, I took all my favorite new producers at the time that were inspired by older stuff, like Morgan Geist of Metro Area, people like that, and I mixed up older things. I’m proud of that mix; it still sounds kind of fresh now.

Todd L. Burns

And you DJed more and more after the release?

Trevor Jackson

When the Playgroup album came out, the record company forced me to go out on tour – they wanted me to go on tour – and I didn’t really want to. It was maybe detrimental to the record, but I love being at home. The idea of going off touring for two months was just a nightmare. I didn’t promote the record in any way whatsoever, really, as much as I should have at the time.

Todd L. Burns

Do you think it’s possible nowadays for artists who are making electronic music to just stay at home and make beats and not go on tour and do live shows?

Trevor Jackson

It depends if they want to make a living. Now, you can’t really make a living from putting out music, you have got to make a living from doing other things. The live arena now is more important than it’s ever been. It’s the most important thing. The experience of experiencing a band, that’s what it’s all about now. Unfortunately, it is not just about making music now. The music has got to be good, but if you want to make money now, you’ve got to do more than that. You can’t just make only great records any more.

Todd L. Burns

Is that one of the reasons you ended up stopping Output?

Trevor Jackson

I ended up stopping Output, because I didn’t enjoy it and we were losing too much money and all the people I was working with became fucking nightmares. I talk to them now, and most of them are fine, but they would admit it. It became very difficult. I was running a label, which, on the outside looked like a very professional company. But it wasn’t a company. Again, it was just me and someone helping me out, so I got myself in the shit really badly, because I never expected it to take off. I honestly never expected people to like the records so much. It sounds crazy now, but when I first heard The Rapture, “House Of Jealous Lovers” or “Losing My Edge” by LCD Soundsystem, they didn’t even have that much confidence in those records. Nobody else wanted to put them out. I said, “I love them, I’ll put that record out, I love it.” I didn’t have any idea it would take off the way it did. The problem was, the minute it started taking off, we didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support that… I could survive as long as I could, and then I had to be honest to myself and say, “This isn’t good for me, and it’s not good for the artist, because I can’t pretend to do something that I’m not capable of doing.” It was the logical conclusion for me after ten years and a hundred releases to say, “That’s it,” and creatively put an end to it.

Todd L. Burns

It seems like, when given the chance to ramp up on certain things, you actively stop doing things. You could have hired more people to help out with Output, but there’s this DIY streak in you that won’t allow you to bring in other people to help you out doing these things.

Trevor Jackson

Ultimately, at the end of the day, no one can do it as good as I can. With my own vision, I find it very hard to delegate. It’s not hard, but ultimately you can only rely upon yourself, at the end of the day. Well, I had someone amazing – Rob – working with me on Output, who was incredible. Output would not have survived as long as it did without his help, and I’m totally indebted to him. But, generally, I feel far more comfortable when I’m in my own world, and I do my own thing, and I control everything around me. But also, going back to what I said before, I’ve never been interested in being flavor of the month. I think I’ve survived for two decades, doing what I do with credibility, because I haven’t wanted to be famous or be a star. That’s not what it’s about to me. To me, it’s about the achievement and doing things I’m proud of. And, ultimately, I just want to please myself, and maybe that’s selfish, but I really don’t care. I like people to like my records, but I don’t make these things for other people, I make them for me. To satisfy myself.

Todd L. Burns

I wanted to talk about the Soulwax artwork, for which you won quite a few awards. This was, I guess, 2005 or so, before Output ended. How did you end up meeting those guys in the first place?

