His massive 2012 cut 'Child' arguably defined the house sound of that year — a swinging ode to garage from both New York and London, with a memorable R&B-sampling hook, dark, techy bassline and Detroit- inflected analogue riffs. In January, he minted his first Radio 1 Essential Mix, always an effective yardstick of a DJ's popularity, laying out his stall with a set of rough machine funk and molten bassy techno, while brand-new tune 'Thinking Of You' (out now on Hotflush) is a darker beast than his previous hit, with a menacing electroid lead line and thunking percussion that demonstrate he's not content to sit still. It's the sounds that cats like Fitzgerald and fellow future thinkers like Dusky and Bicep make that are defining the new popular sound of clubland. Yet while their contemporaries modify to more commercial parameters, Fitzgerald and co are evading pigeonholes and presaging the next dance explosion before it happens.
HOUSE CALL The 28-year-old Fitzgerald, from Watford (but now
Berlin-based), first lit up our mainframes in 2010, with a debut 12” on Scuba's Hotflush Recordings, then known as one of the UK's most futuristic dubstep labels. 'The Let Down/Weakness' was part of the wave of fresh beats that emerged after Joy Orbison's 'Hyph Mngo', taking dubstep in a brighter, synth-laden, more dancefloor-friendly direction. A tabula rasa sea change for dance music, this new broken beat vibe in dance would facilitate and plant the seed for the shift towards a fresh sound in 4/4 house music. By the time Fitzgerald's first productions surfaced, he was already shifting his attentions to house and techno — inspired by trips to Berlin and Panorama Bar, the staple diet of his sets then and now. “I think at the time, when I started off producing, before I started releasing, I was mainly making kind of garage, dubstep kind of things,” recalls George when DJ Mag sits down with him in Miami, prior to a few gigs he has in the city during WMC. “By the time I started getting releases out, everything that I was listening to and playing was house and techno, and I think there's been a bit of a lag between my production catching up, and also people realizing that's my thing. For a long time now my sets have been about house and techno, with bits and pieces of garage.”
When George imbedded his past influences into the house and techno rhythms he'd been increasingly playing out, heads really started to take notice. Already feted through his Hotflush connection, he bagged several prestigious DJ bookings at London's roaming underground deep house event Secretsundaze, an opportunity for him to test his 4/4 mettle. A purist no sell-out club with a clued-up clientele, his success at Secretsundaze ensured his acceptance as a house DJ/producer was complete, something George is very grateful to promoters Giles Smith and James Priestley for today. “Giles and James got in touch really early on about a remix,” he remembers. “Playing for them was really cool at the time, because that was my first contact with the house scene proper — especially those guys, they're very underground, very deep house. It was cool to be acknowledged by them, be brought into the fold so to speak. That brought me to the attention of a lot of people who are purely into house.”
GARAGE INFLUENCE Further releases for Hotflush followed, but also EPs
for Hypercolour and Will Saul's Aus imprint as his
productions came to mirror his DJ sets, his tastes cleaving closer to house than ever. In 2011, he launched his Man Make Music label, an outlet for the producers and associates involved with his club night of the same name, which he'd hosted at pub/club venue Star Of Bethnal Green (among others). But 2012's 'Child' was the tipping point, a record that captured the zeitgeist and exposed him to a far wider audience than ever before. Conceived as a blend of the influences that fuelled his fire at the time, it was an experiment that paid off, big style. “I was working in [London's] Black Market Records at the time, in the deep house section. Listening to all this US stuff, and hearing the link between that and the 4/4 Tuff Jam garage stuff I was buying when I was a teenager, I wanted to make a tune that stood in the middle of those two things. Something a little bit bashier than the US stuff and a little bit deeper than the UK stuff.” The influence of garage — the music that many of today's house and techno producers grew up with — seems to be the prevailing grain that runs through the modern club sound that's so captured the imaginations of clubbers and casual listeners alike. EZ was the first DJ to get George Fitzgerald into dance music, and he fully acknowledges the garage flavour that runs through his, and his contemporaries' tunes, recognizing a sound that unites them all, though he's loathe to put a tag on the new movement. “There is a crew of people who are kind of pushing that sound a bit. There's obvious differences in the way that people are going about it, but that UK approach to house is of the moment and people seem to be really interested in it, that's really cool... I don't want people to put a name on it, people should see it as house. I think the moment someone comes up with some terrible name for what that particular group of people are doing... I give it a shelf-life of a year.”
