It’s all change for 2000s electro tag-team Groove Armada. Back in the day, they were masters of “big band” house music, their gigs hands-in-the air-celebrations featuring dozens of musicians and feel good hits such as ‘I See You Baby’. But nowadays founder-member Andy Cato is most likely to be found mucking around on his farm in France while he and partner-in-vibes Tom Findlay have retreated to the purer sounds of their early, club-specific incarnation.
“We’ve entered a whole new period since 2010 when we did the last of the live shows at Brixton,” a chatty Cato told Hot Press last year. “That’s when we were touring the album Black Light. It was Grammy-nominated, but remains a well-kept secret amongst a lot of people. It was our finest ever record in terms of album writing. We finished touring that in Brixton and then decided to knock all that big band, Glastonbury- closing-slot style touring on the head and just go back to doing the house music warehouses and free parties, which is where it all started for us. Since we’ve done that, we’ve been doing tunes with Hypercolour.”
In 2015 this new outlook yielded concrete results with Little Black Book, a two-disc collection of new material and remixes.
“We went into the studio thinking it would be easy,” Findlay recalled. “But then when we realised something was going to come out of it, we started giving it as much creative focus as we could. We thought we’d go in the studio, just grab some nice tunes we’d done before and mix them together, but you always want to make it the best you can. So when we started focusing on it, we were inspired to write new material and, all of a sudden, we had new song after new song.”
Far from a decision lightly taken, their return to DJing was influenced by the changing face of electronic music.
“Around the time we were touring Black Light, there was a sense that we were always playing on the main stage of a dance tent,” Findlay said last year. “We were always doing the same slots, coming on after Laidback Luke or Calvin Harris, and it wasn’t really the scene that we wanted to be part of. The music was all sounding great, but that big electronic scene was not where our heads were at. Instead, we felt the need to go back to what we had always done – and we decided to go that way, playing nice house sets, having a good time, rather than pushing this large EDM–size stone.”