The Fly can be found at www.channelfly.com. Thanks also to Mark Reed for providing this article to me.
Site-owner's caution: rude words a-several contained below, lock away your children.
Look- let's get this out of the way first... UT-AH SAINTS!! U-U-U-UT-AH SAINTS!! Phew. Can't resist it, can you? That single refrain seems to sum up all memory of the Utah Saints in 1999, and yet there's a sneaking suspicion that musical history will owe more to the Utahs than the mere sight of Newman and Baddiel in T-shirts and beanie hats, stood on stage as Utah Saints Unplugged.
Today we sit in a glorified pool hall, and Jez Willis (Utah's mainman) grins across the table. It's a friendly face, devoid of the dreadlock frame that used to surround it. A tidy, clipped goatee is the only sign of hirsuite excess these days. Jez was a member of industrial goth outing Cassandra Complex before moving on to the more technophile noodlings of MDMA (the band name, that is). Then he met Tim Garbutt, a DJ who was making House music at a club in Harrogate.
"I was listening to his set, thinking 'this isn't much different to the industrial stuff I'm doing'- the main difference was the drum sounds." Jez grins that grin again. "I had this MDMA track I'd been mucking around with, and I used a 909 drum machine on it instead. I took a cassette to Tim, he made some suggestions, and I took it home again. I'd bought a CD in a bargain bucket, just 'cos it was in a wooden box, which was by the Eurythmics. I was messing about with a new sampler, and out popped that vocal bit. It just seemed to fit.
"A week later he played it in his set at the club. That was 'What Can You Do For Me'., and it went down really well. I suggested to Tim doing a 12", him doing one side and me the other, and putting it out as a white label. We recorded the tracks, pressed up a thousand copies and gave it to a distributor to promo. Then Tim, who knew all the cool record shops, dropped some copies around." More grins. "Shops were ringing up asking if there were any more. When I asked how many, I expected them to say 3 or 4, but they were asking for 200. All that went through my mind was 'fucking hell'. A copy landed on Pete Tong's desk, and within 3 months we'd signed to London Records and we were on Top of the Pops." That's what you'd call 'meteoric', then.
From there it all went a bit mad for the Utahs. "Luckily for me, I'd done that whole back-of-a-transit thing, so I had my feet on the ground. I started to go to raves with Tim, and I stuck out like a sore thumb; I was wearing motorcycle boots, leathers and dreads. But I just realised that the way people perceived dance music was kind of blinkered. It was all white gloves and glowsticks, so most people I knew would write off dance music as shit, but they loved industrial music. The two aren't really that far apart- both lend themselves to a DIY ethic, and raves weren't very far from a moshpit. It just seemed natural to make the Utahs a band thing. The biggest risk involved was that the dance people thought we were taking the piss, and so did the indie crowd. Except... it worked. People loved it."
Y'see, it's easy to remember the cartoon imagery of the Utah Saints without the effect such an approach had on the people around them. In truth, the Prodigy would never have become the stadium band they did without the influence of Jez, Tim and their merry band of Saints. 1991 was a crucial year for dance music; doors were being opened by the Saints, the Shamen, KLF and the Orb. Indie kids in long shorts and Carter T-shirts were turning up at raves and learning to dance without their hands behind their backs. It was incredible the amount of totally disparate groups who were taking to the Saints' sound. "One week said it all. We played the Smash Hits do one night, then the next night we were in Leeds playing a benefit for the homeless with the Mission and the Sisters of Mercy, then we were off to do a rave. Next stop was off to the States to support Nine Inch Nails!" Everybody loved them and nothing could go wrong.
Eight years later you could be forgiven for forgetting that they ever existed. "Somewhere around that time," sighs Jez, the grin on the back burner for a moment, "we lost the plot."
"In two years, we'd gone from playing gigs to fifty people to supporting U2 and being hailed as revolutionaries by the press. We'd toured America and played Top Of The Pops. When you take a long time to get success I think there's a guilt thing attached to it. I was thinking 'why are we getting all this when I'm just doing what I've done all along?' The US record company wanted us to be NIN, and the British record company wanted us to be The KLF; we were capable of doing that, but we could also make cheesy hit-type shit. People were saying to us, 'oh well you sampled Kate Bush, why not sample some 70s stuff and make hit records?' So we did a few things like that, but it just wasn't us. It might seem clichéd, but we always wanted to do stuff that was, um, us. And this wasn't s. So we decided to take a break for a while. By the time we'd regrouped the Prodigy had exploded."
And it got worse. "We gave our manager a track we'd made as a joke for his birthday- Rod Stewart's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy over a house beat. A few months later, N-Trance had a hit with it and we were left thinking 'what the fuck's happening with music?' We didn't want any part of it." It seems that despite the fact people were perceiving Utah Saints as a novelty, they thought of it as anything but. Wanting to progress dance music, they were left in a corner and couldn't escape.
Missing out the disasterous second LP, which was never released (due to a loss of enthusiasm on the part of both band and label), it's now a long time since the Utahs had anything to say. What the hell gives them the right to believe they have any relevance in 1999? What have they got to say?
"If we really thought we had nothing to say, we'd have packed it in a long time ago. The thing is, we were doing music (idealistic as it sounds) because we wanted to. A lot of people get into it for the lifestyle, the sex drugs and rock 'n' roll thing. But we always stayed in Leeds, kept away from the glamour, celebrities and supermodels. Parties full of people you don't know aren't really worth it for anything more than the odd story to tell your mates. But the best stories are ones which really involve you and something you've done- not 'I stood ext to Naomi Campbell' or something." Tell us a good story then.
"Oh, it has to be when we were in a redneck bar in South Carolina," laughs Jez. "Normally on a Wednesday night it was stripper night- this was real Blues Brothers territory." What did they make of the Utahs? "Well, it had been organised by a radio station, and they were saying, 'where's the chick? your record has a chick on it'. I was trying to explain that she was in this little box called a sampler. Anyway, in the soundcheck we played Rawhide and Stand By Your Man and after that we got on famously. The gig was filled with 60 or 70 people who couldn't believe the band from the radio were playing their hometown, and about the same number again who'd come to see, umm, the strippers. And they'd cancelled the strippers for us." I wonder if it was billed as Strip Show and Utah Saints or the other way around...
I tell Jez that I reckon they're going to get a lot of people throwing shit at them. Doesn't it bother them? "Not really. It happens to everyone, and it's mainly just people who resent us doing what we want to do. I think the dance press might be sniffy about it, but that's not really right; we were around before the people that now get front covers. Bands like Orbital and the Prodigy are headlining festivals, and that's just what we did too. We were never snobby about what we did- we did the Smash Hits roadshow because if it's just full of boy bands, those kids will think that that's all there is to music. And there's far more."
January sees the release of their new single. Taking more of an influence from the Leftfields and Underworlds of this world, it combines (as the Utahs always did) good pop sensibilities with an acute awareness of dancefloor culture. They may have been away for a while, but I suspect that the Utah Saints are not going to be leaving again for a long time yet. That grin is going to stay put.