Drum & bass with face

Spring Heel Jack meet the press, smiling

by CHRIS YURKIW

It was London in 1994 and there was no way that John Coxon's and Ashley Wales's respective messing about with breakbeats and sweeping string samples wasn't going to get mixed up with the UK drum & bass explosion that has given the '90s its most exhilarating new music.

"Around the time we got together you couldn't really ignore it," says Coxon, who with Wales took on the production name Spring Heel Jack in 1994. "Every time you'd turn on the radio the pirate stations were all playing drum & bass, and I think we were just part of that evolution of music that was going on in the UK."

The magazines contented themselves with trumpeting a triumvirate of duos--as far as they could beat down electronic music's collective spirit--and there proliferated innumerable profiles of the future of pop music in The Chemical Brothers, The Orb, and Orbital. Attention is now turning to other artists, and Spring Heel Jack--a duo all the same--have lots of hooks on which to hang your future of pop music.

Then there was "Walking Wounded," a piece they did for Everything But The Girl who, as Coxon says, "turned it into an album."

"They had sent us a copy of a track from our first album with Tracy Thorn singing on top it. We didn't really like it that much, because the piece of music was already finished. So we thought, 'Well, let's write a track for them and they can sing over top of that,' and that's how 'Walking Wounded' happened."

So what about this star business, in a music that Coxon has claimed is simply made by people who love it and is antithetical to the star system?

"I think the more exposure it has the better, and if that means you have to deal with some of the more irritating aspects of the music business then you just have to take it on board. I mean, we want to play to people, so if that means we have our photograph in the newspaper, it doesn't change us. It's easy to say, but I really think it's true."

Spring Heel Jack play live with Strictly Kev, Riz Maslen & Steve Bear and Task at Groove Society on Sunday, March 23, 10:30pm. $15 adv/$18 door. Their album 68 Million Shades will be released in Canada on April 22