TD 1
I remember taking my mum to see TR-One and it was
the first time she’d heard the 303, and she was like “What’s that sound? I want to hear more of that sound”, and I think that’s how a lot of people respond to a 303. I’m still messing around with a 303, 30 years later. PHOTO Dorje De Burgh A long time, actually. What happens between Manny’s baseline and John Squires guitar part and Ian Brown’s melody is so elegant and brilliant and has a lovely, Lego brick, overlapping thing going on, that I always thought would sound really cool synthesized. It’s brilliant playing it live, watching people figuring out what it is and by the time it gets to the third chorus, they’re all singing along. Your New Jackson persona has existed in a physical sense since 2011’s The Night Mail EP, but how long were you living with “him” before then? I probably started going clubbing like a lot of people when I was 17 or 18 in The Temple of Sound, Billy Scurry and Johnny Moy on a Thursday night, and acid house was the sound. I’ve been fascinated with it to this day. It’s just such an alien amazing sound. I remember even taking my mum to see TROne and it was the first time she’d heard the 303, and she was like “What’s that sound? I want to hear more of that sound”, and I think that’s how a lot of people respond to a 303. I’m still messing around with a 303, 30 years later. So, around 2006/07, I started to realise, “Oh, I can make this stuff myself”. I’ve learned so much stuff around the electronics that were supporting the David Kitt stuff that I was doing. Right from the beginning really, I was always working drum machines and synths and samplers. By the time I got to The Nightsaver (David Kitt, 2010). There’s a song called Nobody Leaves on that, which has a bit of a Mr Fingers kind of thing and that was the gateway. But I’ve always said like there’s this one song Projekt: PM – When the Voices Come (Guidance Recordings, 1996). A one hit wonder, vocoder house track from the mid ‘90s. New Jackson has always been like, “What if those guys made loads more music,” and I still stick to that. The two personas, New Jackson and David Kitt have a degree of overlap but are also quite distinct? How easy do you find it to compartmentalise one persona over another when you are producing material? Increasingly easy. There’s just a very clear line for me in terms of what I’m trying to express in the two different places, but there have been times over the years where I’ve written a song in the New Jackson world that feels like a really great song. Something like There Will Always Be This Love exists in both, and sonically they’re very different, but lyrically it’s the same song, and melodically it’s the same song. 46