T wo time winner of the DMC championships Tony Vegas, a self acclaimed

‘Turntabalist’, is one quarter of Scratch Perverts, the collective known for creating many of the out-there DJ techniques taken for granted by our generation of clubbers. Taking time out of his ‘hectic’ schedule, he sat down with Maks Fus-Mickiewicz to bitch about amateur DJs, rub-bish York University events and most importantly how do some-thing about it.

How’s your day been? It’s been alright actually,

I’ve just been sitting in the studio and chopping up this track with a bit of bass but I’ve kind of chopped it into one million parts, so I’ve completely lost track of where I am.

You recently played a gig at York University. Did they cut the sound levels on your gig?

At these events that seems to be part of the course - we had gigs in Cambridge and Oxford where we were handed a letter before going on, saying if you exceed this stated sound level then you don’t get pay bla bla bla you’re breaking your contract. I mean what’s the point of having music on if you’re going to have it at a level where no-one is going to be able to appreciate it. If you can hear a conversation in the room, its just f**king pointless.

You’ve got two decks and a mixer - but what makes you a Scratch Pervert?

I think the main thing is we play music quite quickly, we go from genre to genre really quick, the emphasis isn’t so much on the scratching, that was more so ten years ago. So the scratching skills

were something you need-ed more to win the DMC championships?

Yeah, we still do the freestyle things in our DJ sets now, but the emphasis is defiantly more on the dance floor, and that’s how music has become over the last five years really, the people you see in front of you at clubs want some-thing different from what they used to want.

Could you explain the feedback tech-nique and the Euro scratch?

The feedback technique was just where you plugged the feeder back up itself, and it basically made an in-credible f**king amount of noise, but you could actually control the sound within certain mixes, pass it different-ly through the equalizers and faders and such, it wasn’t just a ear-shatter-ing sound, it was something you had control over. The Euro scratch was simply crossing two faders at the same time, so mixing up the volume on one deck at the same time as the other, so you’d create twice the amount of cut-out when you did it, so, it would just be the quickest scratch on earth It sounded f**king good!

How did all the of Scratch Perverts all meet?

We met at a record store called Mr Bongo, in Soho on Poland Street, I was working there and just about every-body who was anybody was coming in. So the record store was more of a kind of social space where we met. There were so any record stores there, that’s where everybody went to hear their music and buy their music.

Are there still record stores like that today?

I think it’s changed, obviously every-one has found different places to lis-ten to music. The only places left are places like Phonica and Wyldpytch , were there is defiantly new music and dance music. Two record stores left in the whole of London.

You’ve collaborated with MC Dyna-mite - at what point did you feel you needed someone on a live mike?

I think when it became more dance floor based; he can be out there at the front of a stage and command a crowd. He’s very interested in MC’ing over different types of music rather than just Drum and Bass, which is where we originally met, at a Drum & Bass night. If you’re doing a bigger festival you need an MC, someone to hype them up a little bit and if you don’t have that sometimes you can feel like you’ve fallen on your own face a little bit.

LTJ Bukem recently said he saw D&B as four tracks crammed into one...

There are always ru-mours as to how some people play drum and bass, people have always pointed an accusatory finger at each other. I was at a club and this particular person had them playing on the same dub-plate, he’d premixed his

whole set, come to do his set, played the same track on both decks and cre-ated the illusion that he was mixing, which is for me is...well a big no no. The problem was he had eyes behind him and we were all saying "that’s not DJing".

What do you think about Serato Scratch software then?

Well, something I’ve seen more and more is where people have just gotten rid of turntables, you usually get turntables brought into these places with loads of other equipment and you plug it in and press play and you just get massive feedback. The crowd just run for cover and it’s because the turntables just get knocked about, it just sounds bad. It becomes a real pain and so going digital is fine because it gives you a greater deal of safety. However, you can do anything with computers, bring in edits and mini mixes and stand there and act clever without actually doing anything, but it makes a mockery of the whole thing really. Getting two tracks and mak-ing something new, that’s the idea I’m interested in.

You’re also associated with Hip-Hop, do you find it odd that one of the first Hip-Hop tracks Africa Bambasta sampled was the classically schooled Kraftwerk?

No, I think it’s actually very much a part of what Hip-Hop has been, it takes from a lot of styles. One of the first hip-hop records that was ever made was ‘King Tim freaking my fat back’ around 79, instrumentally everything was sampled, it became a sampled based music and it’s a good thing really, you listen back to those tracks now and there still bloody good

Could you give us your three mixing tips?

Don’t pre-record you mixes, that would certainly be the first one...Under no circumstances pre-record your mixes! Smile a little bit more, it would be nice, I saw a really po-faced DJ recently, how about a smile, it’s not too hard is it?

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