Electro king Fake Blood is back with a new album — and he’s talking to the press for the first time about the project. DJ Mag USA quizzed him about his hip-hop roots, graffiti, EDM and his burgeoning soundtrack work for a famous cult horror movie...
words: CARL LOBEN pics: DAN WILTON
hen ‘Mars’ by Fake Blood was doing the rounds as a DJ promo in the summer of 2008, the
speculation as to who was behind the old skool-tinged electro track
reached fever pitch. Was this some new 21-year-old kid from London? Was it so-and-so? Why did nobody know who it was by? “One person thought it was Tiësto,” says Theo Keating, aka DJ Touche, aka Fake Blood. “You couldn’t tell which ones were serious guesses and which ones weren’t, it was like names out of a hat really. Random stabs in the dark. I thought it was pretty obvious myself, but apparently not.” Somebody even set up a blog dedicated to guessing who had created ‘Mars’. If a major label spent a million dollars on a marketing campaign, it wouldn’t have
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created anywhere near the same buzz as the mystery and hype surrounding the track. But all Theo did was not talk about the record at all. “It was totally unintentional on my part, it was completely accidental, none of that was engineered,” he tells DJ Mag USA. “No management, PR, nothing. It was just me sat here, deciding to do no interviews, no press, answering no questions. Everything else was created by the public out there – none of it was by design at all. “By doing no press, no marketing, no promo — nothing — I got more hype and reaction and interest than anything I’ve ever done,” he continues. “People afterwards would say to me ‘I want to do something like that’, and I’d say ‘I wouldn’t recommend it as an approach, because now it’s been done’. It was just a set of circumstances, the stars just kind of aligned.”
HIP-HOP ROOTS This happy accident kicked off the Fake Blood moniker, a pseudonym that Theo had used first to remix a track by the Black Ghosts, his main production project at the time. His refusal to talk about the project fuelled the speculation throughout 2008 as ‘Mars’ blasted into the
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mainstream Belgian and Dutch charts, and was heralded as the standout record in many of the lists of the year put together by DJs, electronic music blogs and other media outlets. Fake Blood has since become one of the biggest names in the global electro scene. It all seems a far cry from his (equally successful) debut project in the 1990s — The Wiseguys. The duo — Theo and Paul Eve — released an album of party hip-hop and trip-hop on Wall Of Sound, ‘Executive Suite’, before Eve went off to form Bronx Dogs, leaving Theo to pursue The Wiseguys solo. He hit paydirt with ‘Start The Commotion’ and then happy-hop cut ‘Ooh La La’, snapped up for ads for Mitsubishi and Budweiser (featuring the beer brand’s three frogs) respectively. The latter crashed into the UK charts at No.2 on re-release. Theo’s DJ sets at the time included house and techno and drum & bass as well as hip-hop, often lumped together under the catch-all genre name at the time — big beat. “Some of it was people who made hip-hop making dance tunes, or people applying hip-hop production techniques to different tempos,” he recalls. “It wasn’t so much that I turned my back on hip-hop — it was a gradual shift.”
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