Neu Disclosure: ‘I Feel A Bit Sorry For David Guetta’

Disclosure’s rise can be viewed as both gradual and sudden, depending on how you look at things. Brothers Lawrence appeared three years back with singles on Moshi Moshi and Transparent, and in terms of recorded material they’ve been building up steadily to the end-point of this chapter in their career; a debut album due in spring of next year. But then again, Disclosure only played their first show in a grimy pub - London’s Old Blue Last - two years into their existence. Neu interviewed the pair a week prior to releasing their most recent ‘Latch ft. Sam Smith’ track. Conversation turned to the sudden popularity of their close friend Jessie Ware, to explicit videos and being pigeonholed as two young guys with decks.

So are you putting finishing touches to the album? Are you really in the thick of it at the moment?
Guy: Yeah we’re right in the middle of it. We put finishing touches on the first single and it’s just getting mastered right now, actually. We’re still writing and everything. We’re not looking to put it out until March next year so we’ve set aside some time to write it.

What’s the biggest crowd you’ve played to this year?
Howard: I think the biggest one was in Ibiza, as part of a radio 1 takeover.
Guy: Yeah we only played fifteen minutes which was a bit weird, but with 8,000 people and millions on radio 1 listening, that was quite big. It you count radio 1, that’s an audience of a few millions.

And you only played the Old Blue Last just over a year ago and that was your first show?
Guy: Seems like a long time ago now. That show was probably the most nerve wracking one that we’ve done. When you first play it’s like ‘oh my god, what’s gonna go wrong?’. The hardest part of playing live is working out how to actually go about doing it. The actual playing of it is ok. Building your live set is so difficult.
Howard: At the moment we’re re-designing the whole live show for next year. We’re gonna completely take it apart and put it together in a different way. We’re basically giving ourselves the same problems we had last year (laughs).
Guy: Yeah, just starting over again. We’re just adding a lot more synths and drums and vocalists.

So it’s all about incorporating live elements to it, making it a more realistic experience?
Guy: Basically yeah. We’ve seen a lot of people who say they play live and they just turn up with an Ableton controller. It’s like mate, you’re doing fuck all. There’s nothing wrong with having a backing track here and there. We like making it visual for the crowd. The best show we played this summer was in Ibiza at Space and it was so amazing because we were in the middle of the room because the whole crowd was around you. It was so much better than being a DJ in a booth with everyone looking up. That time round the crowd could see exactly what we were doing.

Did you ever read that blogpost from Deadmau5 saying that all he does is turn up and press the space bar?
Both: Yeah (laughing)
Guy: Everyone knows that anyway. It’s the opposite of what we wanna do. I was chatting to people the other day about David Guetta and how he fake DJs. I kind of understand it now, though. If you’re getting paid hundreds of thousands of pounds per show, which he is, it’s like if you mess up, then it’s so much money you’re liable for. Whenever he plays he relies on backing tracks. For the difficult bits, he just doesn’t do anything. I feel a bit sorry for him in a way. There’s so much pressure.

I assume when you get bigger you’ll have to be confronted with that issue.
Guy: We’ll just have to learn to play the space bar.

It must’ve been nice to get out of London, progressing quickly from the capital.
Guy: Yeah we always make sure we don’t play too many London shows. It’s not good to play too many. We just got really lucky with Europe, I think. The Europe shows are always the nicest. Whoever you are, if you’ve got (UK) next to your name on a line-up, people will turn up to see you. We’ve played some weird places right out of the way, places like Slovakia and Estonia. And they’re the greatest: They sort you out with the nicest places to stay in and they treat you so well.
Howard: Europe is so grateful for the quality control of music in England. Out there, there’s a lot of shit that comes out and it gets to a lot of people, it gets really pushed, for some reason. Whereas if you’re in the UK it’s unlikely you’re gonna get huge. Although, looking at the charts, maybe not.

So it’s like an anything goes approach there?
Guy: They just love getting people over from the UK. Especially with us being a live act, they were so intrigued to see us. They always bring a crowd, even if they’ve never seen you before.

When you first came out a couple of years back releasing singles with Moshi Moshi and Transparent - were you under any pressure at all to go straight into the route of playing live?
Guy: I don’t know. We were definitely under encouragement. Our management knew that we played instruments. We’re not just programmers. Most techno producers are just programmers, they work machines, they’re good at mixing. Whereas playing instruments such as guitar and piano meant that it’d be silly to avoid using them. We don’t ever write songs with the live aspect in mind.

You’ve also mentioned before that you’ll be working with lots of female vocalists on the album.
Guy: Yeah that’s been really cool but we’re also gonna start singing as well. The first single’s got a male vocal on it, so we’re trying to mix it up a bit. Our managers are really really good at pulling people in to do vocal takes. They’ll often show us a Youtube video of this kid singing and we’ll be like ‘oh my god, how did you find this?’ So the single that’s about to come out, I think everyone’s gonna be pretty amazed at this guy’s voice. And no-one’s even heard of him yet. We definitely enjoy bringing in unknown names into the world.

What’s it been like seeing Jessie Ware skyrocketing since the album’s been out?
Guy: Literally the last couple of weeks, it’s like ‘wow, you’re actually famous now.’ It’s a bit weird. To us she’s just our mate. We’ve been to Ibiza with her three times this summer. Now she’s on BBC Breakfast.
Howard: I think it was two weeks ago, I was in Kingston and I called Jessie and asked if I could come to this show that she was doing in Banquet records. I came and talked to her and all of a sudden these flocks of people would come in shouting ‘Oh my God! Is it Jessie Ware!?’.
Guy: We were like, ‘you’ve gone famous, what’s going on here?’ I saw her album in the chart at number 5. It’s great to see a credible artist in the charts all of a sudden.

Out of all your remixes, the one for Jessie’s ‘Running’’s still being played non-stop.
Guy: We try not to do too many remixes but literally since we started - 3 years ago - we’ve been producing.

What did you make of the unofficial video for ‘What’s In Your Head’?
Guy: Yeah we didn’t have any part in making that. It was just a random guy from Poland. But we saw it on Youtube quite early on, when it had a few hundred hits. We were tempted to take it down because we didn’t wanna offend anyone. Went to bed, woke up and it had 30,000 views. We’ve had a few emails expressing disgust, with people saying ‘your music should speak for itself’. But it’s like ‘shut up, mate’. It’s pretty great really, when you think about it.

I take it you haven’t shown your parents that one though?
Guy: Yeah! Our mum found it and it was all ‘jesus christ, oh look at that’.

Do you ever get irked by the fact that people always ask you about your music in reference to your age?
Howard: Sometimes in interviews, even nowadays, there’s people who’ve read our first press release and they start by saying ‘So Howard, you’re fifteen years old’. No, no, I’m 18.
Guy: We don’t mind being asked about our age. But I get a bit frustrated when you do an interview and the person just hasn’t got a clue what he’s saying, quoting that we’re 15. I’ll be interested in seeing when people stop talking about our age. It’ll be a sign that we’ve gotten old!
Howard: We’re still referred to as young newcomers to the game even though we’ve been around for three years.

Disclosure’s new single ‘Latch (Feat. Sam Smith)’ will be released soon via PMR Records.

Taken from the October 2012 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.