With summer's subterranean smash tune ‘Jack’ signed to a major and chart success beckoning, Ben Westbeech, aka Breach, tells us how he’s heading for
the top by staying true to the underground... Words: IAN MCQUAID Pics: MIKE MASSARO
P
op music has always run from the sublime to the irredeemable. The charts have rotated from gold to grot since the dawn of the Hit Parade, and the model doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon. So whilst there are always dark periods when commercial radio is little more than a cemetery
of tired ideas, dug up and forced to fandango one more time, every now and then a new generation of musicians kick down the door, reset the rules, and party ‘til the lights come on. Right now we’re in such a time. The paradigms are shifting. What is seen as ‘commercial’ in dance music has been snatched from the perma-tanned Guettas and LMFAOs, and the UK’s preferred form of home-grown rave has re-emerged; bass-heavy, nocturnal, and cool-as- fuck. It’s in these glorious moments, whilst the mainstream wobbles and tries to catch up, that the weird shit can — and will — break through. A&Rs from major labels are scratching their heads. 'Christ!' they murmur, Duke Dumont’s at No.1. House sells! Better sign some quick. And the programmers at radio, they think, 'Wow, well we better keep up with the kids. Disclosure are killing it right now…' Before you know it, Greg James is freaking out Radio 1 drive-time listeners by following Little Mix’s drivel with Breach tunes, and you're left wondering what exactly just happened…
“You get these people
that don’t like it if something gets more commercial, ‘cos now everybody’s hearing their little scene. It’s a bit of a funny view to have, because with 'Jack' the reason it crossed over was that everyone on the underground was playing the crap out of it. Now it’s gone mainstream and you get people being like, ‘Oh, it’s gone too commercial…’ Well
that’s what
happens if a record gets popular!”
It’s no surprise that Ben ‘Breach’ Westbeech is feeling good. Said tune, 'Jack', has blown up beyond his wildest expectations in the space of a few short months. Meeting us in a canal- side café, nestled on the outskirts of his new home of Amsterdam, the enthusiastic producer is marvelling at the track's unlikely, meteoric success. “I’ve just found out now that I’ve been Radio 1 ‘A’ listed; Capital playlisted; Kiss FM playlisted. Everyone’s playing me. It's just nuts, it’s insane.” He pauses to let the enormity of it sink in, if only to himself. “If you’d have told me that was gonna happen, I would have probably told you to fuck off.” To map his switch from cult-ish producer to Top 40-bound daytime radio prospect, you need
to rewind to early 2013. Westbeech had finished a Breach remix of an Infinity Ink track, earmarked for Crosstown Rebels. When label boss Damian Lazarus chose to turn down the mix, Westbeech stripped out the Infinity Ink vocal, added in his own whispered contribution and got on the phone to Dirtybird boss Claude VonStroke. He takes up the story. “I was having dinner with Claude in London, telling him I’ve got this record that’s really Dirtybird —that was the original A-side, 'Let’s Get Hot', and we were talking about a B-side when he suggested trying something sleazier. The next day, I dreamt about something, I don’t know what, but I woke up with the ‘Jack’ lyric in my head, so I put it straight in my phone, went down to the studio, put the vocal down over a kick drum, left it for four days then went back, fucked with the vocal a bit then made the tune in four or five hours or something.”
NO SELL OUT The result, 'Jack', was
five minutes of dirty, uncluttered genius. Built from a sordid old skool bassline, a synth that sounds like a lusty cow, some pummelling house kicks, and a breathy female vocal exhorting listeners to “jack”, the track is both intriguingly off-kilter and remarkably catchy. That the cow sounds and the girl’s voice are all supplied by Westbeech’s own vocals (unrecognizably twisted via a bunch of plug- ins) makes proceedings stranger still. When VonStroke aired it at the Miami Winter Conference, it instantly went off. Within weeks of its Dirtybird release, 'Jack'
was getting hammered by DJs from around the globe, breaking onto Defected comps and getting UK garage rewinds. Suddenly the man from Atlantic Records rocked up with a cheque book. Westbeech elaborates. “The Atlantic deal came out of nowhere. I mean, 'Jack' went off in Miami, it was a big tune there and the ball started rolling. The thing is it’d been out for two months already, so to have it re-signed and taken back off the net was pretty hard to fucking do! We’d never seen a deal like this happen; me, Claude, my manager James — I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I’ve never seen a tune come out and get pulled back to get licensed by a major. It was really surprising to be honest.” So now 'Jack' is getting a re-release with a proper,
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