Rap Van Winkle

If you neglect the muse for one day, she’ll leave you for three. Ignore her for three years and she’ll shun you for nine.

Stereo MCs, one imagines, have taken to heart the lessons dispensed in Bernard McClaverty’s Grace Notes.

The last time the band were publicly active was the year of our lord 1993, when they were touring the festival circuit on the back of their third album, the BRIT-winning, 1.5 million selling Connected, a record which reached number two in Britain that summer and yielded a couple of sizable hit singles in the form of the title track and ‘Step It Up’.

Since then though, nothing but a silence of My Bloody Valentine proportions. Almost a decade of it. The last time Stereo MCs released a new album, Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence, Charles Bukowski, Jeff Buckley, Paula Yates, William Burroughs and Diana Spencer were all still alive. The Spice Girls and Oasis were unknowns and Britney was but a baby.

And now, here we are in HQ, watching Rob Birch, Nick “The Head” Hallam, Cath Coffey, Owen If and a cast of extras pumping through a batch of new tunes at a dry run for tonight’s gig. The sound is crisp, confident and powerful. A few of the tracks we know from a five-track sampler distributed by the record company, most notable among them being the forthcoming single and title track of the new album Deep Down And Dirty, which sounds just that – up to date enough not to seem out of place sandwiched between Outkast and DMX on the radio, but hardly a marked departure from the formula the band have been perfecting since they first blew into London from the Midlands in 1985. Similarly, ‘Sofisticated’ and ‘We Belong In This World Together’ come replete with tenement block rocking beats, baggy phrasing and catchy choruses. More of a departure is ‘Breeze’, which seems to overlay Air-y airs over a Jamaican skank, the skeletal Birch breathing into his vocoder, a hip hop artful dodger with sticky-uppy hair, rolly-uppy cigarette and saggy-undery combats.

Two nights ago in Galway the band played their first gig in a dog’s lifetime. When asked how he felt beforehand, the bald-headed Nick Hallam was succinct in his summation:

“Pretty fuckin’ nervous.”

You’d be worried if he wasn’t.

Okay, let’s not beat around the burning bush stuck in Rob’s gob. What on earth took them so long?

“I think the old expression, ‘You’ve lost it’, that was the feeling I kept getting,” Birch admits, sitting beside his partner in the Bill Graham room upstairs in HQ.

“We was just workin’ on music, trying to key into something really,” he reflects. “ I knew there was something, but we just couldn’t find it, y’know? It was just, for a long time, like banging my head on a wall. It was like your head’s screwed on the wrong way round.”

It’s an old story. Band scores hit album, band tours hit album, management and record company offer band loads of live work to extend hit album’s shelf-life, and the next thing you know, band is stuck in a shed in middle America playing its songs for the nth time, having become estranged from the creative processes that precipitated its success in the first place. When the musicians finally get back home, they feel dislocated from their environment and in no fit state to write a note for the milkman, let alone a new album. But then, could you resist the offer to go on the road with the techno headfuck that was U2’s Zooropa tour?

Nick: “I can’t diss anything about that ’cos it was great and U2 were brilliant and everybody on that tour was really friendly, but it just wasn’t really what we should’ve been doing. Those shows tend to be once every four days, and there was a lot of dead time just kicking around imploding on ourselves, ’cos you can’t just zip back to England for a couple of days and try to do something creative…”

Not unless you’re the headliners and you get the urge to record an album called Zooropa, but go on . . .

“… and then we went on did something else in America, this WOMAD tour, nice people on it, but you’re playing these sheds which are pretty vibeless really. I think we probably just carried on playing the same fucking songs 30 times too many.”

The touring was one thing, but worse, when the band returned to Brixton, they entered a fruitless loop, trying to regenerate some kind of musical spark. They would record literally hundreds of tracks in a variety of locations over the next few years, using none of them.

“Rob and me just fucking parted mentally for a couple of years at the end of the touring,” Nick laments. “We kind of said, ‘The touring made us tired’ and stuff, and it sounds a bit fucking pathetic, but y’know, we did tour for a long time. And at the same time a couple of things happened to us both personally which was a result of being away. Two years is quite a long time, and whoever you’ve left at home, they’ve had this whole different life, and we both had personal stuff to deal with.”

