Formed out of the musical melting pot that was Leeds in the early 90s, Utah Saints were one of the stand-out acts of the dance scene’s formative years, with singles such as What Can You Do For Me, Believe In Me and the Kate Bush-sampling Something Good storming the pop charts.
Consisting of Jez Willis, a heavy metal aficionado and mobile disco operator, and Tim Garbutt, a DMC finalist from Harrogate, Utah Saints quickly became as well known for their live performances – supporting U2 on the Zoo TV tour, among other accomplishments – as for their creative use of sampling, pillaging artists as diverse as The Human League, Sylvester, Slayer and The Average White Band. And who can forget their appearance on Channel 4’s Gamesmaster? 😉
Utah Saints’ 1993 self-titled long player made it to the top ten in the album charts, and while the follow up (2000’s Two) didn’t reach the same heights, in the years since the pair have continued to make music and remix countless artists.
October 19th, aka National Album Day, sees the re-release of their debut album, on double vinyl and double CD, backed by a host of remixes both old and new, while they’re also in the midst of a tour, taking in the All Back to Minehead and Shine On Weekender festivals, as well as dates across the UK. Could there also be a new album on the way? Never say never…
909originals caught up with them.
Great to have the chance to talk to you guys – obviously, you were quite influential back in the day, and I’m sure you have an interesting take on how the industry has changed now that you’ve re-immersed yourselves into it.
Jez: We never went away—we’ve never stopped doing music. We just went proper underground and went back to what we did back then, which is promoting nights. We’ve always been here. We didn’t just go away, do other things, and come back to music.
Obviously, there’ve been intermittent singles here and there?
Jez: We’ve been quite slow putting them out, alright. But before we go on, you’ve done some great work with 909originals. Thank you for all the work you’ve been doing for the scene. It’s amazing.
Thank you very much. That’s very kind of you. I want to talk about the tour first, since you’re back on the road and doing a few gigs around the UK and maybe in other countries as well. Are you doing a full-on live set, then? Or how’s it working?
Jez: Well, the last time we did a live show with a band would have been around 2001, when we did a track with Edwin Starr and did some gigs with him. We did TFI Friday, if you remember that, and a few TV things, so we had to put the whole band together for that.
But really, where we started was me and Tim both being DJs, and we’ve just kept doing that. This year we’ve been out every weekend. It’s not like we’re touring as such; we’ve just been DJing all the time. We’ve been out every weekend since May without a weekend off, doing everything from full-on underground dance raves, which are maybe a bit retro, to Ibiza weekends at Butlins.
We’ve also done a lot of big festivals like Bearded Theory, Camp Bestival, Sound of the Times, Soulfest, Beat-Herder, and more. When we DJ together, Tim is on the decks and I do effects and some synthy noises and stuff like that. It kind of has elements of a live set, but if we try to DJ together, we get in each other’s way.
Tim: We re-work our own tracks and re-work other people’s tracks, and we try to make it our own. These days, if you go and see Fatboy Slim live, he’s got his visuals and has re-edited his tracks, and people kind of see that as a live thing. But it’s not like when you see Orbital live—where they’re playing all their own tracks live, they’re running everything live.
I’m not saying that we won’t go out again and do a live thing; it is something that we’ve looked at. But at the moment, we’re really happy just going out and doing a DJ thing and playing as many different tracks as we can. The festivals have been really good this year because I think a lot of people may have a preconception about what they think Utah Saints are when they’re going to see us live or DJing.
So, I like to think that people kind of go away thinking, “Right, I get it now.” Yes, we’ve had records in the top 40, but our music backgrounds are so diverse that the music we’re drawing on is from the past 35–40 years. We’ve both got massive record collections, so we’re good at spotting samples – we know our sh*t, basically.
Obviously you have the anniversary album out, and that’s why I was curious about the live sets. You probably had to—and you can correct me if I’m wrong here—when you were digging out some of those old remixes and older tracks that maybe weren’t part of your repertoire over the years, you probably had to remaster them. You know, dust off the Atari ST and dig up the old settings and stuff?
