Cut To The Chase
Celina Murphy meets the UK’s hottest production duo Chase And Status to discuss making dreams come true, putting Rihanna on the backburner and what happened when hundreds of Tom Jones fans turned up at their show.
Celina Murphy, 09 Dec 2011
Cast your mind back, if you can, to a time when Plan B was more likely to appear in a dingy club than on the side of your Lucozade bottle. A time before dubstep was the genre du jour, before Kano was getting shout-outs from Nas and Busta, and when Example was a noun and not a chart-topping MC.
It was around this time that drum‘n’bass impresarios Chase And Status started manipulating the UK’s music tastes from their home studio in London. Looking back, it seems as if Saul Milton and Will Kennard (doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?) were developing a formula for spotting future stars, but the duo say they’ve always had the same attitude towards their collaborations.
“We’d work with anyone if we think they’re cool,” Kennard tells me before their show in Dublin’s Academy. “If we like their music and we like what they’re about.”
Ireland last welcomed Chase And Status to its shores for this year’s Oxegen festival, a pretty wild show by anyone’s standard… or so I thought.
“It was good,” Milton hums, “but it wasn’t the craziest by any means. Quite tame, really.”
“We’ve had some pretty outrageous moments, actually,” Kennard adds. “We had a couple of mad ones in Europe this year, but yeah, general madness throughout.”
Care to define this “madness”?
“It’s like being at the Sex Pistols back in the day,” Milton smiles, “that kind of vibe, people moshing out, guys with their tops off, blood everywhere, going nuts.”
“There was one funny thing,” Kennard remembers. “Tom Jones was playing after us in a tent, so to get a good spot a lot of elderly women and grannies had to get in the front row early. Obviously we came on and they got crushed! We had to stop the music for like, ten minutes to get them all out of the crowd, which I guess was not that humorous but quite bizarre!”
The duo mightn’t be getting a selection of M&S’ finest panties flung at them every night, but they’ve already achieved above and beyond what most producers would deem possible, including performing in front of a crowd of 65,000 people at a show in Milton Keynes last summer.
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