by SCOTT C

Strictly Kev has earned his keep in the Ninja Tune stable over the years, producing under the DJ Food umbrella alongside PC and DK, as well as blowing the minds of young London and the world on his genre-juggling weekly Solid Steel radio show. After revisiting his 2001 mash-up opus “Raiding the 20th Century,” the Mirror spoke to Kev from his studio, where he had just mastered a brand new Solid Steel mix due out in the spring.

Mirror: I’ve just spent the afternoon listening to your mix, and—

Strictly Kev: Which one?

M: “Raiding the 20th Century.”

SK: Okay, good! The thing is, I just finished a Solid Steel release that’s coming out in April on Ninja, and we literally mastered it yesterday. No one’s really heard it outside of Ninja, so I was like, “shit!”— thinking that you’d already got your hands on it.

M: No, not quite. It just boggles my mind that you guys have been doing these insane mixes for so many years, and the result is always crazy. It’s overwhelming just how much you’re able to squeeze in there.

M: Just out of curiosity, how long does it take you to make something like this?

SK: Well, “Raiding the 20th Century” took about a year to research and find all of the things that I wanted and edit.

M: Wow.

SK: Well, there’s like 160-something tracks in there, and each one is distilled to the barest essence and the best part of that track, so you can say, “Oh, I know that song,” and recognize it, because it’s only there for five seconds in some cases. It’s got to be the best parts, so that takes a long, long time. After I had all the information, it was 10 solid days of 16 hours a day at the computer, hacking away.

M: So you’re saying how many tracks?

SK: 167, I think, is the actual number.

M: And that’s just the songs?

SK: Yes, and then there’s about 60 pieces of spoken word, all specially chosen to link things together.

M: How did you decide to undertake something so huge?

SK: I was asked to do a guest mix for XFM in the U.K., and they’re not really my audience at all. This was right in the middle of the whole mash-up craze in England in 2001, when all the stuff that was coming out was still quite underground. I decided to turn in a mix that was so good that people would have to ask who it was. I was a bit older than a lot of

M: How old are you ?

SK: I’m 36 now. I’ve been DJing for over 20 years and figured the best way to get these people’s attention was to present a condensed history of what mash-ups are. These mash-up DJs were repeating history left, right and centre, and didn’t even know it. They had no idea who Stockhausen was, or John Cage, and these guys were in a way the forefathers of all of it.

M: Who’s the narrator throughout the mix?

SK: That’s Paul Morley. He wrote a book called Words and Music: The History of Pop in the Shape of a City, that I’d read when the mix was still only a 40-minute version. He came up with the title “Raiding the 20th Century” 20 years ago, and his book was so in line with the first version I’d done that I had to do more, later getting him to read excerpts from his book throughout the mix.

M: I thought that was Earl Zinger.

SK: (laughs) No. It’s a book about the history of pop, really, and he was really resistant at first about being involved, but then he came round the studio and we chatted, he read and we had a really good time.

WITH GHISLAIN POIRIER, GHOST BEARD AND LUV AT IGLOOFEST/ PIKNIC ÉLECTRONIK DES NEIGES AT QUAI JACQUES-CARTIER ON FRIDAY, JAN. 19, 5 P.M., $5, ALL AGES

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