I Feel So Hexstatic!
Too much can be a bad thing
The prospect of Hexstatic playing Zoetrope, underneath Blowback towers, has got me a little over hexcited. I turn up at the sound (and vision) check to meet the boys, only to find that I can’t take them upstairs as I’ve left my swipe card in the office. No-one can let me in as, everyone else is at home getting ready to come out later. We shuffle into The Kitchen, (the venue not, actually a kitchen.) with me rooting through my bag only to realise I’ve left my Dictaphone…and the questions upstairs too. Things are not working out.
More kerfuffling ensues as we’re told that the bottle of wine Stuart’s been carrying round, can’t be drunk here. The waitress eventually sees the look of dire need in my eyes and relents. I take a glass.
I break the ice by telling Robin and Stuart about when we started the Blowback – all those months ago – we had a wish list of people we wanted to interview. Hexstatic was on it. Their heavy mash up mixture of breaks, beats, Cliff Richard and whatever generally got a party going, expertly combined with a visual eye fest that has reduced MTV flickers to tears of joy; was one of Blowback’s earliest baptism moments. They are, in short, directly responsible for influencing the gorgeous beast. I’m met with awkward flattered silence. Okay, it wasn’t really a question, as such, what does it feel like to be heroes?
R: Oh I don’t know, we play the 333 quite a lot and people tend to lump us in with them. But we take it quite modestly I suppose.
S: It’s funny because we were always doing our own thing. And now it really does seem like the future. We’ve never really been over involved with Avit’s site or huge technical improvements or anything. We’re always pushing it though. I mean I’ve got a new Mac and y’know it’s a brand new laptop and I already feel like I might be stretching it.
R: Now it’s something to be a VJ though. There’s been a real development in software and equipment. V-Jammin’ and better programmes for editing and looping.
S: I’ve got this DVD mixer, which is amazing! We’ve got the new Ninja DVD on it so we’re going to mess with that. But we are throwing things in all the time – the set is evolving as we play.
R: We like, build off the set, we’re throwing out the things that don’t work and he’ll either bring something new to it, or I will. It does get difficult, you get into set routines after about 30 or 40 shows. But tonight, well we haven’t played for a while so we’re just going to mess with it.
R: We don’t really have rehearsals. I didn’t like the idea from the start.
Tomorrow Hexstatic play the Lille Capital Of Culture festivities. Over on the continent they look at visuals in a different way, more prestige is given to the visual artiste.
R: Well we’ve played The Guggenheim Musuem (laughs) that was surreal.
S: We don’t do this for chin strokers
There has been a slightly more, goatee growing political angle to some of Hexstatic’s work. Back in ‘98 working with Coldcut as Hex, they did a Greenpeace record called Timber, which featured sampled up rainforest carnage. Recently pictures of George Bush and chimps have appeared in the live show.
S: [Conceding] Well it’s kind of there. The Timber track was more for Coldcut really, but mostly we’re in it for the laugh.
R: We’ve kind of found that a lot of people who do visuals are quite political. Y’know The Light Surgeons etc…
S: Infact when we were over in Chicago, some people from the audience actually thanked us because we weren’t political. It was like ‘Thank God there’s only so much 9/11 stuff we can take.’
R: We enjoy it. We’re about having fun. If we weren’t having fun we wouldn’t do it.
I launch into a rubbish speech about how you can’t produce art if you’re unhappy. Complete balls. Robin bails me out by saying,
R: We want people to have a good time.
S: I’ve never done a gig sober I don’t think… Well the name Hexstatic is a homage to that life style I suppose.
R: Yeah I did a bootleg with Flawless and Eminem’s Purple Pills, that was supposed to be the ultimate pilled up anthem.
S: I’ve never thought what it would be like to experience it sober.
Funnily enough neither have I! Stuart takes another glass of wine, Robin unfortunately, has to drive tonight. The pizzas arrive and we’re told we most certainly cannot eat that in The Kitchen. Others Blowbackers arrive and say equally as dumb things to the boys as the night properly begins. We get smashed.
I remember Bush’s leering face, Nancy Sinatra doing Drum n Bass, Julie Andrews doing something unmentionable and Cliff being totally wired. I remember laughing my arse off, dancing and everyone looking, talking bollocks to a French guy… fragments to piece together in the morning.
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