He’s the dub-head from England who’s made it big in the States. He plays to thousands of people every night, and gets more wasted at each show than most of the crowd. He made his new album on a variety of drugs, he’s still got a beef with Deadmau5, he hates nu-metallers Korn and hasn’t exactly got a lot of time for so-called ‘brostep’ or Skrillex either. He’s Rusko, dubstep hero, and his new album ‘Songs’ is set to take him stratospheric. DJ Mag joins him in the middle of a 30-date tour…
R Words: CARL LOBEN Pics: CLAYTON HAUCK
usko is in a chatty mood when we catch up with him in Kansas one spring afternoon after yet-another 4000-capacity US show. The word ‘Illinois’ is still written on his hand in marker pen, the remnants of a nightly ritual to remind himself where he is each night. “It’s the only thing I have
to remember,” he smirks, “and I always forget.” Looking a little rough, he begins explaining how he doesn’t do one-off shows anymore. “I used to do a few gigs, then come back and work on a tune, and so on,” he tells DJ Mag. “Now I only do tours. I basically operate like a band. Take a couple of months off, write the whole record in that time, and then go out on tour for a few months to promote it. Then tour it and tour it and tour it, and then I do it again.” If Rusko (real name Chris Mercer) these days is operating like a big rock band, playing to the sort of numbers that most bands can only dream of, he’s also indulging in assorted rock & roll behaviour — principally by imbibing copious amounts of drink and drugs. “On the tour bus it’s pretty much party time, really,” he grins. “It’s bad, it gets worse and worse as the tour goes on, which is probably why my voice sounds like it does today. I’m very raspy today, after 22 nights of getting pissed up in a row. “You know they have the one litre bottles of Grey Goose [vodka], the big fat giant ones, and then they have the smaller ones?” he continues, conspiratorially. “I do a whole big one a night. It’s a combination of tolerance, and being more fucked up. Every day I wake up more and more hungover and more and more bruised and tired, so I have to drink more to get myself in the right frame of mind to get back on the stage. I’ve been drinking vodka every night for the last 22 nights in a row, so you build up a tolerance to it. Now I’m just necking it out of the bottle. It does make the mornings a little harder, but every night I get more pissed. It’s fun. If I worried about it, I’d be a mess.”
Rewind. So how did this dub kid from Leeds, England, get to be a massive star in the US? Rusko begins enthusing about his first rave, the Sub Dub night at the West Indian Centre in Leeds. He initially went for the drum & bass in the back room, but was soon seduced by the sweet irie sounds of dub reggae institution the Iration Steppas, nicing up the area in the main room. He ended up travelling all around the north of England to reggae soundsystem events. “That was my first raving,” he says, wistfully. Introduced to proto-dubstep when Mala from Digital
Mystikz played the back room at Sub Dub, he began making his own dub reggae tracks on his computer. He’d previously been in bands, playing sax or bass, but admits that he was too much of a control freak for them to last. “Slowly I realised that I can’t make music with other people. I have to do it on my own.”
Rusko sent some of his dub tunes to a DJ called Quiet Storm, who was running the Storming Productions label. One of those tracks, ‘SNES-Dub’, was like an On-U Sound cut, pretty close to dubstep, and he was asked if he could make a couple more tunes that sounded a bit like ‘SNES-Dub’. So he made dubwise cut ‘Hornz Cru’, and then literally moved straight down to London before this first release came out. “I could’ve stayed up in Leeds where all my friends and family were, and I had a job, and waited until it was an appropriate time to give up the day job — but I was like, ‘Holy shit, someone wants to put out one of my tunes, bye!’” Rusko rapidly recalls. The only people he knew in London were dubstep dudes Reso, Luke Envoy and Caspa, who DJ Quiet Storm had become. “I had to move in with Reso, cos the other two lived with their parents,” he remembers. Thrown into dubstep’s mid-noughties heartland, he began grafting with his new mate Caspa, taking white labels around to all the record shops and being “as poor as shit”.
AMERICAN MARKET As the dubstep scene burgeoned, Caspa & Rusko began to get booked at premier underground London club Fabric, and after they put out the Lock Stock-sampling release ‘Cockney Thug’, Fabric approached them about publishing. “They kept booking us and booking us, and then we got the CD because Justice’s mix was shit,” Rusko remarks. “If Justice hadn’t sent in a bag o’shite with ‘70s Eurovision songs on it, ‘FabricLive 37’ would’ve been Justice.” He starts telling the story of how Fabric phoned them up in Sheffield on Saturday night to tell them a CD mix had to be done by Monday, to replace the inappropriate Justice one. On the way back down to London on Sunday morning, Rusko was in the front seat of Caspa’s car, cleaning every dubplate with a rag, and they drove straight to Fabric without even going home first. “We parked the car, they loaded up Room Three, and we did the whole thing in one take,” he recalls. “We just banged it out live.” This ‘FabricLive’ CD turned out to be a great opportunity for Caspa & Rusko. Not only did it help get their sound out there in Europe, but in the US, it was pretty much the only dubstep CD commercially available in regular stores. For tens of thousands of American kids, it was their introduction to dubstep.
Rusko moved to Los Angeles in 2008, after finding he was doing great numbers in America. He’s still blown away by how dubstep has blown up in the US. “It’s a combination of a lot of things,” he says. “It’s nice now that it’s separating, I get different people come to my gigs than go to Skrillex’s gigs, especially with this Korn record and everything else. A lot of Americans think that’s what dubstep is, which is the biggest
www.djmag.com 025
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100