Clubbing Magazine

X-Press 2 - Lazy beats

From the opening jet-plane whoosh, slinky percussion, and squawk of a scratched record that opens 'Muzikizum’, the debut album from British house trio X-Press 2, it’s clear they’ve got all this sorted out. Sorted out enough to have hooked in two impressive collaborators - Talking Heads’ singer David Byrne and Yello’s frontman Dieter Meier - who make up just part of what is as accomplished an album as British house has produced in a decade of existence. And yet X-Press 2 know that house music is often taken less seriously than pretty much anything else in pop music. As Ashley Beedle - who with fellow DJs Rocky and Diesel, makes up the X-Press 2 triumvirate - points out, "A lot of people have given house music a bit of a bad press. But compared to rock n’ roll or even hip hop, house is such a young thing.” X-PRESS 2 first burst onto the international club scene in 1993, with the demented sirens, typewriter-noise percussion and dancefloor pyrotechnics of ‘Muzik Express’. The three DJs, all from unfashionable suburbs of London, had each played leading roles in the capital’s cooler, more influential club scenes: Flying; Slough’s famous Sunday afternoon club Full Circle; Soho record shop Black Market, where Ashley was the manager. Rocky and Diesel had been mates since 1986. They knew Ashley because they bought records from him. Their first studio session left them cold - they’d intended to sample an old Cloud One track but that typewriter percussion noise was all that survived. Everyone else disagreed. ‘Muzik X-Press’ was an instant worldwide club hit. DJs as influential as Pete Tong and New York’s Junior Vasquez - then in his Sound Factory prime - loved it. Clubbers around the world declared it an instant anthem. Its follow up, the juddering, funky ‘London X-Press’ with its exhortation to 'raise your hands!' was just as monstrously successful, as was the daft dancefloor smash, ‘Say What’, that came next. Over the past year, X-Press 2 have been putting the drama back into DJing with six deck DJ performances that used effects-ridden mic performances from Ashley, CD-players and basic samplers to send crowds at London’s Fabric and Ibiza’s Pacha wild. "We like a bit of a challenge and it certainly creates something of a potent atmosphere," says Rocky. "It’s like a jam, really, it’s not rehearsed, we’re inspired continually by the shenanigans on the dancefloor. We play two records each and we go round like a tag thing. Whoever’s playing the tune coming out the speakers, the other two can cut in effects, beats, acappellas. It becomes like a wall of sound.”"
Audio part You can listen to the telephone interview with Ashley Beedle here, The interview was done in 2002. Length: 17,43 min, mono 32kbps Size: 4155Kb Format: MP3
Interview by: Christian Almind