Awards… Easily one of the most contentious aspects for any genre. Especially drum & bass. Trust us on this one. The stress of organising, the pressure of the night, the inevitable backlash of the results.
For us that stress with the Drum&BassArena Awards seems like a long way away (although it will be on us before we know it) but for the Drum & Bass Awards – the crazy rave-focused yin to our sit down, industry-focused yang – all the stress and pressure is happening now… And will climax on Saturday March 4 at Castle Donington with one of their biggest line-ups ever.
Chase & Status, Sub Focus, Camo & Krooked, Sigma, SASASAS, Shadow Demon Coalition, Hazard, Danny Byrd, Dimension, Friction, Congo Natty, Mollie Collins and many more will be soundtracking the celebrations as The Drum & Bass Awards celebrates their 11th ceremony and 10 years in the awards game.
We caught up with founder and promoter MC Magika to discuss the development of the awards, the unfortunate issues they experienced last year and why there is more than enough space to necessitate two different awards in our game. Get to know…
Two weeks before the big day. The calm before the storm?
I guess so… I’ve been doing this a very long time now. It’s relatively relaxed. Final preparations and bringing it together – everyone knows their role and does it well. Nowhere near as much stress as the first award. Oh man, that was a whole other head fuck.
Take me back to that first one!
I need to go back further to really set the scene – I was MCing for years, I never came in as a promoter, I was an artist – I was Carl Cox’s MC for seven years. But along the way I made friends like the late Murray Beetson who ran Dreamscape, Dave Pratley from Helter Skelter. Old school heads. I got to see how they did things on many levels – marketing, structure, production, bookings, logistics, all that. I would go to raves and watch and learn. I was never one of those MCs to fly in, do the set and fly out. I would hang around and watch them because without their work the whole rave scene wouldn’t be anything. I wanted to know every mechanic.
So all that helped me when I started doing events with my partner. We never wanted bog standard parties – we wanted to deliver experiences. So yeah when we first started the awards I’d already been doing parties for years but the first awards was a completely different challenge. There were no awards at the time. The old guys from Knowledge Mag and Accelerated Culture did their own awards – like ours, you had the rave one and the sit down one – but they both wound down in the early 2000s. Around 2005 I thought ‘something’s not right – every other culture or genre or industry has awards, why hasn’t D&B got one anymore?’ I was thinking about it for years then decided to have a good go at it in 2007. A lot of people didn’t want to play at the first one. They didn’t want to know – they were sceptical.
People are sceptical about awards full stop!
Massively. I took a lot of flack when I started this. Because I’m a face as well – especially back then I was still very much Magika the MC not Imran the promoter. People knew me and could take shots at me. I was a target of punters, the industry, artists. I didn’t take it too personally – we’re all passionate about the scene aren’t we?
It’s funny. I actually love seeing how much people love the genre and how they take it so personally. You need a helpline after the awards to counsel people through it. The messages we get are mad – it needs to be a 24/7 manned phone. But that’s how passionate people are and no one can take that away from them or the genre. So from my perspective I need to make sure I’m representing every part of the spectrum of the genre and flying the flag for D&B, getting exposure for us all, spreading the message and create an amazing party that attracts a really unique crowd… You have the core ravers, you have the people who aren’t serious heads but love D&B and want to come to something special and you have the older people who don’t get out so much because of commitments but still love the genre. They’re a very loyal, passionate and increasingly international crowd.
It’s a big and diverse enough crowd for two awards!
Exactly. Between Drum&BassArena and us we cover the same ground where our predecessors left – Accelerated Culture did the big rave award, they stopped and we stepped in a few years later. Knowledge Mag did the sit down awards, they stopped and a few years later you cater for that side. Two very different experiences – one message.
I want to go back to the year you started. Mid 2000s was a mad time. Loads of new people coming through, changes in production technology, a real change of guards…
EVERYTHING was changing. Line-ups were different every single month. New names coming through, lots of old names getting jaded. It had happened before with the old line-ups were the same big names time after time then in the late 90s it all changed and you had your Bad Companies and Ed Rush & Optical dominating. It happens – it’s the beauty of drum & bass and how it evolves. Our 2015 awards, for example, we had guys like Maztek, June Miller and Optiv & BTK. The heads knew what we were up to but a lot of fans were like ‘who?’ But that’s what we try to do – we try to cover every nook and cranny and try something different.
Can we talk about the situation you experienced last year with Best Tune?
If we have to haha! But yeah… my very first thought was ‘people have voted this track as best track – that’s what they wanted, shouldn’t that count for anything?’ But the other side of me thought ‘we’re going to get slayed for this’. The thing was we didn’t stipulate in any rules that the track should be released within that time frame.
Bricks Don’t Roll did get bigger in a way. More and more DJs were double dropping it, especially at festivals. The crowd always sings along to the bassline. I heard it more in 2015/16 then I did in 2014/15
Exactly. How do you gauge it? If it’s big and it’s loved by a lot of people then why not? I spoke to some very big guys in the industry. Godfathers of the game and they agreed it should be kept in – it’s what people voted for. I spoke to Hazard and Guv at the time – because a track has been voted for surely that counts for something? Hazard’s fans voted for it. By denying the award he was kind of throwing it back at them.
But I do agree there needs to be a timeline – a lot of talented people are making amazing music all the time, we need a timeline to make sure people get a fair chance. But I won’t change the results because Guv’s tune didn’t win. But this is what people need to know; I don’t sit around a table with some big guys talking about who should win. It doesn’t work like that, as you know. We aren’t the cause of why people didn’t win. Anyway, I still have stacks of respect for both Hazard and Guv, they’re good friends of mine. I just wish we’d had a little more communication between us all. Anyway, a timeline is now in place – it’s the track of the year, not track of whenever. And so we move forward…
With the biggest line-up you’ve ever had!
We’ve pulled out all the stops, yeah. We’re working with a big production company. We’ve moved to Donington raceway which has been overlooked in electronic music. Back in the rave days it was a mecca for your Dreamscapes and Fantazias so we want to bring that vibe back. But in terms of the biggest line ups I think 2009 is a close contender – we had Chase & Status with Plan B and Kano, all the underground guys, Annie Mac, David Rodigan. A right mix. A massive celebration of people in the scene and people who were supporting from the outside.
I think we’ve covered a lot of angles and there’s scope to grow in this venue – we’re surrounded by some key cities with big D&B populations. It feels right to make this return at this level. I want to go back to that time we had at Custard Factory in Birmingham – we had a real base and home there and it really flourished. When that closed down we did one event at Rainbow Warehouse, then Gatecrasher in 2015 then London last year in the summer which wasn’t the best move. It didn’t work in the way we wanted to it to work. So we came back into the original timeline, the original place in the UK and the original spirit we were founded on…. Celebrating drum & bass and having the best party possible.
Celebrate with them: Drum & Bass Awards 2017 – March 4 – Castle Donington Exhibition Centre
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