Trevor Jackson

Through my DJ gigs, I just started to meet people. Like-minded people. I was meeting people like Hell and Tiga and Soulwax and Tiefschwarz and people like that, and musically, creatively, we were on the same level. So, Soulwax, I just got really friendly with, and they wanted someone to work on their artwork for them. I kind of had this idea about creating a campaign. Going back to when I was younger, like I said, records used to just be a photograph with a bit of type on it. And I just thought, if you’ve got an option between walking down the street and seeing a poster that says, “The New U2 Record,” and it has got, “Coming out January 5 on 7, 12” and CD,” and a photo of Bono… that is immediate but instantly forgettable. I wanted to create a campaign that was not immediate, but it wouldn’t be forgettable. So, I came up with the idea of doing these optical effects. So, we did a whole series of posters and sleeves which were based around these effects. If you imagine walking down a street and seeing a poster like that, at first you can’t see it and you’re like, “What the fuck is that?” And you would go back and see it. I would stand there in the street for an afternoon and people would walk past it and go back. And I thought that has more of an impact on someone than just walking past the poster going, “Oh, yeah, that comes out on whatever date.” So, it took me a while to convince the record company to do it and the band, but eventually they did it, and were very brave and they went for it and we did a whole series of things with dots and lines and circles. These subtle kinds of optical effects, and yeah, it went down very well.

Todd L. Burns

Did you show them a lot of designs and concepts or is this the only one?

Trevor Jackson

I did eight different ideas. I worked my arse off for this, and they were my friends, so I wanted to do the best I could for them. It took a lot of convincing, initially. But I think the main thing that convinced them was the black and white sleeve, so the record company thought it was cheap to print and I think that was part of the reason why they maybe decided to do it.

Todd L. Burns

Some of your earlier stuff, before the Todd Terry things, they were also just black and white.

Trevor Jackson

I am color-blind, see. I’m red/green color deficient, so I try and keep away from colors as much as possible, and try and stick to very direct things.

Todd L. Burns

It’s very interesting you are using this stuff because it was a cost issue back in the beginning.

Trevor Jackson

This is the thing… I have to straddle the line between being a business person and a creative person, so I am sympathetic now. When I do designs for other people, I am fully aware of how things are in the industry and how things are going. I’ve got that knowledge, which I suppose is kind of fortunate in some ways.

Todd L. Burns

You were talking about the live arena and you have been working with this RGBPM, can you tell us a little about that?

Trevor Jackson

Let me find it. So basically, this is Output coming to an end and me getting to the point where I’m pissed off again. It has been ten years, so I’m thinking, “What do I want to do?” I could see already, by the time the label was coming to an end, that the industry was changing. Just putting out a CD and a video is going to be quite antiquated ,and I want to come up with something new. So, I developed and created a piece of software, we programmed it in six months, which was a visual synthesizer. So, I created a piece of software that runs on my Mac that I can make visual music with. I can play a piece of music and create live visuals. This is a year-and-a-half ago. Now, there are pieces of software that can kind of do it, but this is something that we custom-built. I’ll play two things quickly, this is a simplistic thing. I got asked by the BFI IMAX in London, there was a show called Optronica, which was a festival of visual music. They asked me to open this festival, myself and Lemon Jelly. Lemon Jelly and I are coming from quite opposing areas, which is quite interesting. I did this show called RGBPM. I’ll flick through and show you some of the sections of the piece.

[starts demonstration]

The thing was we program on Max/MSP. Now, Max and [Ableton] Live is kind of like a joint thing, but at the time I was using Ableton Live for the music, but Max and Jitter to create the visuals. There wasn’t an existing software to create these visuals. So, over the period of six months, myself and programmers designed the whole thing and I actually showed the show only once. A 40-minute show once and that was it…

Todd L. Burns

And here today with us… Have you been doing more of this kind of stuff?

Trevor Jackson

I want to do more stuff. The idea for my next album is to be more of an audiovisual, encompassing experience. That is the idea.

Todd L. Burns

You’re working on a new album, you said you were going back to create your studio tonight and tomorrow?

Trevor Jackson

Basically, what has happened is coming out of this other pissed off period, I moved out of my home. I’ve got a beautiful home, full of all these thousands of things that I adore. Like, 60,000 records, 20,000 books, everything, and it was really getting me down having all these beautiful things around me and I decided that, actually, it is a hindrance. It is not of benefit to me because it is distracting me. I get up and start listening to music and before long the day is gone, or I’m sitting here looking through my books and think, “Wow! That’s great but I am not doing anything because I’m busy looking at all these things.” So, I made a conscious decision to lock it all away and put all of it in storage and all I’ve got is that bag behind me, with a laptop and a suitcase about as big as that table. I have been living like that for a year and I’ve just been travelling around sleeping on peoples’ sofas and doing a few gigs around the world and crashing with people. It has been really quite inspiring. So, all I have is my inspirations in my head. I’m avoiding purchasing and buying anything. I just want to get back to a more pure, simplistic way of thinking.

