Forty years ago, Stereo MCs formed in Clapham, south London, blending hip-hop with electronic influences and transforming dance music into a true live force. Since then, they have achieved five UK top forty hits. The most notable was their mainstream breakthrough, ‘Connected’, which landed them support slots with the likes of Happy Mondays and De La Soul, as well as remix opportunities for U2, Madonna, and Tricky. Jumping to present day, the group continue to tour often, dominating the festival circuit and putting on headline shows of their own, while also releasing the music of various Afro-house artists on their Connected label.
In 1985, Rob Birch and producer Nick Hallam were next-door neighbours, before being offered £14,000 by a property developer who wanted them to vacate the flats. This helped them finance their career as Stereo MCs, but Birch believes that they’d have got where they are now even if that hadn’t happened: “My philosophy on life is that, somehow or other, if you’re on the right path and you’re putting in the right energy, the means to do it will come to you. So if that hadn’t happened, something else would have done. But I have to say, that was a funny moment to two guys who were skint and doing odd jobs washing up, on the dole. You really lived on the bread line, you’re rolling up cigarettes from the nubs in the ashtray and eating cabbage for three days just trying to survive. I loved them days, though, I was a happy guy”.
Despite the length of their career, Birch prefers not to dwell on it, and hadn’t realised Stereo MCs had reached the forty-year milestone. “I don’t really think about it too much. My focus is more on how happy I’m feeling in my creative journey, which has its ups and downs. If I think about that too much, I feel a bit like some piece of stone, or a statue or something. And I don’t ever want to be that, I’d rather just be this little leaf floating off a tree, just surviving, hanging in there”.
For a portion of their early career, Stereo MCs self-released their material, including debut album 33-45-78, via Gee Street Records which they formed alongside DJ Richie Rich. The label took its name from its location in a converted warehouse. In 2015, they launched Connected Records, naming their new venture after their most successful album and single: “It’s definitely different now. In the eighties, it was all about pressing up your own twelve-inch records and taking them around the dance record shops. It was a physical issue, and you needed people around you — it was all about word of mouth and getting out there and knowing people”.
“The way that the label started now, we just found a distributor called Kompakt in Cologne. We started off very small, and gradually more and more artists, younger artists, started coming to us to release material. Originally, we were just going to release our own material, but really it’s more about releasing other people’s material now, which is mainly Afro-house and deep house. They’re all pretty young guys doing modern experimental electronic music.”
Connected Records has reached its 159th release since its formation, and Birch was eager to mention the upcoming 160th: “Souhail Artwork featuring Ness Muru, and the track is called ‘Panture’. It’s a very Afro-based tune. I do a show on Margate Radio every month, and I’ll definitely be featuring that one”. If the rest of the Connected Records back catalogue is anything to go by, it sounds promising.
Since 2011, Stereo MCs have refrained from releasing new material of their own, instead focusing on the label and remixes of their own for other artists. However, “We are working on stuff right now”, Birch stated, “Experimenting with different ideas. Some of it is more groove-based, and some of it, oddly enough, is a bit like poetry”.
“We’ve made a lot of records and done a lot of remixes over the years, and I just came to this spot where I was listening to a lot of what you might call Afro-jazz — old African music which is quite atmospheric. I really like the vibes of some of those instruments that that were being played, and I was experimenting with some tunes where you actually have either very little rhythm or no rhythm at all, and just have a musical ambiance and a spoken word come over it, more as a story being told or a poem. There’s a mixture of ideas”.
“You come to a point where sometimes maybe you just don’t want to make another dance record, and it’s quite nice just to have a breath where it’s music that you could maybe be reflective whilst you listen to it. Music has become pumped out from somewhere, and it’s just this constant blur of shiny drum beats and auto-tuned vocals, and sometimes I think it might be nice for people to actually take a bit of time out and really listen. Just sit under a tree somewhere, sit with a bit of music and absorb it”.
Stereo MCs’ upcoming tour, which is due to take them across the UK throughout December, is entitled True To Life. For Birch, that means “Making a connection with the people, more than just trying to sell a ticket to make up a crowd. We want to have an honest experience with an audience, which is what we try to do all the time. So we say how we feel, we try to uplift the crowd and make sure everybody is feeling like they’re having a good time, and that everybody is welcome. There’s too many divisive influences in our society right now, and I think that the musical environment should be a place where everybody, whatever their orientation, should feel safe and should leave the place feeling happy. Our intention is to make people move, make people feel good, and not just through some shiny, happy, smiley thing because we want to talk about real things too. But the object is for us all to go in the same direction”.
The True To Life tour includes a date at Manchester’s O2 Ritz, which hosted Stereo MCs’ previous appearance in the city. For this set, though, the group are “Going to introduce maybe a couple of other tracks that we’ve haven’t played for years. We’ll obviously be playing tunes that are better known, but we’ll also be playing tunes from across our whole catalogue, and also tunes that are collaborations with more recent artists like Adam Port from Keinemusik. There’ll be a real cross-section of music coming through”.
Birch has a noticeable admiration for Manchester, which is the home city of his favourite football team. “The Red Devils! I love Manchester. Full stop. I’ve always found crowds in Manchester friendly. I like the general way people greet you and are quite open”.
Aside from being the frontman of Stereo MCs, Birch is also a father of two children who are now both in their twenties. Speaking on the topic of balancing music with fatherhood when his children were still young, he admitted “It was a learning curve, but you have the strength and resilience to do it. You’re built for it, it becomes your purpose in life, and you wouldn’t have been given this purpose if you didn’t have the strength to go out and do what you have to to bring back into the household what it needs to survive. What you gain from having a baby is just incredible, you grow as a person”.
From talking with Birch, it’s clear to see that Stereo MCs hope to inspire euphoria and happiness in everything they do. Despite being forty years into a consistently busy studio, the group are due to embark upon a touring schedule taking them from mainland Europe to the UK and back again all before the end of January, and it’ll be interesting to see what they bring to the stage this time around.
