"NO SOUND SYSTEM IS SAFE" declared the cover of one
                        magazine when Leftfield launched their debut album,
                        'Leftism', in 1995. It was a prediction that by the
                        Summer of 1996 had literally come true: during a gig
                        on the 'Leftism' tour at London's Brixton Academy,
                        sound levels reached the highest ever recorded at the
                        venue, while the bass vibrations caused the ceiling
                        to start disintegrating, showering dust and plaster
                        onto the stage. Four years later, 'Leftism' has just
                        been declared the Greatest Dance Album Of All Time in
                        a poll of top DJs, while its timeless mix of
                        ribcage-shaking dub, grandoise techno, and futuristic
                        splendour still sounds like it was made yesterday.
                        Fresh enough to soundtrack key parts of this Summer's
                        hot film, 'Rogue Trader' - the story of renegade
                        Singapore stock market trader Nick Leeson which stars
                        Ewan McGregor and Anna Friel.

                        'Leftism' was an album that redrew the borders for
                        dance music, pioneered a radical hybrid of dub and
                        house and breaks (long before anyone had invented big
                        beat), and threw together guest vocalists from other
                        musical worlds (gothic torch singer Toni Halliday,
                        reggae toaster Earl Sixteen) over rhythms borrowed
                        from dub, reggae, and African music. It sold more
                        than half a million copies in the UK alone. More than
                        just a great dance album, it was a defining moment, a
                        Pink Floyd for the 90s, the Dark Side Of The Disco.
                        Now, four years later and three long years in the
                        making, it's time for the new album, 'Rhythm And
                        Stealth': the sequel.

                        Many thought the Leftfield duo of Neil Barnes and
                        Paul Daley would never be able to match its
                        melancholy splendour again. Paul Daley was one of
                        them. 'Rhythm And Stealth' - a stunning album that is
                        as vital and challenging as 'Leftism' - will silence
                        them. Leftfield have spent three years struggling to
                        invent new cathedrals of sound, racked by the fear
                        that they could never do anything as good as
                        'Leftism' again. Hear rising London rapper Roots
                        Manuva freestyle over the sci-fi hip hop of 'Dusted'
                        and let the bass blasts those doubts away. Listen to
                        the way the pounding beats of 'Phat Planet' - the
                        harsh soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer's stunning,
                        monochrome Guinness ad, the one where the surfers are
                        chased by horses - breaks into dirty funk. And get
                        fired up by the chilling future electro groove of
                        'Afrika Shox', dark and bassy, with a vocal from
                        electro godfather Afrika Bambaataa that is far from
                        the party-time singles he's been releasing lately.

                        'Rhythm And Stealth' is an album that is futuristic,
                        creative, and forceful. Where 'Leftism' was
                        grandiose, 'Rhythm And Stealth' is tailored, minimal,
                        ruthlessly effective - a new take on the
                        breaks-orientated dance music of the last few years.
                        Even the collaborators, bar Brummie toaster Cheshire
                        Cat, are new, like former Curtis Mayfield
                        collaborator Nicole Willis, who sings on the esoteric
                        'Swords', from the film 'Go'. Leftfield are defiantly
                        back.

                        PAUL Daley blames the delay finishing this album to
                        the success of 'Leftism', the way it span into
                        something neither he nor Neil Barnes had imagined. He
                        found the acclaim difficult to deal with. One fan
                        came up and declared that he'd crashed his car
                        listening to 'Leftism' and spent six months in
                        hospital: he lost concentration "when the bass kicked
                        in!" "I don't like a lot of attention from people
                        singling me out to be something, cos you have to live
                        up to that, and that's when you stop being yourself,"
                        says Paul reluctantly. Bewildered by the acclaim, he
                        also was racked by self-doubt. "Is your music any
                        good? All these people telling you you're great, are
                        they saying that cos they really think your music's
                        great, or are they just saying that to make you feel
                        better?"

                        Daley grew up in Margate, Kent, where his dad ran a
                        boutique called Just John. His Grandad was a jazz
                        drummer who taught him to play along to Top Of The
                        Pops with a pair of brushes on a biscuit tin. School
                        was not a huge success. "If Paul showed as much as
                        much zest in his English Language as he does in his
                        drumming, he would be a genius," sniffed one report.
                        As a young punk rocker, Paul got a job collecting
                        glasses in a local disco and it was here he was first
                        force-fed dance music. Margate had a thriving club
                        scene with punk venues next door to cool soul clubs,
                        transvestites from London promenading down the High
                        St, and a raucous mix of punk, funk, disco and soul -
                        all of which fed into the young Paul Daley.

