Groove Armada interview – “Every time you do a hit single you get asked to make lots more of them”
The devastating duo on 25 years at the top
“I’ve been out in the field, that’s why I look a bit dishevelled,” says a faintly windswept Andy Cato as he logs on to our Zoom meeting from his National Trust farm near Swindon. “This is prime time trying to get all the crops sewn for Autumn while it’s dry.”
For a man who’s spent a lifetime navigating music’s notoriously perilous crossover realms – recording and performing alongside friend and bandmate Tom Findlay as Groove Armada – this may seem like the unlikeliest of interview openings. The band have just released their latest single, ‘Hold A Vibe’, and the 25th-anniversary boxset album GA25 is scheduled for release on November 11. For the moment, though, Andy is preoccupied with altogether more earthy endeavours.
For the past 15 years, the Grammy-nominated artist has combined his wildly successful music career with the noble pursuit of sustainable farming. Having learned some of the unpleasant truths behind modern food production, he spent a decade researching less destructive ways of growing food, eventually setting up the Wildfarmed project alongside some friends. “It’s all been about trying to find new ways of growing things. Helping growers change the way they farm and help consumers to participate in that process.”
After years of living and farming in France – where he was awarded the Chevalier l’Order Merit de Agricole for his services to agriculture – he returned to England in 2021 to help facilitate the new project. While achieving the Wildfarmed manifesto of ‘fix food, fix the planet’ is both entirely necessary and vast in scope, if his success in the (figurative) field of music is any sort of indicator, there’s ample reason to believe Andy will continue to make strides in the (literal) field of responsible agriculture.
He and Tom have achieved barely imaginable musical feats since launching Groove Armada during the halcyon days of UK rave in the late ’90s. An act forged in London’s subterranean depths, the duo managed to scale heights that are more typically the preserve of balls-out pop artists, scoring a series of commercially successful hits while stubbornly retaining artistic integrity. “It’s hard to quantify,” says Andy .”It’s been an enormous privilege to have this long in the game, with my best mate, having the maddest set of experiences anyone could hope for in one lifetime.”
Their 25-year career has seen them release eight studio albums, thirteen compilations and scores of singles. Songs like ‘At The River’, ‘Superstylin”, ‘I See You Baby’ and ‘Get Down’ are among those that will live long in the memory, having garnered top 40 chart positions in the UK and across continents. Presented alongside an even greater number of esoteric club-primed jams and an effervescent live show, the true context of the Groove Armada project becomes all the more palpable.
Maintaining a position on the cusp of the underground and the mainstream is a challenging task. Tilt too far in either direction and audiences are alienated, credibility lost. For Andy and Tom, walking this stylistic tightrope was a case of instinct over design. “I think that’s where we’ve ended up cos that’s who we are,” says Andy. “I was brought up in the early era of house music and free parties, and that’s what changed my life. Similarly for Tom, it was the Tonka parties around Cambridge, so that’s where we’re most at home. DJing in a small dark basement was where most of our formative years were spent. That’s the world that we come from.”
Much to the dismay of some of the bigger imprints to which they were signed, Groove Armada were never about cynically hammering out an endless succession of chart-toppers. They often refused to bow to label pressure to replicate their biggest hits, continuing to make the music they loved rather than chasing monumental sales. “Every time you do a hit single you get asked to make lots more of them. So, when it was ‘I See You Baby’, it was like ‘can you do 12 more of those’. When it was ‘Superstylin” ‘can you do 12 more of those’. What we did instead was to make music that we like, which was incredibly varied. That made packaging it much harder, it meant we probably didn’t pursue the pop riches that we could have done, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
The pair’s fortuitous meeting was instigated by Andy’s then-girlfriend, now wife, Jo, who had been a schoolmate of Tom’s. “I met him in his bedroom at his parent’s house for the first time, he had this pretty cool set-up in the attic with wall-to-wall records and a window he could smoke dope out of. It was teenage paradise.” Andy had been producing music since the late ’80s – recording “house music white labels” under various monikers – and, at the time he and Tom first met, was also a member of the band Beat Foundation along with his flatmates. We [Beat Foundation] had just signed a deal with Virgin, and making music with Tom was just a real nice Sunday session,” says Andy. “I’m shit at football, but Tom’s a brilliant football player, so we’d have a kick about on the park, he’d show me a few tricks. He’d bring a few of his disco records around, and I’d show him how to take samples from them. That’s how we started making music together.”
Before long, the duo were regularly DJing at Tim ‘Love’ Lee’s ultra-hip Tummy Touch events in London, and the earliest Groove Armada singles were produced as “party promotional tools” to support the nights. With things simmering along nicely, Andy and Tom went away for a week to record more promotional tunes, and it was from these sessions that the project dramatically burst into life. “We ended up with an album’s worth of material, which was ‘Northern Star’. One of those tunes was ‘At The River’, and Zoe Ball started playing it on Radio One, Rob Da Bank put it on the front cover of Muzik magazine. Thanks to ‘At The River’ and then ‘I See You Baby’, which came not too far after that, our world transformed completely. We found ourselves wrapped up in every cliche of what was, still then, a very old-school music industry.”
