An interview with Loxy and Ink

We interview Renegade Hardware's finest...

Renegade Hardware has been a bastion for drum & bass at The End for well over a decade. Throughout that time, DJs Ink and Loxy have been ever-present, and have become synonymous with the night. Although both producers have had illustrious solo careers, some of their best work has come from the fruits of their collaborations. With their first ever joint artist album earmarked for a release in 2008, as well as the next Hardware LP ‘Babylon’ on the horizon, we grabbed both Loxy and Ink for an interview.

Endclub.com: Of all the producers in drum & bass, Loxy & Ink seem to have one of the strongest sense of crew mentality, with the Horsemen project and its umbrella of artists. Where does this crew ethos stem from?

Loxy: It’s just people with common interests and common goals man. It started off with the four of us: me, Dylan, Keaton and Ink. After a few years me and Ink just thought there’s a lot of people out there that try and emulate the sound that we do, or are on the same vibe. We and the new guys were really bouncing off each other’s music and we just thought it was a natural step to form a little crew.

Ink: Yeah, it was just a natural progression to bring them under our umbrella, and nurture them as artists.

Loxy: It’s not like we’re recruiting new members or anything, it’s more of a sound than strictly a crew.

You guys both had individual careers long before you started making tunes together. How did your paths first entwine?

Ink: I first met Loxy in Lucky Spin Records on Holloway Road. He had a record bag full of test presses, showing off as usual haha.

Loxy: I had the magic tunes in my bag! I was just doing my thing - haters haha!

Ink: Anyway, we knocked heads in there then ended up playing on the same radio station Underground FM, shortly after that we went to check Bukem and Fabio’s new night Speed. By this point I had already met Kemistry & Storm, and become good friends with them. They mentioned they were thinking of starting a club night called Metalheadz, and they wanted me and my Architex partner Quest involved. We met again there, and basically we just kept turning up at the same places and discovering more and more that we had a similar mindset.

Then you went into the studio right?

Ink: That’s right. Our first outing together was on Architecture, a tune called ‘Submerged’, which did fairly well, Kemistry picked up on it, and it ended up on a couple of international mixtapes. Shortly after that we did a tune called ‘Airlock’ which was my first introduction to Renegade Hardware. Loxy had already done work with Usual Suspects that had been on the label, but my introduction to Hardware in terms of releases was that tune. I’d met Clayton at Music House, the dubplate cutting house in Holloway, and he was sitting in there just talking about music in general, and he said “one of my favourite tracks at the moment is a track called ‘Blueprint’ by some guys called Archie-Tex” and I went “no that’s my tune and we’re actually called The Architects.” I was rubbing it in his face that he’d got it wrong haha. He then started expressing an interest in us doing something for his label Renegade Recordings which was geared towards more the melodic sounds. Then, after me and Lox had ‘Airlock’ on Hardware everybody thought we were inseparable, like Siamese twins pretty much. I’d already had my own crew and my own label, and Loxy had been doing his own thing too, but after that we were sandwiched together because of the power of Renegade Hardware and the weight its name carries.

Do you think being thought of as ‘Siamese twins’ affected your solo careers at all?

Loxy: Who knows man. I don’t look at it like that, I make tunes with my mates, I could never look at it like whether it’s harmed my career, or made it better. All I know is that anyone who knows their history knows that we were solo before we came up, we were both doing our thing and we were DJs in our own right. We’re not a double act; we do make tunes together and occasionally do a set together, but that is partly because we’re very fussy on who we like to play with, so if there are back to backs then we do it.

You mentioned Metalheadz, and that you guys used to play at the Blue Note, what were those days like?

Loxy: To be a part of the Metalheadz Blue Note days is to be a part of history as far as I’m concerned. That was a really big achievement for me.

Ink: The Speed and Metalheadz era defined drum & bass. Music was made for those clubs. In many ways the music of today is as a direct result of what happened at those clubs. I mean, Metalheadz down at the Blue Note, the word legendary gets used a lot but that really was the first club of its kind. There’s a handful of drum & bass clubs over the last fifteen years that you can say have been genuinely legendary. Paradise, AWOL, Speed definitely, Metalheadz at Blue Note and more recently Renegade Hardware at The End.

People often tag you guys as 'dark' drum & bass; do you think that’s an accurate description?

Loxy: It’s not an accurate description. When I hear people say that I think they’re a bit dumb, anyone who knows us, and knows their history will know that we nearly signed with Good Looking back in 1995! We come from a musical background, from a Reinforced background, so we’ve always been both sides of the coin.

