DJ Zinc Interview: Watch The Ride

Why the Bingo boss prefers basslines to business meetings.

DJ Zinc and The End go back a long way. Formerly a resident in the heady days of True Playaz at The End many moons ago, he has regularly rocked the main room in the years since. With his label Bingo releasing their fourth instalment of ‘The Bingo Sessions’ series this week, and DJ Zinc’s latest mix album, ‘Watch The Ride’ currently burning up stereos around the world, we got him on the phone for an interview.

Endclub.com: You’ve got your new mix album ‘Watch The Ride’ out now on Harmless Records. How did you go about deciding the track listing for the mix?

DJ Zinc: Basically I just wrote down all the tracks that I’m playing at the moment. I didn’t even adapt it to make it right for the CD, it’s just exactly what you’ll hear me playing in a club. That’s how I try and approach these things, just make it a very current mix. A guy from Harmless came out with me last night, and I think that he liked the fact that nearly all the tunes that are on that mix CD, I’m playing right now. He was surprised, because a lot of people try to adapt these things to make them more friendly to listening at home, but I just tried to keep it exactly as you’d hear me in a club.

Why did you decide to do a mix for the ‘Watch The Ride’ series rather than on your own label, Bingo?

Because I like what they did with the Scratch Perverts one, and I think they just seem like quite a pro outfit. As time goes by I’m realising more and more that I don’t actually particularly want to run a label. Well…it’s not that I don’t want to run a label, it’s that I enjoy making music and mixing more than I enjoy phoning somebody and arguing over the terms of a license! You know, if I phone up Optical, I want to say “that tune you sent me is fucking amazing”, and that’s it. I don’t want to phone him and say “can you do this license for 22%” and all that nonsense. I prefer to work on the creative side, I don’t really enjoy the business side so much, and I think that the business side can stifle your creativity. So Harmless was perfect. I do release mix CDs on Bingo, but because I wanted to put loads of different tracks on there, I thought, you know, it’s not a bad idea to let somebody else handle that side of things, especially somebody that can do it better than I can.

You've already had Bingo Sessions mix albums from yourself, Friction, Marky and Chase & Status. What are your plans for the next instalment?

The next one is D.Kay, and it’s out in November!

You’ve got some really exciting fresh artists releasing music on the label - do you have any other new artists coming through we should know about?

I do like working with new artists that I don’t know about, and it’s always nice to be able to release new music by new artists. We’ve got more stuff coming from Redeyes, but Raf & Ill Logic are finishing an album that I’m hopefully going to be putting out on Bingo and it’s amazing! It’s a great drum & bass album, very sample-based, very musical, and strange – really good music.

One of the tracks on ‘Watch The Ride’ is a remix you’ve done of the dubstep anthem ‘Night’ by Benga & Coki, and you also remixed Skream’s classic ‘Midnight Request Line’. How did you become the official dubstep remixer in drum & bass?

(Laughs) I don’t think that I am, but I know a lot of the dubstep guys, and if they do new tunes that I really like, I’ll play the originals. Like ‘Night’ for example, I’ll play that in a club as it is. But with a lot of the music, I really like it but I can’t play it in a club, so I say to them “can I do a mix?”. I get to hear a lot of the tunes really early, I think because a lot of the dubstep crew are aware of who I am from the breakbeat stuff I did on Bingo early on. So it’s easy for me to say to Benga for example “can I get some tunes to play in my set?” and he’ll say “course you can mate, you can have fucking everything”, whereas if another drum & bass DJ asked, he might be like “yeah there’s a couple”. They know me and I’ve got good relationships with a lot of them - I’ve done some touring with Skream, and we’re on the same agency. So yeah, it’s been quite natural the way the remixes have come about really.

How do you feel the current dubstep scene is progressing, and how effectively do you think the two scenes overlap?

If you have a full set of it, I think it can be really good, if you play one or two dubstep tunes it can be quite hard. I was in Canada two weeks ago and I played two dubstep tunes in the middle of the set and people went fucking mad, absolutely mental! But then in other places, like the other night in Nottingham, I played ‘Night’ in the middle of my set and people weren’t really ready for it. So some places it really works some places it doesn’t. I dunno man, I wish I fucking knew which ones do and which don’t! (laughs) It depends on the crowd really, but I think generally the drum & bass crowd is becoming more and more open minded.

Can we expect to hear any original dubstep releases on Bingo?

Maybe, I don’t know, never really thought about it! Anything’s possible though…

Do you have any current plans for another DJ Zinc or Bingo residency in London?

No. With that sort of stuff, if it comes naturally. If a set of events leads to me doing something like that, then cool, but it’s not something I’m actively looking for.

When can we expect another DJ Zinc album from you?

Artist album I don’t know. Maybe next year…I’d like to get back into more production. At the moment I’m doing a lot of DJing, so I’d like to refocus on production but I don’t know when that’s actually going to come to fruition. So I can’t really say when there’s going to be a full album, but I am definitely getting back into studio-mode.

Published: 12/11/2007

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