Tim: Back when we made those tracks, it was complete old school, so yeah, you’re right; it was coming out of the Atari, the Akai, the M1, and some other outboard gear. But it was running straight through the desk and then onto the DAT tape, so we didn’t record stems; we didn’t record multi-tracks. We just did the track once. What’s completely different from nowadays is that when you’re working on a track, at the end of the day, you can just save it and then call it up later.
We’d make a track, put it on a DAT, send it overnight on a train to London, they’d be listening to it in the morning and then they’d come back and say ‘make some changes’, or not.
Sometimes it took weeks to make changes. We’d have to take photographs of all the settings on the desk, and we’d go in again cold. You’d never get exactly the same result as last time, so you couldn’t make precise adjustments.
Whereas now, you just open up a folder or a project, and you can go back to it and tweak it. We literally put the records straight onto DAT, and then they would go off and get mastered. When it came around to this record, we had the original DATs remastered for this vinyl release, and the same with the mixes as well.
Interesting. I was talking to Paul Hartnoll of Orbital a few weeks ago, when they were doing the Green and Brown tour. He was saying that when they were remastering the albums, he was going into what might have been a very early Cubase or something—and there were these little notes written by his 19-year-old self that popped up when he was loading certain loops. But you guys were just playing live onto the DATs you did, where it was kind of more freeform. It was like, okay, this is us in the moment, like a band, really, as opposed to constructing it through parts.
We have had discussions regularly with Paul over the years because we started on the same label together. Both Paul and Phil. We were signed at the same time by Pete Tong, and we were of a similar age.
Tim went on tour with Orbital, Aphex Twin, and Moby around America and stuff, so we’ve been fairly close. I’ve always teased Paul a little bit about his ‘anxiety synths’ because he’s got all this legendary gear that, for me, just causes massive anxiety. I always think it’s going to go out of tune or that it’ll be switched off accidentally.
Whereas with us, I think it came from a kind of different perspective—my side of things was metal, and Tim’s side was Public Enemy. What both of those have in common is that there’s a lot of chaos, and from that chaos comes something. We kind of start off from the chaotic, and you’re right; I think perhaps Paul is slightly more on the clinical, better-prepared end of things.
I think it’s really interesting what you say there, Jez, about the multiple different influences that came together to form Utah Saints. You know, you had the ’80s metal scene, punk before that, and obviously hip-hop—all these different things creating a swirl of influences. Did you both know each other from a young age? What were the separate storylines that led to Jez meeting Tim?
Tim: We had one common meeting ground, and that would have been Donna Summer – I Feel Love. Even though I liked Public Enemy, and Jez liked metal, we both bonded over that record. That and The KLF.
Jez: Basically, Utah Saints happened very fast. We met at the beginning of ’91. Then we went to the studio around March, and the record went top ten in August. So we really didn’t know each other very well at the start,
Rewinding from that, I started off in Carlisle with the ambition to DJ the school disco, as it was then—the school dance kind of thing. I achieved that ambition by the time I was 14. I borrowed all this PA equipment from the music department and bought some equipment.
Basically, I got a couple of summer jobs, and I bought a hi-fi with quite a big amp. Then I borrowed my mate’s dad’s hi-fi speakers, which were bigger than my speakers, and hired the local village hall. I started playing rock records one at a time because I only had one deck, to the local guys who liked motorbikes, basically.
Did you have a DJ name at the time?
Jez: No, I didn’t have a DJ name, not at that point anyway, ha ha. We used to charge like 50p to get in, and people would come in and headbang to rock and metal records.
From there, I saved up a bit more money. I had a summer job and bought a Citronic all-in-one two-deck system, along with a 15-quid light controller. I still remember that because I had to make all the light boxes at home out of regular light fittings. I used the cellophane from biscuit tins to make the colours, so I had a blue one, a red one, and a green one—that was it.
