Phat Of The Land

If ‘80s icon Gary Numan told you you’d “got balls”, you’d be forgiven for nervously checking if your fly was open. But Scottish dance dons Plump DJs took it as a compliment, and recorded a track with him for their forthcoming album Eargasm.

Numan was talking about their music, thankfully, which is a cocktail of squelching synths and snappy breakbeats. Of course the Plump DJs (aka Andy Gardner and Lee Rous) have been leaving dance fans in awe for quite some time with their raucous DJ sets. So now they’re attempting to propel themselves into the mainstream and join the major league currently inhabited by the likes of the Chemical Brothers and Underworld. They’re even getting interviewed for Playboy along the way.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the majority of dance albums are a waste of time. Dance is undoubtedly a genre which is built on singles. But can the Plump DJs become the latest exception to that rule? It’s the $1million question. They certainly have buckets of the same wacky charm that’s been the backbone of crossover dance music success for the past ten years, making millionaires of Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx, amongst others.
But are the two twenty-somethings anxious to enter the mainstream?
“Yeah it’d be great,” says Andy.
Lee continues: “It’d be self fulfilment really. We’re in a lucky situation in that we’re fuelled by an independent record company and we get to get in the studio and make the music we want to without any pressure”.
Well, almost without any pressure.
You see, the Plump DJs have been making Eargasm for two years now. In that time dance music’s public image has changed radically. Two years ago there was no heavy talk of crisis or meltdown. And even though the rumours of dance’s demise are ludicrously exaggerated, 2003 is a tough time for a dance act to shift albums. This hasn’t gone unnoticed at Laboratoire Plump.
“The worry is that we’re not dribbling it all out, with one single then another one, we’re just putting all our cards on the table,” says Lee.
For Eargasm to crossover, rock audiences will need to be sucked into the Plump vortex, something which Andy is confident it will happen.
“A lot of people will appreciate breakbeat, it’s an open canvas and we still haven’t explored all the avenues. But we’ve done some tracks which aren’t strictly dancefloor as well. There are some slow tunes and the Gary Numan collaboration.”
Though the Plump DJs are the most modernist of success stories, the blueprint for what they do is an age-old one, according to Lee: “I think our music’s fuelled by our history as well as a lot of modern dance music. There’s a funk influence, a disco influence, and with Gary involved, and Louise from Lamb, we get quite a far reaching sound. We’ve had an indie phase, a hip-hop phase, a disco phase, a Motown phase, and we’re both really into house.”
Andy agrees: “I still like all kinds of music, though I got the new Madonna album and wasn’t too impressed.”
He’s not the only one who’s been hard done by at the record store lately.
“I got the new Rolf Harris album and I wasn’t too impressed either,” Lee says with a smirk.
Joking aside, Eargasm is the culmination of two years of whirlwind DJ sets and hard work in the studio. But whether the Plumps break into the mainstream or not, they remain firmly committed to their scene.
“We love DJing, we love dance music and we’ll just keep our heads down and do what we do.”
No complaints from hotpress.