Nic Fanciulli & James Zabiela Interview
We quiz Nic and James on globetrotting and life in The Adventurer 3000.
Though they are two of dance music’s most revered DJs and producers, with their contrast of styles, James Zabiela and Nic Fanciulli seem unlikely bedfellows. But with their 2007 One + One album, and its subsequent world tour, they proved exactly why their back to back sets are greeted with such anticipation. With an extended back to back set on the way in The End’s main room at Nic’s Atomic residency, we decided to interview the pair…
Endclub.com: Nic, this is your third Atomic at The End, how are you enjoying the residency?
Nic Fanciulli: It’s somewhere that I’ve always wanted to play, especially as I used to come clubbing here when I was growing up. I’d played Turnmills and Ministry, which were both great, but Ministry doesn’t have the same family vibe and underground feel that The End has. The next one is going to be great as it’s the first time me and James have played together in London this year.
Endclub.com: How do you find DJing slap bang in the middle of the dancefloor in The End’s main room?
Nic Fanciulli: I was really paranoid at first, as I wasn’t sure about having people standing behind me, but after being in the DJ booth for about 10 minutes, it was amazing!
James Zabiela: I’m a bit nervous about playing The End actually, it’s been a while since we’ve done a back to back, but we’ve done a lot of sets together.
Endclub.com: At least you’ll have Nic there to support you…
James Zabiela: Yeah, quite literally.
Endclub.com: Individually you both have quite different styles – how does it work when you play together?
James Zabiela: Well I compromise what I play, and he compromises what he plays and we meet somewhere in the middle ha ha. It’s weird actually, I think at first it’s kind of strange but then after playing together for the best part of eight months, like we did last year, you really get to know each other’s music. I don’t normally like playing back to back with people, but with Nic, I have a really good understanding with him, and now he’s probably the only person I really like DJ-ing with.
Nic Fanciulli: Yeah, the whole point of the One + One tour wasn’t really about musical styles, it was about friends going on tour, travelling, getting inspired, and bringing our music together. We don’t really need to compromise too much in what we play.
Endclub.com: So when you play back to back – do you ever have a bit of a ‘tune-off’, seeing who can get the best reaction from dropping a track?
James Zabiela: It’s not really about competition, it’s more about inspiration.
Nic Fanciulli: We’re just both trying to make it go off as much as possible. If one of us does play something that really goes off, the other will be like, “Hey, what’s that?” We always want to know what each other’s tunes are.
Endclub.com: One of the tracks on the album is called ‘Rover’ – wasn’t this written in your Landrover? You don’t really strike us as a Land Rover type bloke?!
Nic Fanciulli: Ha ha, it’s actually a Range Rover…does that make it better? And I do live in the country, so it’s not too inappropriate! The track’s called ‘Rover’ because we’d rented a studio and wrote a load of stuff, then we got stuck in the Blackwell Tunnel in my car, the traffic didn’t move for about 3 hours, so we just started putting the track together in the car.
Endclub.com: The tracklisting for your joint mix album ‘One + One’ includes some fantastic old gems – Furry Phreaks’ ‘Soothe’ and Alcatraz’s ‘Give Me Luv.’ Do you often sneak old classics into your sets?
Nic Fanciulli: Always – especially this time of year with all the festivals going on. We had a re-edit of Deep Dish ‘Stay Gold’ on there as well, which is one of my all time favourite tunes. ‘Soothe’ was obviously inspired by the Sasha & Digweed album that was out when we first started DJing. We re-edited all those records to make them a bit more in time with the mix. It was a lot of fun working together – it was probably the easiest compilation I’ve ever put together, as you’ve always got someone to sound off to. Usually when you’re doing a mix album, you have doubts about what to include, but if there’s two of you, you can pull each other out of that. The whole process from start to finish took about 6 months, but recording the actual mix only took 5 days.
Endclub.com: You guys undertook a pretty epic tour last year - you even had a tour bus, right?
James Zabiela: Not exactly a tour bus! We had a proper naff camper van – it lasted a day before it fell apart. You know the Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt? It looked like his mobile retirement home The Adventurer 3000, except this one the door fell off and stuff like that. We had to get a Ford Explorer and drive around America in a car. It was a shame because there was something about The Adventurer 3000 I really liked!
Endclub.com: Were there any tales of mischief from the tour?
James Zabiela: I think the worst one was when we were driving to Albuquerque in New Mexico, and there was these Mexican dudes in front of us, and they kept trying to cut us up for a laugh. Kos got some road rage and stuck his finger up at them, it ended up in an actual car chase, and it looked like they were pointing a gun at us! We were all shitting our pants, but it turned out it was a mobile phone ha ha.
