Utah Saints interview: “We’re proud we got away with it”
The return of the Saints
Dance music is part of the mainstream furniture these days, but it wasn’t always thus.
It’s easily forgotten just what a shock the early days of UK rave and techno were to the system. Pity, for instance, the poor production team at Top of the Pops faced with Utah Saints when the Yorkshire rave pioneers – the band dubbed “the first true stadium house band” by The KLF’s Bill Drummond – turned up to perform their Kate Bush-sampling ‘Something Good’ back in the summer of 1992.
“They had to have us on, because we’d have the highest new entry that week,” remembers Tim Garbutt (pictured above, foreground), on media duties today as his bandmate Jez Willis is doing his weekly slot teaching at Leeds Conservatoire. “When we turned up hey were like: ‘what are you doing?’ Well, we’re running vocals out of a sampler – on prime time television, at a time when there were only four channels. With the samples, we thought ‘we won’t get some girl in to sing them, we’ll try and be honest about, because it’s Kate Bush. They expected us to hire someone to mime the vocals. We had imposter syndrome, but we’re also quite proud that we got away with it.”
The times, as a certain Bob Dylan would put it, they were a changing. And changing fast.
It hadn’t been long before that that Utah Saints had knocked up a track in Jez’s bedroom and pressed it – it being ‘What Can You For Me’, this time distinctive for its Eurythmics sample as well as its trademark energetic beats and high octane samples – with the hope of making a few waves in the underground.
“Our intention was just to press white labels. I’d get in the car and go to Manchester and go to Liverpool, go to the record shops and leave a few on sale or return. Then they all rang up saying ‘can we have some more, can we have some more!'”
The record quickly caught the attention of Pete Tong. who was an A&R man for London’s dance offshoot FFRR, and soon the band were signed, the samples were cleared and Utah Saints were on a trajectory that would last three decades and beyond.
Indeed, we’re chatting to Garbutt because the 30th anniversary edition of the pair’s eponymous debut album has just hit the nation’s shelves. It’s quite the deluxe package too, pressed onto two slices of vinyl rather than the single piece that it first appeared on when it arrived in 1993.
Back then, it sold in equal amounts on vinyl, cassette and CD – this time, it’s very much about giving the vinyl lovers something to chew on, although there is a double CD version with even more remix action on.
“It stayed around as a record and obviously vinyl is having a big revivial now,” Garbutt says. “When London Records was taken over, the catalogue got taken over by Because – in 2017 I think. We had conversations with them and it was always something we wanted to do and it seemed right to put it out on a heavyweight double vinyl with the mixes on it as well. In any case, I still have a massive record collection, I still go into it and search stuff and rip it to digital because it’s still on vinyl only.
“We had Pete Tong as our A&R man and some good people involved, so we had some great remixes. We were massive dance heads so even though we didn’t make full on hard techno, we were massive techno fans. So to have a CJ Bolland mix was fantastic and Weatherall did a Sabres mix of ‘I Want You’, as well as lots of others.”
As well as running their own club nights between 1988 and 1994, booking the likes of Sasha, Carl Cox, Tong, Oakenfold and many more, Garbutt says they were also regulars at legendary Leeds club The Orbit, also a big influence on their sound.
“People say it was one of the best techno clubs ever,” he says. “It was in this shothole area but it was all about the music and they got really good DJs in.”
As for their memories of recording the album, it was a rough a ready affair, very much in keeping with the times. The need for the US market to have an album rather than just singles dictated its speedy assembly, but listening back now, its rawness and spontaneity definitely add to its charm.
“We recorded it in quite a fast period, in about six weeks, basically, in a little studio quite near the train station in Leeds called Lion Studios. It was owned by a guy called Brendan Croker, he worked with Mark Knopfler and people like that, he was a kind like a folk artist.
“It was a conventional studio which had an Atari and an Akai sampler, but most of the gear we had ourselves in Jez’s bedroom, so we’d bring things in. These days, it’s dead easy to save arrangements on the computer – you’d just press save. Back then we’d actually take the picture of the desk to remember where the settings were.
“Because we didn’t have automated desks we’d try to finish a track by the end of the day, get the DAT tape and put it on the Red Star train down to London. They’d get in the morning, listen to it and if there are any tweaks they thought we needed to do they’d let us know.”
There was no recording to audio, so it was all samples being run by MIDI. Even the famous Kate Bush sample on ‘Something Good’ gained its unique personality as a matter of necessity – always the mother of invention – rather than taste.
“We sped the first bit of the sample up to try to keep the rest of the sample in time. It’s very easy now to change any sample without changing the pitch, but we weren’t running audio, everything was MIDI being sent to everything in the room, so we never even had stems we could send people for remixes. We’d literally say ‘no we can send you a bit of MIDI piano or something but you’re going to have to take the sample off the CD like we did!’
“When we took that Kate Bush sample it had drums underneath it and strings – now you’d just isolate it. But all that gave it a really nice feel. A lot of great records were made around that time.”
As well as being very early on the case in the Uk scene with a fully fledged album, Utah Saints also broke the mold with a full on live act that along with the likes of The Orb, LFO and Orbital, helped the pave the way for the huge industry that is live electronic music these days.
“We always wanted to do it as a live band rather than a rave PA,” Garbutt says, “but we also got chucked in with loads of rave PA agents. That just didn’t really work for us, because you’d turn up and you’d have a DAT and you could run a few things live, but you’d turn up and they’d literally want you to play for ten minutes.”
With the evergreen popularity of nights like Bangface, where the unmistakable euphoria of rave is repurposed for an entirely new, younger audience, the live arena has been a great place for the Saints to keep their legacy not just alive but thriving. They even played a show at longstanding Central London venue The 100 Club recently, to celebrate the arrival of the 30th anniversary edition – and their commitment to the gig experience remains as solid as ever.
Having visited the club they opted to bring in their own, turbo charged PA, to make sure every frequency in the sound spectrum was operating at full power. It was a decision, Garbutt tells us, that meant they effectively ended subsidising every one of the sell out crowd’s tickets to the tune of a couple of quid.
“It was like our ‘Blue Monday’,” he laughs, referring to the huge selling New Order single that cost the label 5p every unit it sold. “But what the hell.”
Ben Willmott