Utah Saints are back. But as they tell Vaughan Allen, they never really left.
Looking back now it's hard to remember the early Nineties on planet pop. The analyses have all been written. As with all history, it's written backwards. Acts like the Prodigy become imbued with a purposeful history. Never mind that their first big hit, Charly, was widely seen as being responsible for the death of rave. It's only their subsequent work which has saved them. Acts which were as big at the time seem small through the inverted lens of pop history. Even if they never quite went away.Like the Utah Saints. From our current perspective, they seem to be one- or two- hit wonders who then faded from view. But at the time, well, things were rather different. If they're known for anything now, it's the ground-breaking What Can You Do For Me, sampling Gwen Guthrie and Annie Lennox, and doing more for the sales of Akai's sampler division than possibly any other single. But then the frail finger of fame lingered over them. Before passing on.
Or that's how it seems. But Utah Saints Jez Willis (the one with the multi-coloured dreads in the old days, now sporting a just growing-back mohican) begs to differ.
"We have kept working all this time. We just looked at ourselves, and we didn't like who we had become. People found it easy to ignore us in this country because we stayed in Leeds, never went to the right parties or took the right drugs."
So, after gigging with a second album, Willis and partner DJ Tim Garbutt retreated into the studio. Leaving London Records, a label possibly unable to deal with the less singles-orientated act, and joining the somewhat cooler Echo Records (home of Moloko and Feeder) took up most of the middle of the last decade. Then two new singles were selected and recorded and fell by the wayside (including Rock using an AC/DC sample which was cleared and then frozen in legal difficulties), and thus 1999 was reached with nothing having been officially released for six years, while the sampling techniques the Saints inspired have been picked up and abused by every Tom, Dick and Brandon.
"The sampler's just a tool anyone can use," points out Willis. "We've spent years mastering it. It's a good time for us now... it feels very like the late Eighties again."
In the immediate sense that means Love Song, which is released this week. A dark, compelling, gets-under-your-skin-type track, it's about as far from What Can You Do For Me as it's possible to get while staying on genre. The video for the single sees a scary pastiche of Taxi Driver (explaining the Willis haircut) taking the song ever deeper.
"Listening to all the tracks we do," says Garbutt, "they're so different. The single after Love Song is a collaboration with soul legend Edwyn Starr, and the album has some really heavy techno pieces on it. But there's a thread running through it that is definitely about being the Utahs."
The as-yet-untitled LP does indeed wander across myriad musical territories. It still succeeds in throwing into the mix enough ideas to keep the most bored of critics happy. Collaborations with Starr (on his own Funky Music) and Public Enemy's Chuck D nestle alongside the movingly intense Till The Morning Sun and their statement of intent, Technowledgy featuring Iggy Pop. But the stand-out track is Sick; a hormone-bursting, blood-boiling, totally unfettered techno masterpiece.
And, after the LP, come the live gigs. Beyond all their influence in the studio, it's for their record-breaking US tours they should be worshipped by the Prodigy and Underworld's bank managers for being the innovators who made it possible to truly rock out and sell big with dance music.
"We may have opened some doors for people," smiles Willis, "but they've been doing the same for us all these years. And now we're back to take advantage.
Welcome back.