Basement Jaxx March On, With Their Tits Out

Basement Jaxx's Scars will be one of 2009's most overlooked dance masterpieces.

It's so packed with house-y goodness, thick layers and curious guests, and is a big noisy mess with a little more pop constraint than their last two albums — but still a lot more fun.

We had a chance to sit down with one half of the Jaxx, Simon Ratcliffe, while the boys were in Toronto spinning a DJ set downtown Toronto in November (it was rumoured to go waaay past 3 a.m.).

The dynamic duo have come a long way since their DJ residencies in the London underground. Thanks to that, Ratcliffe had a lot of whacked out stories about current working partners Yoko Ono, the hardcore badass-ness of Yo! Majesty and their mysterious new EP.

CHARTattack: OK, we have to ask, how was it working with Yoko Ono? How did that come about?
Simon Ratcliffe: That came about because initially Felix said he wanted to meet her because we'd heard that she was a fan of our music and that was quite exciting.

And there's a journalist in America who's interviewed us a couple of times and he just so happens to be her music manager. So he'd communicated to us that she was into what we were doing, and were quite excited about that. So we managed to pin her down.

We went to New York to see if anything could happen and then we tried to make the most of it and booked a studio for two weeks and we got whoever was around to come in and record.

So Yoko, she came in, she's a very busy lady, and she was 76 then, so 78 now, so she said she'd give us an hour of her time and we didn't know what to expect. Felix has some words written down [for "Day Of The Sunflowers (We March On)"], some kind of train of thought lyrics and what came out was quite Yoko Ono really.

Ah! I thought she wrote it that song!
A lot of people did. Felix wrote it.

She came not knowing what to do. We thought she would come saying, "I want to be a tree," but she was like, "Well, guys, tell me what to do."

So we did. We asked her to do this melody and she did it and then asked her to go off a bit and she said, "You mean, do a Yoko Ono bit?" and we were like, "Well, yeah." After 40 minutes she was gone.

[You can watch her perform this disjointed bit of Yoko brilliance here.]

"Twerk" with Yo! Majesty sounds like the biggest party on the album. Did you have a party making it?
That was part of New York sessions. We were really productive then, and it was done early on. We started the album in April 2007 and then it ended about two years later; it just dragged on for far too long, but we got a lot done in those first two weeks.

Yo! Majesty, they came up from Tampa and we had them in the studio for two days. I had heard their stuff, but I didn't know what to expect; I'd never met them, but it was like, FULL ON.

It's very hard to tell them what to do. They come and they are Yo! Majesty and you might say, "Do you think you could just say 'bitch nigger' a bit less? And maybe just remove that 'motherfucker'?" Then they just look at you and carry on anyway. It's very hard to direct them.

But they were wicked, so cool and funny. And like, Jwl [B] takes her top off, she got her tits out in the studio with her Jim Beam, some Jack Daniels and a big skunk. They're hardcore.

For the first time in Basement Jaxx history, you don't have interludes on your album. What happened to those breaths of fresh air?
I miss the interludes, to be honest.

The reason they're not there is because it seemed inappropriate. The fact that most people will be downloading music from the internet, what do you charge? In England for a track it's 79p for a track, 99 cents in North America. So do you charge 99 cents for 10 seconds, or do you add it on the beginning of that song? But that means every time you listen to that song you've got to go through the interlude and it just felt a bit... it was just deemed not relevant.

But I'm a bit sorry about that because if there was anyone who was championing that, it was me. And our manager and Felix were just like... grumble...

You've also done something else a little different… you're releasing a weird EP!
In England, we're a pop group. We've been in the charts a lot and that's weird and as an antidote to that, we're releasing this EP.

It's like Scars part two. It's some of the first music we did for this album. It's jazz, ambient, experimental and largely instrumental. We wanted to do a double album, but then we all said that's not relevant these days and it's a bit off-putting, so we put it out by itself for the people who know it's there and for the "heads" who would be interested in that sort of thing.

We'll put out some physical copies because the artwork we have for it is beautiful, but most of it will be for download. Most of it is instrumental, and it takes its time and it's really just us being free and doing stuff that has no relevance to club music or pop music and if we have any 15-year-old fans, they'll probably just be really disappointed. But they probably won't even hear it.