UK dance duo Chase and Status are coming good on that 'new Prodigy' tag (you know you've made it when Dizzee Rascal, Jay-Z, Rihanna and The Hoff want to work with you). Saul Milton tells BRIAN BOYDhow it all went right and why their latest video is getting noticed
IF EVER you get the chance to hear drum'n'bass duo Chase and Status perform their immediate classic Blind Faithlive, you'll wonder if the euphoria of early-1990s ravedom has returned with a retro vengeance. Sounding like a club classic with a warehouse undertow, it has become this year's Firestarter or Born Slippy, and is quickly propelling Chase and Status to the toppermost of the dance poppermost.
"Already I hear Blind Faithbeing called a seminal track, and it was only released this year," says Saul "Chase" Milton. "When we play it live now the place goes demented. There's a lot of nostalgia for that early-1990s rave sound, and a lot of people are either reliving their youth or experiencing the madness of those times for themselves. And it was a big chart hit – which helps."
There have been quite a few hits already from the duo's current release, No More Idols, which was released in January and is still selling well and being tipped as this year's Mercury Music Prize winner. The album is crammed with big-name guest vocalists – Dizzee Rascal, Tinie Tempah, Clare Maguire and Plan B among them. All those "they're the new Prodigy" observations are beginning to seem less far-fetched by the day.
Their US fan club is growing too. Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg have already had them round to do remixes and they have three collaborations on the latest Rihanna album.
Saul “Chase” Milton (28) and Will “Status” Kennard (29) are Londoners who, like The Chemical Brothers before them, went to Manchester University – not with the intention of doing serious study but rather to dive deep into the city’s music scene.
“Myself and Will were friends already from London, and he sort of followed me up to Manchester. It’s a very happening music place and, for me anyway, it was a case of having to get out of London because I was being very badly behaved. We quit our courses fairly promptly – they were getting in the way of the music.”
Their 2008 debut, More Than a Lot, was a fairly straight-up drum'n'bass affair that did so well for them they felt the pressure piling up for the follow-up. "This album almost killed us," says Milton. We didn't want to replicate the first one, and we really suffered from that difficult-second-album syndrome. We were getting so stressed out and losing all perspective. I think there were about 50 different versions of all the songs, and we were going slowly bonkers."
An unexpected phone call one Sunday night from Dizzee Rascal helped them focus. “He had talked about working with us, but we didn’t think it was going to happen,” says Milton. “I was at home when he rang and said ‘let’s go into the studio now’. He just asked us to play him a selection of beats and then he took out a pen and paper and four hours later we had the track finished.”
Such was their growing reputation, when they were recording the album they had no problem pulling in big-name vocalists. Only one person on their wish list couldn’t make it. “We really wanted Adele on the album – not just because she’s a brilliant singer but because she’s a brilliant person also. But with our album coming out the week before hers in January that was never going to work. We’ll get her again, though, and we really want Ellie Goulding as well for the next one.”
The Rihanna connection came through their manager (who also manages Pendulum), who gave a copy of More Than a Lotto the president of Jay-Z's Roc Nation organisation. "Apparently Rihanna just picked the album up in the office one day and played it," says Milton. "The next thing I know I'm getting a phone call from her at 6am in the morning and she's going, 'We have to do this, you have to be on my album, let's make this happen'. She wanted really hard stuff from us – nothing pop at all – and the last time we saw her she said she wanted to work with us again. She's great – a real professional. And as a result we are now co-managed by Roc Nation."
Chase and Status are one of the hottest festival acts this year, due to put in appearances at Glastonbury, T in the Park, Oxegen, Global Gathering and the V Festival, and with new dates being announced all the time. "As much as we love DJing – and the first album was very much a DJ album – No More Idolsand the tour is a band thing," says Milton. "What you will see at Oxegen is the full band line-up. And thanks to the singles off this album doing so well there is a massive difference in how the crowd react to the show now. We've just moved up to putting on a big visual display, so we're trying to make it a real spectacle. There's a great sense of unity now with the live thing and, for us, it remains the most exciting part of all of this."
But are they still defined as a drum’n’bass act? “We always get asked ‘are you drum’n’bass or are you dubstep?’ and all we can say is that we are definitely from a drum’n’bass background – I love that music – but how we define ourselves now is as a UK bass-driven music band.”
They were recently on the same bill as The Prodigy – was there a sense of the baton being passed over? “I really don’t mind all the ‘new Prodigy’ comparisons,” he says. “They were a huge inspiration to us, and they will always be the kings as far as I am concerned. They are big shoes to fill. We’ll see what happens.”
Lots of famous names are now on the phone trying to secure their services – what’s been their strangest request to date? “That would have to be David Hasselhoff. We thought it was a joke at first, but it turns out he’s seriously interested. Maybe we should sit down and have a burger with him first and talk things through. It’s a flattering – and interesting – offer.”
The new single, Time, features a great vocal from rising UK rap star Delilah – "watch out for her; she's amazing," says Milton – has a very disturbing video concerning domestic male violence against women. In the UK the video carries the phone number for Refuge, a domestic-abuse charity, but in Ireland the number will be replaced by the Women's Aid freephone number.
“The video looks at one of the most shocking sides of contemporary life – in the UK one in four women will be victims of abuse in their lifetimes,” says Milton. “What the director Lindy Heymann has done with the video is to reflect something that is so widespread. We wanted the subject matter to be tackled honesty and accurately. The feedback we’re getting from it is just how much people are touched by what it depicts. It’s very bleak and poignant.
“We’re getting emails which say ‘the video made me cry’ and ‘this means a lot to me because this happened to me and my mum’, so it’s great to get that message out there. It’s an important one.”
* The album No More Idolsis out now as is the single Time. Chase and Status play Oxegen on July 11. The Women's Aid freephone number is 1800-341900