From that, my friend and I started advertising. His brother had a car, which was important, and also had a mobile disco setup. We started advertising in the local paper. It was called Index Disco: The One To Look Up—that’s what you get when you’re 15 and trying to be creative with your marketing.
But we didn’t have a lot of money, so I used to go around the pubs that had jukeboxes, and I made deals with them to buy their ex-jukebox singles. That built up my back catalog of hits. I started doing functions—school discos, weddings, retirement parties, 18th birthdays—anywhere that would book a mobile setup. Then I got a residency above a restaurant in Carlisle.
I also joined a band there, which did metal covers, and had my first singing experience covering Motörhead. That was where we nearly got banned from the club because, a), I wasn’t of an age where I should have been in the club, and b), I brought in these pyrotechnics, which were for a theatre basically, not a tiny little club.
So when we started doing these rock covers, the pyrotechnics went off, and I always remember the security guy running in with a fire extinguisher because he thought something terrible had happened.
But that got me into promoting and the idea of selling tickets, and I was really excited. Around the same time, I went to Newcastle City Hall with a few friends from school, and I saw Thin Lizzy. Phil Lynott was just the coolest rock star ever. I can still remember it to this day; I was probably about 14 or 15. The whole place went dark, and you had Phil Lynott shouting ‘Are you ready?’ and Brian Downey’s drumsticks—one, two, three, four—and then everything kicked off at once: the lights, the sound, and the pyrotechnics.
The first ten seconds of that made me say, “Whatever the hell that is, that’s what I want to do for the rest of forever.” So that’s how my journey started.
I came down to Leeds, started in a musicians’ collective, and with the tracks that I’d built up for this mobile disco thing, I started DJing ’70s disco. I began a night with some friends called the Mile High Club, which was ’70s disco, soul and funk. That was in the late ’80s, in a function room of a restaurant. Again, that became a bigger and bigger night.
Someone else then bought the restaurant, and turned it into a wine bar. I worked with him really closely for about a year to turn it into a 400-capacity, four-room nightclub. That was around 1990, and then we had three and a half years of madness because I was promoting four nights a week at that club, as well as nights outside of that.
I’d been in various bands with some success. I was in a surf band, and the guitarist left to join the Rollins Band. I left and started an electronic punk band called MDMA—before anyone else had the name. That’s why there’s never been an acid house act with the name MDMA, because we had it. This was before ecstasy became a thing.
We chose the name because it was a truth drug during the war, but nobody had really heard of it—certainly not in our world. Then six months later, boom, everyone had heard of it.
And so, basically, I’d left those bands and was kind of on my own. I tried working with a DJ from London, went to the studio, but it hadn’t quite worked out. I was already interested in industrial, electronic music—all the European side of things like Front 242 and the Play It Again Sam bands. I bought some gear and made the basic structure of What Can You Do For Me.
I took it on a cassette to Tim’s night, who I had only just met. Tim played it at the top of the night, and afterwards, we discussed it and decided we’d go to the studio together for three days, record that track and one other track he had already been working on, and press a thousand copies and see what happens. That was the long journey of how I got to Utah Saints.
Yeah, via industrial and metal, pyrotechnics, Thin Lizzy, and disco. I mean, that Thin Lizzy gig was probably near the end of their run. Phil Lynott died around 1986, didn’t he? So it would have been near the end of his life.
Jez: Yeah, it was. What a shame. Like I said, he was just the coolest. At the time, I didn’t even realise it fully. He made bass playing really cool. He had a great rapport with the audience and was everything I wanted in a rock star.
It’s only with hindsight that you realise what an extraordinary person he was, you know? He was doing his own thing, really, and doing it against a system that wasn’t designed to give him the easiest ride.
Oh yeah, 100%. And anyone in the world who thinks of Thin Lizzy probably thinks they were American. It’s like, no, they were actually Irish! People are like, “What?!” Tim, you’ve got a lot to live up to now—that was a hell of a story. And that idea of buying the old records from jukeboxes, that’s very clever. You had an instant record collection, right?
