Hearing the angelic tones of Annie Lennox laying softly over a slamming drum beat is hardly something that can go unnoticed, and it was in this fashion that Leeds-based Utah Saints crashed into the public eye and the charts. Instantly making a name for themselves in both the club and chart scene, Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt have managed to avoid the 'faceless techno' tag usually attached to sample-heavy dance acts. They have acheived this by ensuring their music has a very lively sound and because Utah Saints has been pushed as a band rather than simply a 'thud-thud-thud' studio act- an approach which has come from the combined history of the band.
Although only in existence for the past three years, the history of the band's constituent parts goes back a lot further. Frontman Jez started by playing in local Leeds bands, eventually becoming part of industrial band Cassandra Complex (who are best remembered for albums such as Cyberpunx and Satan Bugs Bunny And Me). This was followed by a shift towards the dance market with MDMA. Unfortunately, MDMA weren't fated to acheive the success of Cassandra Complex, dissolving after just a couple of years and leaving Jez with mounting debts.
"I've always DJ'ed 70's disco music to pay the rent," he explains. "I started going to Harrogate on a Saturday night and Tim was DJ-ing on a Friday night playing house stuff."
Tim made his way into the music business via the club circuit, DJ-ing in local club and getting a break by becoming a semi-finalist in the 1989 DMC DJ championships. This was followed by a series of specialist nights in Harrogate. "That's how I met Jez. I did an indie night Thursday, a house night on Friday and I got Jez in on a Saturday."
Getting to hear the stuff that Tim played on his Friday night slot opened Jez up to a whole new range of musical influences, because until then he hadn't got involved with the house scene at all. "I remember seeing letters in magazines after S-Xpress came out where people were saying 'I could do that,' and the answer was always 'well why don't you?' I thought that about house music."
It was at this point in time that Jez started to mess around with house tracks at home, seeing if he could possibly come up with something that would work in a club.
"He'd bring cassettes over on a Friday night," recalls Tim, "and I'd drop them in inbetween to see how they went. Then he'd bring it back and keep doing things. That's how What Can You Do For Me? came about."
Jez continues the story of the single: "I'd written it the night before the last ever MDMA gig because I thought I'd run out of tracks. Then I took it across to Harrogate and asked if Tim could play it at the end of the night, so he said, 'yeah, I'll try and play it next week'. I'd got this 99p Eurythmics CD- I'm always buying CDs for samples- and I just thought, 'god, her voice is out on its own there', so I put it in and it fitted straight away."
Tim played the track on his house night and it seemed to go down well, and although they played different kinds of music, their approach was similar, so the two decided to team up, with Tim bringing the club influence while Jez brought his experience as a gigging musician. Thus Utah Saints were born.
"That's been about three years now," says Tim, "but I've never done the Transit thing."
The duo decided to get the money together to work for two days in Leeds' Lion Studios and release 1,000 copies of what had then become What Can You Do For Me?- ploughing anymoney made into building up future releases. However, things didn't quite go as planned, as Tim explains...
"We sent it to Pete Tong when he was still an A&R man at FFRR with the intention of getting it played on his Friday night show. He played it and then they were on the 'phone saying we could go down and do a deal- and we only had one song! We didn't even have a B-side and they wanted to sign us.
"We signed to London and within three months it had sold 170,000 copies and gone Top Ten," says Jez, still seeming fairly incredulous two years on.
Although the three singles that Utah Saints have released so far put the samples to a radically different backing, they all seem to have a similar chord structure to the original tracks. Had this been an intentional way of working?
"It isn't," Jez points out. "The chords that we put under Something Good are different to what's on the record. We get a rhythm going then we get a bass line and we usually structure it out as if it's verse-chorus-verse-chorus, even if it isn't, then we usually drop the chorus in towards the end."
This is typical of the way the songs have been constructed: getting the track working as it stands before any kind of voices are added, including the current single.
"Believe In Me was done, basically, without the Phil Oakey sample," says Jez. "We knew it needed something else, but we didn't know what. It just so happened that that sample dropped in and fitted more or less straight away."
Guy Hatton, producer and unofficial third member of the band, adds to the tale, "Once we'd tuned it to get it in time it was in key as well!"
"The Kate Bush one we couldn't quite get to fit", reflects Jez on the band's second single, "but by pitch-bending it to make it go 'ooo-ooh-I!' it worked.
"I think one thing that we will do that a lot of other bands don't seem to want to do is to be a bit more cavalier in taking samples that have already got stuff going on- not just an acapella," he continues. "We just ignore what's going on in the background. We take the whole thing and then try to cover it up, so the sample comes quite late in the equation."
