Indie Blog Archive 002: Mr. G
Published on my Independent blog in December 2014
I’ve been a fan of Mr. G for a long while now. I play so many of his tunes in my sets, you can always rely on a Mr. G cut to provide good energy; well produced, groovy and built for a big speaker stack. He’s a lively performer as well, pulling off moves that DJs half his age would have trouble replicating.
This interview was conducted around the release of his Personal Momentz LP, written after the passing of his father. It was one of those chats that filled me with nervous energy, knowing I would be touching on a very personal subject with a complete stranger... on the phone. Would he be ok talking about his dad? How would I approach the topic of his death? Just because someone has recorded an album during a period of grief it doesn’t mean they’re up for actually talking about it.
Anyone who’s met Colin will tell you what a lovely man he is, so it took no time at all for us to ease into the interview and his father came up naturally as part of the conversation.
It’s funny, as a journalist you sometimes have to ask people about the most personal subjects, things you might not even ask a friend to speak about. You have to put your work hat on and confront your fears, be human, be sensitive, full of empathy and compassion.
Mr. G talks life after the release of his deeply personal album
Mr. G (AKA Colin McBean) is a stalwart of the UK house and techno world, maintaining a high level of output, quality and universal respect within the business for quite some time now. He recently released a new album, entitled ‘Personal Momentz’, which is the result of his return to the studio following a break after his father passed away. In light of the LP’s release, and its very personal connection to Mr. G, I caught up with him to discuss the project…
Copyright: © Photography by Jake Davis (www.hungryvisuals.co.uk)
Firstly, could you ever have imagined you’d still be making music, at such a prolific rate, at the age of 53?
Not in a million years. After The Advent, I hadn’t reinvented myself as Mr. G. I didn’t want to travel again, I didn’t think I had a story to tell… and here we are 14, 15 years later. It’s strange!
You have a label, and you spend a lot of time in the studio and performing. How do you manage to stay on top of everything?
Discipline… Discipline. I’ve done it before so I knew, if I did it again, what the pitfalls are, and what not to do. I limit my gigs, I do only 24, 28 gigs per year at the most, I’ve worked my way down from doing a four a month, to three, to two a month and now I want to do just one per month, just 12 great gigs a year. It’s about not burning out, so I do my pilates, I do my yoga, my regime at home is strict; up, exercise, walk the dog, breakfast, studio, splash of rum through to about six, then cook dinner. Weekends are for touring, but Monday to Thursday is studio time. If I don’t get s*** done, I don’t feel right. Also, when you travel there’s always something you hear that can trigger an idea in your head, which you take back to the studio with you – the best tracks I’ve made are when I’ve got the energy from, say, Womb in Japan – you hold that energy and put it into the first tune you write. It’s quite fascinating.
How long has it taken for you get that disciplined with your lifestyle?
It took many years of mistakes. My favourite one was when I used to work the other way round, up all night in the studio. One night I made this track that was amazing, it was 5am and I’d been working on it all night. I turned around to get a DAT, caught my foot in a cable and powered down the whole room, having not saved anything for 14 hours! After that you realise that you’re not at your best at that time of the day. Your best time is when you’re fresh and wide-eyed, so I found a way of working that was disciplined. It took a few years, but now… it’s a way of life, the best thing I ever did.
Besides the studio time you factor in, what about your personal life? Do you keep a balance with that?
Yeah, I go out, I go to the theatre, if someone special is playing I’ll go to the arts centre, I go to exhibitions. Music is my life with regards to who I am as a person, but day-to-day it’s a small part of what I’m about. I cook, I’ll have a dinner party, I make sure I travel to places that I want to go to, to relax – I make sure I can switch off because this industry can burn you out quick! A lot of friends ask me, ‘How do you do it? You’re so prolific, but you’re out on the road’. I say it’s about quality not quantity, I’d rather miss five ok gigs for one that’s going to give me energy. Some people don’t have the ability to say that, they’d rather get as much in as they can for three or four years and end up playing a lot of gigs they’d rather not. Me, I’m only interested in the experience of tearing down a soundsystem in another country. You’ve got a good soundsystem, yeah? Book me! I’ll come and put it through its paces. That’s a turn on. If it’s anything less than that, I might as well stay at home!
Has that always been your driving force then?
Always, that’s the only force. Anyone who knew me from the time I started the Mr. G alias will know my ambition was always to play Japan. That’s my spiritual home I believe. The minute that happened it was like, ‘Wow, it worked!’ I get silly offers from places, but the sound might not be right – people don’t understand that you have something to sell but you’re choosy about who you sell it to. I don’t want to turn up in an EDM club just to build my name or to get a pay cheque, I’m not about that. I want to play to people who’ve come to sweat, to get down and be taken on a journey. You wanna come my way? Come with me, let’s go!
