David: Can you fill me in a bit on your background?

The Bug: I guess the first thing that I was really involved in was a band called God, which ended up being maybe twelve people, or maybe more. My idea when i formed the band was to create really physical music that was very loud; volume was very much a part of the equation. But as it went on what I wanted to do was mix free jazz with noise rock so basically I just kept inviting more and more people in to get closer and closer to that idea and the last show we did I had two drummers, a percussionist, two bass players, a double bass player, two guitarists, three saxophone players and a group of African drummers as well. All of it was amplified, and all going through effects so it was really psychedelic, incredibly loud and incredibly physical.

D: When was this?

TB: Well this would of been about seven or eight years ago, i guess and the last show I did which was interesting in terms of knowing what i think you’re in to, I invited the Disciples to come and play with us and another group called Bart Psychosis who had started doing jungle music under the name of Boymerang and at that show we had loads of problems — neighbours were complaining at the venue, amplifiers were blowing up and when Boymerang played, people who were in to God were throwing bottles at them because they thought it was shit dance music and when The Disciples played after us everyone had left and it was just me and the rest of the band left to watch them. I felt really bad about this because I had convince them to do something outside of their normal scene because we all loved the whole UK live dub soundsystem scene like Abashanti, Jah Shaka, The Disciples, Iration Steppas…

And I stood there in the middle of their three Stacks that night and I was like everything I want to do with God they’re doing by having access to a sound system and having access to mixing as being the main part of the disorientation, just fucking your head with sound basically and it was that night i decided to finish with God and say “Fuck it! its not good what i want, its too difficult, there’s too many people not committed to the sound.” For me I’m obsessed with sound, my whole life’s been about music basically, my father and grandfather were musicians so for me its in my blood anyway and from that point on it was all about the studio because when you're in a band that size, you have to make compromises, you cant really use the studio, particularly with jazz players, they’re really fussy about how you mix them, they want to be pure and i wasn’t really in to that.

People that really changed my way of hearing production were reggae producers like Adrian Sherwood, King Tubby and Lee Perry; i wanted to know more about that. There were really pivotal things that made me change my approach to music; one was seeing a group called Swans play live, who were one of the loudest no wave bands, just totally brutal, just reduced everything to a riff and rhythm so its like noise and rhythm. Also hearing the first Public Enemy album, The Bomb Squad Production changed my whole view of sound, and how it could be used and, again it was more like rhythm and noise, i suppose.

D: Were you playing an instrument at this time?

TB: Yeah, i was playing saxophone through effects on an amplifier, a Marshall stack, and I was screaming—I was a vocalist and producer so i just screamed my head off basically, it wasn’t music, it was nasty (laughs). And whilst I’d been working in God, I’d worked really closely with a guy called Justin Broadrick who was a lead singer and vocalist in Godflesh, a metal band who mixed hip hop and metal who were the first metal band to do that and he had formed Napalm Death.

He was one of the original Napalm people and, whilst he was Godflesh and I was in God, we found that we were both frustrated, myself with being in a band who hated the studio, and him with being in a metal group who hated the audience. What we were both loving at the time was soundtrack music, contemporary classical music and dub so we started Techno Animal Love and the whole idea of Techno Animal was to use those elements that we couldn’t do in our normal thing and work together because we realised there were a lots of parallels in terms of our personality, our background and what we wanted to do.

We both love extremes, don’t care if its loud or quiet, or melodic, or totally noisy as long as its extreme and as long as its done for the right reason. And for me 95% of all music is shit, it doesn’t matter what the genre is, every type of music, 95% is done for the wrong reason, 5% for me is done for the right; originators, the people who are fresh, people who come with the ideas for the music, not just to sell not just to copy. And with Techno Animal we tried to do this really intense instrumental hip hop that again was totally bass driven. We played a lot of shows in France for some reason. After we played Transmusicales, we suddenly found there was a lot of interest in Techno Animal so we played a lot and Godflesh were very popular here (in France) and basically through Techno Animal and working with Justin, I’d learnt to work with the studio more, he’d been producing for longer, I hadn’t really produced, I’d always worked with engineers. Subsequently I was deciding what to do after I’d jacked God in, and now Justin had more work with Godflesh, I was left in a position of not knowing what to do, and also I was actually quite depressed in London: I had no money at all, my girlfriend at the time hated London, she was German, she wanted us to move to Berlin and I was thinking strongly about it at the time and it was the only time I’d ever thought maybe I shouldn't be making music because I had no opportunity, no money, no label, no nothing.

