The Italian job

“I was reading a book about John Gotti and I got the phrase from that. Capo Regime is a rank in the Mafia. It’s the captain of a crew. We spelt it differently; it looks much better on a poster with two ps.”

Robert Jess knows all about clandestine groupings that work under the radar of straight society. For the last two years, he and Stuart Adamson have been prime movers in the twilight world of Belfast drum and bass – a tightly knit but increasingly noisy coterie of talent that, at the moment, looks set to go over-ground. According to Robert, it’s a scene that places great stock in its sense of unity and collective support.

“You’ve got so many branches. You’ve the guys from Roo Nation putting on nights at The Menagerie, you’ve Carl (Graham – Judge Dredd) at The Front Page and now Morrisons and you’ve Johnny Tiernan. No one really seems to be battling anyone else. There aren’t many ego-clashes, everybody seems to be trying to make the scene work.”

Stuart: “We all help one-another out. We’ve remixed tracks for Solarise and Spree, Kato has done stuff for us, and we’re hoping Carl will come around soon to give us a hand. It’s a competition, but in a really good way. Anytime Spree are playing, we’ll be down there. Anytime we’re playing they’ll be there. But we’ll be like, ‘You’re a bastard’, when we hear one of tunes and it’s great. We’ll be straight into the studio trying to go up a notch.”

For the past few years the emphasis has been on laying the foundations for the few fanatics plying their trade in and around Belfast, but as far as Robert is concerned, the time has come to widen some ambitions.

“With the scene being as small as it is, it definitely has its advantages, but you really have to make an impact in London, and the only way we can do that is by bringing great acts over, and making sure we support people like Dominick when they do have a success.”

Dominick being Dominick Martin – aka Calibre – who at this moment in time, and following on from Musique Concrete, his ecstatically reviewed debut album from last year, is the star graduate of Belfast drum and bass. Martin’s progress has had a particular resonance in the Cappo Regime ranks due to the fact that Stuart was, at one time, a co-pilot in Calibre.

According to him, the duo are delighted by Martin’s current success.

“I wasn’t surprised it made the kind of impact it did. Fabio had been talking it up for ages before it came out, so everyone knew it was going to be a big album. Dominick is just a dead talented guy, he can make gold out of shit – can take a sample and just transform it in a way you’d never think yourself. He’s just very musical. I can remember lending him a sampler and he banged out sixteen tunes in a week. He told me once that if he couldn’t make music it made him ill.”

With the Calibre LP already in the shops, and both Spree and Roo Nation recently returned from some stateside word-spreading duties at the South By Southwest Festival in Texas, the drum and bass community in Belfast is looking in remarkably fine nick. Cappo Regime, through their flirtations with hip hop and regular slots in mega club Shine, are now determined, in the words of a wannabe cockney wideboy, to push things forward.

“I think the great strength of drum and bass is that you can take techno, hip hop, jazz, soundtracks and it all makes sense,” says Robert. “It’s a very open music, it’s very open to other influences. So we definitely don’t feel as if drum and bass is restricting us, the opposite is true. There’s diversity coming in. People had a preconception of what drum and bass was. I think when people first came into contact with the fast breaks and the way they were chopped up, they just didn’t know how to dance to it. But with us playing Shine, and more drum and bass clubs opening up, people who would have been mainly into House and Techno are more willing to give it a chance. It does seem as if our music is getting to more people than before and that they’re a lot more open minded when dealing with it.”