Diverted get the Endclub.com grilling

Stephen Baxter and Lee Richardson tell us about Diverted

Diverted have been making their mark on the breaks scene for several years now with some seriously rocking breakbeat on labels such as Sokolov Sounds and their own label Diverted Traffic. With their debut appearance at Chew The Fat! on May 11th '07, we caught up with them for the lowdown on their tunes, their live performances and the breaks scene in general.

Endclub: Hi guys, where are you and what have you been up to?

Diverted: Right now we're in the Gold Coast, Australia, out here for our first tour. We started off in Perth playing a gig at HEAT nightclub and drinking Jagermeister bombs - a dangerous drink. Then we headed off to Sydney to play in the Cave with Matty Dopamine at Chinese Laundry. The day after that we flew to Christchurch, New Zealand to play at Double Happy, and right now - thank God - we are getting to chill on the beach for a few days before we head up to Brisbane to play GPO. After that we go home unfortunately. All the gigs so far have been really cool. We've felt really welcome wherever we've been and people have seemed to enjoy the sets.

How did you both meet, and eventually end up in this game?

We met at school when we were about 15 and originally played in a punk band together with another dude. We made the journey through metal, hip hop, rave, happy hardcore, drum and bass and finally fell into breaks when we started playing d&b records on 33 RPM and wondered if people actually made tunes at that speed - and they did! That was about seven years ago. We made the natural progression from DJing to production and started sending stuff to various people - one of those being Vlad, who Lee had met playing old school and breaks on Interface internet radio. He helped us fine tune our productions and gave us our first release 'Worm/Ted' on Sokolov Sounds in September 2003.

Every creative duo is unique - tell us a bit how you guys work together.

Well we tend to work collectively, some ideas are born separately but ultimately we pretty much do stuff together. Right now we live together in a house in the countryside so we could combine all the studio gear in the basement of our house. That way productivity is high whilst we're trying to write an album. We are amongst loads of musicians and play ourselves in another band; that kind of atmosphere rubs off on our latest productions. Having all types of music come through the studio really keeps things fresh for us too instead of getting caught up doing the same thing everyday. There's no real pattern as to who does what so you can't exactly say Steve does the beats and Lee does the bass or anything like that. We like to work as free as possible.

Sokolov gave you your first break with your early releases, now that you have your own label, Diverted Traffic, do you plan to continue working with them?

Yeah we are planning to do a collaboration with Vlad sometime in the near future. We have great respect for Vlad and the Sokolov catalogue. Just recently Nine Lives The Cat put out 'Sureshock' on Sokolov Sounds and we did a Diverted Live remix of that, the first record we've actually done as a band with Nine Lives himself providing the lyrics.

Speaking of your label, you've been breaking some new talent yourselves, can you tell us a bit about your protegees Tom Tonic and No Hands?

Tom Tonic is a guy from Maidenhead, Berkshire that Lee met through the university where he works. Basically it was as simple as he gave us his first tune, that just needed a bit of fine tweaking and we signed it immediately, this track is 'The Enemy' and he's currently working on his next release for us. Mr No Hands was introduced to us also through someone at uni. He has really helped to sculpt the sound of Diverted Traffic. Much like our first situation with Vlad we have tried to keep the label open to new ideas and artists. No Hands has gone on to work with the Bassbin Twins on his current release 'Adrenaline Ltd' which we were extremely proud to release and has been doing very well respectively. He's also been doing some remix work for Sound of Habib and has finished his next single 'Rumpy Pumpy', lined up for Diverted Traffic in the future. Out of five releases on our label he's been on three of them!

We hear you're working on your debut album and a live show. How's that going and what are the plans?

The album's coming along great. When we originally set out to make dance music we've always wanted some sort of artistic license. Now we get the time to express ourselves in a variety of styles. The album will of course have a good handful of breaks on it but it's hard to describe what some of the other styles are, kind of a mish mash of stuff. Doing it on Air (Ali B's label) gives us the freedom we want I guess. We've been working with some vocalists and of course Nine Lives the Cat will feature heavily on that as he does with the live show. We did one live show at Cargo last month at the Air night and it seemed to go down really well. We came back buzzing from it, it's been ages since we've actually played on a stage musically.

Will you guys be playing instruments in the band, or will you be twiddling knobs?

Yeah we play various things and we all kinda switch around whilst we're playing. It keeps things fun for us on stage and I guess that comes across to the audience. Steve plays bass guitar and synths, Jono plays synths and drums, Nine Lives MCs, plays drums, percussion and synths and Lee plays the electronic drums, percussion and synths. Behind all of this we have bits & pieces of the tracks running in Ableton but the idea is to keep things as live as possible. The potential of things going wrong on stage really keeps the adrenaline going, it's a real buzz. So in answer to the question, we're playing instruments and we're knob twiddling! :)

Are you looking forward to your first appearance at Chew The Fat!?

Can't WAIT!!!!! This is the last main event on our hit list in London, been waiting for a while but good to save the best 'til last!!

What are your thoughts on the current breaks scene?

Despite the amount of moaning we hear we actually believe it's a very healthy scene. It's friendly, diverse, not too big and not too small. There's some great new talent coming through and the big guys are always still there. The great thing about breaks as well is that it's really sociable. You can hang at the bar or go and dance and without the rules of certain genres where you have to dress or behave in a certain way.

What other producers are you feeling right now?

Really actually feeling a lot of the Aussie stuff. Dopamine of course, Nine Lives, Hook n Sling, Bass Kleph. No Hands is always surprising with every release. Rennie Pilgrem's latest stuff is great. Chris Carter and Jhz are wicked at the moment and we have always been big BLIM fans.

Your gig diary seems pretty hectic these days - what's been your best experience of touring so far?

Getting to see Australia for the first time has been a right eye opener. This year we've been to Spain a few times and that's been full of energy, really looking forward to going back in September. We're going to Russia in June, can't wait for that. As for English gigs, playing Fabric at Breakspoll with Vlad was insane. We did a festival last year in Birmingham called Drop Beats Not Bombs; that was a particular highlight. Coming up we've got Glade Festival this year too, cant wait!

If you could go back in time, would you have done anything different?

Nope, right now it's really exciting for us so we wouldn't change a thing. Really looking forward to the next few years and seeing how the album and live show goes down.

Published: 15/04/2007

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