Todd L. Burns

What are you going to have in your studio? Is it all going to be on the laptop?

Trevor Jackson

This is the thing. When it comes to equipment I’ve got some beautiful things. I collect drum machines. I’ve got so many different things, and I just want to master one thing. So, I think I’m going to use on my laptop, Logic, for recording, but I’m going to get one of my old sampler and drum machines, maybe an SP-1200, or an MP60, or a Studio 440 and just say to myself, “For the next month, I’m going to master that machine so well.” Just a limit of maybe ten seconds of sampling, just make a record really back to basics and pure again. I hear so many things, if I’m honest with you, a lot of the reason I do things the way I do it is because I can’t do it the other way. If I listen now to a production by Trentemøller, or someone like that, I think, “How the fuck did he do that?” I can’t even start to imagine, I don’t have the brain capacity to work out how these things are done. So, I’m more like, “You know what? I’ve got to do it the other way.” And in the same way I used to design record sleeves that look like eight-bit graphics, the truth was, as much as I couldn’t afford a computer, I didn’t know how to use those big computers. So, for me, always going back to basics is the simplest thing and I feel more comfortable using things I know. The simpler things I feel more comfortable with.

Todd L. Burns

Do you feel like you have mastered certain things over the years?

Trevor Jackson

As you said before, the minute I get to a certain point, I just push it away and do something else. I’ve got a very, very low attention span, and I wish I could master something. The thing is now on this computer, I am like an archetypal Mac user, so I do everything on this computer. I do my visuals, my music, my video stuff on it. But if I use something like Logic, I am maybe only using 5% of the program. Every time there’s an update, I’m like, “I don’t even want that.” I don’t even need half the tools. I just use the basic things, and I think in a way that stops you from getting too caught up with trends. Because if you get into some new software plug-in, your music starts to sound like other people. If it was up to me now, I would mostly go back to – well, it is up to me – but maybe I’ll just get my 950 and my Atari ST and start making music how I used to make music at the very beginning. But literally, this afternoon I am going to go to my storage and pick the machine and say, “That’s the machine I am going to finish my album on.”

Todd L. Burns

So, today is a really big day for you?

Trevor Jackson

It’s a pretty big day, and I’m glad I can share it with all you guys.

Todd L. Burns

You said, even though you have quite a short attention span, the amount of projects you take on is quite small. You devote yourself very carefully to them. Instead of doing 18 graphic design projects in a year, you’ll do four or something like this. That’s a conscious decision?

Trevor Jackson

When you get older, I find I can’t do as much stuff. When I showed you those very early sleeves at the beginning, I was doing three record sleeves a week. I was doing a remix every week. Now it takes me a month to do a remix. The thing is that I’ve lost, unfortunately, I’ve lost my naivety. It’s weird when I started my label I used to adore bands that I could hear that naivety in. An early demo has something in there that’s so beautiful, and I haven’t got that any more. So, now I have to work in a different way. I don’t think it’s possible to unlearn that, not at all, there is no way. And it’s sad because I wish I could still create the same way I used to. But I’ve been tainted by so many things around me, it changes. You become very conscious, you become very – not contrived – but you think about things too much. It’s funny, you asked me a question before about why I get to this point and break it down again. I think a lot of it is – I won’t tell you that now, I’ll tell you that later, because it’s really going to put everyone off if I tell you that now.

Todd L. Burns

You spoke a little bit about the future of music being live as a way to go. What are you doing with your music to take advantage of the situation?

