Coldcut History

Most people come into music, do the same thing for a few years, slowly
sink back into obscurity and spend the rest of their life collecting
publishing royalties and re-forming for tribute tours. Their
biographies can afford to be quite short – most of us aren’t that
interested in golf or angling. The problem with Coldcut is that,
despite their veteran status, they act like two unruly children who
just won’t sit still. Which is why even a brief trawl through their
various activities looks like a large chapter of a big book.

Ex-art teacher Jonathan More and computer programmer Matt Black have
been a team since the mid-eighties. Both Matt and Jonathan had been
building their DJ reputation on the nascent rare groove / warehouse
party scene. Jon had a show on the then pirate station Kiss FM and
worked in Reckless Records in Londons west end, where he sold Matt a
bootleg of ‘Across The Tracks’ by Maceo & the Macks. Matt came back
the next day with “Say Kids, What Time Is It?” and suggested they work
on it together. Meanwhile Jon helped Matt onto Kiss FM and they soon
started the joint “Solid Steel” show (still running to this day). “Say
Kids…” was released in 1987 becoming the UK’s first sample-built
record. In the same year the duo defined the term ‘remix’ on Eric B and
Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” cutting and pasting Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s
vocals in a notorious reworking which became a worldwide classic.
Coldcut’s talent was recognized by a BPI “Producers Of the Year” award
in 1990. Their debut album, “What’s That Noise”, went silver.

The concept of setting up an independent label took shape during a trip
to Japan where Matt and Jon made a discovery: “We found a book about
cut-out-and-keep Ninjas. They build these amazing houses where they
have special traps so they can disappear and reappear somewhere else.
They were all about artifice and hidden identity.” Tiring of the
juggernaut marketing ethic of major labels, this stealthy philosophy
seemed appealing. They wrapped up their involvement with the Big Boys
in 1993 with the album “Philosophy” and plunged into the establishment
of Ninja Tune, though not before their ambient cover of “Autumn Leaves”
had kickstarted the easy listening movement.

The story of Ninja Tune is another whole chapter and has been told
elsewhere. It perhaps suffices to say that the organisation has grown
into one of the classic independent labels to emerge in the ‘90s,
providing a welcoming home to a range of acts including Mr Scruff,
Cinematic Orchestra, Herbaliser, Kid Koala and Wagon Christ, as well as
the likes of Roots Manuva and Ty through the later-established Big Dada
imprint. As befits a pair of DJs who seem to believe that the whole
world is there to be cut and pasted, “we mix things, over as broad a
spectrum of activities as possible.” Hence the duo’s label-running
activities in the early and mid-nineties were augmented by a plethora
of other endeavours: the Stealth club night (Club of the Year in the
NME, The Face and Mixmag in 1996), the pioneering Pipe web site
initially written by Coldcut themselves in 1995 and a variety of
multimedia experiments with Rob Pepperell as Hex. Fired up by the
possibilities presented by digital interactivity, Coldcut and Hex began
developing toys and art installation pieces ranging from the “Top
Banana” computer game to the “Generator” for the Glasgow Gallery Of
Modern Art and “Synopticon” for the JAM, a major exhibit at London’s
Barbican.

While spending the early 90s building this diverse, avant-garde collage
of activities, Coldcut were maniacally preparing their own musical
breakout. In 1997 they unleashed their fourth album, “Let Us Play,” the
first on their own label. The album featured collaborations with highly
political ex-Dead Kennedy Jello Biafra, legendary funk drummer Bernard
Purdie, poet Salena Saliva, and - one of Coldcut’s biggest inspirations
- Steinski. Both album and classic single “More Beats and Pieces”
reached the UK Top 40. And, as important as the art was the politics –
tracks like “Timber” and “Atomic Moog 3000” setting out an
anti-corporate, ecological, anti-authoritarian vision that found it’s
technical expression in the group’s continuing interest in
interactivity with their audience.

At the same time, Coldcut were still doing their “Solid Steel” show on
Kiss every Saturday, keeping up the traditional mixed bag and stacking
up plaudits such as the Sony Award for Best Specialist Show. All of
which led to their “Journeys By DJ” mix album, “70 Minutes of Madness,”
which was released to rave reviews and declared the Best Compilation of
All Time in Jockey Slut, 1998. By 2000, though, the culture at Kiss has
become too commercial for Black and More and they moved the show to BBC
London Live, although their main focus was on building its profile as
an internet station.

