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 “It’s almost like some bizarre, perverse penance you’ve inflicted on yourself. We’re lucky, because we have a good life and we enjoy what we do, so something like people going ‘Who’s Adam?’ is like a curse, a payback.”
Laughing as she reveals she still gets people asking which one is Adam, A Man Called Adam vocalist Sally Rogers admits there’s been ‘loads of times’ she and band mate Steve Jones have considered ditching their 18 year old monicker.
“We’ve never actually thought of stopping making music, but lots of times thought of not being A Man Called Adam, but somehow it’s always been expedient to be A Man Called Adam. It’s never become a dirty word really, so there’s always a reason for keeping it,” she muses.
Starting out as a ten piece collective in 1987, the band initially specialized in ‘mellow house grooves’ (Guinness Book of Rave) though as they shed members including Leftfield’s Paul Daley and Derek from the Sandals, gradually scaled back on the beats towards a more leftfield, chilled out eclectic style and sound. And 18 years on, it’s led them to be selected to compile Space’s first ever downtempo compilation Space Tranquil to match the vibe of the Ibiza club’s brand new roof terrace; Not that Sally’s too familiar with its environment, she chuckles.
“I have to admit that we have had a hiatus from Ibiza this year. We haven’t been at all. We were there last year and we’ve done it every year for a long time and we just wanted to have a summer of not doing all the things we usually do. It was quite a conscious decision,” she says.
Musically, however, she’s certainly done her homework, selecting tracks from the likes of Grace Jones, Yoko Ono as well as Pete Tong’s favourite tune of the season M.A.N.D.Y vs Booka Shade’s Body Language. And none of the tracks are beatless, instead projecting more of the mellow house grooves they first made their name with.
“We knew we were making it for Space who aren’t exactly renowned for being an ambient club, so it’s a little bit more uptempo than maybe an album that we would do purely for our own sake, says Sally, “You think about who you are working for, what they will enjoy and what will be paletable to them.”
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Where did you start in making the compilation?
A Man Called Adam: “When you are out DJing you always accumulate some favourite tracks and when this album project came up, we started by putting together a big list of all our biggest tracks. Then there’s all the licensing issues to consider, plus the fact that a lot of the great vocal tracks of the last six months that we were playing were actually bootlegs so we couldn’t use them. The budget for the album was also quite small too so we tried to avoid tracks licensed to major labels, so it was all fairly underground stuff. And then some of favourite tracks, such as one we’ve been playing which is Marvin Gaye over a Bob Marley dubtrack isn’t licensable anyway. So in the end we managed to find a couple of good vocal tracks and the rest were our best, most useful DJ tunes.”
Skrufff: The CD’s centred on Ibiza, did you live there at one point?
A Man Called Adam: “No, I’ve never lived there. I don’t think I could live on any island; Too crazy. Everybody knows your business. I couldn’t handle that.”
Skrufff: What do you make of Ibiza today, there’s constant stories of the island becoming too expensive and the club scene becoming stagnant?
A Man Called Adam: “I think what they are trying to do there is change the culture a little bit, which is why if things are getting really expensive, it’s almost to squeeze out the Club 18 –30 types. I don’t know if that’s the solution really. It has to shift culturally. People I know who were there this year told me there’s nothing happening that’s experimental at all, it’s just that banging mainstream stuff. I know people are doing rock and things but I think that’s more to get coverage in the papers. The general cultural trend is towards slightly more highbrow stuff, I think they ought to try bringing some of that out there – a cinema festival or just something cool. There is talk about it but it’s a big business, Ibiza.”
Skrufff: Last time I called you in Cornwall, Chris Coco was staying at your house, do you all site around planning chill-out’s future?
A Man Called Adam: “Global domination? No. Strangely we are all good friends but we are all also slightly competitive in some ways. In a healthy and proper creative way, in fact, we collaborate with Chris a lot.”
Skrufff: Do you find chill out people more chilled out than house people?
