Photo Credit: Philip Volkers
The outspoken leader of Shiny Toy Guns talks "dance music?"
Interview by: Thomas Cesa
Many electro rock bands claim they have been interested in dance music for a “long time.” They attempt to combine indie rock guitars and shout-y vocals with slick electronic production, yet they wouldn’t know a disco ball from a wrecking ball. However, Shiny Toys Guns’ bassist/keyboardist/writer Jeremy Dawson might be an exception to that rule. He balances his appreciation for melodic, lyric driven rock with an understanding of what will and won’t fly on the dancefloor. The one time rave promoter and DJ/producer has shared the decks with DJ Hell, been asked to work with Paul Oakenfold and even knew when to take a step back to avoid being the next Darude. While on tour in the UK, Onbeat caught up with Jeremy who is looking forward to his sixth Winter Music Conference and the Shiny Tog Guns live set at Ultra Music Festival 09. Word to all producers: if you are going to remix a Shiny Toy Guns track, don’t half ass it.
Onbeat: You’re on tour in the UK now. How’s it going?
Jeremy Dawson: It’s good. We’re on day four or five. We’ve been primarily in Ireland and Scotland. In fact we are still in Scotland. Just going out to new markets and so far just about every show has been sold out.
You have a big show coming up at the 2007 Ultra Festival in Miami. You excited about playing there?
Yeah, we are very excited. Unfortunately we have to turn right around and fly straight back to Europe. The Winter Music Conference is something that is very important to us. We’re like a hybrid band, where it’s rock and it’s dance. So to go there and be a part of that world and feel at home with all our friends who are DJs and producers in the club world is cool.
Photo Credit: Benjy Russell
Do you see it as a challenge to play in front of a predominantly dance music audience?
It’s not a challenge at all. It’s easy. The American mind right now, as far as the American club goer, is a lot more open and in-tune with the new artists and producers that are out right now. The biggest clubs where we are from in L.A. are rock clubs” people going and dancing to bands like The Killers and The Bravery, along with mash-ups and full-blown club anthems…you can do that now, you can play everything.
You have people like Adam (DJ AM), Steve Aoki, Tommie Sunshine - these guys are some of the top US DJ’s. These guys will pull out a Dokken song as quickly as they will pull out a Tiësto one. So to be a band who plays future forward rock music at the same tempo as dance music, that’s influenced by dance music, it’s no challenge at all. It’s exciting, it’s fun. It’s something that people can dance to and can accept from the get-go.
At Ultra you will be sharing the stage with The Cure, a band many might see as an influence on your music. But you never site a lot of ‘80s / New Wave acts as an influence. Is it something you find flattering or something that scares you?
It’s not that we don’t like it. We are not from the ‘80s. We didn’t suddenly discover ‘Til Tuesday and start painting our hair pink and wearing six belts. In the later ‘70s and early ‘80s, bands were very focused on the melody - everything was very melodic. And you had a lot of really talented singers doing rock, pop and everything. Bands like A-Ha and even in the metal world you had your Skid Row and Whitesnake groups, where the singers where classically trained. Everything was very dramatic.
The worst thing you can have is a competitive brain in music. It’s like water competing with another body of water. It doesn’t make any sense. There will always be room for music.
You also have technology introducing itself to music outside the world of bass, drums, guitars and vocals: the sequencer and the digital arranger, instrumentation with synthesizers and drum machines. These things became the new trend that became the focus of music for that decade. We are a band that focuses on melody, lyric structure. We have a calendar that says 2007 and we want to integrate the new technology that’s available into our band. Everyday something new is invented to make music more unique and interesting. So we want to grab that and bring it into Shiny Toy Guns.
I think melody was just something that was missing from much of the rock music in the ‘90s: the “Puff Daddy years”, the “grunge years” and the “nu-metal years.” Melody wasn’t number one. It was genre and sonics and styles and trends. I think now the “song” is making a comeback.
Photo Credit: Benjy Russell
Mentioning technology and production, you have an extensive dance music background. You and Chad produced progressive, melodic dance records as Slyder.
We did melodic stuff that other producers couldn’t do because of our musical background with music theory and piano and just playing music all our lives. But it all turned around on us when dance music did a psychotic 180° against melody driven dance tunes. It was like, “Crap, we’re screwed. We’re done. Let’s move on now before we get painted up with all the Darude’s of the world”.
You were a DJ first before you got into production.
Right. Well, I started out in punk bands with Chad when we were 14-years old making screaming, horrible music. When I jumped into the dance scene it was as a DJ and a club/rave promoter in the ‘90s. It was cool.
What kind of music did you play? Any records that you remember?
Back then? Oh God. “Expansion,” “Move Your Body,” “Jack’s House”…I’d have to go dig man, it’s been years. DJ Tomcraft, Armin Van Buuren’s early stuff.
Do you still play out?
Yeah. I play mostly rock and club mixes of rock songs. I played last night in Glasgow.
It was tough, man.
How so?
The way they do is, they have a notebook and the kids are allowed to run up to the notebook and write down a message for the DJ and a song/title. And while you DJ, you look over at this list and you see: “I want to hear this [fill in the blank].” If you see a bunch of requests for the same song, you tend to lean towards it. So I’m looking at this list, and it says “Please play Pantera.” I’m like, “What the crap?!” “Can you please play Underoath, and Taking Back Sunday, and The Offspring and Green Day?” I show up with a bag of vinyl and some CDs and I know I didn’t bring my Victory Records collection - which I don’t own - with me.
That’s great.
