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UNKLE’s James Lavelle has been influential far outside of DJ circles. He founded experimental hip-hop label Mo’ Wax, which triggered the trip-hop explosion. His collaborators in dark breakbeat-favoring project UNKLE have included future DFA producer Tim Goldsworthy and DJ Shadow, but it’s mainly Lavelle and whomever he’s lured in the studio. UNKLE has also incorporated rock guitar from time to time. On the new album War Stories, UNKLE gets heavier with rocker Josh Homme, the Cult’s Ian Astbury and producer Chris Goss contributing. But as we found out, Lavelle is still in demand as a DJ (spinning “dark but sound track-y techno records”) and keeps his ear to the ground. As UNKLE plays Metro this week, we called Lavelle at his London studio and had a refreshingly open chat about hip-hop and his interest in singer-songwriters.
Coming from a background in hip-hop, do you feel like DJ culture has run its course?
No, but I think they’re very different and sort of satisfy different needs. I’ve got to deejay tonight. I’m playing at Fabric tonight; I’m starting at 2:30 in the morning. One minute you’re doing live shows at nine or ten and you’re with 20 people on the road and it’s a gang mentality, and then you’re back into deejaying and it’s quite lonely in a way. I think that in the DJ culture people are going to get drunk, laid, do drugs, hang out and you’ve got a handful of people that are very focused on what you’re playing recordwise, but generally you’re moving a crowd through an evening of weird emotion and people are constantly coming in and out. But deejaying has a massive influence on the records we create and how the show is. The show does go through a journey, it does take you through different kinds of musical spectrums, it’s not like going to see the Hives and getting rock & roll for an hour; there’s strings, there’s piano, there’s rock, there’s classical, there’s all these things thrown in. For me, it’s more of a Pink Floyd–type of mentality.
People aren’t necessarily expecting to hear one thing over and over again from DJs anymore?
I think so. I think what’s happening in what would be the cool end of DJ culture right now, your Ed Bangers, it’s very eclectic isn’t it? That isn’t really where I am at, I do play quite eclectically but they’re coming from a more rock & roll–type deejaying role. When we grew up, it was Sasha and Derrick May, or Grandmaster Flash and Red Alert. I think with deejaying there is a whole side of that culture that exists which is so un–press-oriented. I think it’s very subversive and very interesting, it’s like punk, whether it’s Ricardo Villalobos or Richie Hawtin, the whole minimal thing going on, and then you have bigger-than-ever trance and fucking hard house. It’s all going on, it’s just not on the cover of Rolling Stone.
You think nobody cares about ’90s DJs but tons of people come out.
Right, totally, I’m sure fucking Digweed makes a lot more money than the Klaxons do. But it’s a much more global thing. I played in Singapore and there were 3,000 people there. I don’t think that half the bands that are on the front cover of magazines could do that and that’s through deejaying. Same as if you go to South America or Eastern Europe or Romania.
Hip-hop has become a huge cultural force. Do you think you played your part in shaping that?
Things change don’t they? The power base shifted to black entrepreneurs in America and I think that is actually a positive thing. I’ve got a 10,000-strong hip-hop collection from ’86 to 2000 but I don’t pay attention to contemporary hip-hop records, as far as artists go. For me, I’ve become a lot more interested in singer songwriting and I’m not a rapper. But the way that I make records essentially comes from sample-based culture. That whole thing still lives with me.
UNKLE plays live on stage at Metro Saturday 20.
