The Young Punx Interview

The Young Punx are one of the most groundbreaking duos in music. Incorporating vintage sounds with today’s Electronica and unique illustrative music videos thanks to Dutch artist, Han Hoogerbrugge, Hal Ritson and Nathan Taylor put their audience in an intentionally uncomfortable position, questioning every track on their third studio album, ‘All These Things Are Gone’. From a big band of the 1930s to an ambulance siren, these guys are geniuses when it comes to using everything around them. To find out what makes this duo tick, we sat down with Hal in his studio at London Bridge, to talk about the past and present of The Young Punx.

Hi Hal, how are you?
Good, thank you.

What have The Young Punx been up to?
Well, we made an album, which is a remarkably large amount of work! Everyone underestimates how hard it is to really get through the body of work it takes to make an album. That’s why I think most Dance people work on EPs because you can get it out while it’s still fresh. It just takes forever! But it’s the third one we’ve done and in some ways it’s similar to the ones we’ve done before, in terms of taking different types of music and mashing them up with modern Electronic sounds. But, we’ve approached it slightly differently in that we’ve not really had a commercial head on of thinking, “What are people into at the moment, what will sell, what will get the A&R men excited?” We’ve done it more of a personal statement of just things that me and the musicians that I work with want to do. That means it won’t be a number one chart record, but a lot of music fans and people getting bored of what’s going on in the charts are getting quite excited about hearing something different.

It’s been over a decade since you and Nathan Taylor teamed up; how have the ideas about what The Young Punx are changed?
What’s strange is that, if you listen to our music, consistency is the last thing that comes to mind, but the intent has always been the same, a joyous tinkering with what sounds are available and no real rules about what style we can and can’t play. What’s happened over 10 years is we’ve slowly understood what we’re doing. When we started, we were just randomly doing stuff, but we’ve been trying to work out what it is that we’re doing and I think we’ve worked it out!

Was it more experimental at the beginning?
I don’t think it’s any less experimental – this album’s probably the most experimental in some respects. I think we’ve kept doing the same thing but in a slightly different landscape. When we started it was done in a bedroom, with no sense of experience, so it had that level of freshness and then everyone has that difficult second album, because when you make your first album, everything you do that’s a success is a win, because it’s coming up from zero, and you’ve got your entire life up to that point to make your first album. When you make your second album, you’ve got expectations: should it sound like the previous one? Should it move on from the sound of the previous one? Is it going to be as successful as the previous one? It’s a very high pressured thing. We’ve enjoyed doing the third album now because it’s taken the pressure off of my day job of making hit records for other people! We’re just doing stuff for fun and we don’t care if people really like it or not, and you tend to make the best music by not caring if people are going to like it or not.

You said you started off in a bedroom, did either of you have a background in music?
I’ve been making music all my life – I started my first band when I was seven with a little Casio keyboard, the drummer had drumsticks and some Tupperware, we were saving up for an electric guitar!

Wow! What were your inspirations at that age?
Well, what’s interesting is people can really patronise children for their musical tastes and if a child likes it, it’s kind of a novelty thing. But Pop music has been driven by 10 – 16-year-olds over history and I was listening to Police, Depeche Mode, Jazz and Blues because of my parents, New Wave music. There was one track that was my guilty pleasure, like I was really ashamed of and it was Captain Sensible ‘Wot’ but now I’ve gone back to listen to it again, it’s a Punk copying what the New York rappers were doing at that time, and well, actually it’s kind of cool! The last track on the album is called ‘Polaroid’ and the guy who’s singing on it is actually who I used to walk to school with and we used to say “What if one day we could be in a Pop band?” and we’ve actually both gone on to make a living in the music business and the song’s all about memories, so the fact that he’s singing it is really important to me, though it makes no impact on any of the listeners unless I tell you!