Having said that, the primary source for many of the sounds on the Utah Saints' records are a selection of various Akai samplers. "I just love the fact that you can put something into the sampler that starts off as one sound, change the start point, transpose it and it comes out as a different sound," enthuses Jez. "That's where elements of punk come in. I'm quite impatient with sampling stuff, but we will take messy stuff. Although I don't like programming a synth because it might complicate stuff, I'm quite happy to lift samples that are very messy and then slap stuff over the top to cover it up."
Jez prefers the immediacy and creative spark that working with samples can provide, rather than spending hours fine-tuning a synth sound. "Neither of us have got the patience to program sounds on keyboards and to be honest I don't trust myself doing that. Because I don't really understand the process of sound synthesis, there's this paranoid side of me that always thinks I'm going to put elements into that sound that will clutter up the whole mix."
"We'd rather take a sound, get it in the sampler and mess with it by triggering it from [Steinberg's] Cubase- trying a drum loop at half speed or at ten times the speed to get a hi-hat sound- really just to experiment with that, because we can get newer sounds that haven't been used before."
So how does a Utah Saints song actually begin to form around the first few samples? Jez goes on to explain the process: "I just put a loop in, tune it so that it's running at whatever speed we've decided to run the track at, then we just whack something in for a bass line- usually off the [Korg] M1- and get a basic kind of rhythm happening. Once that's happened, Tim and I simply sit there for an hour or two with CDs, whizzing through to find sounds that will inspire the next bit of the track.
"What sparks off the creative process in most cases is finding the sounds, since it's the frantic and quite often overpowering attack of sounds on a Utah Saints record that gives them such an urgent sound.
"I find that a good starting point for a track is finding a new noise or an interesting sound, but we usually start writing a track with drums and bass to get the actual groove going.
"What we normally do is keep running the song and keep chucking lots of different parts in," says Tim, "so at one point it sounds really messy, then I'll try and start plucking stuff out."
Tim and Jez tend to bash away at sampling and sequencing the tracks until the early hours of the morning, leaving the mixing until Guy arrives at ten in the morning.
"With bizarre instructions," complains Guy. "There are extra drums not muted on the sequencer when they should be, so I'll do a mix with entire sets of drums which weren't intended to be there. Then Jez comes in and says: 'there's something funny about that'."
Another thing that makes things difficult for Guy is a mixing term known as the 'Jez Willis EQ', which involves boosting everything to the maximum.
"The way I look at a mix is a bit impractical really," says Jez trying to clarify his technique. "What I try and do is get a sound and listen to it on its own, then I think 'what's the essence of that particular sound?' Then what I try and do is boost that particular element by a ridiculous amount and back everything else off, so you get the hint of a sound and imagine the rest. That's my theory. Unfortunately you just end up with loads of really harsh sounds together and Guy has to step in and calm it all down. I end up with all the faders at the top of the desk and Guy has to come in and rescue it!"
"The joke is," adds Guy, "that there's usually a point where Jez is getting frustrated on the desk and he turns around and says 'help!'"
Even though the sampler is undoubtedly the favourite Utah Saints instrument, Jez does go to other synths and sound sources to pull new noises for tracks.
"We tend to use the Korg for basslines [their equipment room boasts an M1 and two 01/W keyboards] and also for spacey sounds. We've just bought a [E-Mu] Vintage Keys which is brilliant- we're going to buy another couple of those, I think. We've got a [Roland] JD-800 which is good for squidgy sounds. The JD's also good because you can just whack around with things really quickly without knowing what you're doing. I'm a big fan of the Korg's, and unfortunately I'm a big fan of the sounds from Ensoniq."
Er... what's unfortunate about that? Ensoniq has some brilliant-sounding gear.
"I had an ESQ-1 for a while and I know that because it was one of the first keyboards that it would be prone to a bit of crashing. I had three or four of those and they kept crashing so I don't bother with them any more. I bought an SQR and had to take it back, but now the second one's done the same thing. It's got a mind of its own and because we generally don't use tape it's incredibly frustrating. The Ensoniq stuff makes good sounds- it's great to get a really hard bass sound from, but the reliability's awful."
The inadequacies of machines is something which comes to the fore when you're trying to create equipment-punishing tracks such as I Want You, as Jez has found out on many occasions.
"I'm bad enough at making that crash," he points out, indicating the Atari ST. "In a given day I'll make it crash half a dozen times, which is why Guy's got the auto-save on it!"