Trevor Jackson

I don’t know. The thing that’s very fortunate is that I am not signed to anyone at the moment. I’m not going to let myself be pessimistic about the current state of music industry. I don’t care about the music industry. The business side of it, I’m not bothered with. But music as a whole, I think at the moment is really exciting. When I first started making music 20 years ago, the thought that I could make a record at home and put it online and have millions of people around the world hearing it is an alien concept. To me, I just embrace that as a concept, that is amazing. I don’t care. In a way, if I do my new album, I would maybe rather a million people hear it for free than 20,000 people buy it, to be quite honest with you. Because music to me, it is all about communication, at the end of the day. That’s what it is, it is one of the most basic primal forms of communication. I think that is what’s coming back to now, it is just going to come back to people making great music and making it for the right reasons. It became a point where people wanted to get into the music industry for that, to make money. I think that’s when things start to fuck up. Because bands got greedy, record companies got greedy, and now we’re coming back to a new stage, and it is being revolutionized at the moment and I think it is exciting.

Todd L. Burns

If I may play devil’s advocate for a moment. You are Trevor Jackson, people want to hear what you’re going to put out and people will pay to buy it. Radiohead puts out a record for free, or says pay what you want. Enough people paid that they make a decent amount of money, so where does that leave a young producer?

Trevor Jackson

It leaves a young producer to think I want to make music, not because I want be in the business. I make music because I fucking love making music. To make music because when I used sit there, listening as a kid to a beat for five hours non-stop, I was nodding my head because I loved that beat – I wasn’t thinking I can make some money off this. I find it quite hard – and I don’t want to be disrespectful to anyone here – but the people that want to learn about being in “the business,” to me that’s just bullshit. You should just want to learn how to make music and make music the best you can and make music you love. That’s to me anyway… I am fortunate maybe because, yeah, I started doing it a long time ago when there wasn’t as many people doing it. I don’t know if it’s different now, well, it is different now, but that is what I believe.

I remembered what I was going to say, actually. The problem I have with my creative process is when things become too easy, I think there is something wrong. I feel like I’m on a couch with a shrink or something here. Maybe Tony will understand, maybe it is a hip-hop thing, but you think it has got to be a struggle, you’ve got to battle someone. From the beginning, when I used to make music I had to make music better than someone else. It wasn’t about making money. I just heard a beat and I thought, “Fuck, I’ve got to make a beat better than that, I want my records to sound the best.” And I think what happens is, when something comes up really easy I question it and I think, “This can’t be right. I’ve only spent three hours doing it.” When I’m used to struggling. The struggle is part of it for me, the fight and the struggle is part of the whole creative process.

Todd L. Burns

So, this UNKLE record you mentioned was an extreme struggle?

Trevor Jackson

But I think they’re good. I go through back and forth, maybe I’m telling you too much. Anyway…

Todd L. Burns

Should we open up to questions?

Audience member

Hello. I was wondering if you could tell something more about the visual program you made, was it live? I mean, was the video generated real-time? So you are sending separate channels, MIDI messages through Max/MSP? You told us that you presented it on a big, big screen. What was the resolution and how could your computer survive?

Trevor Jackson

It was HD quality so I was just running it off a MacBook Pro. I was running it off the old MacBook Pro with the audio at the same time. You’re right, you’re right. It was two computers synced. One computer was running Ableton Live, and the other one was running Max-MSP and Jitter. But that’s the whole thing, you look at the graphics, you think they’re a bit simple but the whole thing was that it was HD real-time so I was playing stuff live and things were responding live to the signals.

Audience member

You said that you find a lot of this kind of thing really embarrassing, but is there any part of your work that you really loved or something from the last while that makes you really happy?

Trevor Jackson

Don’t get me wrong, I am not embarrassed about my work. In some ways, I’m very proud of what I’ve done. I have done a lot of stuff, but I don’t want to show off about it. I’m proud of everything I have done. I wouldn’t let things even get out there if I wasn’t happy with them.

Audience member

What of everything is the favorite thing you’ve done?

Trevor Jackson

Visually or musically?

Participant

One of each.