                        Paul moved to London and clubbed his way through the
                        rare groove and acid house scenes, working as a
                        percussionist, constantly chasing the party around
                        town. "It was a time when things were still very
                        underground," he recalls, "and there was a definite
                        definition between - how can I say this without being
                        insulting? - everyday people and the world that we
                        lived in, which was very much a bohemian, nighttime
                        thing that no one knew about."

                        Paul met Neil while playing congas for A Man Called
                        Adam, at a club called Violets in London's Soho. Like
                        Paul, Neil had spent years learning the congas,
                        unlike Paul he grew up in North London, living in
                        cheap co-op accommodation and working in Playcentres
                        like his friend John Lydon, and later, as a teacher
                        at an FE college. Dressed as a punk, Neil had hung
                        out in soul clubs like the West End's Global Village.
                        Like many punks, he also discovered dub reggae, blown
                        away by its revolutionary experiments in sound, form,
                        and bass. In the early 80s, he also saw Afrika
                        Bambaataa perform, and went up to ask what kind of
                        machine was playing the drums for them: it was a Linn
                        Drum and back then, it cost £3,000. Like Paul, that
                        intense obsession with all kinds of good music - from
                        Kraftwerk to reggae - is all that's ever been
                        important to Neil. It's what clicked between them
                        when they first met, at a time when London's nascent
                        warehouse party scene was a melting pot of all styles
                        - cool black jazz dudes, proto-ravers, wide boys,
                        united under a rare groove.

                        Around this time Neil became aware that technology
                        was changing in ways that could work for him. He
                        rigged up a basic studio in his flat and patched a
                        record together called 'Not Forgotten' - a mash-up of
                        beats and film samples. Paul remixed 'Not Forgotten'
                        into a bona fide British dance classic. Later,
                        Leftfield provided a pummelling remix for David
                        Bowie's 'Jump They Say' - Bowie, who loved the mix
                        even though it lost virtually all his vocals,
                        described them as "craftsmen". Along the way, they
                        helped create the first credible British dance sound,
                        known as 'progressive house'. You can still hear that
                        sound in the music of Underworld and see its
                        attitudes - it's all about the music, we are not
                        performers - in the shy diffidence of the Chemical
                        Brothers today. Neil went into the college where he
                        worked with 'Not Forgotten' under his arm. "You can't
                        do that. You're a teacher," the kids teased him. He
                        was still teaching while Leftfield were churning out
                        those early remixes.

                        BOTH Paul and Neil admit to being obsessive
                        perfectionists, but in the struggle to make 'Rhythm
                        And Stealth' both reveal it was usually Paul who was
                        "the difficult one". A track like 'Dusted', for
                        instance, was redone again and again - "because it
                        sounded too much like a hip hop record," says Neil.
                        'Afrika Shox' has gone through at least four
                        different edits - being slated for release in 1998,
                        then shelved because the rest of the album had
                        overtaken it in quality. Leftfield knew there was an
                        electro revival coming last year, but typically,
                        weren't too fussed about getting on board.

                        Neil emphasises that Leftfield are not musicians, but
                        that they know how to put together a good song. "In a
                        way your sound is influenced by the development of
                        the machines you use. This has happened all the way
                        through music and most people shun away from it," he
                        says. "We're not musicians. We're sound fashionists."
                        He points out that the technology they struggle with
                        allows them to create sounds - most particularly on
                        'Dusted' - that hadn't existed until Leftfield
                        invented them. Not being musicians makes them more
                        open-minded, not less. He doesn't need to explain:
                        Leftfield's love of technology and sound systems
                        verges on iconography. The sleeve of 'Leftism'
                        featured a speaker, not the band. The 'Leftism' tour,
                        in 1996, took the hi-fi fetish to new levels. It
                        wasn't the band starring up there on stage, it was
                        the biggest, crispest, fuck-off sound system, a
                        battlement of speakers that took the limelight.
                        "LEFTFIELD TOO LOUD" screamed one newspaper headline;
                        in Belgium people asked for their money back because
                        their ears were hurting; at Brixton Academy the gig
                        reached the highest sound levels ever recorded there
                        and the volume caused the ceiling to start crumbling
                        above them. Even celebs like Mick Jagger got a blast,
                        when Leftfield performed at a star-studded
                        Trainspotting party at the Cannes Film Festival. "It
                        had to rock," they say simply, now. It did.