Ink: For me, originally with my crew Architects, our main emphasis was on melodic music. But getting pigeon-holed as ‘dark drum & bass’ happened because of our early releases on Renegade Hardware. As a duo we are the kings of the dark funk. That’s our title, our style, which has encompassed and embraced the rest of the Horsemen. Renegade Hardware’s ID does have a harder edge, but if you scratch the surface you’ll see there’s a much more diverse sound.

Loxy: What people have got to understand is when you’re booked for a one hour set, in London especially, what the crowd want is for you to smash it, so you play a certain way because you have to cram it in. DJs like me and Ink prefer to play longer sets; when we go abroad we’ll play for three or four hours, and we get to play across the spectrum. I think the longest set I’ve done was like five hours in Budapest!

I hear you’re back in the studio together with an album planned for later in the year, can you tell us anything about that?

Ink: We’re in the building stages of that, but we’re tying to take it one album at a time. We’ve got the ‘Babylon’ LP, a compilation Hardware do every year, to do first. We try and use a lot of the recognised Hardware artists that play at The End, and we’re compiling that this year. We bring in some new artists and some established names; we’ve got Calyx & Teebee on there, Hive on there, plus people like Fission, Manifest and Gremlinz.

Did you compile it together?

Ink: Yeah we’re basically A&R-ing, getting a sound together, trying not to get pigeon-holed, and it’s coming along nicely. We’re 95% complete on the ‘Babylon’ LP and then we’re moving on to the first ever artist LP on Renegade Hardware, which will be by me and Lox.

That’s really surprising that there’s never been an artist album on Hardware before…

Ink: Yeah, it’s weird. It’s been in the pipeline for a long time, Usual Suspects, Vicious Circle, a lot of the other cats proposed an artist album but never really got round to it – because of business reasons, or just internal crew changes and so on and so forth. But now we’re going to knuckle down and get that done.

How are the tracks you’ve done for it so far sounding?

Loxy: There’s a track called ‘Artical Dub’, which is basically us trying to capture that old dub feel man; we’re into dub so we just done a really dubbed out tune, with the old crackle on it, really fucking retro. That’s the vibe on that one. The whole album will be eight tracks; what we’re doing is four tracks together, a solo tune each, and one separate collaboration each. My collaboration is a track called ‘Venom’, with Resound and Monk, which is getting quite a bit of airplay. That’s just a typical Loxy Cylon vibe, but updated.

Loxy, What about your tune ‘Hajime’, it’s very different – how have people been reacting to it so far?

Loxy: What I’m liking about the scene at the moment is people have been at a turning point in the last few months, I’ve seen it just through the music that I’ve been doing, people seem to be into the deeper ones, which is a good look, because if it’s the deeper tunes getting love, then the scene must be doing a bit of a 360 right now! Me and Naibu went in on that tune, and people seemed to be in it, I played it to Kasra (Critical Records boss), as I know he likes different kind of stuff, and he was going mad about it, listening to it on loop, and he asked if he could put it out.

Do you think clubbers are getting more open-minded then?

Loxy: Definitely, the tune’s got rhythm, and that’s what people want to hear. People make the mistake of thinking they want to hear things loud and basic, but when people go out to a ‘normal night’, a pop night, they don’t need to hear tunes smashing up the place but they’re still brocking out all night long! It’s the same mentality people should have in drum & bass, you don’t need to hear something obvious for you to be able to dance to it, it’s all music, as long as it’s got a rhythm to it, you can move to it.

You guys once had a hip hop act called The Fifth Element. Can you tell us a bit about that, and are there any plans for you guys to get back on the mic?

Ink: I’ve always been into hip hop, but never really been that into vocals in hip hop to be honest. The reason I got into drum & bass in the first place was because of the powerful instrumental. So I always veered away from tracks that had any type of vocal in it, be it the Jamaican influenced drum & bass or whatever, in fact the only vocal track I really liked was one Goldie did with KRS-One. A lot of my friends that were into hip hop were writing and rapping verses and they were really talented guys. Sway is my cousin, and he was part of the Fifth Element in its initial stages, plus me, Lox, Verse, MC AD, Midas and J Dubb. We all came together in the studio and built a sound and labelled it Fifth Element, a combination of drum & bass and hip hop, a concept that we called DROP music. We were just trying to merge the two together in the most fluid way possible. We came up with a track called ‘Instinct’ which we got a lot of critical acclaim for, and although it didn’t sell massively worldwide, there was a lot of respect for what it brought to the table. But, you know, life developments pull people apart, plus our distributor Alpha Magic dissolved, and so we disbanded after a couple of years.