Jez: Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of paying for music is a whole other area—a whole other discussion. But it’s interesting trying to explain to people today that you’d buy a record just for one song. That’s mind-blowing for a lot of people, I think.
So, Tim, yourself and Jez are around the same age, pretty much?
Tim: Yeah, like Jez, I always loved music from a young age. The one thing that made me want to DJ was probably hearing Grandmaster Flash on The Wheels of Steel, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash. I remember hearing that and just thinking, “How the hell do you do that?”
This was before the internet, I lived in a small town in Lincolnshire at the time, and my only access was seeing stuff on TV, programmes like The Tube.
I remember seeing DJs messing around with turntables and thinking, “Yeah, that’s what I want to do.” So, I saved up my money, bought a set of turntables, and just stayed in my bedroom practicing for years.
What were the turntables, Tim?
Tim: Well, I had my mum’s old belt-drive turntable and tried to make that run in time with a cassette—pretty unsuccessfully. I knew I needed to have Technics because I had done my research on what everyone was using, so I got a little job, saved up, and bought some Technics around 1985 or 1986. I then practiced for two years in my bedroom.
In ’87, I entered the DMC mixing competition and came nowhere because I’d never played in front of a crowd. But I went back in ’88, won the northern heat in the UK, and that’s as far as my journey went with DMC. I got into the semi-finals that year, so I was happy with that.
Around the same time, I moved to Harrogate, near Leeds, and got a job as a DJ playing for four or five hours a night – I’d get about £30 for that. I decided to start my own night with a friend – we started putting on house nights on Fridays. On Saturdays, we wanted to do something different, because we had the whole venue, so we did more of a disco night.
That’s how I got introduced to Jez—my friend knew him and brought him over to the club. I started going to Jez’s nights, and Jez would come to mine. He eventually brought over the cassette of What Can You Do For Me, the basic idea, and I played it at our rave night. From there, we decided to go into the studio together.
Prior to that, I had done a few tracks—kind of techy, house stuff—on a label in Sheffield called Ozone. I was always fascinated by the Leeds and Sheffield bleep-type sound. I guess I wanted to be on Warp Records, because that was the coolest label, with acts like Nightmares on Wax and LFO, who were both Leeds acts. But I never ended up on Warp, probably because what I did wasn’t quite good enough. Still, I ended up on Ozone and put out a few tracks.
When I met Jez, we had both put music out separately on different labels, and I’d say he had a little bit more success at his end. But yeah, that’s basically how we met.
On the DMC thing, everyone knows the DMC Championship now and what it became famous for with scratching, showmanship, and gimmicks. Was that starting to emerge when you were participating, or was it more straightforward mixing back then?
Tim: It got very gimmicky. And what I realised with that, watching it, is that the people who progressed from it, if you came second or third or fourth or fifth, it didn’t really matter; you had to win it. And I didn’t think I was good enough to win it, but I wanted to get the jacket, a Technics jacket. It’s a UK DMC mixing thing – if you won your heat, you got the jacket and you won a load of stuff. I was only young; I was only about 17 or 18, so I was kind of happy with that.
I thought, “yeah, I like this, but equally, I want to get into doing music”. And to be the best at that, you have to devote all your time to it.
Did you have a little segue that you were particularly proud of with your mixing? Every DJ has their little signature, you know. Was there a little riff or something that you put together?
Tim: When I did the mix for the championship, I remember I used two copies of Rob Base’s It Takes Two. I had a good little trick with that. But at that time, I was watching people like Jazzy Jeff, DJ Cash Money, Grandmaster Flash, those sort of people. To me, they were like next level. And they still are.
So, I guess, what’s always been a problem for me and Jez is that, when I do something, I just look at the best. With the music, we were looking at the best – The Prodigy, or The KLF – and that’s where you would set your bar. And then with DJing, I set my bar with Jazzy Jeff, or Grandmaster Flash – those sort of people.
