“We want to finally show everyone what Te


Qemists are all about!”


Well Liam was working with Coldcut on an album, and they needed a remix of the first single for this album and Liam asked if we could have a crack at it for free. Tey liked the remix we did, sent it out and Zane Lowe loved it so much he played it every night on Radio 1. So at that point I think the record label thought “Oh hang on there might be something in this sound!” It was right when Pendulum were just emerging and Chase and Status were breaking out from drum n bass to a rockier live band feel. So we ended up being signed and making two albums with Ninja Tune, although we’ve now completed our deal with them and are moving on to another international label. You’ve toured loads as a band. What’s been your most memorable gig so far and why? So many great gigs! Woodstock on the border of Poland and Germany was amazing; we had a crowd of 250,000! Tat was great, there’s footage of that on Youtube. Our first time at Summersonic Festival in Japan was amazing – we had a dressing room between Lady Gaga and Beyonce! We had the number one foreign album in Japan at that time. It’s a funny thing, you have to put in a lot of ground work with fans, engaging with them and showing them your music. We’re never afraid to put in that hard work. Everything else is a gloss put on the industry and the press, that musicians deserve some kind of special treatment. We really don’t! If you met us you’d understand, we don’t deserve any special treatment, we just like to get up and play music to people who appreciate it so we’ll


play wherever that is! Your latest album Warrior Sound is about to come out. Can you tell me what we can expect from it? We’ve been working on it for some time, over two years. Songwriting is something that’s really neglected by dance music producers and we wanted to try to understand what it is that makes people feel emotions in a track as well as refining our sound so it was really recognisable as our sound, the way everything fits together, we wanted it to be the definitive statement of what it is that we’ve been trying to do over the last 10 years. I think everything comes together quite nicely and if you look at the new single’s video we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback about it. People get confused as to whether we’re a dance act or a live band, but this video for Run You has seemed to explain who we really are. Every song has undergone such scrutiny and there are no fillers on this album. You’ve done several remixes for other people including Roots Manuva, Dr Octagon and Coldcut . What’s the first step you take when starting to remix a track? We like to approach it in a way that that fits out own songwriting. We listen through and find the hooks of the track or the most important musical parts and see how they fit together as well as how they could fit together in a different way. From that we decide on what to focus on and then we work out how to heavy it up or make it in a drum n bass style. And from there we have a bank of drum and guitar sounds that we use, so it’s about


writing a song around that. Some songs you can pretty much use the entirety of the song and others you can only use a couple of seconds as it doesn’t sit with the style that you’re trying to make. You have to pick out what makes a song great and then create something around that. What do you guys do right before you go onstage? Listen to some whale songs and enjoy a camomile tea? Well, we’re not as young as we used to be, so we do some neck exercises. Olly and Bruno do their vocal warm ups’. I normally annoy everyone by tapping on a chair, and yeah, we have to stretch or else we’re in the bus the next day complaining about aching from jumping up and down! Te thing is about being onstage is you have to exaggerate your movements even more so people can see you. So we just go completely mental, even if we’re in a bad mood or we think the gig’s not going to be a good one. You don’t get up there and act like that, you start going crazy from the minute you hit the stage, no matter if there’s only three people watching you. What’s next for Te Qemists? We’ve done so much and we’re so proud of our career up until now, but there are some things on the list still to do. We want this record to be a proper release; when I’ve got the vinyl in my hand that’ll be a good moment. We want to finally show everyone what Te Qemists are all about. We’re hoping to go to America as well.


Lizz Page outlineonline.co.uk / December 2015 / 27


INFORMATION Te Qemists play Te Owl Sanctuary on 2nd December. Tickets from theowlsanctuary.net.


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