Distributors going under is a real problem in dance music at the moment…

Ink: Absolutely, dropping vinyl sales and the impact of technology is having a massive effect. The days of going to Music House and cutting dubplates is a thing of the past, people AIMing tunes to each other just killed that culture off. In the past when you were playing someone’s tune you had met them, or you’d built up a relationship on the phone – like “can I cut that tune, it’s bad rah rah rah”. Now, I can play a tune by a guy from New Zealand and never have seen his face before. There is an advantage to that because I’m playing tunes by a guy from New Zealand, but it’s a double-edged sword…

Loxy: Yeah, there’s no intimacy now, you can’t get to know the people, that’s one of the bad points about technology and the internet, because I could get a tune from someone and be battering it and could walk past them in The End and not even know who the guy is. It used to be a face to face thing. You couldn’t get the tune unless you went down Music House and met them. There is a lot of difference between the new artists and the artists of old who have been through the whole Music House culture, they didn’t see how it works.

There’s a bit of an old school vibe running through a lot of your stuff, and X-tinction Agenda’s manifesto has a bit of a retrospective vibe, is that in any way down to disillusionment with the sounds of today?

Loxy: It’s just taste man. When we started that label it was in a period when it seemed people were being brain-washed, the scene was very one-sided. Doing what we did was us putting our stamp down, promoting the vibes that seemed to be getting lost at the time, which was the Good Looking vibes and the Metalheadz kind of vibes. That is basically what our label was formed from, it’s like an amalgamation of the two. So, that’s kind of what we thought the scene was missing, although there is no shortage now because I think there is a lot of good music out there so that just goes to show, we just stuck to our guns and there’s the turn around.

Ink: Yeah I’m still here and playing drum & bass on a weekly basis, and I wouldn’t be able to do that if I couldn’t find music that lifted me up. For me it’s very hard to just go on auto-pilot and play tracks. It’s impossible to remain relevant to any type of scene if your heart’s not in it. You will get called out. Punters are not stupid, they can hear what’s going on, and a lot of cats have had their skirts pulled up, so to speak, because they haven’t been in it, and they’re just throwing a load of things together that aren’t really representative of what they were about in the first place or what got the punters into them as an artist in the first place.

Do you reckon that’s changed now?

Ink: Yeah I think it’s got a lot better because like I say, punters will call you out. A lot of the guys and girls that come out are DJs themselves and are better than the guys behind the decks! Especially at The End club, you’re like a gladiator in the middle of the stadium and there’s people surrounding you, and the people closest to the DJ, they’re the most critical people. They’re standing round and they want to see what music you’re playing, if you’re drawing dubs, vinyl, CDs, Serato, whatever, and how you’re putting it together – and they will be vocal if they’re not hearing the quality that they want to hear. I’ve seen it and heard it! I’ve seen DJs go up there and mess up and heard jeers and boos! I’m not here to name names, but it definitely happens. It just shows you’ve got to do your homework. It’s like Premiership footballers, if you go out there and don’t perform, you aint gonna be in that first team! It’s the same at The End, especially at Renegade Hardware.

Yeah, the crowd are really well informed…

Ink: Definitely, they have an expertise. They know that at Renegade Hardware they’re going to hear the latest and freshest tracks. That’s what Hardware has always been about, that cutting edge. That’s why people come down there, and if as a DJ you come with anything else, it’s not gonna cut the mustard.

Do you think that’s what has kept the crowds coming back for all these years?

Loxy: Yeah it’s the freshness and the diversity. It’s one of those nights where it’s competitive in a friendly way. People are warming up before, getting ready for Hardware and I know a lot of the DJs are thinking to themselves “I wanna shine tonight” and it brings out that competitiveness. I think that the crowd sense that and know that is what’s happening. So people want to come back and see what’s new. Between the gaps of every Hardware you know the DJs are coming back with some fresh new things.

Ink: That’s why Renegade Hardware has slowly crept into that hall of fame, along with the likes of Metalheadz and Speed, because DJs and producers make tracks especially for the night, like “damn, I’ve got Hardware next week, I need to make a killer for that.”

Loxy: Yeah, the anticipation of new things, that’s what I wanted when I used to go raving. That’s what I think makes Hardware stand out from other places.

Ink: A lot of albums have been based on producers making tracks especially for that particular night. People are trying to outdo each other, they’re going into the studio to make bangers that are going to be drawn for the first time that night, so the music played is always totally fresh, and that is what makes Hardware so special.

Published: 24/03/2008

More from...