So it’s not like, “I want to be alright”. You want to be up to that level, and it’s hard to get to that level, but you just try your best.
You were both obviously teenagers when you started doing these nights and things like that. I mean, I’m sure your respective parents were kind of thinking there was a different career in mind for both of you. Were you trained in anything else? Were you doing college degrees or anything like that? Or was it always just like, “No, music’s the way forward?”
Tim: No, it was always music. At that age, you’re not arrogant, but you don’t really think of being a responsible adult or anything like that. You just think, right, this is what I want to do. And, you know, it’s only later on in life when other things happen. You start having kids, family, houses, and then you feel the pressure that your job has to pay.
But going back to what you said about parents’ expectations, I guess for both me and Jez, it’s that in order for your parents to realise that you’ve been successful, they need to see you on Top of the Pops and see your record for sale in Woolworths. That’s the level where they get off your back, because you’ve got a real job, and they can comprehend the level of what you’re doing.
Jez: I came to Leeds to do maths at uni, and I lasted three months. Then I got offered to tour around Europe with two different bands and do 168 gigs in a year, so I dropped out of uni. I couldn’t wait to drop out of uni, to be honest, because what you just described there has been, unfortunately, a bit of a theme for me my whole life.
This idea that music is not a legit career and ‘when are you going to get a proper job’, you know? The fact is that music is a massive industry, and there are so many ways into it and so many roles. You never get someone who’s gone into, I don’t know, town planning, being labeled as a ‘failed town planner’. They might go and do something completely different, but it wouldn’t be seen as a failure in the same way.
The whole reason I’m regularly on committees, or focus group, or UK music panels, is that I’m trying to address this narrative that music doesn’t provide you with skills. I mean, I’m not trying to be big-headed here at all, but by the time I was 15 or 16, I was running a business based around music that I had to create myself. I made all of the light boxes and had to go out and advertise. So I’m learning all these different skills, and yet it’s still perceived as ‘not a proper job’.
If I’d started a chip shop, maybe it would have been a different thing, but it’s the same skills—you’re still trying to market stuff, make stuff, and do things on your own.
I’m still on a mission to try and do a tiny bit to undo that narrative because it definitely lingers. Even though we got started early in our careers and everything happened really quickly, I still think it could have happened a couple of years earlier. But that said, nothing exists in a vacuum, so maybe it was the kick up the arse I needed.
You mentioned the bleep scene, and obviously the rave thing was kicking off all at the same time. You mentioned there was a rock night, a disco night, and a rave night in the place you were running. What was the rave scene like in Harrogate? What was it like in North Yorkshire?
Tim: It was amazing. This little club, we started booking people like Sasha in there. We had Graeme Park play. This club was only for 150 people; it had a license for 150 people, and the fire officer eventually closed it down because they came down, and we had 300 people in. But no, it was amazing times. There were no superstar DJs – everybody played everywhere, as much as they could. The fees weren’t huge, and people were starting to make a name for themselves.
You’d see Carl Cox, Sasha, and Grooverider, all on the same bill, following on from each other. Grooverider would be playing house, and the early breakbeat stuff. It wasn’t as segregated.
Whereas everything’s a bit more branded now. So if you go to a Defected night, you know you’re going to get a house thing. If you go to a Glitterbox night, you know you’re going to get disco. The club nights are brands; you know what you’re going to get in the tin. And you didn’t have that then. I kind of found that exciting, really.
We’re not saying that music is not exciting now, because I think it’s as exciting as ever, because it’s just different. But I do remember those times fondly, where you had a flyer and a phone number on it, and we’d finish our night in Harrogate and then sometimes go off to a rave somewhere on the M62 or down Blackburn way. Everybody would get in the car and drive to the rave. It was exciting.
Obviously, people talk about the little pockets around the UK with Manchester and London and things like that. Leeds had that rave scene as well. Was it a bit later coming to Leeds? What year did the Orbit start? That started around that time as well, didn’t it?
