26 Music Week 01.02.13 PROFILE FUTURE CUT A CUT ABOVE THE REST
Future Cut are the producing brains behind three number one singles. After recording Lily Cooper’s (née Allen) platinum selling debut album Alright, Still, they’ve contributed to over 25 million record sales. 2013 begins with releases lined up from Stooshe, Little Mix and Olly Murs
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PRODUCTION BY RHIAN JONES
D
arren Lewis and Tunde Babalola are a pair of proper modern day producers. After recording Lily Allen’s platinum-selling debut album Alright, Still with nothing more than
£500, a computer and a microphone, they’ve since earned a respectable crust working with a long list of A-list pop stars. These include the likes of Professor Green, Dizzee Rascal, Wretch 32, Shakira, Tom Jones, Rizzle Kicks, Rihanna, Jamie Cullum, Nicole Scherzinger, Olly Murs and Lianne La Havas. Yet despite their success – including three UK No.1
singles (Lily Allen – Smile, Olly Murs - Please Don’t Let Me Go and Dance With Me Tonight) - their minimal approach to music making hasn’t changed. Now with their own publishing and management
company and the potential of more big hits lined up for 2013 - Olly Murs, Little Mix, Stooshe – we catch up with
the duo to find out if this producing lark is really as easy as they make it sound...
Is there a specific formula for creating a trademark Future Cut record? Tunde Babalola: Yeah - great artist, great song, great beat, put them together and poof! Darren Lewis:To be honest, that’s kind of it really. More than anything we try not to do stuff that we’re not 100% in love with and it might tank, it might succeed, but our rule of thumb is if you go with what you love there’s a chance that if it’s good, it’s going to work.
Are there any tricks of the trade you’ve always stuck by? Babalola: I always try to listen to a track when we’ve finished like you’ve never heard it before. I think people get stuck on a track when they like one bit and that’s why they like the song, but actually the song as a whole doesn’t work. Lewis:We both consciously try and forget the process for making a record and I like the fact that a year later you’ll
ABOVE It takes two: Tunde Babalola and Darren Lewis have worked with a host of pop royalty including Tom Jones, Lily Allen and Dizzee Rascal
be like, “I’ve no idea how I got that guitar sound.” Particular engineers dwell on that - we don’t have any engineers, we do it all ourselves - but I quite like forgetting stuff and then re-finding it, I find that kind of exciting. We tend to move stuff around or change the way the studio works or buy new plug-ins and use those exclusively and forget old ones and then come back to them. We’re always trying to mix it up.
Your career started when the DIY approach to home recording had come around and everything was much cheaper. Have you found it hard to get respect for what you do, because you’re part of the wave of producers achieving a good sound without much training? Babalola: If you’ve got the talent then it will show itself. Yeah it’s easier to make a record now, but it’s harder to get that record heard and it’s so easy to self-release; it’s so easy to put something on YouTube. So what it means is that polish makes things stand out. We’ve got home stuff which is at a decent level, but it also means that we can
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