SOLAR FLAIR Four key elements of Hot Natured
EAST LONDON Ali: “The first time I went to Secretsundaze, like 10 or 11 years ago, my mind was completely blown and I was there every weekend after. That’s how I started the house thing. That’s how I met everyone, that’s how I met Jamie, and Luca was always in and out of that kind of scene. Obviously, I then moved to On The Rocks [now Basing House], which was when Trailer Trash was below me. There are just so many stories...”
name, which coincided with his and Jamie’s debut Hot Creations party at WMC, a move borne out of wanting to play live-sounding dance music — disco, freestyle, funk and even r&b — as a reaction to an entire week of house. “The name came about because we’d started working on music the summer before and through the fall [autumn]. Just before that Miami we’d decided to use that name in Los Angeles before we went, actually in the house that we just finished the album in, so it’s kind of come full circle.” “Lee had been living in LA and I’d been spending quite a lot of time over there during the winter,” picks up Jamie. “Our friends, who now own Culprit Records over in LA, who we did the first release on as Hot Natured, they had a big party house — good vibes, good place for meeting people, DJs coming and going, and Lee had a studio in there. That’s where we first started producing together.”
GENESIS OF THE BAND While this could easily have led to the aforementioned standard DJ album, albeit one helmed by two of the world’s busiest, best travelled and most popular names in the sphere of underground house and techno, Hot Natured’s genesis always suggested that their destiny was going to be more imaginative and uncharted. “We tried to finish that album with a vocal song,” continues Lee, “then all of a sudden we were like, ‘Woah, let’s do more vocal songs’. We can do a whole vocal album and have a concept. Before you know it, more and more people are getting involved, but the thing was much more delineated by Ali and Luca coming and putting in the time with us.” Meeting them together as a single unit, it’s easy to see the similarities between the two pairs of friends and understand why their chemistry works so well. Ali and Luca also met around the turn of the millennium at a jam session at Catch 22 when Old Street was still rough and undiscovered. Having
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moved there from Norfolk and Italy respectively, London clubs such as Nag Nag Nag with its electroclash soundtrack provided a backdrop of synthesizers and drum machines mixing with guitars. Ali was briefly in Luca’s band The Cazals who signed to Kitsuné (“He got caught falling asleep while playing but still keeping time,” laughs Luca on why Ali was fired after only two weeks), while Luca played keys on Ali’s 2010 album ‘Love Harder’. It was living with Drew McConnell of Babyshambles recording parts of this, Ali living off the proceeds of his Chemical Brothers collaboration ‘Do It Again’, that the pair began collecting bits of gear to use in earnest, and wrote ‘Diminishing Returns’, the catalyst for Jamie and Lee asking Ali to provide the vocals to ‘Forward Motion’, a love song that fitted collective unconsciousness and the duality of human existence into its first verse. “We began talking about a band,” says Ali on the self-fulfilling nature of the track’s title. “I was kind of um-ing and ah-ing as I wasn’t sure about joining any bands, or anything like that, but it naturally progressed. Once Luca came in, it felt so right between the four of us. You know, the songs just got better. The way the record has gone, some of it is really timeless. I always aspire to something timeless more than anything else.”
This spirit manifests both musically and lyrically. ‘Isis’ nods to Hot Natured’s shared loved of disco with a looped sample of The Jones Girls’ ‘Nights Over Egypt’, and borrows imagery from Egyptian history and mythology, ‘Different Sides’ evokes sub-atomic particles, alchemy and interplanetary distance to tell a tale of love separation over bump and grind beats, and ‘Physical Control’ rides out with the cosmic rising and falling of an arpeggio. LA vocalist Anabel Englund, meanwhile, an extended member of the Hot Creations crew, reprises her role on current single ‘Reverse Skydiving’ with the emotive ‘Mercury Rising’, possibly
LIVE DANCE MUSIC Luca: “I started going to house clubs when I was 15 in Italy. I used to go to Tuscany in the summer. It was all underground house music, but that was a summer thing for me. I’d go to these clubs with my friends, and then in the winter I’d listen to punk rock and rock and roll, or whatever. Then slowly I started buying disco music and more alternative electronic music. So the electronic thing has always been there, with a live element.”
SCI-FI & MYTH Lee: “I love Star Wars, that’s probably the ultimate example of bringing together sci- fi, mysticism and positivity. That entertains everyone, everyone goes home happy and you’d have to be a real hater not to like it. You’d have to want to not like the original Star Wars.”
PETE TONG Jamie: “He’s introduced so much new electronic music to the UK. To me, growing up in a small part of Wales, he’s the first person who played me a Daft Punk record. He’s the person who played me most of the big dance records over the years before I moved to London. I certainly trusted his taste, so it’s really good that he’s supporting us.”
an even better track, though one less suited for club play. In person, Ali is every bit what a front man should be: good looking, funny and with a disarming honesty. But it’s his ability to breathe fresh life into well-worn themes and paint his pictures with timely references that makes him precisely the singer to match Lee, Jamie and Luca’s near-faultless studio production. “Songwriting never stops,” he says on this ability to knock out compelling imagery. “It’s constantly going in my head. One person says one word to me and I’m like, ‘Bang’. That track ‘Diminishing Returns’, that came about because I stayed awake for six days in Ibiza once,
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