A very long interview with the charismatic frontman

HEY ROB, WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
Right now I'm in Nottingham, mate.

THAT'S YOUR HOMETOWN AS FAR AS I KNOW.
Yeah, I came home for a couple of days

EVEN THOUGH YOU GUYS ARE CONSIDERED TO BE A BRIXTON BAND.
Well, you know, we've been in South London now for a long time, bro. So I guess in a lot of ways Brixton's home to us. But you always return to the place you were born. It
It's always good to go back. It sort of reconnects you with your roots.

SO HOW HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN AND WHAT'S UP IN STEREO MC'S LAND?
Well right now we released our new album "Emperor's Nightingale" about two-three weeks ago. Basically we've been touring all over the Summer, doing festivals and quite a few gigs. We're back in the studio for a few weeks, working on a couple of things.

ALREADY?
Yeah, you know, you're always writing music, man. That's the way you wanna be, just constantly productive. And we've got a few things on the go and we're trying to get a few new ideas to make the live set a little better. We want to make things good, so that when we come to Europe in December and do some touring, we've got a special show for the people, we wanna do something nice.

"EMPEROR'S NIGHTINGALE"...NOT A TYPICAL STEREO MC'S ALBUM TITLE. WHO CAME UP WITH THAT ONE AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Haha, well...Oh boy...To be honest with you, mate, this isn't a typical Stereo MC's record. So, really, the title suits the record. The reason the title came about was because our managers came round the studio for a meeting and they wanted us to talk about our music and tell them what the tracks meant. And in the process of telling them what the tracks meant, I told them that whilst we were writing one of the tunes, I was reading to my children at night. And the story that I read to them was about this nightingale, it was called "The Emperor's Nightingale". It's an ancient Chinese fairytale. And everyone sort of went: "That sounds like an album title." Cause we were looking for an album title, and it just seemed to stick. And the whole idea of it, although we didn't mean to call the album that, the idea of it makes sense, because in the fairytale the nightingale became unable to sing whilst it was caged up. And once it was free and it was free to sing to the people, it found its voice again. And the whole way this record was made was in a way where we decided to change our whole working method. The way we've always worked before was by making loads of backing tracks and then trying to think of writing vocals to put on top of them. With this record we changed the whole method and we decided to jam with people, get a vocal idea alongside a very rough piece of music and then go and turn that embryo into a finished track. So it's a bit like returning to the source. You know, you go back to the way that you very first started making music when you first picked up a guitar and just try to sing. It was a bit like that really.

WHEN YOU GUYS CAME BACK WITH "DEEP DOWN & DIRTY" AFTER "CONNECTED", YOU GOT SUCH NEGATIVE PRESS, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS SUCH A BRILLIANT ALBUM. BUT YOU STILL PERSEVERED WITH "PARADISE" AND "DOUBLE BUBBLE". WAS THERE EVER A TIME WHERE YOU FELT LIKE PACKING IT IN, FELT THAT YOU JUST CAN'T PLEASE SOME PEOPLE AND THAT'S THAT?
Everybody, in any walk of life, they have ups and downs. The thing about being a musician is that...When we started making music it was like a dream, the things you wanted to do were like a dream. You just dreamt about it every day, of doing it and of what you wanted to do with it. And somehow, I never lost that dream. And it doesn't really matter what people say to me about it, cause when I first started out, I had a lot of negativity. As a kid growing up loads of people were really negative towards what I was doing - from the teachers at school to people in the record business. For instance my teachers would say I was polluting the atmosphere when I brought my guitar to school to show everybody and I was like "yeah, this is my guitar, man". And then when you get out into the real world and you meet publishing people and stuff like that, they'd say to you that unless you've done something with yourself by the time you're 25, you might as well forget it because you're too old. If you ever listen to those people you'd end up never doing anything. Instead of listening to the crap they were saying, you become a sort of rebel and you take their negative energy and you process it and you use that energy as a positive spur for your own motivation. I thought that was an important lesson for the rest of my life - not to take on board too much of other people's opinions, whether they're good or bad opinions. Just to use the energy that comes at you and somehow use it to spur your own motivation.
And so I guess that leads up to "Deep, Down & Dirty". I tried not to think to much about, to be honest with you. I think after "Connected"...I think it's important to stay grounded in life. And the music industry is very good at...what's the word...they sort of "infect" people. You get a really good artist, who's a pure artist and they make beautiful music, and they get infected by what the music industry does to their ego. They reach this point and then suddenly everything is crap from thereon. So you have to keep re-grounding yourself and keep making music and make the music that you wanna make, not the music everybody's telling you you ought to be making. I think that one thing we've found, is that, even now, a lot of people who review our records, they still can't stop talking about "Connected". That says two things to me. One of them is "Connected" must have been a good record cause those people just can't stop talking about it. And another thing it says to me is that maybe if we put out this record udner a different name, I wonder if it would have gotten a different review by that same reviewer. Sometimes people prejudge your music before they listen to it. And maybe if they didn't actually know who you were, they might have a totally different opinion.

