If you’re a fan of Te Prodigy, Chase and Status or Pendulum, you ought to check out Te Qemists from Brighton. Tey make the most incredibly energetic, full on music, a melting pot of belting rock and dance music with a shiny polish to it. If you can stand still when you hear their tunes, you’re probably Lot’s wife (look it up). I spoke to Leon, drummer and founding member of the band, about how to go about making a remix, doing stretches backstage and their brand new album.
You’re playing Te Owl Sanctuary here in Norwich in December. It’s got a capacity of 150. How do you think that’s gonna go down? It looks like your gigs sometimes get pretty hectic! We’ve had people crowd surfing so quickly they land on the drum kit when they get over the barrier! We really wanted to go around the UK and do a tour of smaller cities because we hit a lot of the bigger places early in the year and not everyone can travel to the larger cities. We’ve got some wicked venues booked across the UK, like Te Owl Sanctuary, and we’re very excited to do this tour before the end of the year. You used to be live sound engineers. Is that how you met Liam and Dan originally? We met a long time ago and started playing in a rock band together. Because of that we all started getting jobs in music, so I was touring as a sound engineer, Liam was working as a sound engineer and Dan was a music technology lecturer. So we’ve always worked in music, it’s been our love and passion since we were young. How come you ended up adding Bruno and Olly to your line up? When we started DJing and getting proper sets in Brighton in 2004 we had MC’s working with us as well, so Bruno was often down there, we liked how he sounded and he ended up on our DJ sets. Since then he’s been a part of Te Qemists and when we get our live show together for our Join Te Q album we asked him to come on tour with us. Olly is a recent addition to the band. For the new
26 / December 2015/
outlineonline.co.uk
album we wanted some really strong songwriting this time around and we were really going down the rock influence route with our sound. I mean it’s still very dancey and drum n bassy but we needed a good songwriter. Olly was writing for us and we got him in the studio and heard his voice and we ended up doing so much stuff together on the album that he joined the band full time! I think Te Qemists have always been moving towards being a rock band rather than being a behind the scenes studio producers and Olly really completed that cycle. So you started off as a more traditional rock band. How did your current sound develop from this and how come you changed? After we learnt how to play instruments we really got interested in building our own studio and all the technical stuff, and we did that more and more. When we were a bit older and started going clubbing and stuff we got really into the DJing and production stuff, which went together well. It wasn’t until a couple years after that in 2005 when we started
thinking that we could do the two things together, the rock band which is produced like a dance act. Tat was really when Te Qemists were born..we called ourselves that because of our experimental nature. Tat’s what it is now, is a fusion of the two. Which bands and acts have influenced Te Qemists’ sound? Te first band that really blew us away with their totally different production value was Rage Against Te Machine’s first album. You know how it just sounds amazing on a soundsystem? A DJ can play those tracks and it’ll go down so well because it’s so clean and beautifully produced. It was a huge influence as were Queens of the Stone Age for the same reason, this sound which was so different. We listen to a lot of drum n bass and dance records, there are a lot of sampled sound in our music as well, and we feel that gives us that really close, well produced sound that you can play live or you can DJ. How did you come to get signed to the legendary Ninja Tune label?
“We had a dressing room between Lady Gaga and Beyonce!”
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