This weekend sees east Oxford’s pinnacle event in the social calendar, Cowley Road Carnival. With the free Carnival itself in the park on Sunday, today and tomorrow we’re looking at the warm-up events taking place this weekend. On Saturday, Roots Manuva comes to town as part of the fundraiser Fiesta In the Park. Preempting this, however, is a Carnival Warm-Up show at the Cellar on Friday night courtesy of Skylarkin Soundsystem, promising to get the weekend celebrations off to a raucous start.
Headlining the show is DJ and record producer Wrongtom, fresh from releasing the Duppy Writer collaboration record with Roots Manuva last year. We caught up with Tom via the means of Twitter this week and chatted about his upcoming show, working with Roots, and what the future holds. Read the full interview after the jump.
Are you looking forward to Friday’s show?
Yes! I’ve had a few weeks off from djing and Skylarkin’s always a good session. Hopefully should have a couple of new tracks to preview too.
Nice! I understand you and Mr Larkin go back a bit?
It must be about 5 years now. I think he heard my bootleg of Lily Allen’s LDN and got me to play his old Brixton gig in 2006.
Do you like playing in Oxford? How’s the crowd?
I love playing there. The crowd’s always open minded, and I’ve rarely had any dubious musical requests.
On that note, what can we expect to hear in your set?
No doubt a lot of 80’s digital business as ever. I’ll probably get a bit of jungle and a nod of dubstep in there somewhere too.
Hopefully a bit of dub too, eh?
There’s always room for a bit of dub.
Going back, you got your break through producing & touring with Hard-Fi, how did that come about?
I was mates with the singer Rich and did some stuff for his previous band Contempo. He kindly kept me on board when things took off for Hard-Fi back in ‘05 and I’m still working with them now.
Hard-Fi - Wrongtom Meets the Rockers of East Medina
What were the highlights from this period?
The gigs at the Astoria at the end of the 2005 tour were some of my favourites, the last one was like a Christmas party but with two thousand people.
You’re credited on their No.1 album right?
Haha yeah, something to tell the grand kids. Most of what I did was scrapped though. I guess I forgot we were making a pop record!
Tell us about where you went after the success with Hard-Fi. It must have opened up many paths for you…..
In some ways it did but actually the next major thing was the Slime & Version mini album for Roots Manuva/Big Dada neither of whom seemed particularly aware or fussed about what I’d done with Hard-Fi.
Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom - Dub For The Worms
Is that where your relationship with Roots Manuva started? How did it come about?
Yep. I was sent a promo of Buff Nuff and wanted to give it a dubby rerub so dropped the label a line. They actually asked me to have a pop at doing a radio friendly mix of the next single Again & Again. I sent it over but Shy FX had done one which was admittedly better. I figured I’d never hear from them again.Then I get a call asking if I’d be up for doing some dubs to accompany the album. I had 9 days, barely slept for a week and handed over 7 versions which were mastered later that afternoon. This was summer 2008.
Blimey, and after all that you carried on working with Roots Manuva, eventually leading to the Duppy Writer record last year?
It started out as a plan to rework his 1st LP as they never did any dub versions but they couldn’t find all the acapellas so it slowly turned into a retrospective of his back catalogue.
Did you work alongside him? What’s the process when re-working artists tracks?
I don’t really have a process, unless you could class stabbing around in the dark a process. I did most of Duppy Writer on my own playing along to Rodney’s acapellas and building the tracks up like that. He got more involved by the end when we recorded the single Jah Warriors.
Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom - Jah Warrior
Have you played the tracks live with him? He is over in Oxford for the Fiesta in the Park performance on Saturday….
We did a couple of gigs together last year, like a live split channel dub thing, lots of echo and reverb. It worked really well in a small club but we supported Bonobo and tried it in front of about 1000 people and it didn’t feel right. Not bad but sort of inappropriate.
Finally, what’s next for Wrongtom?
Quite a lot. Just started working on some tracks with an deejay friend called Deemas J, hoping to have a single out together soon. I’ve got various remixes piling up including a remix project for Tru Thoughts records (something which has been in the pipeline for ages) and I’m slowly but surely putting my own LP together.
Cheers Tom. Best of luck with it everything.
Go and visit Tom’s website for all more music and musings. And don’t forget to get your tickets for his Skylarkin Carnival Warm Up this Friday at the Cellar; the best way to kick off your Carnival weekend.