SO, THE NEW ALBUM IS ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC AND VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOUR PREVIOUS STUFF. DO YOU THINK YOU'VE SURPRISED A FEW PEOPLE?
Hmm, yeah. Some people, definitely. They either love it, or they just don't know how to take it. And I can understand that. But at the same time I'm glad that we've done what we've done and that we did what we felt like doing. It's important to get a buzz out of doing what you do and be excited about it. And the way to do that is to keep changing your routine and your method and to keep learning new tricks, keep re-learning music. When we started out it was in the early days of hip hop, around the time that Public Enemy made "Rebel Without a Pause". And then you had to totally forget everything you knew about music and re-learn music again. In a funny sort of way, with this record, we had to let go of all our usual working methods and go to something that we normally never do, which was just jamming, jamming live with other musicians.
I don't really read interviews too much, to be honest. I think it's important to stay true to what's in your heart. You've got to listen to your heart and your instincts at the end of the day. I mean, I've written it enough times in my lyrics that you've got to follow your instincts and follow your own path. You've got to stay true to that, that's the important thing. Otherwise you might as well just work for British Telecom or work for the government or something. And that's not the reason why I did music - I did music cause I wanted to do what I want to do. I feel the same way about music as a priest or a monk must feel about when he prays to God. It's the same thing, music is my religion. So you have to follow your heart.

STEREO MC'S ALWAYS MAKE YOU DANCE, BUT THIS TIME THERE'S A MUCH DEEPER FEEL TO SOME OF THE SONGS. "BOY" FOR EXAMPLE IS QUITE EPIC SOUNDING. YOU'VE GOT JAMIE CULLUM PLAYING ON IT, HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT?
Well that happened because when we wrote the track, I've got an upright piano in my house that my daughter learns to play the piano on. And I had the idea and I recorded the piano part on a little portable microphone I've got. And it just sounded a little rough, to be honest. We had the track finished and written and all recorded and stuff, but we just felt that something was holding it back. So our manager suggested that we get Jamie Cullum in to come and record the actual piano and see if it just opened the track up a bit. And because he had a kind of connection with him, he was able to come down and within a few hours he sort of....you know, I showed him the part, which as it turned out, he said that it takes a person who doesn't know how to play the piano to write a piano part that's impossible to play. But he managed to play it anyway and I think, to a degree, it did open the track up and made it nicer to listen to. AT first, when I heard about it, I wasn't sure, I thought you can't do that, you'd take away the character from the song, but you've got to open your mind when you're doing music and you've got to listen to certain feedback you're getting and you've got to embrace new ideas and try them out. If they don't work, then fair enough, but you never know till you try them.

THE ALBUM'S OUT ON !K7. IN THESE BAD TIMES FOR RECORD LABELS, HOW USEFUL IS IT TO BE ON !K7 - A LABEL WITH INTEGRITY, IF NOT MILLIONS IN THE BANK?
Well, they're actually quite good at getting the record out there and getting it into spaces where we're unable to. The fact that they've got credibility I think is a good thing. I'm glad that we're on a label that has some credibility.

YOU DID A "DJ KICKS" FOR THEM AS WELL....
Yeah, that's right. So we've got a little bit of history there. I quite often listen to records when I see that they're on a label that I like, I'll go and check the record out. It's like, well I know the label and I know that they put out decent tunes, so I'll check the record out. I may not always like it, but I'll always give it a check. I like !K7 as a label and like I say, they may not have loads of money, but they do know where to put your record. They seem to get it across to the right people and, to a degree, what more can you ask for?

YOU'VE BEEN TO BULGARIA ABOUT FOUR TIMES NOW. IS IT A PLACE WHERE YOU NOW FEEL AT HOME WHEN YOU COME OVER TO PLAY?
Yeah, definitely. We have a good relationship with Bulgarian audiences. I've always found that when we play shows in Bulgaria, they're the sort of shows that make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and I get that really excited feeling, an electrical sort of a feeling. Because the people there, they want to be entertained, they want to leave the show exhausted. And that's the kind of audience that Stereo MC's want to play to. It's an audience that is ready to get down to the music basically. I can't put it any other way than that - people wanna get down to the music. That's why they're there. They're not there to study what you're doing or criticize or intellectualize it, they just want to get the energy. And that's what it's all about, I think. You want to feel the energy of a live show - that's the important thing. You never get it on youtube, you'll never get it on a live recording, or very rarely. You'll never get it on a TV, you've got to actually be there and share the atmosphere of the event, that's what it's all about.

THE STEREO MC'S ARE VERY CLOSE WITH THE HAPPY MONDAYS. YOU DID A LEGENDARY TOUR TOGETHER BACK IN THE EARLY 90S, RUMOURED TO BE QUITE THE WILD TRIP. WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM THAT TIME?
Well, we did a lot of touring with the Happy Mondays. We didn't just do one tour, we must have done at least three tours with them. We went to America with them, we did a lot of touring in England with them. They were great tours, really enjoyable tours. To be honest, the only thing I really remember is having great fun onstage. It was a great atmosphere, the whole thing had a great atmosphere. And you know, there's an old saying: "What happens on tour, stays on tour. What happens on the bus, stays on the bus." You don't go off hanging out the dirty washing in public. At the end of the day they were very nice people and they treated us - as a support group - with the utmost respect. Which a lot of main groups don't do. A lot of groups, they'll sabotage your soundcheck, make sure that you sound crap.

WAS THAT THE CASE WHEN YOU SUPPORTED JANE'S ADDICTION? I KNOW THAT PERRY FARRELL PERSONALLY ASKED YOU TO SUPPORT THEM.
Yeah, that's right. They were alright actually, they were ok. There were a couple of other instances with other groups, but I'm not going to mention their names. But it's a well known fact that the support band doesn't get the full soundsystem and stuff like that. We've threatened to walk out of tours at the beginning because they're not giving us the full soundsystem. In the end they either say "ok you can have it", or we just say "right, we're out of here" - it's like that. Cause you wanna kick it when you're playing live. If you ain't gonna kick it, we ain't gonna do it.