                        AFTER stunningly original videos for Madonna and the
                        Aphex Twin, Chris Cunningham is one of the hottest
                        promo directors on the planet. His video for 'Afrika
                        Shox', shot over a year ago, features an alienated
                        derelict wandering the streets of New York whose his
                        limbs shatter like porcelain every time someone bangs
                        into him. It is powerful and disturbing. Film-makers
                        have long understood the visual power of Leftfield's
                        music, as the band's contributions to the soundtracks
                        of Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, and now Rogue Trader
                        show. Cunningham's vision fits right in.

                        The Cunningham connection is just part of a buzz
                        around 'Rhythm And Stealth' which is becoming
                        deafening. 'Phat Planet', released on a limited
                        edition ten inch, is already tearing all kinds of
                        clubs - from big, screaming house nights, to
                        breakbeat mash-ups like London's Headstart.

                        'Rhythm And Stealth' is about a fierce, bass-heavy
                        redefinition of the new and Leftfield's relentless
                        experimentation hasn't let up or let them down. It's
                        just the beginning of a new wave of Leftfield that's
                        going to drown out everything else this year.
                        'Leftism'? That was just the first episode.

                        OLD BIOG PAUL DALEY, NEIL BARNES
                        When London club promoter Sean McCluskey suggested to
                        Paul Daley that Leftfield had invented their own
                        music, he summed up perfectly the effect that their
                        music was having at the time. He was referring to a
                        form of harder house music that opened up invention
                        in club city during the Summer of 1992 and which
                        inevitably became christened with a 'buzz name' by
                        the media. 'Progressive House' was its classification
                        and ugly as the term may have been, there is no doubt
                        that without the sound sculpturing of Leftfield, the
                        music would have veered off in another direction.
                        1994 and Leftfteld are still recognised as leaders in
                        making midnight music, having kept their cool, their
                        identity and are now poised to position themselves on
                        an even higher level with the release of their debut
                        LP "Leftism".

                        With both Neil Barnes and Paul Daley having similar
                        musical backgrounds, their coalition is a meeting of
                        interests and ideas that together produces a music
                        that soars above the standard club soundtrack, theirs
                        is a sound to be reckoned with, always awaited for
                        with anticipation, always rewarding. Neil Barnes
                        (born: Kentish Town, North London 1960) spent the
                        best part of his teenage years with a violin wedged
                        under his chin until the discipline of the instrument
                        and its 'dullness' finally left him dismayed enough
                        to pack it away for good. When Punk hit town in the
                        late Seventies, the guitar became his artillery for a
                        handful of small London bands and through various
                        Punk associates he was introduced to and seduced by
                        other types of music including reggae, and when the
                        vibrating lure of percussion stepped into view, yet
                        another musical door was opened. Swayed by the
                        rhythmic structures of Santana and the steady funk of
                        disco imports, Neil took up lessons in percussion
                        through the eighties, eventually graduating with his
                        tools enough to play congas and bongos for the London
                        School of Samba.

                        Whilst spending a handful of years behind a pair of
                        Technics decks in the mid-eighties, the witnessing of
                        Afrika Bambaata and his Soulsonic Force live changed
                        Neil's frame of mind completely. Up there on stage
                        was a small box of rhythm that to his already
                        percussive mind was nothing short of genius. The drum
                        machine has since been responsible for a serious
                        growth in vinyl. Stopping Neil in his tracks and
                        deciding that the live bands he was still tampering
                        with were dead on their feet, he decided to
                        investigate further, but with the technology being
                        relatively new, the price was inevitably high and his
                        ideas were frustratingly shelved until the general
                        arrival of the sampler.