It's not only a problem with systems crashing that causes frustration though, since they tend to get everything working in Cubase and then master straight to DAT without going via a multitrack.
"All the vocals on I Want You are sampled a line at a time and then triggered off Cubase," explains Jez. "Then we'll use the pitch bend on the actual sample and then just mess around with the chords on the [Digitech] Vocalist. It doesn't do it as realistically as you'd expect, but if you bury it in a mix or make a feature out of it you can get those weird sounds."
But because everything is being fired from a sequencer, it can cause the machines to complain somewhat, as Jez points out: "A lot of keyboards, if you overload them they drop notes- sometimes at random. It's a problem we used to have with the Roland stuff. With all the Partials [the basic patches used to create Roland synth sounds] and stuff it would drop certain things and play them later, which shifts everything out of time. Occasionally we get problems with overloading Cubase and it gets pissed off and drops stuff or crashes.
"Stuff like cycling round for half a beat for half an hour," adds Guy, "that's one of the things it seems to object to. Short cycles and stuff."
Even the poor old samplers have been posing a few difficulties, as Jez points out: "The one problem we've had with the Akais up to this point is that you get a slight phasing problem when you try and trigger a stereo sample, because it's triggering one sound slightly later than the other. They've got round it now with the new one, so now we've got to get another sampler."
This may sound as though the band are suffering with the gear that they are using in their current set-up, but it's still a lot more capable and advanced than the first pieces of equipment that Jez had to put up with when he was writing material. Ever since he first started with Cassandra Complex, he wanted to create music that fused the urgency of guitars with the beats and power of electronics.
"The good thing about the position we're in now is that we have the machinery to do what I've always wanted to do," he enthuses. "When we started we had a Yamaha KX5 and a little Yamaha RX11 drum machine and that was it. All our sequencing sounds came from the KX5, which was 28k or whatever the hell it was. The sound quality was awful. It was like trying to write with a toy Casio keyboard, it really was. The cool thing is that now we can mix things and try to create new sounds."
One of the criteria of Utah Saints right from the outset was the wish to play live rather than just miming to a backing tape on the PA circuit. Jez was quite firm on this point when the originally went to see Pete Tong at London Records.
"I was going in quite aggressively saying, 'look, we're a band and we're going to play like this, live'. I was expecting him to be totally on the dance thing saying, 'no, you've got to get a chick in to mime the vocals', but he wasn't. He said, 'if you want to be a band, fine'."
"We're a five-piece band live," he continues, "I alternate between bass, a little Yahama KX5 which plays the sampler, and a Stepp MIDI guitar which plays the sampler as well. Tim's got his decks which he uses more like an instrument- just cutting stuff in- and he's got another KX5 controlling a sampler. We've got a keyboard player who plays a Korg 01/W and an Akai S950. We've also got a drummer who plays a Simmons kits hooked up to an Alesis D4. We don't use the Simmons brain, just use the D4, but we're going to get him a sampler soon so that he can have loads of different kits and different noises. Then we've got a percussionist who's just got timbales, congas, cymbals and bits like that which he plays over the top."
Although they concentrate very much on the performance aspect, there's still a little bit of confusion on the part of the audience when they hear such odd sounds coming from five guys on stage. Jez explains some of their reservations: "Initially, with three of us playing samplers live, we were a bit concerned. This is because if we get bad monitoring with three of us playing loops (and we've got the two percussionists) we could end up sounding like a jazz band, since we can't hear each other! It's a bit confusing when you've got this small KX5 keyboard which people tend to associate with dodgy funk/jazz bands, but I play it like a bass- which is quite low. Off one key I'll get Slayer or a voice sample or guitar sample or whatever and it's a bit confusing sometimes."
Jez isn't all that concerned about the audience's inability to fathom quite what's happening on-stage at a live gig: "First off we thought it might be a bit weird for an audience to look at five males in a band when there are female vocals coming out, but I think people are familiar enough with the technology now to know that you can use it like an instrument.
Whatever the original concerns, they seem to have transferred the energetic sound of Utah Saints records on to the stage, with certain mags giving a nod of respect in their direction.
"NME called us 'the first true stadium house band', which is pretty good," he says with a hint of pride.
Despite the fact that the three singles have all been based around smapled lyrics from other records, Jez is pretty quick to point out that this isn't all that Utah Saints are about: "We wanted to do three records that had big vocal samples in, so we've done that and now it's time to move on."