Of course, it's also this sound, loosely defined by its emphasis on bass, its grab-bag of influences, that has infiltrated the UK charts, seen tunes by the likes of Duke Dumont and Disclosure become genuine pop hits, artists that have operated in a similar zone to Fitzgerald before adapting their tracks for more pop potential. What does George think of this development? Are they diluting the music or elevating it to its rightful position? “I sometimes have a problem when people write pop records and dress it up as underground music,” he says. “They try to do both. In my mind you can't really be at the top of the charts and claim that you're an underground artist anymore. But that doesn't mean that their influences and where they've come from aren't really credible, and that they're into really interesting things. The Disclosure guys are really on-point, they know their shit and they're really good producers. They're making stuff that crosses over, so good luck to them. Some people get really upset about it, but I'd rather that were at the top of the chart than 99% of the other shit, I think it's a good thing. It helps everyone, there's a whole new generation of people out there who are more willing to listen to the stuff that I make.”
MAN MAKE MUSIC Being asked to do the Essential Mix for Radio 1 was
another coup for Fitzgerald, one he's still in awe of. Admitting it was an intimidating gig, the anxiety of past masters' timeless mixes looming over him, he set out to create something less concerned with pushing the big underground tunes of the moment, and more
focused on a sequence of wall-to-wall killer cuts, a mix designed to be listened to again and again. “It was amazing [to be asked]. I was really blown away to be honest. It was quite daunting,” George admits. “Once you get your head around doing a two-hour mix, that you've got to put together two hours of not boring music, I found it actually quite liberating. It's quite a document, the Essential Mix. It's the sort of thing where I listen back to quite a few of them, and you're not thinking, 'Oh, there's that track that's really new', you're just listening to whether it's good. All the songs have to have a timeless element to them.” Subtly repositioning expectations of his sound, including cuts by denizens of the deep like Âme and Soul Capsule, tunes on labels like Perlon and Workshop, and techno curveballs by Shed's EQD alter ego, his Essential Mix also included several new tunes forthcoming on his revitalized Man Make Music label from Trikk and Lazlo Dancehall, big tracks that indicate he's stepping up operations as 2013 progresses. “The next release is by Trikk, he's got something on Hypercolour soon too. We spent the first year-and-a- half releasing first-time releases by everybody, and now it's quite nice that everyone is doing their second release. I didn't want to just sign stuff by friends and not establish an identity as a label, that would have been a quick fix. It's gonna take another two years to get to the place where I want it to be, I really wanted to discover some new people, give them a platform, and turn the whole thing into a proper label. This is exciting.”
BERLIN George lives in Berlin at the moment, the place where
he really fell in love with and understood house and techno. He loves the city, says it's a great place to be as a DJ, but isn't so sure about its reputation as a creative hub, suggesting that a certain musical close- mindedness prevents it from being the artistic bolthole it was only a few years ago when minimal reigned. “Most of the stuff coming out of there is really boring at the moment. Seriously, it's not actually a very inspiring place in itself,” George confides. “People are just straight down the line into house and techno. On an artistic level, there are a few other places that are more interesting at the moment. I'm not knocking Berlin, but that's a big misconception about that place, that it's this creative paradise, it's not. A lot of Berliners would say that. There was a period a few years ago when loads of interesting stuff was coming out of there, but it's gone a bit dead recently. A lot of them are waiting. A lot of my German friends are waiting for something else to come along and give it a kick up the arse.”
As well as running Man Make Music, and organizing a label takeover of Boiler Room on 18th June, George is touching down at plenty of festivals: Glastonbury, Parklife and Body & Soul in June alone. He's got several of his own club bombs in reserve, which he plans to dispatch this summer; 'I Can Tell (By The Way You Move)', perhaps his biggest tune yet, is destined to drop soon — a soulful vocal cut-up houser buoyant on big room, circulating electro synths, replete with a breakdown that will have the crowd melting before the whole shebang kicks back into gear, and that's just a hint of what's to come. Despite that, he's not rushing into an album, preferring to work on 12”s and build up to a long-player for next year. “I'm working with some singers on a couple of things. Hopefully things that people don't expect from me are gonna come out. I'm really excited about the music.”
djmag.com 043
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