Prior to the release of “Let Us Play,” Matt Black was pioneering the
concept of VJing at diverse parties such as the legendary Telepathic
Fish, Sabresonic and The Big Chill. And the first fruits of this
collision of audio and video were to be found on the free CD-Rom which
accompanied the CD. It was, however, only with the tours that followed
the record’s release that a wider audience began to get an idea of what
Coldcut were up to. To promote their work live, Coldcut designed their
own VJ software, VJamm, allowing the live re-creation of whole
audiovisual pieces. Video could now be jammed or scratched with as
easily as sound and audiences were blown away by this new direction.

Coldcut called the show CCTV and have presented is everywhere from
Sonar in Barcelona, the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Glastonbury Dance
Tent, Roskilde, the Queen Elizabeth Hall (as part of John Peel’s
Meltdown), Steve Reich’s remix project launch party in New York and the
Darklight Digital Film Festival in Dublin - to name but a few. John
Peel, incidentally, was a staunch fan of the group and, in addition to
three Sessions during his lifetime, Matt and Jon were chosen to
introduce the DJ section of the John Peel Memorial BBC concert night
last year.

1999 saw the release of remix album “Let Us Replay,” featuring
contributions from Cornelius, Carl Craig, Shut Up And Dance and Ryuchi
Sakamoto amongst others. Perhaps more importantly the accompnaying
CD-Rom also included a free copy of Vjamm, software which by this point
had ended up on permanent display in the Interactive Games Room of The
American Museum of Moving Image.

Coldcut’s politics came to the fore again in 2001, when they released
“Re:volution” to coincide with the British general election.
Characterised by Matt Black as a “celebration/diss of UK politics and
the 2001 election. An audivisual PARTY political broadcast cutting up
your fave enemies over a steaming punk jungle (pungle?) stomper,” it
led to a campaign involving a mayhem-packed double decker bus ride
round Westminster in the company of Brighton’s Free Party and the
Church of Bob. It also inspired American activists to ask Coldcut to
become involved in a project for the 2004 US Presidential election.
revusa.net allowed people to download over 12gigabytes of footage from
the last 40 years of US politics and then use them to create a cut-up
over a Coldcut beat. The result was Coldcut v. TV Sheriff, “World Of
Evil,” widely acclaimed and somehow regularly shown on MTV.

Alongside the headline-grabbing releases, there has been smaller, more
grass-roots activity, too. piratetv.net was run from Coldcut’s Spacelab
studio in London and viewed all over the world, pioneering what Black
describes as “guerilla netcasting”. Special guests on the show ran from
Radiohead to the Surveillance Camera Players. Coming from another
angle, vjs.net has focussed on educational activity. Matt is also
heavily involved with nowthemovie.org which aims to make a 21st Century
montage documentary in the spirit of “Sans Soleil” or “Baraka” using
footage uploaded to the site by people all over the world.

And the art projects continue apace. Gridio (a collaboration between
Coldcut and Headspace) is an “interactive responsive environment”
originally commissioned by the Pompidou Centre in Paris which has
toured all over Europe. Last year saw Coldcut produce a play in
conjunction with renowned young author Hari Kunzru for BBC Radio 3
(incidentally, also called “Sound Mirrors”). A collaboration with the
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has led to the short film “Wavejammer”.

Running parallel to this, the remix and production work has continued
apace. It is a tribute to Coldcut’s standing as well as the sheer
diversity of their output that the last few years have seen them
re-work the theme to Dr Who, the music of Herbie Hancock and the Trojan
catalogue, that they returned to the South Bank’s Meltdown festival for
a live audiovisual dub with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Mad Professor and
Headspace. That they have assembled a group of artists as diverse as
Jon Spencer, Robert Owens, Saul Williams, Soweto Kinch and Roots Manuva
to appear on their new record. That musically, they have continued to
refine and develop both their skills and their style so that, after a
twenty year career at the forefront they can honestly claim that this
is their best, most complete album to date, utterly contemporary, as
fresh as the day they started. Maybe they’ve remained masters by
remaining unruly schoolchildren. Who knows? All that matters is that
the masters are back.