Stereo MCs prepare for a Mucky Weekender before The Wedgewood Rooms in autumn | Interview

And this weekend they’ll be playing at Mucky Weekender, the festival named after Dub Pistols’ ode to a hedonistic 48 hours and curated by that band’s main man Barry Ashworth. Also on the bill are The Selecter, The Skints, Goldie, Mungo’s Hi Fi and many more live acts and DJs.

The group has kept a consistent lineup over the years but were formed by frontman Rob Birch and DJ/producer Nick “The Head” Hallam. The pair grew up on the same street just outside Nottingham, with Nick the elder by a year.

"It's a nice, human fact that people can get over quite big sticky problems in life,” Rob tells The Guide over a Zoom call, “when you have a deep understanding of each other. We've had our ups and down and all that, but we're like brothers.”

It took some time before they started making music together – Nick actually worked on music with Rob’s elder brother before him.

“Although we were good mates, we weren't actually doing stuff together. We were both really into music and that, but within different groups. I was still immature compared to him.

"Nick and my big brother lived in London, and to cut a long story short, we eventually all shared the same house in Battersea back in 1983. In those days it was quite easy to rent out flats around there, not like now. People don't realise now, Battersea used to be quite a roughneck neighbourhood – it had burnt out cars in the street!

“As it turned out, Nick was really into early electro, and I was playing in groups at the time. Everyone who was in my group found something better to do so I was left on my own and Nick was recording his tunes on a drum machine and a Jupiter-4 (an early synthesiser), and he just said to me: ‘Maybe you could come with me down to some of the recording sessions that I'm doing?’ I'm quite melody-minded, I've an ear for tunes. And he said: ‘Just help me with some of the tuning’. I jumped at the chance. It was music that I wasn't really that close to, and the idea of me going to help him with his tracks was a really free feeling. I didn't have any control over this, I’d just go in there and feel it out – which was nice, I liked the idea of that.

“We just did that for a while and experimented. We weren't really going to form a band. That was it really, we were just having a good time. We experimented with tape loops, making drum loops out of tape on a reel-to-reel, and then learning the early, rudimentary learnings of how to make electronic and rap music.”

It was from these early experiments that Stereo MCs were eventually born.

“Nick used to get mixtapes sent over from New York. You'd hear this music and have no idea how it got made. It's not like now where you get inundated with offers of sample libraries and new bits of tech you can get to do this, that and the other.“In those days, it was like, I've got no idea how people made that sound – like Public Enemy and stuff like that, so you just experimented in the living room!

“We made a few tracks and thought that we'd like to release one, so in order to do that we had to have a name and then it was: ‘Oh, I guess we're starting a group!’”

Advances in technology have changed music-making beyond recognition from when they began compared to now.

“It was a lot of fun in those days because you didn't really know what you were doing. You had very minimal equipment to work with so you didn't have that many options – it was really down to your imagination and being inventive.

“You weren’t looking at a screen for 24 hours, you were just listening and your hands were both occupied trying to manipulate a tape loop or a turntable. For example, our first track was called Move It, and when we made the demo for it, you know those dodgy compilations where they did cover versions of greatest hits? They were a lot cheaper than licensing the originals... I found one of those and it had Superstition on it by Stevie Wonder, but it was a cover version and it had the drumbeat at the beginning, so for our tune, I wanted to loop the drumbeat, right? These days you'd put it into (music production software) Logic and it would time stretch it to whatever you wanted and you'd copy and paste it and that's it.

“When we started out, because we didn't have a sampler, we only had a belt-driven turntable – you can't rewind the record properly because it's on a belt – whereas with Technics, you can spin it back and that's how people do the drum breaks. To make a drum track which lasted three minutes from this drum loop, I had to keep rewinding the tape, remember how many times I'd recorded the drum loop by actually flying it in and pressing play and record at the same time. I spent all night making a three-and-a-half-minute drum track! But that's how you did it.”

Even though their music falls into the “electronic” category, they have always prided themselves on maintaining an organic, human quality.

”I love to hear the human element in music, and I still hear it in modern music, and that's the music I try to go for: ‘I just love something about the feel of that track..’ Where it doesn't sound too much to the grid, it has a certain organic feel to it – it moves me. It's important to feel moved by a piece of music, even if it's electronically generated, you can still be moved by it.

“In these times where music is becoming more and more disposable and musicians are becoming more and more 'pimped', if you like, it's nice to hear music where there's some love.”

It is also why their live shows remain as popular as ever.

“As life goes on and you get on a stage, you want to feel that in that hour-and-a-half you've really done your best to make it go somewhere, and the feeling that you've had with the people in the audience is a shared feeling, and that it wasn't just 'click in, click out' and take the money. You want it to be a good experience.

“I'm grateful we're still getting airtime out there and people are still giving us the opportunity to get out and play, because I'm not a youngster anymore! There's plenty of people from younger generations coming up all this time and we've still got a shot, so let's make the most of it and see if we can get a genuine feeling with these people in front of us.

"It's not always easy because you've had to get up at 4am to catch an aeroplane and drive here, drive there... and your body is rebelling. You have to try and find it from somewhere, where you're going to generate this feeling from. But generally we get there and that's what makes live performance a beautiful thing. Most times I come off stage just like 'Wow!', there's no feeling like it.

The band released their last album Emperor's Nightingale in 2011, but they also have their own label Connected through which they release other acts and numerous collaborations.

Will there be another Stereo MCs album? “I don't like to promise things and say we're making a new album because I don't know. At the moment we seem to be getting quite a lot of gigs and it's taking up a lot of energy. It doesn't give you much time to focus on other stuff, so we do a lot of collaborating which is quite rejuvenating. Working with these younger guys making electronic music, it's a learning curve for us.

"My wish is that we come up with some more original music of our own in the not too distant future, but I'm not sure what form it will take.”

While the band are now independent, Rob doesn’t look back on their commercial heyday with any regrets.

“It was great being on Island Records back then, when it was independent, it was a very cool label,” Island is now part of the Universal Music Group. “For our first three albums, it was the same people working on them, so the whole label had a real feeling of accomplishment when we made a record that went across the boards. It was a bit of a family vibe – we met (label founder) Chris Blackwell and he was a bit of a paternal figure. There was a good energy there.

“I don't look back on that as being part of ‘the industry’, and besides we were on a wave of energy that was beyond our control – we were just working really hard but everything else was a force of nature.

“It was tricky after that, you create some tunes, but you can't just repeat yourself. I don't even know how we made those records or where it came from. With music you can't really own it and say that ‘I'm the author’, because you don't know where it came from. If somebody says: ‘Go on then, write another Connected", I'm like: ‘Sorry mate, I can't do that’. I don't know how we did it – we were just in a groove and it came together.”

Mucky Weekend takes place at Vicarage Farm near Winchester on September 8-9 and is now sold out.

Stereo MCs will also be playing their own headline show at The Wedgewood Rooms on Saturday, November 18. Tickets £21.50. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.