“Anything Pure Can Get Destroyed So Easily In This World”: A Deep Chat With Basement Jaxx

It’s eleven o’clock in the evening, and Felix Buxton is thinking about change.

It’s not an unusual state of affairs for the celebrated musician, one half of legendary duo Basement Jaxx. Buxton is somebody who likes to think a great deal about the state of the world. He is fascinated with the teachings of Daoism, and responds to relatively banal press-related questions with great thought and attention, gently pushing them in unexpected directions.

A conversation about his listening habits — he doesn’t have Spotify yet, although he wants to get it eventually — quickly transforms into a discussion surrounding the complicated nature of personal taste; a question about pop music morphs into a back and forth about purity and authenticity. “I suppose I’ve always found my inspiration outside the main sphere of culture,” he says at one point. It quite quickly becomes clear that’s an understatement.

Not that any of this a surprise, really. The music of Basement Jaxx has long been similarly esoteric. ‘Where’s Your Head At’ might be the single that the group have founded their reputation on, but it’s only a glimpse at the true ambition of their music, which is big, and baroque, and emphatically strange.

Songs like ‘Romeo’ take the formula of the techno banger and messily turn it inside out, producing something more akin to a Jackson Pollock painting than the tunes you’d usually find playing at a local club.

All of which makes the group’s current project a natural progression of their sound. Teaming up with Australia’s own Metropolitan Orchestra, Basement Jaxx have reconfigured their bangers with the help of a full orchestra, expanding and altering the singles that have made them one of the most exciting acts in techno into new, bizarre forms.

It’s the kind of change that would have most other musicians terrified. But Buxton’s not worried. He, after all, has been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot.

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When you’re rearranging Basement Jaxx songs for an orchestra, does your opinion on the songs themselves change in the process?

Well, the first arrangement that we did [the album Basement Jaxx vs. Metropole Orkest] was in 2011. I was working with conductor Jules Buckley and I said to him, “I don’t want to just do a dance song with strings playing on it.” So, the aim was to actually reimagine the music and make it its own thing.

And to get down to the actual base of the song, you have to [capture] all the colours and the textures. That’s about really doing something new, rather than just doing it for nostalgia’s sake, and I think Jules did that.

Is it sometimes a difficult process, seeing things change?

I think it’s great seeing change. I mean change, isn’t that what life is? Everything is change…Conversations, friends: everything changes. It never stays the same. All you have to do is try and hold onto whatever that first thing is; that first spark. You have to make sure it still feels alive, still true, and still important to you.

I’m not scared of change. I mean, that’s DJing, actually. You’re always very keen to get new remixes by people out there; versions of your songs from new DJs. It’s interesting to hear what they do and to get their take on it.

What are your own listening habits these days?

I listen to anything. The only thing I don’t listen to is pop music. I’ve never really followed pop music very much. It all seemed a bit fake to me. But I’ll listen to jazz, Tibetan folk songs, lute music…

I think it probably just comes from working in music. You come to realise that actually music is just sounds; just movement. So everything is music, really. Whenever you hear someone talking to you, or sounds of nature, or wind, that’s techno. I think that’s part of the trick of life: getting to hear music in everything.

Do you think the internet and streaming have made it easier to listen widely then?

I do want to go on Spotify, but I haven’t got there yet. But, when I get to a country, I’ll always buy some of the local music. I’ll go record shopping. It’s great to get out of your comfort zone and actually appreciate something that isn’t from your heritage, or in the current fashion or whatever.

It does feel like that’s a beautiful way to discover things about yourself. You can hear something new and you can go, “Yeah, I didn’t think I was the kind of person who liked this, but I love it.”

Yeah, but you can also learn to be the kind of person who likes anything. Actually, if you learn to enjoy something you thought was awful, you’re not suffering, and you’re actually happy and alive.

But taste is interesting. It’s my experience that we all have a fundamental note. That note is different for every person: maybe you might be an F sharp, near the middle range. And if you hear a pure tone like that, a pure sound, it makes you very happy. Something in you will resonate.

Did you find that you were always this open minded about music, or is that something that’s changed over the years?

I think when I was DJing in the beginning, I was a purist. I’m definitely more open in that way now. I was very anti what we were being fed by the system; the music that we were told was new and special. Which was why it was awesome to be in control of the music that I was listening to, away from the very narrow-minded culture.

But I really believed that club and electro was a very pure form of music. It was very much about going into a new city and breaking down barriers and connecting with audiences, or buying new music from new techno acts. It was all of these things that seem very basic. And the music itself was basic, but it was done in a very raw way.

I often feel when a new sound emerges or a new band emerges, you can very protective. Like, you want desperately to protect the heart of the thing that you love.

Anything pure and authentic can get destroyed so easily in this world. It can get shaped by people. As an artist you can worry about that. You can worry about a lot of things. You start worrying what people think and whether they like you or not, and then you can end up on a therapist’s couch.

And then they’ll tell you that it’s all about your mother anyway.

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Basement Jaxx will play Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane this April with the Metropolitan Orchestra. For all tour dates and details, head here. 

Joseph Earp is a music and film critic who writes about horror cinema, bad TV, post-punk and The Muppets. He tweets at @joe_o_earp.