Did you ever find it difficult to stick to your guns in light of that stance?
Yeah, when I started the live show, the first 10 or 20 shows the kids would come up and say to me, ‘Why’s it not continuous?’, they didn’t get it. I thought to myself, everyone I’ve looked up to in the music business has just been on a one-track mission and eventually people would catch the train. This was the only way I knew how; I believed in the music, it took a while to find the ones that worked for me but I’ve found them and now people understand what I do. It took a while, and many times I wanted to give up.
The Boiler Room thing was the weirdest thing that happened to me. I ended up on there through a friend, I’d heard about it but didn’t know it well because I’m not much of a digital person – I live an analogue life in every way. I get drunk, I realise halfway through, ‘Oh s***, this thing’s going out live!’ I drank probably two-quarters of a bottle of Patron, I overloaded the system, then the girl who was in the video didn’t realise I was going to dance because I turned up calm and sober, so she was having a nightmare. I enjoyed it, but then to get home and see the response, I was like, ‘I’ve been doing this all my life, where have you been?! I can’t believe no one knew!’. It changed my life. From that day, it’s been the craziest rollercoaster. It’s been really good. But I think there are a lot of people out there who aren’t disciplined who need to come back, there are people I love who’ve stopped making records and that’s disappointing because I think they have a place in the industry and a great story to tell.
Anyone in particular you want to mention?
I’m looking for Levon. Levon hasn’t made anything in a while and I love his wonky, left-of-centre journeys. I haven’t seen him for ages, I’ve seen re-releases but I want to know where he’s at now. Maurizio is another one, he’s like my God, he can’t do anything wrong. I heard he’s doing something with Carl Craig, but I want to hear it. These are two people who give me food; the Moodymann album, I’m waiting for Theo’s album. This is like food for me.
And have these guys inspired you throughout your career I presume?
Oh totally! Moodymann more than anyone. I bought all of his stuff in the beginning, back when you’d go to a record shop and ask what’s the latest stuff in and they’d put 20 records down on the counter that you’d trust in because they knew you from being a regular customer. Theo, I didn’t understand at first, but when I saw the show at the Barbican – that just set me alight, a full band playing house music? Damn! That was also a huge part of the album because that was something I’d seen during the period after my dad died and wasn’t going to the studio. It was all that energy; he rocked my world that night. You’re always picking up a vibe or an atmosphere that might take you somewhere special.
During that period after your father’s death, were you using the time to check out other gigs and so on?
No, nothing. Nothing. I cancelled a couple of gigs and nearly ended up in court actually, because a promoter didn’t quite understand that my father had died and I didn’t want to play. I went to the record shop and had a search around, bought a couple of things but didn’t even play them. I couldn’t face going to the studio because I know that’s the realm where my demons will come out. It’s a very cathartic place, not just anybody can go in there. I knew, the moment I turned on those machines, the story that would come out would be very painful so I avoided it for nearly three months.
My friends were getting worried about me because I was lounging around, sleeping, not doing anything. They told me to pick myself up and carry on, the mrs was upset so I thought, ‘Right, get in the studio and let’s see how it goes’. When you stop making music it’s hard to get back into the flow, I thought I’d do some skits and some jams, get reaccustomed with the MPC. I literally stayed in there for 10 or 11 days straight, just coming in and out for the odd sleep and more bottles of rum. As I was writing one track, another track idea would come up while I was doing it – I finished everything, I didn’t check anything on the system downstairs, as I usually do. I just mastered it all, put it on CD and, on the 12th day, I said, ‘That’s it’ and left it. Didn’t think about it. The following week I was like, ‘Oh yeah! What about all the music you’ve been doing?’. I thought maybe one or two tracks would be ok, but when I heard all the tracks were good it was like, ‘Oh my God, what are you gonna do with this now? Because it should come out as a piece because there’s a sound and a rhythm that flows through the whole thing.’
I’d never done an album on my label before so I thought I’d use the opportunity to release it there, I got the same pop artist who did the first Mr. G cover to do this one. I wanted it to stand out like a sore thumb, ‘Here I am, come and share this journey with me’. I didn’t expect the response at all!
Can you recall what your state of mind was when you were in the studio during that sustained period?
