A British act that is at the forefront of this reclassification of everything that has come before is Chase & Status. Over the past eight years Saul Milton and Will Kennard have gone from bedroom warriors to the most sought after producers in the world being embraced by artists such as Jay-Z and Rhianna, Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams who all wanted a piece of the heavy bass revolution – that’s drum and bass, dubstep and jungle.
100% is chatting to Saul Milton just moments after he came off stage after the acts No More Idols tour show in Liverpool.
“Sorry mate, can you repeat that question I’m just in the car heading back to London with MC Rage, Andy and Will,” implores the deep voiced Milton as he struggles to hear me over the babble of his musical companions who are nattering away in the background – still high, one presumes, from another sold-out performance. The album No More Idols heralded mainstream success for Chase & Status with it, their follow-up to their 2008 debut More Than A lot, debuting at number 11 on the British chart.
Milton discusses that the potential success of No More Idols was hinted at a few years earlier when some of the world’s biggest pop stars wanted to work with Chase & Status. “It was really flattering and helped push our profile because people like Jay-Z and Rihanna, Snoop and Pharrell wanted to work with us and yeah it was confirmation that we were doing something right.” He now adds that the band’s work ethic and focus helped the act not become cocky from such luminary kudos, “The thing that we really tried to do during that period and to this day is to keep our heads down and keep working and not get caught up in all the accolades.”
Milton now explains that staying grounded and keeping the focus of the act their music and not their status (yeah the irony wasn’t lost on me either) contributed to the title and credo behind their second album. “I mean obviously we wanted the title to be ambiguous enough so that people could draw their own meanings from it but there were a few points of the title we hoped, after they had listened to the record, people would understand,” Milton explains before setting out what those messages are. “In the last ten years there has been a lot of throwaway music – X-Factor, [ Australian] Idol and all that kind of crap. It just seems like the era of idols that people looked up to like Jimi Hendrix and [Jim] Morrison, has vanished so in that sense there are No More Idols. And also with our shows it’s not just us, we have a band and then there’s the crowd so it’s just music lovers under one roof, there isn’t the focus on one person or persons.”
From the above dissertation one could infer that Milton and Kennard are modesty personified and do not want anyone to think they believe they are bigger than the music that they are creating. That is why it is interesting to hear Milton quite happily let London take credit for inventing the heavy bass genre known as dubstep.
“It’s a movement that has become massive world wide which we are very proud of. It’s great to see what is quintessentially British music, I feel, has been translated across the world. Obviously you’ve got Americans like Skrillex doing it and others right around the world adding their own cultural influences to that style.
“It terms of Chase & Status we just make music whether it be 175BPM, 140 or 125; we love dubstep, we love jungle, we love drum and bass, we love hip hop, you name it, we’re into it. Our work from now looking back to 2004 is really quite diverse.”
Okay so Chase & Status have the technology and the skills and are not afraid to go where no man has gone before. Your correspondent now floats the analogy: Chase & Status are Captain Kirk and dance music technology is the Enterprise and they take it pretty much wherever they want to. Surprisingly Milton takes this conceptual and, somewhat, psychedelic question in his stride. “Well yeah, these days it [new frontiers in electronic music] can just happen so fast with the amount of technology you can have on a laptop the levels of production kids are coming out with these days is just through the roof. We’ve got these kids signed to our label [MTA Records] called 16-Bit, they’re young guys and their production is literally ground breaking. Everyone’s got the technology to make something really special.”
In closing Milton confesses Australia is one their favourite locations in the world and that the heavy bass scene is truly unique because we are so isolated resulting in “Chase & Status have had many of our most unique performances in Australia.”