 This feature first appeared in Mixmag February 1995
 
 
 
 
 
 

LEFTFIELD love their music. Whatever the topic of conversation - Paul Daley's recent holiday in Goa,
who fancies some tea, whether the biscuits have gone stale - it always circles inexorably back to their
shared, driving obsession.
"Music's always been the most important thing to us, we don't do anything else
but make music," admits Paul. "I used to be completely obsessed by it - music's
like a drug. " It's a compulsion that, in the four years since Paul and Neil Barnes' truly seminal
debut single, 'Not Forgotten' came out, has seen them become the single most influential production
team working in British dance music, opening up a generation of DJs and producers to the potential
power of dub and tribal percussion and inadvertently creating the bass-booming, bongo-powered
monster that was progressive house along the way.
If any one record could be said to be responsible for finally making British house more respectable
than its American and European cousins, 'Not Forgotten' was it. No longer would British house heads
be constantly looking over their shoulders at New York, Ghent, Milan and Berlin. 'Not Forgotten' and
subsequent Leftfield classics like 'Release The Pressure' and 'Song Of Life' were the cement that
welded a whole new British house scene together. London proudly joined the league of house
capitals. British dance music has never looked back.
Neither have Leftfield. But while so many of the producers that filled 1992's leather-trousered
dancefloors have spent the last two years doing little more than honing their patent ecstatic
breakdowns, Leftfield have moved on, never conforming, never playing the game by the rules, but
always staying one crucial step ahead of the pack. Producing records that defied categorisation, but
that were simply, well, left of field. Tunes like the dubwise 'Release The Pressure' and the glorious
'Song Of Life' that could sound achingly spiritual at home and brain-shatteringly euphoric on a
crowded dancefloor.
They followed up in late 1993 with 'Open Up', a Top Ten hit with vocals from former Sex Pistol John
Lydon that tore down the rock n' roll iron curtain, set rock and dance fans alight, and helped the
guitar-trance of Underworld to flower in the spirit of musical Glasnost. While it's "Burn, Hollywood,
burn" chorus coincided with huge fires all over Southern California.
Now they're back, after over a year's silence, with a major label deal and a glorious motorway pile-up of
an album, where hip hop beats collide with Detroit techno, where roots reggae, indie rock and African
rhythms are shoehorned pitilessly together with pounding trance. Leftfield have taken their history,
their shared heritage of two decades of living steeped in London's underground culture and served it
up as a clear pointer to our musical future. And it's looking wicked.