A Man Called Adam: “Yeah, I don’t know. Everybody is different aren’t they? We are a little gang of people, and we were doing lots of things together in the late nineties, then everybody’s gone on their own way to do their own thing. The dance scene was always kind of factional. Everybody’s definition of it is different. Our’s is kind of super eclectic where you should just be able to play anything if it’s good. Everybody has a slightly different sound to what they do.”
Skrufff: What kind of thing makes you angry?
A Man Called Adam: “In terms of music?
Skrufff: In life…..
A Man Called Adam: “I tell you what really makes me angry is when everybody says they don’t want nuclear power, but then they complain about more tax on fuel. Everybody wants the country and everything to be green and conscious of climate change, but nobody will pay for it. People won’t accept personal responsibility for it. I guess it’s getting better, people are recycling and people are doing all that sort of stuff, but that makes me cross, when people do and say very anti government things.”
Skrufff: You're DJing, releasing compilations and making music, what’s your main focus?
A Man Called Adam: “I suppose making music still, though we’re also doing a lot of new audio visual work as well and we are collaborating with a guy called Paul Lamb who is a pretty serious code guy on some kind of video feed backing machines.”
Skrufff: A V. J type thing?
A Man Called Adam: “Well, we call it video art as opposed to VJing- there’s a lot of rubbish VJing out there; there’s some very good V.J artists in the world but I’m not keen on the term V.J’ing.”
Skrufff: Are you still touring much as a live band?
A Man Called Adam: “Yeah, we are always off somewhere. We’ve just come back from, China which was pretty amazing. We’d never been there before. We did a big Canto pop festival with our live band which was pretty bizarre as a typhoon hit the gig, though everybody else was pretty matter of fact about it.”
Skrufff: A hurricane strength typhoon?
A Man Called Adam: “Yeah, well, it felt like it to us. They were all like ‘don’t worry, it will blow over’, but it was pretty terrifying and all the stage was soaked through – it was an uncovered stage. We had to do acoustic stuff with radio mikes because we couldn’t plug our gear in – it was a death trap. Health and safety is pretty bad in China.”
Skrufff: Was China markedly different to anywhere else?
A Man Called Adam: “Yeah. Culturally it’s an incredibly interesting place. Apart from the scale of the towns and cities, they just go on for miles and miles of skyscrapers, so you’ve never really seen anything like it. Then at the airport, they have rooms set aside for playing cards and chess. That’s the sort of people they are. In the square outside the hotel every morning there would be a gang of middle aged and old people doing Tai Chi aerobics. It’s a healthy and sharp-witted place.”
Skruff: What do you make of today’s culture of Pop Idol and TV Audition shows?
A Man Called Adam: “Well, I’m from the North East, and my mum and dad used to run working men’s clubs, so I’ve always loved a talent show and I understand people’s dreams as well as people’s enjoyment of the talent show format as entertainment. So I can understand why people make it and why people watch it, but having said that, there’s so many people that believe that they can be somebody without doing anything. But I did auditions when I was that age - when I was eighteen I did auditions for producers and lined up in a queue of people. It’s just now there’s this great big televised form of it.”
Skrufff: How many auditions did you do?
A Man Called Adam: “Well the first record deal I had was the result of an audition. I only did about a dozen, then joined a band.”
Skrufff: What were you like then at the auditions?
A Man Called Adam: “I always used to get short listed. I think it was just because I was northern and I was quite a pretty girl when I was a youngster. It’s all gone now. I also had a bit of a brass neck (confident personality), but it was always someone with a really interesting voice that won, who got the jobs; but that’s OK.”
Skrufff: what’s happening after this Space compilation?
A Man Called Adam: “We are just putting the finishing touches on an album we recorded earlier in the year, a new ‘A Man Called Adam’ album. We are doing an album with the Idjit Boys for release in Japan, and Hooked on Classical It’s a new project we’re doing – a little e - zine at www.hookedonclassical.com – it’s our…we call it classical music for the blank generation, so it’s like a punky take on classical music, but it’s not classical chill, it most definitely isn’t, it’s anti –chill.”
Space Tranquil: Volume Uno: is out now on Azuli Records
Interview by: Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
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