MYLO - Myles MacInnes to his family - claims to hold no grudges against rock music.
This from the guy whose floor thumping album, Destroy Rock'n'Roll has become a dance hit and transformed the Scot into the latest superstar DJ.
In fact, the album itself is loaded with enough chunky riffola to keep air guitarists furiously amused. So would he really want to kill a friend?
"I love rock'n'roll, but sometimes it seems so limited by the structure of having guitars, bass guitar and drums," Mylo explains.
Reshape, maybe. But destroy? No way. "It's quite a controversial title and that's something I have to live with.
"I didn't really expect to be seen as fighting a war on behalf of dance music."
Regardless, the reluctant war hero is orchestrating all the right moves, with critics citing influences such as Prince, Scissor Sisters and Daft Punk and he's winning crowds over with tours all across Europe.
But it's the infectious dance-pop of Drop The Pressure, which has many claiming he'll be the next Fat Boy Slim. Not bad for a guy who, less than four years ago was a university student studying for a PhD in philosophy.
His academic life took him from Oxford university to California's UCLA and it was at the latter that academic pursuits began to give way to a more hedonistic lifestyle.
Mylo admits to spending less time on a thesis, which had something to do with "mind, brains, computers and consciousness", than he did on "going to the beach and listening to the radio".
You can hear a west coast theme running through tracks Muscle Cars and Sunworshipper.
All of which seem worlds away from the icy surrounds of Scotland's Isle of Skye, where Mylo grew up.
"You do tend to take that scenery for granted. It still amazes me that a lot of Australians and New Zealanders want to go to London and work crap jobs."
For now, however, he is content to base himself out of Glasgow.
Not that he has probably managed to see much of his adopted city, having only just capped off a UK tour.
He says he'll take a small break and then get on a plane bound for the Good Vibrations festival.
Fans will have to wait for any new stuff, with the self-confessed computer "Luddite" thus far unable to find the time nor the patience to sit down down and work out some tunes on his laptop.
"Part of me is dying to be a bit of a computer geek," he confesses.
Mylo is welcome to his revenge of the computer nerds fantasy. Everyone else, it seems, wants to be a DJ these days.
Everything But The Girls' Ben Watt, however, beat the bandwagon rush to the turntables. After the band's 1997 Walking Wounded tour, which finished in Australia, Watt and partner Tracey Thorn wanted to dedicate time to their young family.
Pursuing a new musical path wasn't top of the priority list for Watt.
"My life has been back to front. Most DJs are DJs first and then move on to record an album and become an artist in their own right," Watt says.
"I had never thought about being a DJ and I probably wouldn't have got started had it not been for (producer and artist and former DJ) Howie B.
"He would come over and look at all my records, particularly all my old jazz stuff, the garage records from the early 90s - it wasn't stuff we did in Everything But The Girl but it's great music.
"And he would ask me when I was next DJing because he thought I had built the collection that way.
"He kept at me to do it. I think he knew that I'd be hooked."
With the benefit of hindsight, Watt now believes that the decks were really his logical new home.
"My Dad was a big band jazz arranger and I inherited from him a love of the structure of music and how it all comes together," he explains. "The connect-ion with DJing is that arranging side, being able to put music into a pattern."
Watt started his DJ career freestyling at Howie B's Sunday night session in a room above a west London pub. When Watt ran into DJ Jay Hannan in 1998, it didn't take long for the pair to start their own club night, Lazy Dog.
After quite a slow build, the night reinvented Sunday clubbing in London, led to regular tours of the US and Europe and generated the hugely successful Lazy Dog compilations.
"I think we were lucky," Watt says of Lazy Dog's success.
"We caught a mood really, it was the right club in London at the right time.
"And I think people gravitated to it because we didn't have an agenda. Lazy Dog coincided with the sudden realisation that superclubbing was a bit boring, that hundreds of people facing a stage watching Paul Oakenfold wasn't an experience. It was cold and people were looking for a bit of soul."
The pair called it quits on a high in mid 2003. Dance music was moving in new directions and they both felt drawn to try something different. Watt moved on by investing in a club and starting a new label, Buzzin' Fly.
His enthusiasm for starting something again from scratch is palpable.
"It's the best bit, absolutely the best bit. A friend of mine who runs Rough Trade records said when you are at the top, the best thing to do is climb down and start again because the worst bit is trying to sustain success," he says.
He coined the label's name from his favourite Tim Buckley song. His focus is on unearthing new talent rather than licensing hot tracks from overseas to release in the UK.
Watt launched his new single Outspoken Part 1 - which features Estelle on vocals - late last month in London and his DJ sets now lean toward deep Afro and electro tunes. He has also signed a handful of new artists including Justin Martin and Unity.
"This feels like the label I could have started when I was 18. The whole aesthetic goes back to the post-punk DIY which drove me to get involved in music in the first place," Watt enthuses.
As for Everything But The Girl, while he would never say never about new material, fans will have to content themselves with the Adapt Or Die, 10 Years of Remixes collection which is released in March.
* Ben Watt performs at Good Vibrations, Centennial Park, February 19.
http://www.breastfed.tv/
Herald and Weekly Times -
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au
By Steve Downie and Kathy Mccabe
17feb05
