Session Transcript:
J Majik
Red Bull Music Academy, London 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

J Majik was born Jamie Spratling, in the suburbs of West London. Luckily, it was within reach of London's record shop mecca, Black Market. Saturday morning shopping sessions and a 7am graveyard slot at a low-rent London nightclub, provided a good education. His first production was the pedal-to-the-metal anthem Six Million Ways To Die. Since then, he's established himself as a talent with Lemon D and Dillinja on the massive Your Sound, experimented with house music and set up his own Infrared label. "It's not as hard as you think," he claims modestly.

J Majik: »I grew up in the suburbs of West London, so it was not too far for me to go into Black Market records to check out music and try and get white labels. My first gig was a place called Spats, a club on Oxford Street. It started at about 7 in the morning. So I got a warm-up spot there and I was playing as everyone was coming in and kind of out of their heads. It's really difficult, because people don't want to know until you've made a tune or unless you know someone to get your foot in the door. It is really hard to get a name as a DJ or even get the chance to play anywhere because most people that are warming up are just friends of the promoter or whatever.

I got a job in a shop called Lucky Spin, which was in Chelsea at the time, about ten years ago. I could get my hands on white labels before other people. And I met a few of the DJs who came in. Meeting all these people and getting their vibes was really important. People like Mickey Finn, and Reinforced was the kind of label that I looked up to. They were making a sound that was experimental for the time and it wasn't like everything else out there.

It felt like I was spending all my time mixing and trying to get in there, and it seemed like there was a forcefield around it. Then suddenly from making tunes, the people whose tunes I wanted to play recorded with me, asking if they could get tracks from me. So the whole thing kind of changed overnight.

A guy called Ranks, who was working in the shop as well, knew an engineer in Camden with a little studio. He said: "I can get you some time there for virtually nothing, to have a little mess about." So I grabbed some samples and went in there. I really didn't know what I was doing. I grabbed a ragga sample and made Six Million Ways To Die with some beats off other records that I liked, and a few little piano stabs and string stabs from old tracks. I just knew I wanted to make a tune that was at 140 bpm and had breaks in it. It came out on Lemon D's label and actually went on to become a quite big track.

From there I got more into producing. I got in the studio again with Lemon D and Dillinja, who makes drum 'n' bass as well. We did a track called Your Sound, which kind of got me into the whole Metalheadz thing, working with Goldie and people like that. I think it was a sort of talent-spotting. At the time Goldie was working for Reinforced, as a talent scout looking for new music, so it benefited all of us really.

The drum 'n' bass scene was really exciting, there were all of us artists at the Blue Note every Sunday, there was a special vibe about it. We all felt like we were trying to and done something new, so it was a good feeling. Then all of a sudden the media and record labels of the world seemed to descend into Hoxton Square overnight. They all wanted a slice of the cake, they saw that drum 'n' bass was a bigger business than just underground clubs and that maybe they could go down there and spot new artists to sign.

You get the odd drum 'n' bass track that crosses over to the mainstream, but generally it's underground music. I think that once you sign to a major you're there to make money for them. One of the first was a guy called Alex Reece who did a track, Feel The Sunshine. They gave him a whole lot of money to sign up with them and I don't think at first he realised the pressure that he'd be under, and the fact that he was there just to make money. They weren't just going to say: "You can do an underground album and you can put out what you want and just go with it." It's difficult to make underground hits and for the A&R men to say: "Yeah this is what we want."

I was approached by Virgin and Mo' Wax. I did a single for Mo' Wax and I was going to do an album but they all want you to sign for five albums and they won't compromise. You've got to look at the big picture and think: "In five years time, am I still going to want to be making a drum 'n' bass album?" I think I was lucky that I didn't sign at the time because you can make a lot more money by doing it yourself with a label. Licensing it out or holding your recording rights to yourself, rather than giving it to someone else and getting 16% of the money, which is what you get on a royalty rate.

At first Infrared was an outlet for my own stuff, I wasn't putting other people's music out, just the odd remix from people like Peshay and Goldie. It was just so I could make a track and put it out in a month rather than go on a waiting list. But over the years I turned it more into a business and now I'm releasing other people's stuff and signing people.

It's actually not as hard as you'd think. It's basically just finding a pressing plant, a guy who can do the artwork, and coughing up the money to get it pressed. Basically that's it if you just want to put a record out and not promote it and just get it on the street, it's as simple as that.

At one point I messed around with deep house and more experimental stuff for a couple of months. It's helped my drum 'n' bass production because I think if you're making other sorts of music, you look at it from a different point of view. I'm still interested in making house tunes because I like house music. Not 'handbag' house, more disco. It's good to try and make all sorts of things. If you're DJing every week and you're going out and hearing music, you've got a better idea in your mind of what's going to work on a dancefloor. My production has changed since I've been DJing more often because I want to make tracks that are going to get rewound or make the crowd go mad. Before I'd have my headphones on and smoking weed all night, getting really deep into it.

I've always made different styles of drum 'n' bass. My older stuff was more hard-edged. At the moment I'm certainly going down the house route, because it's fresh to me at the moment, but I always want to make tracks sound really bassy and more hard-edged. Drum 'n' bass is all different sorts of music, there are stages where it sounds a bit kind of techno and then it will sound jazzy. That's the good thing about drum 'n' bass, you can use snippets from all different sorts of music and make it work. As long as it works on the dancefloor it doesn't matter. I'd love it if my track rocked Cream. I'd love it if Pete Tong played it. The more people that play drum 'n' bass the better. Cream are doing a drum 'n' bass night this year, which shows that drum 'n' bass has come back into the media. About a year or two ago it went underground and a lot of the magazines were saying that maybe it was on its last legs.

Over the last year I've built the label up. I've got more artists, and I've got a few people working for me. I just signed some guys called Accidental Heroes. I just want to put out more music and different people's music and just to try and build it up to be a top drum 'n' bass label. I'm not going to put out tunes thinking: "That would sell 3 or four 4.000." I've got to be into it and it's got to work with what's on the label.

The main thing is to be honest with people and tell them what you are doing. At the label, I let people have a bit of an influence on what's going to go on with the release. Because at the end of the day when I put a record out with Defected, on my royalty statements they are always minus because they spend so much on press. Infrared artists can decide if they want to spend loads of money on advertising or whatever.

You can't put an artist's record out and then have them go and release the track on someone else's label after you've done all the groundwork for them. So they've signed an album deal with me, which is nothing. I felt that with other companies, you go in there and they'll want you to do five albums or commit to them. You don't really know what you are committing to so I think it's important to be independent and not put all your eggs in one basket. You need a contract. I verbally agreed with one label that they could put a track out and do 2.000 copies of it and then I called up the distributor and they'd done 10.000. But I had a verbal agreement, so really I had no leg to stand on. So you've got to get something on paper, even if it's just saying: "This is what I'm going to do." And it's not a contract.

Matrix has just made a house tune and everyone is slating him saying: "He's sold out," and: "Why is he making house?" It's exciting for drum 'n' bass producers to make other sorts of music because at the end of the day, when we got into it, it wasn't drum 'n' bass, it was just music at 150 bpm. It's important to keep your eyes and ears open for ideas that are going on in different scenes and keep re-inventing yourself.«