That’s what they wanted to hear. The young kids love that really painful music that floats around MySpace nowadays. I played for an hour or so and I was like, “Where’s the resident guy at?” But they literally…you drop a hardcore record and they hardcore dance to it…with rave-like screaming and strobe lights everywhere. You play Fergie’s “London Bridge” and they scream furiously and dance to that.
Photo Credit: Benjy Russell
It’s wide open.
They could care less. If it’s good and it’s fast and aggressive, they don’t care. There’s no methodology or structure to what I saw last night. There’s no method to the madness. It just worked; the resident was killing. He was beat matching hardcore records. The kids were all but stage diving. It was unbelievable. I never saw anything like it.
You mentioned Tommie Sunshine who remixed your single “Le Disko” along with Boys Noize. Are you involved in the process of selecting remixers for your tracks?
We had a bunch of people pushing us to have him do that and I am a huge Boys Noize fan. I used to tour with DJ Hell, and Boys Noize was freshly signed to Gigolo Records. So Hell gave me all these white labels of his [Boys Noize] dubs and demo versions of his songs - just slammin’, great music. So we were excited to have Boys Noize onboard. He’s a very good producer. But we have a big hand in the process. We’ll send them right back because, we are dance producers…and remixers don’t know that. They don’t know we were in Slyder or they never even heard of Slyder.
Right.
For example, Ferry Corsten remixed “Le Disko.” When he sent it over, we were like “Yeah, you are going to have to re-do this whole thing,” and sent it right back to him.
He was like, “What the hell are you doing?” We were like, “I have 40 Ferry Corsten records. Don’t try and put one over on us. We know you are way better then this. Spend some time on this.”
The majors make a bunch of crappy promo vinyl and send it to the gay bars and call it a day.
As remixers ourselves…when a rock band on a major record label sends you a remix and a check and you just throw a beat on it…and they don’t care and the label doesn’t care. The majors are horrible at getting Beatport and Satellite Records and dancerecords.com - getting all that crap - lined up. They just make a bunch of crappy promo vinyl and send it to the gay bars and call it a day. That’s how they do it. It’s very difficult to find dance music remixes on some major labels. There are tons of them out there. They are the records you find in a bin for a dollar because the guys in the record services pools drag them into the record stores and sell [them back] by the box load. That vinyl goes into the service pools and is mailed to all the DJs signed up in the Billboard pool or whatever pools are out there for major labels. So that was the vibe that their [Corsten] camp (pause)…But he went back, re-did the whole thing. It sounds really good.
You touched on the fact that you are remixers yourselves. You have any lined up?
It’s been asked over and over. We were supposed to do a remix for The Sounds. We were supposed to work on Britney Spears’ album. We did a track with Scott Weiland…but there’s no time. We totally blew the Britney thing. It was lined-up, all ready to go. Even with the studio built into our buses and RVs, there’s no time. I would love to do a remix, but…I have an agency that does my bookings. I get an email every day or two saying “Hey, I got this great gig, you and MSTRKRFT and all these cool people on this date.” And I’m like “Oh…I can’t.” There’s almost no reason for me to have an agent. I mean, when the hell am I going to DJ? Never!
I heard a rumor that you are going to have your new record out later this year.
No. That is totally not true. That’s hilarious. The second single is coming out in February.
“You Are the One?”
Yeah. The third single comes out in the fall. No, no, no, there’s no new record later this year.
You have any remixers lined up for “You Are the One?”
I know who we want to do it. If I had my way, it would be Switch, DJ Shadow, Gabriel & Dresden and Armin Van Buuren.
Photo Credit: Philip Volkers
That’s quite a crew.
It’s [most likely] going to end up being Armin Van Buuren, Cut Chemist and Chris Fortier…which I am totally cool with. Maybe Switch too. We haven’t heard back from Switch’s camp yet. We have a lot of amateur stuff too…not amateur…really good producers who haven’t been discovered yet or haven’t put a record out yet. Our parts ended-up on the Internet, like the actual spits, and we got a couple of remixes that are really good.
We still have to do the whole, “get the right name on the right side of the record.” But I’m really into letting some of these badasses in their bedrooms get on some of this vinyl. Some of this stuff is just floating around out there - they don’t know who to talk to. I remember being that, and not knowing what to do and where to go. So the second I hear something, I’m right on top of them, emailing them saying “Dude, you are really good. You are on the right track. Keep writing. If there is anything we can do for you, let us know.” - trying to help people get started.
The worst thing you can have is a competitive brain in music. It’s like water competing with another body of water. It doesn’t make any sense. There will always be room for music.
I hear that you worked on Oakenfold’s record “A Lively Mind.”
I did three, [Chad] did one. We were actually given the entire album. And again, “enter a tour,” Perfecto and Thrive were going to send us laptops and they were like “We could do it on the road.” We were like “Ok,” but it doesn’t really work like that because of scheduling, interviews. Even if you have a five hour window to work on something, your heads all twisted and there’s not time to clear you brain out and work on a track. It just got to the point where they were like, “We need this stuff now. You guys are not going to get it to us, are you?” And we were like, “Probably not.” They ended up taking some of the stuff we did and went and got other programmers and very quickly put a record together, unfortunately, and put it out.
So your stuff didn’t wind up on there?
No. I have our versions of those songs. I like a lot of the record. That vocal track with Britney Murphy - I had no idea the girl had pipes like that. She did a great job with that. It just didn’t work out; we couldn’t get the masters delivered in time. They’re not mad at us or anything. It’s just another thing, if we didn’t tour so hard we’d be producers doing more stuff for other people, but we would not be the band we are today. We wouldn’t be in Scotland right now. I think we made the right decision to focus on the band and leave that stuff for a later date.
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