Trevor Jackson

The visual thing was the Soulwax album, if I’m honest with you, because I was just doing one thing at that time. All I did was spend three or four months just working on that, so it benefited from not having any other distractions. It worked for me, it worked for the band and other people liked it, so it was kind of ideal. Musically, I think “Make It Happen”, my first single off of the Playgroup album. I’ll show you the cover… It’s funny because I was talking about not being nerdy, but I remember when I made this album, the whole idea was about strong and powerful women. Because I was sick of hearing all these dance records with divas talking about “I love you baby” shit on it. So the cover was meant to represent strong female sexuality and I was the kind of nerdy Giorgio Moroder producer with all these strong women around me. So, I had Kathleen Hanna on the album, some really strong powerful women on the album. I’ll play a bit of the track because when I finished this track it is the first time I’ve ever made anything and said, “If I don’t ever make another record, I am really proud of what I’ve done.”

[music: Playgroup – “Make It Happen”]

Audience member

I listened to a lot of the compilations from Output, like Channel 2 is one of the records of my life. I wanted to ask you, around that time there were no bands like those that came out on Output. Where would you find them, because so many of them are so crazy…

Trevor Jackson

Let me remind myself, because I can’t even remember who was on Channel 2.

Participant

It had like 7 Hurtz…

Trevor Jackson

Which was 2? 2 was the white one, right? If you remember?

Participant

It had the LCD Soundsystem, the biggest track that they had.

Trevor Jackson

I was attracted to the freaks, to the people no one else wanted to put out. Those were all like rejects. These bands were being dumped by other labels, these were bands that no one else wanted. I was the underdog, which is what attracted me to working with these people. 7 Hurtz was just a guy who used to be in the Brand New Heavies – actually, a really talented producer. Manhead, Robi got in touch with me from Zürich. Colder sent me some of their first demos. Black Strobe, I met them in Paris. LCD Soundsystem, Volga Select is the guy from Black Strobe. The thing was as well, I wanted to put out music that was dance music, but had personality. And the most important thing to me is that for anything to exist, it has to have a purpose to exist. And I thought all these artists had personality. You have the records and the character, and everything else at the time sounded quite bland. I think, “What is the point of putting out a record if it is going to sound like someone else?” It doesn’t mean anything to me, so all these things I think had uniqueness to them, and that was kind of what attracted me to them.

Audience member

Also, how did you deal with the fact that the label released so many different styles? Like electro, with 7 Hurtz, which was deep and melodic, you had punky albums like The Rapture and stuff. Did the press give you a hard time?

Trevor Jackson

Because it was so diverse?

Audience Member

Because most dance music labels or electronic music labels were so formatted… you had a specific genre.

Trevor Jackson

That was the whole idea why I did it, because I didn’t want to do that.

Todd L. Burns

Did a distributor ever say, “We’re not sure how to sell this”? Or did you get a deal with them that was like, “You’re putting this out.”

Trevor Jackson

This is the thing about this compilation. This is a compilation of Output records, but it doesn’t say Output on the cover anywhere, because I didn’t want to. I worked with James Lavelle at Mo’ Wax and I saw the mistake he made, which was he became bigger than his artists. Him and the label became bigger than the artists, and the one thing I learned from that is that I didn’t want that to happen. The most important thing to me was to promote the artists above everything else. The label and myself was inconsequential. It was obviously present, but it wasn’t an important part of it. Once the label started to take off, I think every record sold enough to break even, just about. Some of the records sold more, obviously. But if anything, I think people respected me. The first records were Four Tet and Fridge. They weren’t dance records. But, no, I never had any problems with the diversity of it from anyone.

Audience member

You mentioned a lot of times that you were pissed off?

Trevor Jackson

Every ten years.

Audience member

Sometimes, it was like an internal thing and you got tired of what you were doing and wanted to do something new, or other times you heard what other people were doing and you said, “Oh, I want to do something better than that.” Now, which of those influences was stronger, more important to you?

Trevor Jackson

I think how I felt inside. I am my own business, I am my own world, so when I don’t feel good inside about something, that is going to affect what I am doing. So, I have to feel in the right headspace. I have to have my heart in the right place to do work, to do things I enjoy.

Todd L. Burns

Do you get writer’s block?

Trevor Jackson

Well, I haven’t made an album in ten years. The truth is that I’ve made five albums I haven’t been happy enough with to put out. But when I got real bad block, I started working with other people to inspire me. I just get disillusioned or disheartened and it puts me off, and I find something else to inspire me. I need to be constantly inspired by things.

