By Andrew Drever
Felix Buxton knows what you’re thinking. Not another major electronic dance music act from yesteryear shoehorning an orchestra into dance music and peddling the live show to retired ravers in Australia.
In the last couple of years, we’ve had UK DJ Pete Tong and the UK’s Heritage Orchestra with the ‘Ibiza Classics’ tour. We’ve had Ministry of Sound and their ‘orchestrated’ versions of classic club tunes. And, perhaps most bizarrely, we’ve had New York house bad boy Armand Van Helden backed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Basement Jaxx return to Australia in orchestral mode next month.Credit:
But British dance duo Basement Jaxx (Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe) were collaborating with Dutch orchestra, Metropole Orkest, more than eight years ago, playing shows and issuing an album, Basement Jaxx Vs. Metropole Orkest, so they can’t be accused of jumping on the bandwagon. Now they’re collaborating with the Sydney Metropolitan Orchestra for Australian shows, headlined with two performances at the Sydney Opera House.
“Some of the old ravers have grown older and they don’t want to just hear a regular DJ anymore,” Buxton chuckles. “They want to dress it up and have a night out. But I always said that I really don’t want to just do a DJ set with beats and people playing strings on top. I was always very conscious of the danger of just doing a tacky thing.”
When we speak, London-based Buxton is frantically working the phones and email to Australia, pulling the show together from afar. He’s also producing a new “didgeridoo waltz”-style instrumental and forthcoming Basement Jaxx single, tentatively titled The Yodel Song, to make its debut at these shows.
Alongside The Metropolitan Orchestra conducted by Sarah-Grace Williams will be a full band, horn section, classical chorale singers, dancers and long-time Basement Jaxx live singers Lisa Kekaula, Sharlene Hector and Vula Malinga. At the 2011 Metropole Orkest shows, the reinterpretation of their back-catalogue was so radical there wasn’t even a need for Buxton and Ratcliffe onstage, but Buxton confirms they’ll both be in the sprawling ensemble in Australia.
“Simon will play guitar in the orchestra and I might play a bit of percussion,” he says airily. “They [the tour promoters] said they wanted us to be onstage, which for me … I’m very happy to be putting it all together and getting the whole thing sorted, but honestly, I didn’t really need to be on there. Anyway, I’ll be there, and sorting it all out up to the last minute as well.”
I went and got married a year-and-a-half ago, moved house and did various other adult things.
Buxton says orchestral arrangements of Basement Jaxx bangers like Red Alert, Where’s Your Head At, Romeo and Samba Magic don’t contain dance beats at all. Adopting a purist’s approach to the project, they didn’t want anything resembling a DJ playing along with an orchestra.
“With our music, it’s not straightforward dance music," he says. "There’s loads of textures and different grooves. The whole idea was to capture the energy and the life of our music. I love classical music - I’m a real Mozart fan - and to me that’s alive and full of energy and joy. We wanted to get that without just getting someone to play an acid line along with an orchestra. That, to me, would have been a cheat.”
Despite the frenzy of activity in the camp leading up to these shows, Basement Jaxx have largely been inactive in the studio and as a live act for the past five years.
From the mid-1990s until 2009 (when they released two studio albums in the same year), they undertook an exhausting and constant cycle of 12-inch singles, DJ gigs, underground club nights, studio albums, touring and press promotion that ran uninterrupted. They’ve released just one studio album proper since then - 2014’s Junto - and their riotous live show hasn’t been on the road since 2015, the duo instead concentrating on carefully selected DJ appearances at festivals and high-profile events.
“After 2014, I said to Simon that I was keen to take a break,” Buxton says. “Basement Jaxx was very central to my life and I thought 'I’ve got to be doing more than just Basement Jaxx'. I went and got married a year-and-a-half ago, moved house and did various other adult things. Simon’s always been better at having a home life [than me]. He’d already had a child and he did that move to adulthood a few years ago, but I never did. Also, with albums obviously affected by the internet and modern music, it didn’t seem necessary just to keep on pumping out music. It seemed like it was a good time and mentally healthy to go and DJ for a bit, and say we’re going to live our lives and catch up with those human bits we hadn’t before.”
Basement Jaxx and The Metropolitan Orchestra play Margaret Court Arena, Melbourne, on Saturday, April 13; Sydney Opera House on Sunday, April 14 (two shows) and QPAC in Brisbane on Thursday, April 18.