You say you like to mix different genres and ‘Harlem Breakdown’ is a very cool Jazz-infused song; how does a song like that materialise compared to an Electronic-heavy song?
On the album there are two types of songs: ones which are instrumental and driven by my picking an era of music that I really love, that people aren’t really making these days, and make it the way they made it at that time. For ‘Harlem Breakdown’ we’d go, “It’s 1971 and we’re in New York, get out microphones that they used in those sessions, how did they mic a drum kit? How did the drummer hold his drumsticks?” If you watch a film of Pop bands in the ‘60s, their body language is completely different, so in these instrumental acts we make an homage to that style, one of the things that are gone, in a way. And the other half of the tracks are songs about things to do with the passage of time, and what it feels like when you look back in the past, and when you look in the future. But the way we almost always work is we do a two level production; first we make a vintage track using all vintage approaches and finish it so it sounds like it was made in whatever year we’re aiming for, and then we do a second pass where we do the Electronic level on top of it. That’s something we’ve done across all three albums.

What can fans expect from third album, ‘All These Things Are Gone,’ compared to the previous two?
We’re a bit more chilled out and taking more risks with this one, so we’re doing things just because we think it would be hilarious. On ‘Kowloon Kickback’ we’ve done a full 1930s big band track, which isn’t that unusual because people are making Electro-Swing music, but they tend to just go and sample an old record, we’ve properly scored the whole thing and done a three-minute drum solo like you’d get if you went to a live gig. And, with the title track, it’s 14 minutes long and travels through several styles. It’s a bit more, “What the fuck, let’s just do it.”

The subject for the title track is deep and thought-provoking, but the video is almost like black comedy, it makes you feel a bit uncertain watching it; was that the intention?
Definitely, and this is characteristic of Hans Hoogerbrugge. We’ve always worked with him and i was drawn to him on the first album because I thought there were certain things he has imbedded into his way of working that we share in the way we’re working, where there’s a question of: is this high art or is this pop culture? You can’t tell with him because he’s doing cartoons with jokes in but he’s also a very respected artist and you can see the same thing in some of our tracks: is this a deep track or a party track? Is it an artistic statement or something you put on in a club? There’s a duality between what is serious and what is humour, and something that Hans and The Young Punx always want to challenge is that it has to be one or the other. I always draw it back to Shakespeare, where the jester is the only one who will tell the truth seriously to the king, because everyone else is a yes man whereas the jester couches it in jokes. You can say more serious things in humour.

Is there anything since you recorded it that you think should be on it and what was the process of deciding what you should list?
The process was that it should be absolutely a train of thought, with the angle that it should be giant things, small things, personal things, public things, historic things, recent things, with the sense that as you get older, everything goes. Even a planet doesn’t last forever. What I found more interesting is what we feel like we should have taken off the list, because people keep getting in touch because we put snoods on the list and they made a comeback the following the year, and we put pagers on the list and then doctors were getting in touch! And the guy from Pro Sound News got in touch and said “people still drink Um Bongo.” It’s my train of thought anyway. But we actually made most of the list in an airport in Japan. We had a really ecstatic gig where everything went really well and the next morning we were really hungover and that got us in a melancholy mood to start writing all these things down. It is a “coming-down” song in some ways. Actually if you listen really carefully to the intro you can hear airport announcements. On the album itself we took attention to detail on what equipment things are recorded on, so for the vintage things we made sure to use the right vintage equipment, but actually there are a lot of things recorded on the iPhone as I travel around. So in ‘All These Things Are Gone’ there’s the ambience of the Japanese airport, the entire melody for ‘Detonate’ is a Dutch ambulance and then added bass and drums to it, and the melody for ‘La Luna’ is just a note of me singing to myself and then kept it and didn’t rerecord it. It’s got that spontaneity of a documentary collection of places we’ve been and things we’ve done.

