Decius interview – “It’s not just a genre, it’s a cultural place.”
From bath house to acid house
“I’ve been five times and I didn’t get in once,” laughs Lias Saoudi, the lead singer with Decius, as well as a certain notorious band from South London called Fat White Family.
He’s talking – you probably guessed it already – about Berlin’s famously choosy nightclub The Berghain. But, despite having a zero success entry rate during his time spent living in the city a couple of years ago, Saoudi is definitely enjoying the last laugh now.
He’s actually made it in via a very different route. His spectacular falsetto vocal gymnastics on ‘Look Like A Man’, the lead single from the band’s first album Decius Vol1, now haunt the club from the inside on a regular basis. Practically every resident there has adopted its glorious combination of roughneck acid house and vocals on the edge of hysteria over the past few months.
Indeed, glorious combinations is very much what Decius is all about. Named after a shortlived Roman Emperor – full name Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus Decius – because they wanted something that sounded definitive and possibly even slightly pompous, the band are a fantastically unholy union of Liam and Luke May, DJs, producers and founders of Trashmouth Records, Paranoid London/Warmduscher man Quinn Whalley and FWF frontman Lias Saoudi.
It’s an alliance born, like so many others of late, from the many interlocking communities of the Windmill venue in Brixton Hill. Liam and Luke had encountered Clams Baker, frontman of FWF/Paranoid London hybrid act Warmduscher in his days before the band’s formation, when he’d worked for leading US house label Strictly Rhythm and booked them and Quinn for DJ dates in New York.
The link would take on new significance years later and four and a half thousand miles away. Back in their native South London, Luke, Liam and Quinn found themselves regularly playing the Windmill under different guises, while, as Luke puts it, “entangling ourselves with the Fat White Family”. Their label Trashmouth ended up launching the career of the Fat Whites and Warmduscher and produced the former’s albums Champagne Holocaust, Songs For Our Mothers and Serfs Up! and the latter’s Khaki Tears. At a certain point, Luke recalls somewhat vaguely, “Decius just seemed like the right thing to do.”
A string of low key 12” singles began to establish the name in underground circles, the likes of Daniel Avery, 2 Many DJs, Moxie and Erol Alkan all picking up on them. Now, with the arrival of the triumphant debut album Decius Vol1, the moment for them to come out of the trenches, all guns blazing, has arrived.
Those already struck by the Paranoid London bug will immediately recognise and lap its acid house credentials, but at the same time there are several other dimensions. There’s a rawness and ruthless simplicity going on that delves further back, back to the very early days of Chicago house and its rarely discussed roots in gay culture. Then, the addition of Lias Saoudi’s voice, set to an hysterical high pitch worthy of The Associates’ Billy Mackenzie, working sometimes as a texture and at others a planter of seemingly random phrases that slowly evolve into dominating, mind-fucking mantras with repetition.
“The melody and the beat definitely take precedence,” Saoudi tells us as he (in Brixton Hill) and the May brothers (in Putney) hook up via Zoom, “The vocal is like another texture really. I love that with certain dance records, where you might just get a single line, some bit of whispered malevolence, dropped into that psychotropic atmosphere.”
“Yeah, you want it to become a bit of a mantra,” Luke adds.
After we congratulate Lias particularly on the exceptional high pitched vocals on ‘Look Like A Man’ he confesses that some of the highest moments were pitched up using studio technology, only to be contradicted by the May brothers. “It wasn’t”, they laugh, Liam clarifying “there was guide vocal that was, but that’s all you. It didn’t need it!”
The album’s lyrical content remains fascinating though too. The second teaser track from the album, ‘Show Me No Tears’, tells the story – in abstract terms – of a punter’s distinctly unhealthy and unechoed romantic attachment to his dominatrix. “These are the kind of scrapes we’re interested in,” laughs Lias. “It’s just all the things that I’d always wanted to be but haven’t quite plucked up the courage to be – yet. That’s the theme of this album.”
Recorded in the suburban environs of New Malden in deepest South London, where Trashmouth’s studio was located before the pandemic saw them relocate to the May family home in Putney, the first rule of Decius Vol1 was a strict “no stress” policy.
“A lot of it was done on the fly,” Luke says, “We had a no struggling manifesto as a part of it, Nothing was really figured out… It was quite natural. So it’s quite easy to get transcendental, because there was no stress vibes.”
It must have worked. At least. Lias, who’s been juggling a number of different projects in recent years, said enjoyed the escapism of disappearing to the depths of New Malden for a few hours here and there. “It was like sort of like therapy for me, from the other projects I was working on. I’d be crawling in and saying can we just do a couple of hours, I need to tap into that vibe. And then I’d get a finished track back six months later and it always sounded good.”
For Liam and Luke, the project had a distinct theme – to reconnect to house music’s primal urges, the kind of vibes shaped by the earliest house clubs like Ron Hardy’s Muzic Box in Chicago and the pioneering disco of Patrick Cowley before him. “There’s a certain element where we’re homaging where we feel something came from,” says Luke, “It’s not just a genre, it’s a cultural place, where gay Black American culture threw up these unexpected forms of music, coming out of difficult places.”
At the same time, much as Decius Vol1 is clearly the work of people who inherently understand that culture, they know there’s inevitably a British twist to it too, something they’ve also decided to embrace fully. “We’re homaging it quite clearly but consciously just doing our own thing with it,” says Liam, “When British musicians take American music and do something weird with it, that’s also a thing that we like. But we didn’t sit down and think about doing that before we started, it just happened.”
As for Lias, the nuances and niceties of house music culture were simply something he didn’t have to worry about. “This is a complete departure in that I really don’t know anything about house music, acid house, techno – I like it, when I hear it I know what I like, I know what I don’t like – my big brother plays some serious suspect EDM. But what the genres are and the BPMs, I don’t have a have fucking clue. So I’m doing everything back to front.”
With the band playing their first live show last month to a rapturous audience at Bermondsey’s unpretentious but ultra-cool Unit 18 club, nestling on an anonymous industrial estate in the shadow of Millwall’s football ground, and plans to press on with new releases as soon as they can, it feels like the momentum of Decius is rolling along quite naturally. There’s clearly no reason to worry – the combination, however unusual, is evidently one that works.
“It’s sort of like being a tourist,” says Lias by way of summing up, “you never get too bogged down with it. That’s not how I like to work.”
Ben Willmott
* Decius play Studio 9294 in Hackney Wick, East London on Friday January 20.
Buy Decius Vol1 here