"We do leave ourselves open on the next single I reckon," says Tim, reflecting on the band's next release (which is the track I Want You from their eponymous album).
"Maybe the logical thing to do would be to introduce Jez doing the vocal but on a track that's a bit more similar to the stuff that we've been doing. I Want You is quite a departure from that, so I can imagine people saying 'go back to sampling' and that kind of thing."
"The main criteria for a Utah Saints record is that both Tim and I like it," says Jez. "If we wanted to make lots of money in the short term then we'd have got a couple of keyboards to go and do PAs everywhere and cream money off that. Also, instead of having three records in two years, we'd have put out fifteen singles that all go 'boom-boom-boom'."
The first single did very well commercially, so did London Records put the group under pressure about the possibility of some newer Utah Saints material, to try and follow up on the success of the What Can You Do For Me? single?
"There was a lot of pressure from the record company the month after What Can You Do For Me? came out. They were saying, 'look, just do anything that goes boom-boom-boom and you'll probably sell 40 or 50 thousand copies'," Jez explains.
We started off selling 1,000 copies, so anything after that is a bonus. We're not desperately hanging on to the first record, we just want to do records that the two of us are happy with and to progress, plus we want to keep it a live thing- which, touch wood, is working. --- FM
from Future Music magazine issue 8, July 1993. Transcribed by Stuart Bruce, August 1999.
Akai samplers
Jez and Tim use S950s at home for speed, with an S1000 and 10Mb S1100 (plus expander) in the studio. They're also planning to get a CD3000.
Atari Mega ST running Cubase
The main controller of the system, since the band don't record to multitrack.
Korg synths
An M1 and two 01/Ws provide swirling, epic sounds and basses.
Tascam and Sony professional DAT machines
Used to record the masters straight from the desk. Unfortunately the band have trouble with playing tapes on incompatible US machines on tour.
Roland JD-800
Used for it's 'squidgy' sounds and the ability to quickly alter sounds in real time.
Vintage Keys
Provides hard basses and analogue sounds, for those times when something old is needed.
Spirit 6000 mixer
The studio desk molested by Jez and rescued by Guy.
Digitech Vocalist
Used to add harmonies. Very much in evidence on the chorus of I Want You.
Alesis Quadraverb
Used to add space to mono sounds in a stereo mix.
Sometimes the ideas that Tim and Jez have tried with the use of samples hasn't actually paid off, with the pair scrapping tracks that don't in fact work.
"A lot ofideas that we've had for samples and then scrapped have then come out on records," says Tim. "You know the 'Did I dream' This Mortal Coil saple on the Messiah record? Well Jez played me that at the time of What Can You Do For Me?."
Jez remembers the reasoning for dropping the sample: "We didn't want to do it because thought it was too irreverent to sample This Mortal Coil and put it under that kind of beat, but then Messiah did it and got this Top 20 hit. But then again, a lot of people sit around saying, 'what bastards Utah Saints! I had the idea of sampling Annie Lennox- I had the idea of sampling Kate Bush, but they did it first."
Anyone who has heard the album will be aware that there is a cover version of Simple Minds' New Gold Dream- the track that was sampled to form the main melody for Usura's recent chart hit Open Your Mind. Believe it or not, Utah Saints had put together their cover before the Usura single was released, but certain circumstances thwarted its release.
"We got it up and running and sent it to the record company saying, 'this might be a single'," recalls Tim, "but at the time we were off to America for the tour and we were away for quite a long time, so when we came back the Usura thing was just about to come out. The record company at the time weren't keen on doing it as a single, but we liked the club potential which would probably have been similar to the Usura thing."
This was obviously a mistake on behalf of the record company, since Open Your Mind has shown that the potential for a successful release was definitely there.
"They haven't turned around and said, 'oh, we were wrong- it was a hit'. It's an unspoken thing!"
What Can You Do For Me? (single: 1991)
Including samples from the Eurythmics' There Must Be An Angel and Gwen Guthrie's Ain't Nothing Going On But The Rent.
Something Good (single: 1992)
Including a sample from Kate Bush's Cloudbusting from the Hounds Of Love album.
Believe In Me (single: 1993)
Including samples from the Human League's Love Action, Sylvester's Do Ya Wanna Funk? and Crown Height Affair's You Gave Me Love.
Utah Saints (album: 1993)
Features all three singles so far, plus I Want You, New Gold Dream and five new tracks.
I Want You (next single)
Features no lifted vocal snatches and is the first single release with Jez performing the main vocal.