Do you have much input yourselves as to what goes into the videos?
Not really. Our relationship with Hans is one where we do pay him, but we can’t afford to pay him what his work is worth, so the payoff is that he has creative control. Sometimes I say “this is commercial and it needs some barriers, like it must be able to be shown on television”, because some of his work is quite extreme. But for the stuff we’re not paying him, he says “you can’t see it until I hand it in” and we’re fine with that because we trust what he does. It’s funny because some of his work is provocative in a lude way, and I’ve seen him at an exhibition where he’s totally happy about that but his parents are there and they have to see like, a woman launching herself onto a dildo, and brings about all these uncertainties about the artistic statement, and he’s totally happy with everyone seeing it apart from his parents! Whoever you are, you can’t get away from that feeling of being funny in front of your parents.

You mentioned about your day job as producing for really mainstream acts (the studio is plastered with disks by the likes of Jessie J, Rizzle Kicks and Bruno Mars), what are you going to be working on this year?
To be honest, things just come in week by week, but this week I’m doing something for DJ Fresh, and Duke Dumont and Axwell, but it’s really a conveyor belt of people calling up and saying “I’m making this track, I need a choir on it or this Disco thing recording or can you write a song over the top of this backing track?” but I’ve got no idea week to week.

How do you pick and choose what you’ll work on?
Almost no musician can make a living out of just being an artist, even someone that looks like they’re successful from just being an artist, they’re probably making it from being a celebrity. A lot of musicians can do their own creative statement, but then also do someone else’s project and be the craftsmen behind it. When I’m working on other people’s records, I take no claim on it, it’s someone else’s statement, I can either like it or not like it, if they ask me to do it I’ll try and help them make it a record. I don’t really ever say no to anything – it’s my job!

We watched your video for ‘Got Your Number’ from back in 2003…
Good Lord is that on the Internet?!

It is! On YouTube, and featuring the 118-118 duo. Did you know at the time that you had odds of being Christmas Number One?
This was a bit of a weird thing… It only really makes sense if you were in the UK in 2003! But when 118-188 started, they launched with these ‘70s runners with the Rocky theme and when it was fresh and a cultural phenomenon and it became a bit of an in-joke in the country, like stag nights were going out dressed as them and going clubbing. The Rocky theme is iconic and there hadn’t been a Disco remix of it, so, as joke, we did one. It wasn’t even meant to be a Young Punx thing, because we sent some music over to Judge Jules and also sent him this is a laugh and then he started playing it relentlessly on Radio 1 saying that it was The Young Punx and we were committed then! I could write a whole novel called ‘Got Your Number’ on how to go from unknown to 25/1 Christmas Number One to a record label making strategic cock ups so that the record isn’t even released, all over the course of six weeks!

At the end of the video, there are two guys in a limo with “Young Punx” written across their t-shirts; is that you and Nathan?
That’s actually me and my friend, Cameron. See, The Young Punx started with me and Cameron, and we sent our demos to Nathan when he was working at EMI and instead of signing us to EMI, he left and joined The Young Punx! Now, Cameron is head of Fox Films in the UK, so he still has some creative input, but we’ve swapped Cameron out and Nathan came fairly early on as my DJing partner. I can’t believe you brought up 118 though – we’ve spent years trying to hide from it! At first it was massive, and then we were a duo that did a novelty record, but there was actually a bigger picture; we took things out of popular culture and retextualised them like, is it a joke or is it serious? It’s taken us a number of years to put it in the context of other work we’ve done. It’s actually a classic example of getting things wrong in the music industry because the A&R man said “The video’s gonna be really easy; just get a load of birds with big tits, running around jogging and the breasts will jumpy up and down, it will be brilliant!” And we were like, “no, we can’t do that, we’re fat too arty.” And the whole idea was that anyone could be the 118 guys, so they got these kids dressed up as them, and they spent the budget of a high-budget video, but trying to make it look Indie and edgy so we got a cheap video while spending 50 grand’s worth of budget we’d never see again. But, you live and learn!

And where will fans be able to see you live this year?
We’ve got a couple of things booked for Germany, Austria, the UK, Japan, but the booking for the year will start to fill up.