There was another thing I’d done with a major label, Warner Bros. The label were wankers, arseholes, but I walked away from the deal with a dub soundsystem which I still have, Loefah has it, and I’ll tell you later on but, we’ll start working next year. But basically they wanted us to play live with Ice; we’d never intended to do, it was a one-off project and I said “No way,” and they said “we won’t give you the money for the album” and I said “Well you can help me build the soundsystem and then we’ll take the system out live,” but we got dropped really quickly when they heard the album because for them it was unlistenable but I got to keep the system which I’ve kept building but its just never been ready yet so when my girlfriend was like “lets move, lets fuck off you’re not happy,” I was like “Look I’ve got a reggae soundsystem, I’ve built a spec, I’ve never done anything on my own, I’ve always worked with other people, I wanna find my own sound.”

I love bashment. No one else loved ragga that I knew—apart from DJ Scud actually, he was the only person. (I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him, he reports for Rephlex). He came from breakcore but he was mixing ragga and breakcore and he was a good friend of mine and, apart from him there was no one else but I was becoming increasingly obsessed with ragga because I felt that the production in dancehall and, all Jamaican music was always pushing forward because the audiences in Jamaica are really demanding. They always want the next thing, they don’t really want the last thing and all the music I heard (at that point) was looking backwards, like a lot of noise rock. Everything was looking back so for me I became more and more inspired by dancehall and the producers that were making that music and I said to my girlfriend at the time “I want to try this one thing and if it doesn’t work I’ll move to Berlin (laughs), we’ll fuck off, we’ll do whatever but I want to try this one solo album. That’s how The Bug started up basically; Rephlex heard the stuff and they loved it. I’d done a single with Tikiman and Daddy Freddy on both sides and Rephlex heard that and said they’d really signed anything by me if I did in that style and that’s where The Bug started.

D: Did your connection with the dubstep scene start around this time?

TB: No, to me it started when Kode 9 interviewed me. Funnily enough, DJ Scud whom I mentioned before, he and I used to listen to garage stuff, more the rawer stuff ended up being stuff like Ghost, the Ghost label, because we were just interested in stuff that was heavy dark, deep and dubby and we found some of it there and then when Kode 9 interviewed me just after my Bug album which was released on Rephlex he told me what he’d been invovled in, and I found him a really interesting character because I could hear that we were quite similar in the music we liked and I thought that, well if he’s in there then I’m gonna check more of it out. And through him I met Digital Mystikz, Loefah, I met them all, that Croydon crew really and that was about three years ago, I suppose and I started going to FWD and DMZ in the beginning and it interested me.

I mean in a way some people on the scene have heard The Bug stuff like the Pressure album and have said that actually sounds like dubstep before it was there and when I hear some people like Loefah, I hear Scorn or echoes of what we were doing in Techno Animal and that’s not to criticise him, it’s not criticism, it’s just coincidence. We were interested in bass, space, we were interested in atmospheric music that wasn’t commercial, we were interested in, and I am always interested in, intense music. I look for intensity of sound in music and dubstep had that and what was interesting for me was that all the producers I met seemed to be finding their own sound. They were very individual; I wouldn’t know what the next Digital Mystikz track would sound like that Mala would send me or Kode 9. And Kode 9 and Space Ape in particular, verbally they admitted that the Bug albums were a big inspiration particularly Roger Robinson’s poetry on Space Ape’s delivery so for me there were definite parallels. And when I heard the early Kode 9 stuff I loved it because it was very close to what I was trying to do as well it was just a different tempo. So that’s how I met those people. …/…

Read the 2nd part of the interview where The Bug talks about his relationship with dubstep and grime, about their potential and difficulties and about his current projets…

Thanks to Kevin, Poppy, Dimitri and Benoît.
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