What Nick’s talking about here is a daughter he hadn’t seen for more than two weeks over a period of a year and a half, plus the fact that his relationship with her mother came to an end, and he had a breakdown of sorts. In Rob’s opinion, they had become institutionalised. No wonder the magic appeared to have gone.

“We were going in the studio and doing tracks,” Nick admits, “but we weren’t doing stuff where we thought, ‘Yeah, this is going to be our next record’. Y’know, we could’ve put a record out to capitalise on the success but it would’ve felt wrong, we wouldn’t have been able to go out and play it convincingly. I think it was just very introspective and downbeat and I don’t think that was something we really felt comfortable putting out as Stereo MCs.”

For most bands, such a period of inertia would’ve resulted in financial disaster. Fortunately for the Stereos, a steady stream of money from licensing ‘Connected’ out to eagle-eared advertising agencies meant they could afford to keep players like Owen If on wages while he sat around twiddling his sticks.

“‘Connected’ has been used on one advert,” Nick explains, “at first we kind of passed on it, and the people who wanted to use it pestered us for about a year. And really, it’s simple, we just thought, ‘Fuck it, we might as well make some money out of it’. And we lead pretty simple lives; we’re not out buying mansions or anything like that. We was comfortable in that we could build a studio and just live alright.”

Of course, selling your songs for commercial gain remains an ethical argument that obeys no rules: Neil Young and Nick Cave won’t do it, Iggy and The Stones will. In Moby’s case, ads exposed him to a mainstream audience when neither radio nor critics would give his Play album the time of day.

And while Rob and Nick were wrestling with writers’ block (as in they wrote loads but blocked any possibility of it ever seeing the light of day) tracks like ‘Connected’ were working for them during the clampdown. But then, Stereo MCs, in common with their American hip hop brethren, have always been shrewd operators: their Gee St. label was kick started with the help of £7000 scored from property developers who wanted them to vacate their flat back in the mid-80s. Still, Nick isn’t as brazen about taking the corporate shekel as you might expect.

“I still don’t feel like we want to use our music for adverts,” he testifies. “I still think to a degree it kind of cheapens what you do. It’s like when drum ‘n’ bass happened, within six months it was all over the telly on adverts and in a way that killed it before it was meant to. All those people who write jingles, it’s very easy for them to copy that sort of music, and so I think it watered it down a lot. I still think there’s something to be said for not using your music in adverts if you can avoid it.”

But even then, you’re not safe. There’s the famous case of a certain ad agency hiring Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to cover Tom Waits’ ‘Heart Attack And Vine’ in 1993 after the latter refused to allow his own recording to be used, while a well-known soft drinks manufacturer is currently running an ad featuring a shameless rip-off of Hole’s ‘Celebrity Skin’.

“You see that a lot on telly,” Rob affirms. “You go: ‘isn’t that . . .? But it’s not, it’s a bit cheesy.”

Nick: “I was talking to somebody the other day, Jerry Dammers who used to be in the Specials, and he said there’s an advert on telly, they didn’t write the track but it’s obviously a copy of the way The Specials did it (I believe Nick is referring to ‘Pressure Drop’ – PM). It’s happened with loads of tracks where they slightly change it so that it’s obvious what its meant to be but you can’t get done legally for it. I guess that’s just advertising.”

It was as late as 1999 before the Stereo MCs finally managed to get their creative juices flowing once more. In the interim, Rob and Nick had busied themselves with their RCA-backed Natural Response imprint, a music publishing company Spirit Songs (whose clients included Jurassic 5 and Finley Quaye) and a series of remixes under the Ultimatum umbrella.

Traditionally in rock ‘n’ roll, such diversifications spell trouble. The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, Led Zeppelin and U2 all founded their own labels with the best of philanthropic intentions, but soon found them an unjustifiable drain on their energies – not to mention bank accounts. However, hip-hop tells a different story: from the pavement (Wu-Tang Clan) to the penthouse (Puff Daddy), it’s considered kosher to have a ringed finger in as many pies as possible.

“I think for me it was almost a way of distracting myself from the process we were going through,” avers Nick. “I think if I hadn’t had those other things to think about, to try and find new music to sign, I would’ve just become really bored. I could always see this point in the distance we wanted to reach for, but I think if we’d sat down in the studio all day, you almost start to destroy it because you’re getting irritated. When you find some tracks by somebody, you sign them, they get released a couple of years later and you hear them on the radio, it makes you feel part of the chain in a way, like you’ve evolved.”

