Fila Brazillia interview: “We were cherry picking, and we still are”

The ‘Resurrection’ of Fila Brazillia

For those of a certain vintage, the second coming of Fila Brazillia has been one of the more heart-warming musical stories of the last few years. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Steve Cobby and David ‘Man’ McSherry were true underground heroes – a fiercely independent duo whose hard-to-pigeonhole output blended electronic, electric and acoustic instrumentation, a myriad of musical styles, and an intoxicating blend of dancefloor-focused grooves and horizontal, post-club ready soundscapes.

For a short period in the second half of the decade, the quirky Hull duo were big news. Buoyed by the success of a string of inspired albums on cult local label Pork Recordings, they became in-demand remixers, putting their stamp on tracks by everyone from Radiohead and Moloko to Busta Rhymes and A Certain Ratio. Live tours, backed by a full band, followed, as well as the launch of their own label, Twentythree, before Cobby and McSherry quietly drew a line under their collaboration in 2006 with the release of an uneven and eccentric ‘best of’, Retrospective.

That could have been that, save for a surprise email from Cobby to McSherry in 2019. “I was still working at the University of Lincoln at the time, but I had some time off because I had a hernia,” McSherry remembers. “Steve sent me some music – I can’t for the life of me remember what – and said, ‘have a bash on this’.”

Cobby chuckles, then checks himself. “Don’t make me laugh Man, I’ll laugh out my teeth because I’ve not glued them in! I can laugh them out or shout them out. One of these days they’re going to fly out and hit the guy who sits in front of me at Hull City matches!”

Whatever the germ of that musical idea was, the remote collaborative process – a necessary approach now that they live in different cities – led to the pair’s first new EP since the noughties, MMXX. It offered a neat reminder of their musical talents – a genuine blast from the past that delighted long-term fans and newcomers alike.

Since then, interest in the duo’s back catalogue has significantly increased, leading to a 2022 reissue of their delicious 1991 debut single ‘Mermaids’ – a sublime slab of saucer-eyed Balearic deep house pleasure – and an EP of hand-picked favourites and unreleased versions of classic cuts, Subtle Body, on International Feel. Suddenly, Fila Brazillia were back in the spotlight again, with a whole new generation of listeners discovering the delights or their decidedly deep back catalogue.

“It’s mad,” Cobby enthuses. “Last year a couple of people who’d been to festivals told me that the 90s was back and that they heard our music everywhere. I think what they really meant was that low tempo house was back – chuggers. We never really banged, we chugged. It was a medium ground where you didn’t have to be horizontal, but it wasn’t about banging beats and endless energy either.”

It’s easy to see why younger listeners would approve of Cobby and McSherry’s output, especially their efforts of the 1990s. The pair’s earliest explorations gave a distinctively tactile tweak to UK house of the period while drawing on ambient house culture, funk-fuelled breakbeats and a myriad of musical inspirations. As the decade progressed and wider dance music culture evolved, the pair drew on an even wider palette of influences, carving out their own sonic space somewhere between stoner funk, breakbeat-driven warm-up fare, formative progressive house (see ‘Slacker’ and ‘Rankine’), Ibiza-friendly chill-out cuts and delightfully deep and wayward drum & bass.

“We’ve never done a track that’s got all the components of a genre, and it was meant to be like that,” McSherry asserts when asked to try and define the duo’s trademark sound. “There might be three or four things from a style in there, but then two or three from elsewhere, and some daft bits. We never fulfilled the requirements of genre music at all.”

Cobby enthusiastically agrees: “We never consciously dived two feet first into a genre. We were cherry picking, and we still are. I think that’s what music should be – cherry pick the best bits and make a patchwork quilt out of them.”

The pair’s approach and working methods – which, despite not sharing a studio any more remain the same – have their roots in the early years of their friendship, when they were both in different Hull-based bands (Punctured Tough Guy and the Hitchcocks in McSherry’s case, the Big Life signed Ashley & Jackson for Cobby). Sometime in the mid 1980s, they started getting together in the studio to experiment with technology, creating eccentric collages crafted from tapes, effects, drum machines, guitars and synths.

“We kind of lived parallel musical lives for a long time,” Cobby admits. “We didn’t want to be in a band together, because we were into being in charge of our own units.”

“Then Cabaret Voltaire entered our lives and we were absolutely obsessed by them,” McSherry interjects. “Everybody else in Hull wanted to be in a guitar band and we didn’t, that’s how the two of us connected.”

Cobby nods in agreement. “We didn’t think there was a future in fuckery, but it turns out there was! Fila Brazillia was born out of fucking around – we’d be in the studio all day, and the first six hours of that was just us having a laugh. We just continued doing that.”

The success of that formula – two talented mates having fun in the studio and making music without boundaries – is plain to see on the pair’s latest release on Ali Tillett’s Re:Warm label, Retrospective Redux 1990-2022, a revised and remastered ‘best of’ that spans the entire breadth of their career to date.

Kicking off with the breakbeat-driven deep house dreaminess of early favourite ‘The Sheriff’, the collection offers a chronological shuffle through their catalogue touching on epic Balearic brilliance (‘A Zed and Two Ls’), blazed jazz-funk quirkiness (‘Little Dipper’), languid stoner funk (‘Airlock Holmes’, ‘Madame Le Fevre’), chunky house-not-house (‘Bumblehaun’), dubbed-out, country-tinged haziness (‘Neanderthal’, a 2004 digital-only rarity getting its first physical release), and synth-laden, glassy-eyed ‘Fila Funk’ (‘Hush Hush’). There’s also a new track, recorded last year, called ‘Toro De Fuego’, a forthright t typically melodious and funky club cut that recalls their most forthright moments of the early-to-mid 1990s.

“Somebody said to me that it’s like Fila condensed, and I was like, ‘really?’” Cobby muses. “It’s hard to look at your own work objectively, but a few people have said similar things so maybe there’s a bit of that in there. We have a way of doing things that harks back to another age.”

So, how did it feel returning to their vast vaults and work that was part of their lives in ‘another age’? “I don’t mind looking back, as long as you’re living in the here and now and looking forward as well,” Cobby says. “If you’re just a nostalgia project, that’s a bit sad, but we were never that. I generally don’t pore over stuff I’ve made, but when I do listen to our stuff it’s always a nice surprise. While we were putting this retrospective collection me and Man were sending messages back and forth saying things like, ‘I’d forgotten how good this one is’ and ‘why did we put that out, it’s shit!’”

McSherry laughs, then tries to explain his belief that the Fila Brazillia story can be split into four ‘epochs’, which he was keen to adequately reflect on Retrospective Redux: “It was the Pork era of the 90s, then post-Pork with our TwentyThree label, then the live band era, and finally remote working after I’d moved away from Hull and got a job in Lincoln.”

Cobby nods, before adding: “Don’t forget the resurrection! That’s the fifth epoch!”

Matt Anniss

Fila Brazillia: Retrospective Redux 1990-2022 is out now on Re:Warm – buy it on vinyl or CD