          ALTHOUGH they never met until the hazy acid house meltdown of 1988, Paul and Neil had
          startlingly similar mid-70s adolescences. Listening to their life stories the bubbling pot of
          influences that go into their sound begins to make a lot more sense. It couldn't have been
          any other way.
          Paul grew up in Margate, listening to Santana, David Bowie and Tamla Motown. Neil grew
          up in London's Islington, where his schoolmates included Spandau Ballet. "Everyone in
          my class was totally into music, " he smiles. "Everyone brought their
          records into school and we'd sit in the sixth form common room playing
          music all day. "
          Being young and British in the 70s was very different from today. The charts were full of the
          stack-heeled glam rock of Gary Glitter, The Sweet and Slade. The only narrow-ankled
          trouser wearing alternatives came in the shape of Roxy Music's artschool posing or the
          pan-sexual hedonism of David Bowie, in the glory days before he married supermodels.
          When, in 1976, the sneering, gobbing demon punk first pogo-ed itself onto Top Of The
          Pops, it was, for Neil, Paul and thousands of others across the country, a tantalising
          glimpse of raw, exciting, undiluted rebellion.
          "To be honest, there were very few punk records I really liked, " Neil
          recalls. "It was more the attitude I was into. Seeing John (Lydon) on
          television with Bill Grundy... a young guy tearing into this old guy
          on TV, calling him a cheesy old cunt. Going to early Siouxsie And The
          Banshees gigs, where it was total free experimentation. People
          couldn't play their instruments, but they were making great sounds, so
          it didn't matter. "
          "Punk was aimed at mine and Neil's generation, " adds Paul with pride. "It
          belonged to us."
          The only other musical alternative of the time was to be found dancing to the constant
          stream of now classic American soul at influential clubs like The Goldmine in Canvey Island
          or The Lacey Lady in Ilford, in the days when Essex soul boys were trendsetters, rather
          than Paul Calf-like joke figures. Like punk, the soul scene of the time was young, suburban
          and working class and it was only natural that an uneasy alliance developed between the
          two emergent musical cults.
          For both Neil and Paul, this was their first introduction to the underground black music that
          was to shape the taste of the next decade, the same hedonistic mix of abrasive indie
          attitude and irresistibly funky grooves that would later surface in future classics like 'Song
          Of Life'.
          "There was a massive club scene in Margate, " Paul remembers. "There were
          punk venues next door to soul clubs. It got me into music at an early
          age: when everyone else was listening to the Top 40, I was going out,
          listening to Lonnie Liston Smith and coming home to listen to The
          Clash."
          On Bank Holidays Margate would be invaded by visiting London clubbers, heading to
          now-forgotten funk clubs like Hades. "You'd see all these mad transvestites
          walking along Margate seafront," grins Paul. "That's when I first thought
          London must be the place to be. "
          At the same time, Neil was hanging out at West End soul clubs like Global Village wearing
          punk clothes. "It was a really open-minded period, " he muses. "In many
          ways it was the original Balearic vibe." The next piece of the Leftfield cultural
          jigsaw was slipped in when a friend introduced him to the spiritual delights of dub reggae.
          "It just blew my mind," he grins, "When you first heard that music, the
          way they played with sounds you'd never heard before, it was amazing."
          This was the period when the revolutionary dub reggae experiments in musical form, space
          and pure sound pioneered by Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo were influencing The Clash
          as much as they did rastas, when if you went to a punk club you'd be as likely to hear the
          sweet rootsy harmonies of Culture's 'Two Sevens Clash' as you would 'Anarchy In The UK'.
          "Punk got a lot of people into reggae, " agrees Neil, "but in the end it
          was a bit of a fashion thing for most people, an affectation." Neil
          started heading to Blues parties in Ladbroke Grove, to hear roots reggae played on huge
          dub sound systems, where he and his mates would be the only white people there.
          "It was a really heavy vibe," he remembers, "not violent, but just loads
          of men, very few women and this huge, pounding dub system." Neil still likes
          to hang out at reggae clubs, but he bemoans the lack of any decent sound systems. "I
          like it loud," he shrugs, "in those days, it was so loud you could feel
          it. " The legacy is there too, in the sternum-quivering basslines of records like 'Not
          Forgotten', and in the righteous reggae vocal mantra of 'Release The Pressure', and
          'Inspection', their album's seismic downtempo collaboration with up and coming roots
          singer Danny Red.
 PAUL moved to London in the early 80s, living in a squat and eking out a living as a session
percussionist. "To be honest, a lot of that period's a
blur," shrugs Paul with a hapless grin, "because I was having
such a mad time going to a lot of the warehouse
parties that were happening at the time. I'd go out on
Friday night with a pound in my pocket and come back
at lunchtime the next day. I went to some mad places
in the East End, where they were playing a lot of the
early hip hop from New York. It had the same buzz as
punk, something different, exciting."
Both remember dancing at parties like Dirtbox, Norman Jay and
Judge Jules' Shake And Fingerpop and going to Bank Holiday
all-dayers held in the basement of multi-storey car parks. "It was
all completely illegal, but the police did nothing
about it, because they didn't even know it was going
on," Paul says, sighing wistfully for the Met's lost innocence.
Elsewhere, the future of music was being etched out on now obsolete
circuitboards and Neil was entranced by the crisp electronic sounds of
early electro. When he saw Afrika Bambaataa's Soulsonic Force in
1983 it was the first time he'd seen a drum machine being used in
anger, let alone a DJ who cut and scratched his records into a
seamless collage of funk, rather than simply played them. It was a revelatory experience.
"There was a big geezer slapping records on the deck and mixing them, while
this machine played over the top. I went up to one of them afterwards and asked
him what it was - it was a Linn Drum - and I remember thinking I had to have
one, but that I'd never be able to afford it. "

