"It's very easy to make people dance. They just need a loud kick drum going 'bang, bang, bang' and some weird noise, and they're happy."|

Simon Ratcliffe knows of what he speaks. As one half of the British DJ/producer duo Basement Jaxx, he has made many club-goers happy. Ratcliffe and his Jaxx mate Felix Buxton met in a South London club six years ago, began recording together and then hit the clubs. Their steady gig at a club called the Junction gained such a buzz that the Jaxx stopped playing there because it became more a place to be seen than to listen.

"We were kind of saturated with the whole club experience, and found a lot of it quite shallow, quite meaningless," Ratcliffe says.

A bold statement coming from a purveyor of dance music. But the Basement Jaxx are not satisfied just pleasing the converted -- they want to grow musically, and they could not do that while worrying about whether people in various stages of unconsciousness were keeping up with their beats.

"I don't want to turn my nose up at people who take drugs 'cause I did it," says Ratcliffe. "Eight years ago I went through a phase where I was taking every drug under the sun, and I had a wicked time, a really good time. But I do think that drugs reduce your quality control a bit; things become more wondrous that probably wouldn't be quite so wondrous if you were straight."

This month, having previously released various EPs and singles, the Basement Jaxx exerted their own measure of quality control on their first album, Remedy. It's a house album, yes, but one that people can listen to sitting around their apartments as well as whirling about in the clubs.

"We knew that we were expected to make a house album, and at the same time we were pretty disillusioned and tired of house music," Ratcliffe says. "Club music's all well and good, but most of it has a very short shelf life. It works in the club for a couple months and then it's out the window. We thought that the most important thing for us was to make sure that [Remedy] satisfies us musically, and to worry about the club and the dance angle afterwards. And so we definitely went into it with the approach of let's make some good, interesting new music."

"New" and "interesting" are understatements, when applied to Remedy's hour-long cross-fertilization of pop music. "Rendez-Vu" combines vocoderized vocals with mariachi guitar strummin'; "Bingo Bango" segues from disco beats into jazz piano tinklings; reggae, house and hip-hop meet on "Jump N' Shout"; and "Red Alert," the British dance club staple, combines a funky bass groove, ambient electronic noodlings, faux strings, and old-school soul, courtesy of vocalist Blue.

"I like all sorts of music that makes you feel something, that's expressive of something, and that has emotion to it -- and so does Felix," explains Ratcliffe. "For us it's very important that music does touch you, so that's what we do with our music."

Ratcliffe is a multi-instrumentalist, and that's his guitar-playing in "Rendez-Vu," but he and Buxton more often opt for non-traditional sounds. "For a lot of the keyboard sounds we sample, I don't know, the sound of a car passing by and then pitch it up and it becomes a note. And so instead of playing a piano melody we'll play the melody with that sound."

As for the strings? "The strings are played, but they're not by an orchestra; they're [played] by a string machine thing, which we play, but don't," Ratcliffe says, laughing. "It's funny, we played the strings, but we didn't actually play the strings. We created the string melodies, but technology allows us not to have to hire a symphony orchestra."

According to Ratcliffe, the Basement Jaxx recording process is a benevolent tug of war. "We keep on correcting each other's input until we're both happy. And it usually doesn't sound anything like either of us imagined it would.

"When we're doing music these days -- especially album music -- we're kind of asking ourselves a question: 'Does this stand up against the music that we were influenced by when were young?' Because the music that I was influenced by still sounds good today. That music has songs, it's expressing emotion, it's got character to it and it's got personality to it."

And what exactly did young Simon and young Felix listen to? You name it: R&B and soul, reggae, jazz, Hendrix, Zappa, Prince, Bowie. In fact, David Bowie's Diamond Dogs was the first album Simon ever bought, and he did so by accident. "I was nine years old, or ten years old, and I'd seen Top of the Pops and Gary Numan was on doing 'Are "Friends" Electric?' and I thought he was really weird and really sort of spooky and interesting. So the next day I went to the local shop and I got a cassette. I just bought the first thing that looked a bit like what I'd seen on TV the night before and that was Diamond Dogs. I was really disappointed 'cause it wasn't what I wanted to hear at all. But that was the only thing I had, so I just kind of ended up listening to it every day, and now it's one of my favorite albums. I'm glad I became a Bowie fan. Gary Numan has contributed to music definitely, but Bowie's a bit cooler."

The Basement Jaxx begin a U.S. club tour beginning Sept. 14 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

BILL CRANDALL
(August 27, 1999)