Todd L. Burns

And, I guess, you can go to design work when you’re not feeling music and music when you’re not feeling design work.

Audience member

It is kind of random, but who is the most biggest, most famous wanker that you ever met in the industry?

Trevor Jackson

Blimey.

Audience member

It must be a lot.

Trevor Jackson

I’ve met more wankers than decent people. I can’t really say. It’s a good question, though.

Audience Member

I just wanted to ask about your process. Whether it is artwork or a song, do you start from scratch, or do you have ideas that you have been collecting that are lying around that you may not have used before and you go back to?

Trevor Jackson

I start fresh every time. Musically, it has always surprised me that people have a kit. I’ve never quite understood that. You buy them now on CD, it’s like a kit. Apart from an 808 drum – I’ve got one, which I adore that I’ve used the last 20 years – I would like to think I had never really used the same sound on any track I have done. Maybe a hi-hat or bass drum, but generally, I start fresh every time. I just think if it is a record sleeve, I am inspired by the record. [I’m] inspired doing a remix, so I start fresh every time. I don’t have a load of ideas in my head and think, “That might work for that or that might work for that.” I have never really done that.

Audience member

You were saying before that you are happy to release your music digitally if one million people hear it. But as someone who also designs cover art and stuff like that, how do you feel that cover art is received in a day where people mostly download something with a small JPEG attached?

Trevor Jackson

I don’t see cover art any more. It is just a visual format, so if I think that maybe 20 or 30 years ago the only way to represent a piece of music was through a flat record sleeve, I think that is kind of boring because now you can represent your music by so many other different means. I’m not going to lament over the death of the record sleeve, because I am excited about the future of interactive visuals. For me, there is always going to be another way to find a way, it is all about visually representing music.

Audience Member

That makes a lot of sense because you see boring pictures of three dudes in front of a mountain on a record sleeve. I collect records and I see a lot of those, those generally look better when they are kind of degraded, almost. When the edges are a bit stuffed up and you’ve got sticky tape. If you’ve ever seen, like when you buy a new album and it has got that fake degraded look because around the edges and stuff and there is a fake ring wear. But that kind of makes sense for the Soulwax graphic design because that probably looks brilliant on a screen, in a dynamic way.

Trevor Jackson

Like I said, it was a good idea. I make a living by coming up with ideas. It is the idea that is important to me. So, if the concept is on a memory stick or a 7”, 12”, or a CD, it doesn’t bother me as long as the idea comes across. And what excites me is solving problems. So, if someone comes up to me saying we are not going to do a record sleeve, but they want to represent a record another way, I will find a way of doing it.

Audience Member

I just found out that you worked with Kathleen Hanna. What was it like working with her? Because personally am a huge fan of hers.

Trevor Jackson

She was great. If I’m really honest, I just knew a bit of Bikini Kill stuff and when she started doing Le Tigre, so I wasn’t so aware of the legacy of what she stood for. I was introduced to her through a friend. I remember going out for sushi in Greenwich Village with her and people were like, “Oh my god, it’s Kathleen Hanna!” But she was a really sweet person to work with and we did two tracks – only one got put out– in a couple of hours. She was a pleasure to work with, she was great.

Todd L. Burns

When you collaborate with artists like that, is it usually quite quick or are there things that take a really long time?

Trevor Jackson

Even when I spend a long time doing stuff, when it comes to the process of working with someone, I want to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. Normally, because it’s a thing where you are getting someone in front of a microphone, it’s when they think microphone is off that you get the best thing. And the same going back to the thing I was talking about with demos and naivety, when things get too familiar, to me anyway, when things get too labored, the vibrancy and the energy gets destroyed. I like to try and get someone in the studio and boom, just get it done.

Todd L. Burns

Once you get to the third take they are thinking, “I’ve got to fix this…”

Trevor Jackson

Normally, when I work with someone I never let someone read lyrics. They have to know it off by heart. Unless they know it in their heads, I don’t want to work with them, because I want them to be able to be more real.

Todd L. Burns

Are there any other questions from the audience? Alright, well, thank you very much.