Fabio interview: “It’s the best festival music about”
Fabio & Grooverider head to The Secret Garden Party, with orchestra in tow
There’s no question in the mind of Fabio.
“I think it’s the best festival music about, without a shadow of a doubt,” he says of drum & bass, the music that he and longtime DJ partner Grooverider played a massive part in shaping with their weekly residency at Rage, their 14-year stint as Radio 1 specialists and, well, so much more.
“Back in the day when drum & bass had just started we were treated like pariahs,” he continues. “What the festival promoters used to do was put us right at the back on the shittiest stage and have house on the biggest stages. But the drum & bass tent was always the one that went off. I think over the years promoters noticed that – and now you’ve got drum & bass festivals. There used to be a couple and now there are 20-30 and they’re always rammed and really energetic.”
He’s ruminating about the festival circuit in particular ahead of he and Grooverider’s appearance at this weekend’s Secret Garden Party festival in Cambridgeshire. It’s a sign of the times, and how far drum & bass has actually progressed since its early-90s inception, that the pair will be appearing as the hosts and curators of the 14-piece Unknown Orchestra rather than simply behind the decks.
The orchestra, in effect a mixture of a live band, percussionists and more traditional orchestral instruments, plays a history of drum & bass set spanning the roots of jungle, represented by among others Lennie de Ice’s 1991 ‘We Are IE’ club smash, right up to the modern day. While many of the selections they’ve made Fabio wants to keep close to his chest, laughing “you’ll have to come and see it to find out,” the inclusion of ‘We Are IE’ near the starting point is pretty inarguable.
“It’s a masterpiece,” he says, “it’s the essence of drum and bass, because that’s what it is, the drums and the bass, that and one sample. It uses the Amen break like a ride and just rides that rhythm, it’s actually very subtle the way the Amen break is used. After all these years, it’s still relevant – and you can still play it.”
So what about Fabio and Grooverider’s role in proceedings? “Well, Groove does some great drop outs with his sound controller, but mainly we’re there to introduce the tracks, to be hosts. The set is divided up into different eras – we do 1992 right up to the current day. So, 92-94, then 94-97, 97-99, then we go through the 2000s and so on. So we explain what happened to the music in each era and introduce it.”
Fabio sees their offering as a different prospect to the orchestral renderings of Ibiza/Hacienda classics that have done the rounds recently. What they and the Outlook orchestra are doing is not presenting an orchestral version of drum & bass, but rather a live performance of the music that aims to get as close to the original recording as is humanly possible.
“It’s not like everyone sat down and listening to the Royal Philharmonic – it’s a rave. Hearing drum & bass played live and with this orchestra is really something – they’re so good and it sounds so authentic. We wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t sound right. We procrastinated for quite a long time about whether we should do it. But when we heard them, we were like ‘yes’ immediately.
After a spectacular debut at the Royal Festival Hall in January 2022, with a repeat show after its success, the pair and the orchestra have taken the show to various festivals including WeOutHere and Boomtown last year and Body & Soul on the Ballinlough Castle Estate in Westmeath, Ireland. “Irish crowds, they really know their shit,” Fabio says, “and they were really into it.”
But perhaps most significant of all was the chance to take the orchestra to Brockwell Park in Brixton, South London, for the Project 6 festival. Fabio’s memories run deep with the area, not least attending reggae gigs there during the tense years of the 80s.
“They used to have Steel Pulse and Aswad play, and Matumbi and all the great British reggae bands really. They’d have a little Splash, a soundsplash thing, which was heavily policed, I remember, their presence was so antagonising. Back in the day, the police were institutionally racist and they’d want trouble to start. And it did kick off a few times, I remember.”
Then there’s the park’s proximity to the very first venue – Mendoza’s – that gave him and Groove the chance to play drum & bass. “That’s where me and Groove started, on Efra Road man,” he recalls. “It was great to go back to Brixton and it really felt like home. I was born in Brixton, I went to school in Brixton, it just felt like home.
“Brockwell Park backed onto my school so straight after school we used to go and play in that park. But walking into the park and thinking ‘we’re going to do a live performance here’ just brought back memories. It felt nice, it was special.”
Ben Willmott
Secret Garden Party runs from July 20-23