Live Shows

Your most recent tour, which ended in June [2000], was your third time in the U.S. this year. How's the show different this time?

The only stuff we'd done in the U.S. before had been Andy and I deejaying. But this tour we have a full 9-piece band with a drummer, bass player, guitarist, MCs, a vocalist, a percussionist. It's a new band, and the first time we've gone above a seven-piece.

What are you and Andy playing?

I play a JP-8000 for some of the big drum 'n' bass moments, and I'm triggering a sampler in a few tracks like "I See You Baby." I'm also playing a vocoder on a few things, then on three tunes I play flugelhorn. Andy's playing Fender Rhodes and trombone.

How different is your live show to what's on the albums?

It's massively different. On a lot of the songs we'll have the same themes but change the instrumentation. And there are lots of times where the percussionist goes off and does his thing. In certain songs like "At The River" and "Inside My Mind (Blue Skies)" -- which are around 80 beats per minute -- we have sections where it goes off into drum 'n' bass. Because the tempo of drum 'n' bass is around 160bpm, you can lay the same vocal breaks over it but they're in half-time. The live show is much funkier than the album.

How difficult is it to integrate the acoustic and electronic aspects of the show into the whole?

It's a long journey and we're still learning a lot. We started playing live last year and we had some problems, I think, because we were trying to sequence too much. There were a couple of shows where the computer went down. We were operating with a Mac G3 sequencing some of the rhythms and noises, but we've changed that now and it's practically all live: All the bass is live and all the guitars and stuff, and we just use an Akai MPC2000 to sequence kick drums. I'd say it's about 95 percent live now, so we're not so dependent on technology, and it's working out really well. The downside of it is there are so many people on stage that we're never going to make much money out of it, but the upside is it sounds great.

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