PLAYBOY AFTER DARK
May 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Alan di Perna
“I'm not scared of pop music,” declares Trevor Jackson. “In fact, I love it.” Jackson's latest project, Playgroup, seems made in heaven for underground club play, but it is also an unabashed pop album. The tracks are full-fledged songs — albeit beat-driven — performed by a cast of guest vocalists that includes hip house pioneer K.C. Flightt, riot grrl Kathleen Hannah, dancehall toaster Shinehead, ex — Happy Mondays backing vocalist Rowetta, garage rocker Kyra and R&B diva Joi. Although the self-titled debut references the polyglot dance music of the early '80s, it sounds neither retro nor ironic.
“I'm known for making really dark, intense stuff — really fucked-up beats and all kinds of crazy programming,” says Jackson. “Nobody expected me to make a record like this, which is exactly why I did it.”
In the mid-'90s, Jackson chucked a successful career in graphic design to bring an experimental edge to British hip-hop as a member of The Brotherhood. As chief of the Output record label, he's put out edgy stuff from artists such as Fridge, Four Tet and 7-Hurtz. And his skewed remixes, produced under the moniker Underdog, have deconstructed U2, Massive Attack, UNKLE and others. But a couple of years back, Jackson was no longer enjoying himself: “I'd sit there with Cubase or Logic and make really complicated beats. In the end, some of the remixes took me a month to do. I'd just leave the computer on for the whole month and tweak things constantly. It was getting really anal. So I decided to do something a bit more improvised and expressive.”
Jackson set to work inside his London loft, using an Akai S950 sampler, Mackie digital board and Emagic Logic Audio running on a Mac G3 tower. Apart from wishing to simplify his grooves, his main directive was to “avoid all current production clichés, like that Chemical Brothers TR-909 roll everyone copies all the time.” That flight from conformity led Jackson back to the diversity of the early-'80s club scene, which had inspired him as an adolescent.
The memories got even stronger when Jackson started working with guitarist Edwyn Collins, veteran of '80s Brit indie band Orange Juice. Collins brought in many of his cronies, including Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera), Dick Cuthell (ex-Specials) and dub reggae ace Dennis Bovell. “I'd worked through 200 to 300 grooves at that point,” says Jackson. “I wanted to collaborate. So I took what I had into Edwyn's studio, and we started jamming on it. Some of the tracks were half-hour jams, literally. I took all the audio home and spent months chopping it up in the computer — verse, chorus, verse, chorus — and turning it into songs.” They rented vintage keyboard gear, including an Oberheim OB8, Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Roland Jupiter-8. “But I also used an Access Virus quite a lot,” Jackson adds, “and this thing called the Sid Station. It's got a Commodore 64 computer chip in it, and it makes really fucked-up 4-bit computer game noises.”
Jackson considers each of Playgroup's collaborators to be an individual. “All the people on my album are outcasts or freaks in their own way.”
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