Complete hard drive corruption: It’s every producer’s worst nightmare… Especially when you lose over 12 years of work. Over a decade of ideas, complete tracks, samples, templates. Everything. This is what happened at Social Security HQ in 2011. In the words of Moses, one half of the brotherly duo, “it’s enough to make you want to quit writing music altogether!” Luckily they didn’t. Instead they switched up this ultimate nightmare scenario to their own ‘benefit’ (sorry) and started again from scratch with a mind to go ‘next level’ with new ideas, new mindset, new techniques and, naturally, a new hard drive.   The first fruits of this fresh chapter escapade came our way in April with The United Colours Of Benefit Vol 2, a blistering four-tracker with none other than Nicky Blackmarket. Now this week, they’re rebooting again with another critical quad; The United Colours Of Benefit Vol 3. Boasting a range of vibes that stretches from their own 2013 revisit of one of their earliest works (Break & Social Security’s Warm Bass Rising) to Genesis from a brand new signing Cambridge, it’s another surefire sign that the artists once known as Child Support and Crisis Loan are back and firing on more cylinders than ever before. For added proof they’ve also given us a slamming mix, too. So read on a find out about their hard drive nightmare, bend your ears around their Benefit blend and find out how YOU can get your material signed to their label Benefit Beats! What happened? At the end of the 2011 we had Benefit 6 ready and waiting to roll, but we actually lost all of our music on our hard drives. Total meltdown. 11 or 12 years of material. Unfinished music, tracks, sample libraries. Everything was gone. It was a horrible time, man but everything happens for a reason. So 2012 was spent regrouping and working out how we wanted to build it all back up and do it better. Gutting! It was really, really bad man! We lost all our favourite drums and signature basses. When you lose it all, it’s such a massive blow. It’s enough to make you stop making music all together. We really had to think about what we were doing. Plus I was finishing an acting degree and my brother was finishing his masters in photography. So we had a lot of things to work out and a lot of commitments. It was a hard time… You couldn’t retrieve anything at all? No. The insurance company were like ‘oh send over your hard drives and we’ll assess the damage and nothing will happen’. Lo and behold, they send them back and there was nothing – completely clean! But as I said, it’s a blessing in disguise – we’ve had to go back to a fresh page and we’ve elevated our sound and techniques in a big way so we’re very happy. Great stuff. Tell us about the new EP… We’ve had a lot of support from some big DJs on the new stuff, which has been very exciting. We’ve got so much brand new music to release; our last EP featured Nicky Blackmarket and this new volume sees us go back to 2002 and revisit a track we did with Break. We’ve also signed Cambridge, who’s getting major props from Goldie right now. We’re doing another EP project called The Producers. We’ve always incorporated Marvel comic style artwork in our releases so we’re setting up an Avengers style theme but called The Producers. We’ve got some great artists lined up, some people I really respect like Force and Verb. We’re also looking for new producers to get involved, too… Nice. How do budding producers get in touch? Email is the best, hit us up thesocialsecurity@gmail.com. We’re open all ears and really looking forward to hearing from the next generation. We’ve just signed someone called Sterling Sound and he is out of this world. We’ve got a lot of big plans with him and there’s even talk of an album. There are some amazing things to look forward to man, so many incredibly talented people starting to emerge… The scene’s pretty healthy right now… It’s healthier than ever! There’s a lot of music to get through, much more than before, but I think that keeps people on their toes. They know if they don’t step their game up then they’ll get lost in the sea of endless beats. I think that’s very important for keeping the quality levels up. The amount of fantastic music I’m getting daily proves the high quality… And the music we’re about to release proves this too!   United Colours Of Benefit Volume 3 is out now.  Listen and download.

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