          IT could be early drum machines or it could be the furious drumming on old punk records,
          either way Paul and Neil are confirmed percussion nutters. Even their record label, Hard
          Hands, is named after a 60s hit by salsa percussion legend Ray Barretto. It's this
          preoccupation with making noises by hitting things that makes the drums on a Leftfield
          record sound crisper, harder, funkier and just plain better than, well, the drums on any
          other dance records. "All good dance music is based on rhythm, " Paul affirms,
          "and that happens to be what me and Neil are good at."
          Paul was given his first drum kit at the age of eight, by his grandad, also a keen drummer.
          At school he played drums for a local punk group and proudly listened to their first and only
          release on John Peel's Radio One show. By the mid-80s, he was playing percussion for
          innumerable bands, including early incarnations of both Primal Scream and The Brand New
          Heavies.
          Neil was hammering percussion for living, playing in a jazz group, with friends like Will
          Wildcat from acid beatnik posse the Sandals. When the Sandals started their own club at
          a run-down Soho sex joint called Violets in 1988, both Paul and Neil were invited to come
          down and play percussion over the records. It was a fateful meeting.
          "At the time I used to play percussion at lot of early deep house
          clubs," Paul recalls, "that was how I first got into house music, just
          drumming to pay the rent. Now I can't really remember a time when I
          wasn't into house music."
          "Violets was really good fun, " adds Neil. "There'd be all sorts of mad
          shit going on, poetry readings, Derek from the Sandals doing action
          painting with a bike on the dancefloor. The owners of the club never
          really knew what was happening there."
          Discovering a shared background of sweaty punk gigs and sweatier funk all-nighters, Paul
          and Neil hit it off. 18 months later, when Paul was playing with acid jazz group A Man Called
          Adam, he found himself recording down the corridor from Neil, where his future partner was
          working on the mix of film dialogue, Arabic singing and tribal percussion that would become
          his first single, 'Not Forgotten'.
          Both of them were bored of playing for other people's bands; Neil was into A Man Called
          Adam's 60s-jazz-meets-deep-house space-cadet soundclash and Paul thought what Neil
          was up to was wicked. They agreed to work together in the future. As Neil puts it, "The
          music we'd both been involved with up till then had been fairly retro
          and we wanted to do something else. Something that was all ours."
          The first Leftfield record was Neil's solo version of 'Not Forgotten', released in the summer
          of 1990. "The sound of 15 years of frustration coming out in one
          record," as Neil describes it. It mashed his interests in film soundtracks, high gravity
          reggae basslines and world music into seven minutes of deep house heaven.
          "I went to Ibiza and heard Weatherall playing it in Ku," Paul reminisces,
          "I thought it sounded wicked, totally different to anything else
          around at the time." On his return, Neil roped Paul in to help on a remix of 'Not
          Forgotten' for the B-side of the next Leftfield single, 'More Than I Know'.
          Although Neil now dismisses 'More Than I Know' as "a pile of shit", it was a clear
          indicator of the downtempo headfunk direction Leftfield would occasionally take in the
          future. Paul's remix of 'Not Forgotten', however, was something else entirely.
          "We left Paul in a room on his own, " Neil grins, "and he re-edited the
          whole thing on old fashioned quarter-inch tape. The whole room was
          full of these cut-up pieces of tape he stuck back together. "
          The end result was revolutionary, a timeless dance classic, driven by stuttering edits,
          spinbacks, rollickingly funky percussion, breakdowns that opened up like bottomless
          crevices and gated sound effects that took an already good tune off into hyperspace. "And
          Leftfield, " Paul intones sonorously, " ...was born."

NOBODY had heard anything quite like it before - a dance record that was undoubtedly British, but
retaining all the funk and sass of American house. It took about six months for the remix to become a
staple part of every self-respecting British house DJs set, but when it did, it was massive. Bedroom
producers across the country took notice, starting work on dubby house tracks, featuring driving
percussion loops and arm-raisingly uplifting breakdowns. By late 1991, the sound Mixmag later termed
progressive house held sway with clubland's tastemakers.
"We were completely surprised by it all, " Neil freely admits, while Paul enthuses, "It
was wicked, you'd go to a club and everyone would be going fucking mental to
your record."
Although DJs and clubbers were eager to hear the next Leftfield tune, they had to be content instead
with a constant stream of remixes. Legal hassles with Outer Rhythm, the label that released 'Not
Forgotten', left the duo unable to use the fledgling group's name on their own records. But the remixes
themselves were good enough, with the unique, compulsive Leftfield grooves they contributed to
tunes like React 2 Rhythm's 'Intoxication' being sampled again and again by other remixers.
"We come from a background of grooves, " nods Paul, expounding on the unstoppable
Leftfield groove monster. "Whether it's jazz, funk, hip hop, we've always been into
grooves."
"And punk encouraged us to be experimental, " adds Neil, "to do things like
sticking a sitar on 'Not Forgotten'."
Their abilities at the mixing desk were paid the ultimate compliment when in 1992, they were asked to
remix 'Jump They Say' by one of their heroes, David Bowie.
"After doing the Bowie remix we had everyone wanting to work with us - Paul
McCartney, U2," Paul grimaces distastefully. "But everything we've ever done has been
something we wanted to work on, not because we've been offered X amount of
pounds, but because we like the track. We started to feel like a marketing
tool." They gave remixing a rest to concentrate on their own projects, Paul's new-found success as
a DJ and their new independent label Hard Hands.
By mid-1993, they had already slacked off on their remix workload and while clubs across the world
rocked to the sound they helped create, they turned their back on all things progressive and released
two now classic, mould-breaking singles: the slow motion inspiration of 'Release The Pressure',
featuring roots reggae singer Earl Sixteen, and the epic cinemascope trance of 'Song Of Life'. Not to
mention signing an unknown proto-jungle white label by Dee Patten called 'Who's The Badman' to
Hard Hands and turning it into a huge anthem on the hardcore and progressive scenes alike.
Then came 'Open Up', shooting John Lydon's unmistakable, electrifying, whining, snotty vocals back
into the Top Ten and truly opening up new generations of clubbers and rockers alike to the
genre-smashing potential of the Leftfield sound.
"I'd known John since I was 19, " explains Neil. "We had a mutual friend who took me
round to where he lived. He was a right cunt, even worse than he is now, he
completely took the piss out of me. But he was a total fucking hero. I mean,
how could he not be? We'd wanted to do a track with him for about two years,
but it took all that time to get him to commit to doing it and to get the track
good enough."
Unsurprisingly, the pair have nothing but admiration for the former Sex Pistol's vocal abilities: "John's
basically just really into his music," they say. Coming from Leftfield, this is a big
compliment.