Some of the tracks I can remember clearly. The starting point, in fact, was ‘DAD’. I found some sombre chords and the spoken-word that I’d picked up in Japan and it all slotted into place quite well. It was so meant to be, I didn’t even have to try. Some of them I don’t remember at all because I was so drunk. It would’ve been writing itself. What interested me is there’s nothing self-indulgent, there’s nothing looping around for ages, it’s always moving and progressing, which I find fascinating. My brain was clearly working! ‘Angels’ as well, took me forever to sort out – I remember that because you couldn’t here the ‘d’ in descending, so that took ages to deal with and I knocked over a drink while I was doing it, so I remember having to go and get a towel and wipe it up. The most important thing was that I was angry, so I wanted drive; I’m one of these people who pays attention to how it sounds, not how it looks, sonically. I’m not interested in whether it’s in the green, it could be pumping into the red, as long my ears tell me it can hold that sound, and it did… I expected a blur of bass but it held it.
It must have been quite a relief in some ways to reach the end of it and have that session as part of the grieving process?
I’m totally naked with that album. But there’s still a sadness in there. It’s funny because I keep going back to it, and it still feels exactly how it felt when I put it down, which in some ways is heartbreaking because I found something in myself that I never thought I’d be capable of. On the other hand, I’d rather not have opened that door in the first place. If you read the credit to my dad on the album, it says: ‘If only you’d asked’… he had not a clue what I did in life. It’s really bizarre making something in his honour that he still would never have known about. It’s tough.
That’s’ really tough.
Yeah. He knew I’d travel, but he’d never ask where I’d been, what did I do, show me something… I think I sent him one of my early CDs, but he never commented. It was that generation where your parents are your disciplinarians – I just left it at that. How sad, I can’t put a credit on the album that says something different. That says it all.
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Was your relationship quite fragmented then?
No, I loved my dad to bits but he was a different generation character. One of my friends told me he would always say, ‘I love you’ to his dad at the end of a phone call… and it took a year, but eventually it was reciprocated. So, when his dad died, he knew where he stood. So I got into a habit of doing the same with my mum and dad, it took me a year and a bit. Eventually I got some kind of sound in response, so I was like, ‘Ok, I’ll take that’. Finally it got to the point where we were trying to say it before one another, like a competition, so I knew where his heart lay. He just didn’t have the inner strength to ask me, my dad would squirm when you tried to hug him, but it was a generation thing.
He must have been into music as well though, no?
Not really. Well, I guess I got my musical reference from him. He’d record Sunday songs and old reggae records for his friends so that’s how I got into music. I had all his old 7inches, but there did come a point where the music wasn’t important anymore which is interesting because that could never happen to me.
Where are you up to in terms of the fallout after his death now? Are you finding it easier to deal with?
To be honest, he’s my father and I love him to bits, but dealing with Lex first and having that six-month period of looking after someone with a brain tumour; you cook, clean, do everything for them… I don’t think anything will ever be as hard as that in life. That is you and someone you know on a one-to-one basis for six months; no music, no down time, just washing, cleaning, cooking, going back to chemotherapy, radiotherapy, doctors – that nearly broke me. So, this would never have been a similar response. Having the grounding of dealing with Lex first and getting to understand more about death… it’s still painful but not as crushing as the first time. You have to turn them into positives and speak about them – if you don’t do both, you’re living a lie. Speak about them, you keep them alive in that way. Record titles as well; ‘Lex’s Daily Prayer’, ‘DAD’ of course, these are the ones the kids always comment on or throw back at you. I’m heartened that people feel that, sometimes it’s like the soul is going out of music but it’s really nice that people can hear your pain, see the picture and enjoy it for what it is.
What’s the deal moving forward now?
Like with everything, sometimes you have to step back. I’ve worked so hard for so long, I’ve never really stopped and listened to what I do properly. I’ve had a month off to listen to my music, other people’s music and to relax and bathe in the positive reviews. Usually I feel like nothing is never enough and more always needs to be done, but I’m happy here. I’m not even turning the studio on for a month, I’m just going to relax and go back in when I really feel like it. My first gig back is at Panorama Bar for Bicep, which will be a nice way to get back into things.
Finally, you’re a very energetic performer, tell me about your relationship with dancing?
It’s a way of life. I grew up in Derby influenced by many soundsystems and many friends. It was normal to buy an outfit on a Friday and go and hit the clubs, that grew into a crew who would travel to Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and dancing against the local crew there. It was a normal way of life, my friends would be like, ‘Col, it’s your time to dance, show them what you’re made of’, you know? So I’ve always had that slightly show-offy, “I know what I’m doing and I’m good at this” thing because that’s how I always had to be. I’m like that in the studio, if I’m making a tune and it’s proper there will always be a point when I’m mixing down where I have a visual of a dark, sweaty club somewhere and I’m on stage dancing. That goes without saying.
You can still buy Personal Momentz here.