Tim: I had my stag night at the Orbit. It was a legendary venue. If you speak to people in Manchester, or if you speak to people in London, or if you speak to people in Blackburn, everybody claims different stories of where it started. I generally believe things kicked off around about the same time, but there were slightly different scenes of what people were playing.
Electronic music – imports from America, Chicago, Italy and Germany were all coming to this country – everybody had access to them. Different DJs played different styles, but I don’t think Leeds was behind Manchester. Manchester had a bigger scene because it had the Hacienda, and Leeds didn’t have the Hacienda. So people say it started in Manchester before Leeds.
But when the Hacienda was going, other thing were kicking off in Leeds. But when history’s written, it will kind of say it started there or it started in London.
I’m in Dublin – the same population as Leeds, probably, certainly smaller than Manchester, and you’ve got different people’s different ideas about what lit the touch paper. Everyone has a different opinion on that. It’s similar to the UK, except it’s more geographical there.
Jez: Yeah, I think the reason it kind of gets written like that, certainly speaking from a Leeds perspective, is that it was a bit of a mad time.
We were full—basically, our club was full—and rave had started off being written about in the media as kind of this eccentric thing where kids were going out, and it’s like a new movement, a bit like punk or the new romantics. It was another musical movement related to fashion.
But then it blew up; you got more and more momentum, and it got to the point where it felt like everyone was out at the weekend. There were at least nine or ten other promoters that we knew because we all got together a couple of times to try and work together, but it didn’t work so well because we all had very strong ideas about stuff.
Certainly, when it all really became a tabloid frenzy, I had to be at the front door quite a lot and talk to lots of different parties about the different issues to do with the club. If we got media requests, we’d always used to say “no, we didn’t want to do any interviews” because we didn’t need any more grief.
At Tim’s club, as he said, the capacity was 150, but allegedly they had 300 in there. You just don’t need any more people.
We thought ‘we’ve got a really nice crowd ‘ – people were organising buses to come from Harrogate to Leeds as well. We were full, so we didn’t need to do any interviews.
The result of that is, when you look back on it, you can’t find any media about Leeds or Harrogate or Burnley—or Dublin—you know? Or any of the smaller places, because people weren’t writing about them.
I did an exhibition called Analog Rhythms, and one of the things that was striking was that the flyers are the only relic that certain events actually took place. There was no publicity; there were no newspaper articles, there was maybe pirate radio or something, but it’s really amazing when you consider that, in terms of musical influence and stuff like that, this tiny little piece of paper is the only relic of something happening.
Jez: No, you’re right, though, but that’s how history gets written, isn’t it? And that’s how the narrative gets formed.
What were the names of your clubs, actually, the ones that we’re talking about here, in Leeds and Harrogate?
Tim: The one I did at Harrogate was called The Mix.
Jez: The one in Leeds was called Ricky’s, and then it was called The Gallery before becoming The Pleasure Rooms.
Tim: When it became The Pleasure Rooms, there was a big night coming out of Leeds called Back to Basics, which was run by Dave Beer. It didn’t start there but eventually moved to that club.
Jez: And he did do interviews, ha ha.
Just talking about, I guess, the early development of the Utah Saints sound and the name. I mean, I asked people for questions, and somebody asked, “Are you guys Mormons or something? Where did the name come from?” I’m sure you get this all the time, but where did the name come from? Was it something particular, something you saw on TV maybe?
Jez: Yeah, there’s a film called Raising Arizona with Nicholas Cage in it, and in that very last line, he goes into a kind of dreamy sequence and recalls something, and he kind of gets it wrong, and then he says, “Maybe it was Utah.”
Being sat in a living room in Leeds, Utah just seemed like quite an interesting word that you wouldn’t use in this country much. Outside of America, you probably wouldn’t use it at all. So that’s where that came from.
The Saints bit came because we wanted to make it sound like a team. Names are really hard. Metallica got the best name ever, and after that, all bets are off when it comes to names. So we put the two together to make it sound like a team.
