Brothers in Arms: DJs Ready to Take On Korea
North Korea’s ability to do the stupidly unexpected awards them the dubious honour of being one of the most dangerous nuclear powers in the world at the moment. This doesn’t bother the Stanton Warriors. As one half of the infamous duo Dom B explains, when you’ve been in the game for over 14 years you need to act mental to stay fresh.
“We’re trying to get into North Korea to do a DJ gig. We actually downloaded some tracks off the North Korean embassy website in England, all political tracks,” he explains. “We were thinking about laying them over beats, if we get into North Korea. The Philharmonic Orchestra made it in there, but we plan to play electronic music with political messages over the top. It’s a mad idea but we’re going to try and do it this year. Well we DJ all over Asia, we’ve gone on some mad adventures together,” he adds, chuckling. “So we’re playing at all these strange places and we think imagine playing North Korea… that would be a first!”
It’s not like these guys are stuck at home with nothing to do, either. Smashed in between a mental touring schedule has been the production of their long-awaited artist album for 2011; spearheaded by a track BBC1’s taste-maker Zane Lowe has called ‘The Hottest Track in the World’. Turn Me Up Some is brutal 2-step melodically-fused dance floor bomb, and is set to cause maximum damage when the boys hit Australia later in the month.
“Yeah, he just got sent the track. The night before he did ‘hottest track in the world’ he played it and then rewound it, which is unheard of,” laughs Dom, “And that was good enough for us; we were like ‘Wow, that’s great!’, The next day he played it as the hottest track in the world, and then when it had finished he played the whole track again!”
Because of their touring responsibilities, the album, due to drop in a few weeks, turned into a lengthy process. A good thing, because it gave them a chance to test tracks on dance floors all over the world. The most important thing was to make sure there were plenty of girls on the dance floor, “The chick on the dance floor barometer is definitely high. There’s nothing worse than testing a track out and then looking up and seeing a bunch of dudes in hoods. It’s like what?!” he laughs, “So we can tick that box.”
It’s not like these guys have reached that stage in their career that they are sipping camomile tea at gigs and then heading home for an early night either. Perhaps that’s while they stay so relevant and groundbreaking. Dom is frank; “I drink a lot when I’m DJing, actually. I get involved.”
Can the Stanton Warriors do no wrong? They have a fan base that is still growing, sometimes to the point of odd obsession. Their graffiti-style artwork that they use for album and mix covers has been the inspiration for many a tattoo, but one young man takes the cake for Stanton obsession. “Mental,” laughs Dom, referring to a tattoo of the Get Up bass line which covers one punters entire forearm. “I mean, we’re super flattered by it and everything, but, crazy. I mean a lot of people have Stanton Warrior tattoos, I think at last count it was 14 or 15.” The rest are artworks though. A bass line is” he pauses indefinitely and chuckles, “A bass line. I mean, what can you say, he’s got it now, doesn’t he?”
Station Warriors [UK] play Brown Alley on Friday January 21.