          SINCE 'Open Up', Leftfield have been quiet, sealing a deal between Hard Hands and the
          huge Sony corporation, and working on 'Leftism', a collection set to be the most important
          British dance record since... well, since the last Leftfield record was released. All their hits
          are there - remodelled fresh for 1995 - and in the case of 'Song Of Life' mangled almost
          unrecognizably into an awesome, sound effect-laden musical mission. The primary focus is
          still squarely on the trancefloor, but tracks like the bassbin-busting 'Inspection', or the
          maudlin Detroit-ish techno-hop of 'Space 3000' confirm 'Leftism' as more than just a DJ
          tool. It is the sound of the best part of 20 years of clubbing, partying and making radical,
          no-compromise music distilled into one glorious pigeonhole-exploding album.
          "We basically made the album up as we were going along," coughs Paul
          dismissively. "We did all the tracks, listened to them and decided it
          sounded a fucking mess. But you learn from your mistakes and we went
          back, messed around with the running order and chopped a lot of things
          out. Hopefully now it sounds complete, something that can be listened
          to in one go. "
          If he sounds a little uncertain, slightly unconvinced even, you shouldn't be surprised.

          Leftfield, total obsessives to the end, are the mothers of all perfectionists. "I think
          we're usually pretty hard on ourselves," Neil mutters.

THE first single planned for release is 'Original', a superbly dreamlike collaboration with Curve's indie
pin-up Toni Halliday that should confirm Neil and Paul's reputation as musical genre-smashers par
excellence.
While most dance producers seem happy enough with an identikit overlunged diva and a brace of
disco acappellas, Leftfield stick to their punky guns, searching out singers they can relate to - vocal
talents with guts and individuality.
"I love taking people with nothing to do with dance music, like Toni, or Danny
Red, and putting them in a different environment, " enthuses Neil. "It's getting
back to the original ethic of remixing, taking anything and turning it into
dance music." Having already recorded with one living legend, they harbour secret desires to get
Irish folk singer Christy Moore and Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant in the studio and bend them to their
musical will. Meanwhile, they've got the album to promote and a whole brace of new talent signed to
Hard Hands.
"People go on about Detroit all the time, " Paul smiles, "but we've got some music
from places like Glasgow, Maidenhead and Hornchurch that will just blow people
away. Young, fresh musicians with their own style: it's deep, soulful, jazzy
techno. Techno is the new jazz. If the modern jazz musicians of the 60s were
young now, I've no doubt they'd be making techno. "
And then they're off again, rabbiting enthusiastically about ambient/techno/jungle experimentalists
Global Communications or how Paul is dropping jazzy jungle tunes at house clubs, the best part of
two decades since they were first blown away by the Sex Pistols. Still on it, still with a keen nose for
the cutting edge. Always enthusiastic, always in the right place at the right time, Leftfield have lived
the life to the full. And as jungle, techno, house, hip hop and ambient fall into each others arms all
around us, they've lived the life needed to make the perfect record for 1995.

'Leftism' is out January 30th on Hard Hands