The pair also discovered that getting involved in the remixing of other artists’ music helped alleviate the pressure of trying to finish their own record.

Nick: “We started doing some remixes again like Tricky and Madonna and some Mo’ Wax stuff, and I think it was a very gradual thing, the more things we started doing again, the more Rob and me started clicking with each other.”

Yet another factor was the completion of the band’s own Frontline studio, located in a two-storey building in a Brixton housing estate. If touring was like being vacuum-packed and posted from state to state, then working in the heart of the urban sprawl provided a communal base from where they could nip down to the local vinyl emporium, give some new mixes a spin and get instant feedback.

“That’s life,” says Rob, “that’s what everybody needs, unless you’re going to become some kind of… like in America they teach four year old girls to do that dancing and become little majorettes and stuff, they really make freaks out of people. And I think to a degree, some of them old rock bands, I don’t wanna be rude to anyone, but I look at some of ’em and I think, ‘Yeah, great, you’re still doing it, but you’re a bunch of fuckin’ freaks’. You hear them talkin’ and they’re still living that fucking life and you just think, ‘That’s a bit freaky man’.

“I wanna have my own life,” he continues, “like how I always enjoyed making music at home with my mate and we’d go out and do gigs. But we always had a place to do it which revolved around going down the shops to get a bit of food, seeing your partner every now and then, stuff like that.”

In 1999, Stereo MCs showed the first signs of life in six years with a mix album for German label K7’s DJ Kicks series. Unlike previous commercial remixing gigs, here the band had to chaperone the record right up to the manufacturing stage.

“We had to see it through,” Nick recalls, “and even though it wasn’t a proper record, it was a real thrill having a record you’d made in your hand. And gradually stuff started to appear. I think the first track we really finished was ‘Deep Down And Dirty’, and I think that really had an impetus to it as a track and as a statement, and that opened the doors to freeing up how we were trying to make music.”

Rob: “Before that it’d been like: ‘Why the fuck can’t we finish this song?’ But once we’d done a track like that, to me it kind of said, ‘This is who you are now’ and the rest was just getting into that frame of mind, sitting down on the rhythm, trying to get a vibe together, and a lot of them came quite naturally and we didn’t have to struggle too much.”

“It felt more of a creative collaboration where we were being more spontaneous,” resumes Nick, “whereas after ‘Connected’ it felt like we’d reached a bit of a brick wall somehow trying to repeat that, which we actually tried doing but it sounded like a really bad copy of Stereo MCs.”

All this time, while Nick and Rob were tinkering with the springs and mechanisms of their own band’s workings, outside the music business was changing, with amalgamations, takeovers and buyouts reducing the number of major record labels to a half dozen. Key personnel at the band’s Island label had departed, acts like Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits and Gavin Friday left or were dropped, and what remained of the roster suddenly became property of Universal.

“Island changed so much for us,” Rob confirms. “A year or two after we’d finished touring, so many people had come and gone. The guy who signed us originally, Julian Palmer, was no longer there, Chris Blackwell was no longer there, and we really didn’t know anybody in the office – we’d been there longer than anybody in the building.”

“After Connected, there was only Tricky, PJ Harvey, Pulp, Talvin Singh and stuff like that,” Nick observes. “And there was something about Island when we signed, it felt totally different to other record companies, it was big but it felt small. And then it just felt like a record company who didn’t know what the fuck they wanted to do.

“A new guy’s taken over now who’s been there for about a year, and he’s totally different to Chris Blackwell, I think his purpose is more about selling records, but as long as somebody’s got a purpose there’s a point to it. To a certain extent you’ve got to be on the reins to run something like that. Chris Blackwell did that incredibly, he was just into music and he believed in developing things, and now that we’re back on the right track it feels good to still have the Island logo on our record, ’cos really there’s only us and U2 and PJ Harvey left who were anything to do with Island Records from six years ago. We feel part of how it used to be, and hopefully we can kind of show that Island records does still exist, in a way, within us.”

‘Deep Down And Dirty’ is released through Island/Universal on May 11th, with the album of the same name to follow on the 25th