Things that go bump

“It was frustrating because here was a record from Belfast being played by really great DJs, and no-one over here could hear it,” says Alan Ferris, one half of floor-shaking local dance survivors Welt. “ I think in future we’ll definitely be looking to licence individual tracks, rather than putting our faith in people who could let you down. Because that’s how we lost two years.”

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When, in 1998, Billy Nasty passed on a demo cooked up by Alan and co-conspirator Simon Dalzell to London label Cloak And Dagger, judging by the pair’s previous form, great things were expected. Simon had been producing techno tracks since the mid-’90s, while Alan was one of the main-men behind the seminal Choice club at Belfast’s Art College.

When the brooding beats of the subsequent Darkman EP picked up admirers like James Lavelle, it only served to confirm the duo’s potential. However, Welt’s relationship with the label proved problematic and, when the time came to release a second EP Sole Baggage – a collection of tunes that both considered to be far superior to their debut – it wasn’t long before the association began to unravel.

“We were annoyed because with the second EP we couldn’t even get in touch with the record company for eight weeks,” Alan claims. “They weren’t answering the phones. When eventually we did talk to them, we asked them when the record was coming out and they told us that it had been out for weeks and that they’d sold every single copy. We didn’t even get one for ourselves. Gilles Peterson had been playing it on his radio show, Adam Freeland was using it, and Laurent Garnier was closing his set with it, yet we couldn’t even get a copy. It was a joke. You know, at that time Belfast was getting dead interesting – the whole Slide thing was starting, Phil (Kieran) was exploding. It would have been nice if we could have made our pitch.”

As self-confessed studio buffs, the temptation to work through these label frustrations by indulging in some therapeutic knob-twiddling was high on the Welt agenda. But, egged-on by a couple of Belfast’s more notable beat scamps, Alan and Simon were smoked out of their bunker and persuaded to take to the stage for the first time. A departure that’s proven to be entirely beneficial.

“Paul McClean and Phil Kieran gave us a lifeline really, because they practically dragged us out and got us playing live. We really had no intention of becoming a live act until Phil told us we were booked for Sector One. He was like: ‘You have to do it. I’ve had the posters printed’. So, we agreed and it’s actually turned out to be the best move we’ve ever made. It’s been really encouraging because it’s shown us that there is an audience out there interested in the kind of music we want to play. Just seeing that there are places to play, that there’s more people into it, that there seems to be a bit of a scene developing, we’ve really got off on it and got excited by it.”

Another development has seen Welt’s newer material take on a conspicuous deep house bent. The gritty, internalised groove of their earlier tracks has given away to something more insidiously euphoric.

“It’s not so much a rethink,” says Alan, “it’s just that for four years we were doing eclectic breakbeat because we wanted strong melodies in our stuff and didn’t want to go down any kind of techno avenue. But recently we’ve been going to Shine an awful lot more and getting really into deep house, and we both just realised that we were back listening to really layered four to the floor stuff. It’s been a surprise. We didn’t consciously set out to write stuff that was more dance-floor friendly, but it’s been really enjoyable that that’s the way it seems to have come out.”

If you’re making up for lost time, after all – and once Simon’s upcoming nuptials and honeymoon in New York are over, Welt very much intend to – it’s best to have some fun along the way.