Endclub.com: How’s Ibiza been this year?
Nic Fanciulli: Yeah it’s been great, I went out there with Steve Mac, we took the studio over and just worked on loads of music, although I also popped home quite a bit to work on new Skylark stuff with Andy (Chatterley). It’s been great as I don’t often get the chance to actually go out and listen to DJs, and within a week I’d already seen 15 or 20 DJs. The great thing about Ibiza this year is that everyone seems to have gone back to playing proper house music again, it’s been really inspiring. Musically I’m the happiest I’ve been for a long time.
James Zabiela: For me Space has been really great, the sound is amazing. And now that they’ve closed the outside bit, I actually prefer it, I prefer playing in ‘The Room of Doom’ as Mark from We Love…calls it, going in there with your devil horns on and playing evil ha ha. I did Pete Tong’s night actually at Eden in San Antonio, and it was the second week of it being open, and I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was fantastic! It surprised me, it was just a really good energy in that room. Obviously it was a totally different crowd to Space, which has got its own amazing crowd, but it kind of reminded me of playing at Creamfields or something like that, and the music was all over the place which was what was so great about it, so it was nice to do that too.
Endclub.com: Has there been a change in the island this year, with the increasing crackdown on clubs?
James Zabiela: I never really went to DC10 that much, well I went once but I found it too frightening ha ha! I don’t really party too much to be honest, so when I went it kind of freaked me out a little bit! I think if you’re going to go there you have to have been awake for three days just to understand it. So it hasn’t really affected me personally.
Nic Fanciulli: To be honest, it’s hard for me to tell too, as I was touring until up to August, so I’ve not been there consistently. I was here for the Radio 1 weekend, which was brilliant, then played Space with the Chemical Brothers, which was obviously an electric atmosphere – so the parties I have been at don’t seem to have been suffering!
Endclub.com: What are your favourite places to play?
Nic Fanciulli: Womb in Tokyo – it’s unbelievable. I’ve done the last few New Year’s Eves there, and it’s just been amazing. I played 13 hours the first year and 9 hours at the start of this year. Words can’t fully describe the experience!
James Zabiela: Space and Womb are both unbelievable. I’m also going to a club tonight on the Black Sea coast in Romania, it’s called La Mania, you fly into Bucharest, then you have a five hour drive of nothingness, then you get to the Black Sea and the club’s on the beach; it’s amazing. The clubs in places like Lithuania, Hungary and Croatia are great too; the crowds are incredible, so enthusiastic and passionate.
Endclub.com: James, your namesake Mr Holden, was on the phone last week – he told us he’s building a robot that can play instruments – so far it can play the tambourine! If you could create any bespoke piece of kit for playing live / producing, what would it do?
James Zabiela: Ha ha that’s amazing. I think I’d try and be a bit more ambitious than a tambourine, but that’s definitely a start. If he can get it doing some funky rhythms that’d be good. I think something like the 3D computers in Minority Report would be really cool, although it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple brought out something like that in twenty years time!
Endclub.com: Do either of you have new material coming out soon?
James Zabiela: I do actually, I’ve done three tracks in the past couple of months. One of my own tracks is a Joy Division inspired house record, which I wrote after watching the movie Control. I’ve also done two remixes, one for Spooky, and one for Ladytron. Ladytron like it and are going to release it worldwide which is cool, because I’m such a fan of theirs.
Nic Fanciulli: Yeah, I should have something coming out very shortly too, although it’s just in the process of being signed at the moment so I can’t say any more than that. We’re going to start work on the second Skylark album in November. We started taking Skylark out as a live show but we’re going to re-jig it a bit before we take it out again. We want to make it more of an audio visual show so it doesn’t just look like a DJ set with laptops.
Endclub.com: Nic, what’s the oddest record in your collection?
Nic Fanciulli: This isn’t odd in terms of being really unheard of, but for weirdness in terms of programming, Kraftwerk ‘Numbers’ is one of my favourites – when I play it everyone just loses it, and no one knows how to dance to it! Sometimes I slip a bit of drum & bass in, which people don’t always expect – although I have to be careful where I play it: in Tokyo they loved it, but Miami we cleared the floor with it!
Endclub.com: And finally, James, can you tell us a secret about Nic?
James Zabiela: No! I can’t, I don’t want to say in case he stitches me up. Ha ha.
Published: 8/09/2008