With interest in the group skyrocketing, Andy was forced to make a tough decision about where to focus his musical attention. “I had to have a very awkward conversation with my long-standing flatmates [and Beat Foundation bandmates] to say that I was gonna have to focus on the Armada. That was where it was happening.”
Inspired by the unprecedented success of their first flurry of hit singles, Groove Armada found themselves in unfamiliar territory, surrounded by all imaginable pop cliches and “very much being pawns in a bigger game.” The band were signed to the same US label as pop starlet, Britney Spears, and their undeniable crossover potential set them on an uneasy course with their new bosses. “Bizarrely, they decided they were going to turn us into pop stars, as they did with Britney, and we didn’t have much say in that. We found ourselves doing crazy tours of the States in cheap limos and being taken to radio stations to do pointless interviews. It was just the whole pop chaos – record executives with big cigars and all that stuff. None of that was particularly positive.”
Though uncomfortable at the time, Andy reminisces of these episodes with a knowing fondness, realising that experiences of this kind are unlikely to be lived through by the vast majority of aspiring electronic music acts, particularly in today’s rapidly shifting landscape. While he feels the era of self-publishing and social media marketing have democratised some aspects of launching a musical project, he suggests the same tools that simplify the process have in turn made things more competitive. “I think people have got more control of their destinies now, by and large. And, of course, to get anywhere back then, you just had to get the ear of an A&R person, whereas now anyone can release anything and just get it out there. But the downside of that is, because anyone can do that, there’s so much music out there. So getting to a point where you can break through the noise enough to make a living from it, and start making albums rather than just an endless succession of high-impact singles is difficult.”
If the ‘GA25’ boxset feels like a fitting way to crown a quarter of a century, the new ‘Hold A Vibe’ single arrives as a no-less felicitous garnish, featuring creative input from an old friend as well as a new – but intimately familiar – player. “The original idea for the groove came from my son, Theo, that’s him playing drums on the track. Then me and Tom kept tweaking the vocal and adjusting the bassline until we got that Notting Carnival spirit coming through.” The track sees the band welcome back long-time collaborator, Red Rat, an artist who made an indelible impression on Andy when he first saw him performing on an East London sound system stage. “I was wondering, in something of a daze, through Victoria Park in London after one of our Fabric residencies. It was a bit of a rollover, as was often the case back then. This guy came on stage in a red catsuit, with this extraordinary energy, I mean, you’ve got to see him live, it’s insane!”
From then on, Groove Armada followed him closely, enlisting him to perform vocals on ‘Final Shakedown’ and ‘Get Down’, as well as inviting him to perform on some of their tours. “He played at the legendary night we did at Brixton Academy with Richie Havens,” remembers Andy. “It was a classic Groove Armada moment where we had Red Rat and Richie Havens hanging out in the wings while we played a hip-hop track with a Status Quo sample. A very British combination of styles!”
Memorable live shows such as this have been a regular feature of Groove Armada’s long and winding journey, and while the trials and tribulations of international touring have led the band to call time on bringing the show to the road, they couldn’t sign off without one last hurrah. Pre-covid, they’d planned a farewell tour of the UK, but the pandemic-induced spanner-in-the-works led to some unexpected re-scheduling. “Various things got postponed and rolled over,” says Andy. “It ended up being quite an odd finish, we did our venue tour in April but had some festivals left over from 2019. So our last UK gig, quite bizarrely, was in Cornwall, near Redruth, I mean, who would have predicted that five years ago?” he laughs.
Delays notwithstanding, the tour was a resounding success, with fresh-faced audiences and pent-up exuberance contributing to some suitably atmospheric gigs. “All the live gigs this year have been electric. What’s really nice is that there’s a whole new demographic, so we weren’t playing gigs to people of our own age. When we played at Lattitude, there was an absolutely packed tent and the average age was probably 21 or 22, and the people there knew all the words to all the new stuff, all the ‘Black Light’ stuff that we love. It’s great to not just be playing the old hits and being quite tired, you know. It just felt really fresh and relevant and a great place to leave it.”
They may be approaching the end of the live concert road – a final tour of Australia kicks off in November – but it’s profoundly reassuring to know we haven’t heard the last of Groove Armada. A return to their roots is very much on the cards, with the pair set to resume turntable activity once they return home. “We’re gonna keep DJing and getting back into making pure house music,” smiles Andy. “It’s gonna be fun!”
Words: Patrizio Cavaliere
Pre-order your copy of the 2xLp, 2xCD anniversary collection GA25 here