Cut To The Chase

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.
“We always just wanted to be DJs,” Milton recalls. “I mean, I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid so there was a pipe dream to play guitar in front of millions of people, but that just kind of went out the window when we started doing all the electronic stuff.”
In the interim, Snoop, Pharrell and Jay-Z have all become fans of Chase And Status’ club-ready dance throbs, but it’s their hook-up with Rihanna that has made them the most in-demand knob-twiddlers on the planet. They produced three tracks on her million-selling Rated R album, and are currently making an appearance on her new Talk That Talk record.
“She used our track ‘Saxon’ for ‘Red Lipstick’,” Milton says, “and she didn’t change anything about it. She loved that track and wanted to do it for a long time so we’re happy that it’s finally seen the light of day. We were supposed to do more for that album but we’ve been so busy doing our own stuff that we haven’t been able to, but for sure, we’ll link up again.”
Time must be tight if they’re turning down the dirty queen of pop, but let’s not forget that Kennard and Milton have a record label to run. Already signed to MTA records are dubstep outfit Nero and electronic duo 16bit, who you may remember as the men behind Björk’s ‘Crystalline’.
“Björk has cited them as a big inspiration, as has Chris Cunningham, the legendary director.” Milton beams. “We’ve signed a couple of other artists, a rapper called Dream McLean and we signed a young girl a couple of days ago who’s a real talent, very different from Nero and 16bit, a jazz folk singer, so we’re really gonna spread our wings. We’re just about good music, you know?”

No More Idols is out now on
Mercury Records