We’re not Mormons, but the Church of the Latter-day Saints is based in Utah, and sometimes the Mormons refer to themselves as ‘Utah Saints’. We weren’t aware of that until we started getting requests to send merchandise to Utah, and then we got a couple of fans among the Mormons in Utah.
When we got asked about the name, we also used to say that we wanted to be next to U2 in the record racks because, at the time, U2 was the biggest band in the world. So there wasn’t anything too deep behind it; we just didn’t want a name that put us too firmly in any one camp.
Which obviously borrows from the fact that you’re coming into this with lots of different influences. You’re not putting all your eggs in the happy hardcore basket, for example. Obviously sampling and the development of the Utah Saints sound—sampling was key to it. You mentioned KLF; I mean, there was obviously also Coldcut, and De La Soul in hip-hop. There was a freedom with sampling at the time, which, obviously, was clamped down on, that you absolutely harnessed, right?
Jez: Yeah, we didn’t have a singer, and I’d been in bands with singers. I don’t take anything away from singers, but I was at the stage of my career where I realised that I didn’t want to put my whole career in the hands of a singer.
So, sampling kind of gave us that freedom. You’re right; it was a bit Wild West-y in that nobody really knew what it meant from a legal standpoint. Some people would go, “Right, we want everything from somebody who sampled us, so we want everything from that track,” and other people would go, “I don’t care.” In America, the law is slightly different from the way it is in the UK.
The sampler was relatively new as an instrument, but it was still being perceived in a lot of ways as a device for recycling sounds. For instance, New Order used a big emulator, literally, on Blue Monday – they’d sampled a dog bark and then sampled a choir—all those kinds of things.
Whereas what we wanted to do was sample things that, in our minds, didn’t belong in the heart of dance music and try to make them part of dance music.
Tim: It was more a DJ kind of vibe, because we never based a whole track around a sample. We always had a track going with the music, with the bass and the drums and everything, and then it was more of a DJ thing: “What can we drop over this?”
At the moment, you’re seeing this wave of re-edits of early ’90s music—like C&C Music Factory—where they just take the main loop and do something else with it. That style of sampling became what people would recognise as the sampling genre in a way. But you were doing it differently; the snippets you were taking weren’t the obvious ones. You were taking a little loop and trying to construct something new and different that subtly referenced the original artist.
Tim: Yeah, we were the only people to have a Kate Bush sample cleared. We didn’t take the essence of her track and make it the essence of ours; we just took a small segment and reworked it into something new.
So, we like to believe that this creativity is why we were able to clear it. We still get people coming up to us now saying they never realised that our vocals were from Kate Bush. We always try to treat the sample just as an instrument within our records.
With What Can You Do For Me, which sampled Eurythmics and Gwen Guthrie, it was released at the same time as the PM Dawn track, Set Adrift on Memory Bliss, which sampled Spandau Ballet’s True. It’s interesting because people seemed to think we were stealing more because PM Dawn rapped over their track.
At that time, since sampling was still relatively new—like you said, it was the Wild West—people had different views on it. But now, sampling is completely normal in music. It’s fascinating to see how perceptions have changed over time.
Yeah, I mean, you leaned a bit more on that with something like New Gold Dream?
Tim: Yeah, that was a straight-up cover.
As you said, you didn’t have a singer or a full band at the start. Obviously, when you went touring, you had the band. So when you became a live act, you had a few things going for you then.
Tim: We didn’t have a master plan, and we kind of worked with the band and developed it organically as we went along. So there was never a master plan.
The idea for the “Utah Saints” in the record came from the fact that a lot of hip hop records did it, and the KLF did it too. We just thought, “We’re a new band. We’ll name-check ourselves in the record so that everybody goes into the shop and asks, ‘Have you got that record that goes, “Utah Saints, U-U-U-Utah Saints?”‘ It wasn’t rocket science.
We were thinking of a way to market this brand, and we thought, “We’ve got a strong logo. We’ll do this, we’ll do that,” and you can see in our history how we kind of executed that.
