We have a great deal of admiration for Andy Blake. A DJ who stands out amongst the unsettling ease of the laptop DJ and thinks nothing of playing a 5 hour set strictly from 7″ vinyl only – (the below mix is ‘a selection of hard and hairy psychedelic funk rock 7″s’). Since the days of running one of our favourite and not forgotten labels, Dissident, he’s went on to produce and release records under his Cave Paintings guise – which, as the name suggests are stripped back, primitive and raw analogue beasts.

A genuine salt of the earth Londoner, born and bred, we ruminate with him below.

H&P’s Andrew: I’d only visited London a handful of times before moving down and now
with the benefit of retrospect, it never ceases to amaze me how
rapidly life here accelerates; music scenes disappear as quickly as
they emerge and areas transform in what I can only equate to being the
frenzied quest for the ‘new’. What’s your thoughts? Being an old hand,
it must feel like living in London 10 times over? How do you feel it’s
influenced you?

Andy Blake: I had a great time growing up here. There was always loads of great
music and revolutionary energy around. From punk and reggae when i
first started noticing what was going on in and around Brixton during
the mid 70s, all the way thru to the acid house/balearic explosion
that I cottoned onto during the early part of 88.

I’d always been a bit suspicious of straight-up ‘dance music’ until
then (although i thought the 2tone ska revival in the late 70s was
utterly brilliant and really liked the electro and early hip hop that
came from New York in the early 80s) but that idea of dj’s refusing to
acknowledge any musical barriers and playing whatever they knew was
right for that exact moment and turning rooms full of people into
whirling dervishes and sending them and their marbles into the
stratosphere was all i needed to get me hooked. Of course in
retrospect we can see that it was pretty much just another version of
it was like in 70′s New York for disco or of course early 80s Chicago
for the beginnings of house but this was ours and it was great while
it lasted.

These days things are all very well organised but a bit too tame for
my taste. I reckon as the recession begins to bite some exciting stuff
will start to kick off again, although i doubt you can get the same
level of positive energy in response to the twin-headed hydra of
malignant mediocrity that is the Cameron/Clegg axis as what we had
going in opposition to that vile old cow Thatcher and her cronies
tearing the heart out of the country. Nowadays people in her position
are much more sneaky about how they fuck everyone over, they do it in
a way that doesn’t wake anyone up to it until its too late so everyone
just joins in with the bullshit because they feel they have no other
choice. And rather worryingly, it seems that 90-something percent of
young people in London these days are Conservative by default,
although most would never own up to it of course – the soulless
vampire bastards

Congratulations are in order as you’ve recently celebrated the first anniversary of
your World Unknown parties in Brixton, how has the past year been and
do you find a sense of freedom housed somewhere South of the river?

Thank you very much indeed. The first year of World Unknown has been
great and yes, being south of the river, or at least, some distance
from London’s fashionable Hackney has played a great part in us being
able to get on with it and build something a wee bit special.

When Joe and I started the night, it was all about doing exactly what
we wanted with the music and I think if we had been swamped by
East-end hipsters it would likely have been to our detriment. We had a
few down in the early days, presumably because we were deemed a new
and potentially cool thing, but I don’t think they could get their
heads round the fact that we aren’t a strictly-controlled musical
museum with pointless barriers to what we play and that there’s not
even the slightest hint of that smug, knowing, irony that they seem to
like so much in what we do there. They don’t seem to much like areas
with postcodes that don’t start with the letter E either.

There’s a general left-ish and heavily psychedelic aesthetic to what
we do musically but other than that the gloves are well and truly off
and we play whatever we want. For example when those 2-bob 128kps new
beat/industrial fancy dress nights sprang up in East London shortly
after we started, we almost instinctively stopped playing so much of
that stuff and shifted into other gears.

My favourite thing of all about World Unknown (and thats among many;
our amazing crowd, the venue, the smoke and lights, the lack of any
bullshit whatsoever, the absolute sea of Red Stripe cans all over the
floor at the end of the night) is that Joe and I never ever discuss
what we are going to play at all, either on the night itself or at any
other time. Neither of us plan anything or work out set times or
anything like that and we both play loads of new stuff in all kinds of
styles each time and also play very differently to each other, yet it
always seems to fit perfectly for that particular moment of that
particular night.

We have a full and rocking dancefloor all night whatever we play, our
crowd are always open to what might happen next and the atmosphere in
that smoky arch is electric from start to finish. I think I can say
without fear of contradiction that there are no other places in
London, and very few in the whole world that are anything like World
Unknown.

Moving from one city to another, I’d previously read with a certain
smugness about your love for Glasgow and its densely populated and
varied club scene. Can you expand on this more? What other cities have
impressed you on your recent travels?

Oddly enough, since the interview where I said that, I’ve hardly been
booked at all in Glasgow after having done tons of gigs there in the
year or two previously so maybe I shouldn’t have been so forthright in
my praise . In all seriousness though, just compare the size of
Glasgow to London (its roughly 1/8th the population), the number of
musically interesting nights on in each city every weekend and the
almost rabid enthusiasm with which the Glasgow crowds devour all that
music and turn it into dancefloor energy and that just about says it
all really. And i’m deliberately not going to say anything nice about
anywhere else in case it jinxes all my gigs there like the Glasgow
comment a year or so ago did .

H&P: Having caught you DJ’ing loads of times, I get the impression that
your message that not everything new is good? Whilst I agree, ethos
aside, the biggest attraction to Dissident for me was the music and
how on-point the records were. Each artist was more or less unknown
and a few are now firm favourites, you clearly demonstrated a good ear
on this front, is this something we can expect again? What are you
plans for the future?

It’s not that i don’t think that new is good, far from it. But newness
comes in many more forms than just what has been made recently and is
currently available in the shops as a neatly packaged brand-new
product. When i’m djing, these days I find it far more new and
exciting to combine a bunch of disparate and seemingly unrelated music
from 40 years of dance music/electronic music/disco/whatever you want
to call it into something that can connect far more deeply, thrill
people more completely and say far more about that moment in time than
a set made primarily or solely of brand new releases and/or this weeks
archive discoveries and re-edits.

And if I want to play a straight-up house or techno set then there are
far fresher sounding and heavier, madder, rougher, ruder tunes from
the 80s and 90s than 99% of the new releases. Of course, that’s hardly
a new phenomenon and if you go with the idea that 90%+ of everything
is rubbish and insist on searching out the good stuff then you’ll
never go far wrong in life. New for the sake of new is just plain
silly, it’s just slavish consumerism.

I’m not sure about another label venture like Dissident, after all
I’ve already done that and made a pretty decent job of it, despite
never having any kind of game plan or aims. I’d be interested in
building on what was achieved in those couple of years but a while
back I had talks with various groups of industry people about
developing the basic idea that drove Dissident into a new label with
proper backing so we could focus on albums and developing artists.
Unfortunately whenever it came to talking turkey it transpired that
myself and the artists would have to work our tits off for someone
else’s benefit with no prospect of any financial reward for ages, if
ever. I’m certainly not greedy but fuck that for a laugh, it’s just
taking the piss.

So for now i’m sticking with Cave Paintings, which is purely for my
own back to basics analogue house and techno explorations, and Joe and
I will start a World Unknown label at some point in the very near
future.

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50:21

Download High Quality mp3: H&P Mix.07 – Andy Blake