Jules Spinner... This is Your Life

Jules Spinner is big news on the UK dance scene at the moment. As one half of Bhangra Knights he's had a top ten hit with Husan and more recently their cover of classic house record Fascinating Rhythm. He's also on the verge of releasing his very own sing

Date published: 1st Sep 2004

It's 1989, a year after the second summer of love. You're sixteen years old and you're just about to have your first taste of dance music and club culture. DJ Hype is playing tonight at the Rocket on Holloway Road in London, as you enter the club you are immediately swept up by your surroundings. The night is in full swing and as the crowd shake their bodies to the repetitive beats, you cast your eyes up to the pulpit that sits 20ft above the smiling faces of the party people below.

You've never heard tracks being mixed seamlessly into one another before and you are amazed by the way the DJ can influence and move his audience. You ask your friend how he is able to do this without leaving gaps between records, and they simply reply that he's got a set of decks. And that was it, that moment right there, gotcha! Another human being has been swallowed whole, bitten and infected with the DJing bug.

The very next day you go out and buy yourself a pair of Technics SL1200's, a mixer and a handful of records. You're Jules Spinner and this is the beginning of roller-coaster ride that will take you to the farthest corners of the globe, from Miami to Moscow.

Fast-forward to 1998; after holding down several residencies, DJing at seminal Ibiza nightclub Pacha, and putting on your own infamous night in London; you secure a job as chief dogs body at BMG records. After a year of making tea and mailing out records, you move onwards and upwards to the Ministry of Sound where you are promoted through the A&R ranks, eventually becoming manager in the year 2000. Once you've milked all the experience you can get from the big boys, you are finally ready to set up your own label, Lowered Recordings. It's a dream come true, so what else is left to accomplish?

How about co-producing one of last years biggest club tracks and reaching the number seven spot in the UK chart? Not enough? Ok then, how about reworking a classic house track and making that a hit? Still not good enough? Well about releasing another track at the same time, under your own name and have it tear up Ibiza over the summer?

If you're Jules Spinner then that is exactly what you have done. As one half of Bhangra Knights he took what was the soundtrack to a Peugeot advert and turned it into a club smash. 'Bhangra Knights versus Husan,' released on Positiva last summer, was an instant hit on dance floors around the country and quickly crossed over into the mainstream to take the UK charts by storm. Upon its release across the world the single found similar success, charting highly in every country it came into contact with. “At the time everything with an Indian flavour was really trendy,” explains Jules. “There was a hip hop record sitting at number one and they'd got an Indian vocal sample in there, and you had Bombay Dreams on at the theatre and The Guru was on at the cinema. So I thought, well there hasn't been a house record with an Indian sample in there, so when we saw the Peugeot advert on TV, we sampled it up and made the record.”

Off the back of that one track, Jules and his musical partner in crime MC Raul, were able to take off on a jet set tour of the globe. So far they have played venues in South Africa, Greece, Germany, Estonia, Russia, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Kazakhstan. “We've had a fantastic reaction; in Estonia we got absolutely mobbed. We were signing autographs for about half an hour, we couldn't get off the stage! Proper pop star stuff in some of the places we went to. Other times, like when we went to South Africa, we played some pretty cool venues, intimate places like the Fez Bar in Cape Town. But then we've also done performances in Moscow to 15,000 people in football stadiums. That was a great reaction, we had MTV interviewing us afterwards the whole place went wild, it's been pretty good.”

One year later and Bhangra Knights are enjoying success once more with an update of Bass-O-Matic's early house classic Fascinating Rhythm. A strange choice perhaps for an outfit that are known only for their Asian influenced music. Not so says Jules; “Well its one of my all time favourite records, we're dance based not Indian based in the first place. I've always been into house music, so we wanted to do something which reflected where we've come from and I was thinking of records which would be suited to Raul's rap, obviously his sound made part of that record [Husan]. When we re-listened to the Fascinating Rhythm track and the rap in there sounded just perfect for him, so we took him into the studio and he absolutely nailed it and so it sounds hot.”

The track has already received wide critical acclaim and just entered DJ magazine's Hype chart at number four. On general release this September, Fascinating Rhythm looks set to become another chart topping success for the boys. “We've been getting five out of five reviews in the press and we've had DJs who've been sent the white label emailing us to tell us what a hot track it is. Obviously it was a hit before, we just hope we can make it a hit again.”

As if this wasn't enough Jules is also enjoying success with his own track Rolling On, featuring the vocal talents of his eighteen year old sister aB (pronounced Abi). The track was a big hit at this year's Winter Music Conference in Miami and has gone down a storm during the summer in Ibiza with DJs such as Steve Lawler and Roger Sanchez giving it a major thumbs up. Rolling On recently entered the Hype chart at number one and the Buzz chart at number six and requests have been coming in thick and fast to feature the track on various up and coming compilations, including Sander Kleinenberg's latest Renaissance mix CD.

With all this going on, as well as having to run his own label and artist management company, its little wonder that Jules has hardly any time to himself. “It's true I don't get much time to kick back, it's pretty much music all the time. I do try and relax at the weekends but in the last year we've been doing so many gigs that hasn't really been possible. It's slackened off a bit just lately so we've had a little bit of time to breath, I've had time to set up the record and I have managed to get a couple of weekends off but I am looking forward to it getting busy again and getting back out on the road.”

Starting up your own record label during such a rocky period in the dance music scene is no mean feat. No doubt Jules has had to fight that little bit harder than most to keep his business afloat, so has it all been worth it? “Oh yeah – probably not financially at the minute but we're getting there,” laughs Jules. “It's a lot of hard work, a lot of bills to pay but if you get records signed to good record companies and put stuff out in your own right and they sell ok then you can't complain. I mean I started out at one of the worst points that you could ever start at in the dance music industry and when you start at that point it can only get better. It's not like I've been here as a label when it was the good times and now it's all misery, we started at the bad times, we're building as a label and getting bigger, so no complaints here.”

So what's next for Jules and Lowered Recordings? World domination perhaps? Who knows? What is certain is that there will eventually be a Bhangra Knights album, but apart from that Jules is keen to push the other artists on his label into achieving their best potential, especially his sister: “aB is really talented, she sings, she plays piano and violin all to grade eight standard. She's got a great future ahead of her so I'm keen to really focus on her career. As far as Bhangra Knights goes we're taking it single by single at the moment. We've got some ideas for an album but its not finished yet, we're not into rushing things, we're just taking it step by step and we'll see how it goes.”

Fascinating Rhythm by Bhangra Knights is out on 23rd September on Lowered Recordings, while Rollin On will be released in mid-October.