The logo looks a bit like a football crest, doesn’t it? Was that the intention to create that kind of team/squad idea, as in a football club?
Jez: It was something to hide behind, basically. Even though we had the haircuts and all that kind of stuff, we were trying to push the music first – that’s always been a driving force for us. That’s always been the thing that’s made us keep going. I think we would have stopped if we thought we didn’t have anything relevant musically to make.
Whose voice was it behind the “U-U-U-Utah Saints” chant? Who was that?
Jez: So that was our drummer at the time, Keith. He’d come in and we said, “Right, KLF have got someone shouting, ‘KLF.’ None of us can sing like P.P. Arnold can sing. So we should just shout it.” So he shouted the name.
But in typical Utah Saints fashion, it was only after he left that we thought, “Hang on, we didn’t actually put that in time with anything or in key with anything.” To get it to fit with the track, we had to speed it up. And we said, “Does that sound ridiculous?” And it did sound a bit ridiculous, but the only way we could get it then to scan over a whole bar was to go, ‘U-U-U-Utah Saints.’
So that’s how that came about. It wasn’t anything like we thought, “Oh, this is gonna be a great hook.” We literally were just trying to get the bloody thing in time.
Obviously, everyone knows your bigger tracks. Were there any tracks that you think didn’t get as much love as they could have or you thought were going to be much bigger than they actually ended up being, like a bit of a letdown in the end?
Tim: For me, personally, we had a track called Lost Vagueness. The Oliver Lieb mix, especially, was one that got away. We also did a track called Star, which I was really proud of. But yeah, there are quite a few things, but I’d definitely say, for me, Lost Vagueness.
Okay, because I remember that being pretty big. Well, the remix anyway.
Tim: Yeah, but it was a big club thing; it never kind of crossed over to the radio or anything. I remember seeing it was one of Tiesto’s top five records at that time.
Were you going in that kind of direction – more of a rave-y or trance-y direction – at the time?
Jez: No, I think we just confused the hell out of everybody with that second album, because the first track that we put out was Love Song, which was like a four-on-the-floor thing, with me doing a little vocal and sampling Average White Band. Then the next one we did was Power to the Beats, which had a Metallica sample on it and Chuck D doing a vocal on it. After that, we had Lost Vagueness, and the original is actually a really slow 105 BPM melancholic track, and then the Oliver Lieb mix went with that.
I remember some feedback from people saying, “What are they trying to do? Are they a dance band, an electronic act, or are they trying to be a slow band, or something you listen to at home?” I guess we probably didn’t even know the answer to that.
Tim: Also, did you know, that in the Oliver Lieb mix, the vocal is Chrissie Hynde? We sampled Chrissie Hynde from a track called I Go To Sleep. We approached her, and she sent us a DAT—this is the first time that happened. She sent us a DAT of the acapella, and we took the acapella and put it through a machine called a Vocalist made by Digitech. It had one of those weird sort of random robot settings, and this amazing vocal came out.
We didn’t spend ages on it; it just worked for some reason. It hadn’t worked many times with other vocals, but her voice with that setting kind of created this magical vocal.
Have you guys ever done one of those Back to Mine albums or something? Because then you could put all these tracks on it— all these snippets you took from other tracks?
Tim: We should do, probably.
One more question – you were referencing that you’re still making music. Is there an idea of a new album on the way, or are there little bits that could come together to form a new album on the agenda?
Jez: Yes. We’re always working on new stuff, but we have crises of confidence when it comes to putting things out, I’ll be honest with you. We’re at a stage in our career now where we’ve been really busy this year. We’ve done a whole heap of gigs.
So we’re actually in quite a good headspace now, where we think it’s alright to put stuff out. We’ve got about nine things on the go, so it’s probably the basis for some kind of album.
I think we both feel like we’ve got one big push for an album in us after the re-release of this one. So we’re hoping for next year to be a super busy year.
Thanks to Utah Saints for the chat. You can buy/stream the album and keep up to date with future tour dates here.
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