Chilling In The Name Of

It’s a month before the London riots and, for the moment at least, the mean streets of Shepherd’s Bush are untroubled by chavvy mobs running amok in recently liberated JD Sports clobber. The plan is to interview DJ Shadow at an atmospheric greasy spoon around the corner from the Tube station. But things go awry as Hot Press, having dashed all the way from the top of the high street, arrives red-faced and sweaty only to see Mr. Shadow easing into the back of a BMW and zooming into the mid-morning traffic. A check of the watch confirms that, despite our worse fears to the contrary, we’re five minutes early. Could this be the first time a musician walks out on us before the interview?

A brief phone call to his PR handler lays our fears to rest. Apparently the sound of clattering crockery and jabbering construction workers on their elevenses was making it difficult for Shadow – who changed electronic music forever with 1996’s epically chilled, sample-based Entroducing – to compose his thoughts. So our conversation will instead take place at his UK record label’s Kensington HQ, a warren of open plan offices, hushed conversation and hilariously funky, trying-too-hard wall adornments, where it is briefly possible to believe the corporate music industry is still smoothly functioning and boringly profitable (on our previous visit we spied Amy Winehouse lurking by the lifts eating crisps).
Ensconced in a corner suite, trademark headphones and baseball cap present and correct, Shadow – aka 39 year-old Bay Area resident Joshua Paul Davis – is quick to prick the fantasy about things being okay in record company land.

“People have such a black and white idea of the music industry, “ he proffers. “They think record labels are these mafia guys with pinky rings on smoking stogies behind mahogany desks – it makes them feel better about not paying for music. Like, ‘Yeah, I’m sticking it to the man’. They have the same idea about recording artists – that everyone is walking around with no shoes on, about to get into a private jet, like Steve Tyler from Aerosmith.”
He isn’t simply blowing steam on a dreary London morning. Highlighting the incalculable damage which illegal file-sharing is inflicting upon the music business has become something of a personal crusade for Davis, to the extent that he has created cartoon caricatures of a cackling mobile phone, personal computer and MP3 player, by way of publicising his imminent fourth solo LP The Less You Know, The Better.
“It’s one of the initial salvos in this relatively benign campaign I’m doing. If you log into my website you’ll see the same characters wreaking havoc there. I’m satirising, in a Mad magazine style, what it’s like to be a recording artist
in 2011.”

While Davis insists he isn’t angry about internet piracy it certainly sounds that way. You can, of course, see where he’s coming from. For someone at his level – a mid-tier artist who might once have had an outside chance of shifting a million copies of an album – the web has been a disaster. Yes, it’s a way of reaching out to new fans. But do you want the kind of fan who thinks they’re entitled to your product for free?

“I’m not saying these things from a woe-is-me perspective,” he elaborates. “I’m saying music is my life. I care about it and I’m going to talk about it. It’s the same as if tennis was your life – what if they were going to cancel Wimbledon due to low sales and lack of interest? What if there were no big tennis stars any more? You’d say, ‘Well we have to do something’ That’s the way I feel about the musical landscape. I think the internet is an amazing democratising force. That said, it’s been a culture-sucking, art killing monster.”
It’s hard to get a bead on Shadow. On the one hand, he exudes dude-next-door lack of pretension. He would, you suspect, be an okay guy to sink a few tall-boys with. That being said, he’s clearly rather wary of the media and seems to think people are out to stitch him up when in fact they just want to hear what he has to say. “Are you getting this?” he asks at several points, though not in an aggressive way. “I hope you can report it to your readers”.

Amidst all the doom-mongering we almost forget that the purpose of our visit is to discuss Shadow’s new record, his first since 2006’s opinion-splitting The Outsider. Showcasing his love of the niche hip hop genre of hyphy, that LP was alternatively praised as the sound of an artist bravely expanding his horizons and dismissed as moody, indulgent and attention-seeking. The way Davis talks about it, you sense he didn’t mind upsetting those craving a repeat of Entroducing.
“It had started to dawn on me that there were people who liked Entroducing who were never ever going to buy another record by me again,” he says. “So I needed to stop worrying about them. The Outsider was my big, ‘Okay, either you are in or you are out’ moment. It had to be done. In a lot of ways, I feel validated doing it.”

Ironically, The Less You Know is exactly the kind of record that fans pining for Entroducing 2.0 would flock to. Melodic, atmospheric and awash with big cinematic moments, it’s the album Shadow hasn’t dared make for 15 years for fear he might be accused of repeating himself. He, however, doesn’t quite see it this way.
“I do think there are moments that are perhaps truer to the lineage that Entroducing established. I almost don’t like to hear myself saying that. It could be construed as me going, ‘Okay if that is what people want I’m going to give it to them.’ I hate it when my peers do that. I would much rather make records like The Outsider my whole life – I would rather provoke than settle back.”
He agrees that you can hear echoes of Entroducing everywhere today. If anything, though, this makes him twice as determined to run away from the record and its legacy.
“I come across it in the lobby of my hotel. Every time I get a haircut or I’m in some café or faux sophisticated international bar. I said it to my wife yesterday – ‘That music we’re listening to now, is the kind of music people wish I would make’. I’m never going to do that.”