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Thread started 06/17/01 4:09am

Basement Jaxx: Prince 'a demigod'

Free Belgian music magazine RifRaf (no 126, June 2001) has an interview with Basement Jaxx by Frederik Jaques on pages 20-21 ("Geef het volk wat het wil", translation: "Give the people what they want"). Here's an excerpt, translated from Dutch...

Frederik Jaques : Janet Jackson named [Basement Jaxx's first album - BVH] "Remedy" one of her favorite records. I get the feeling you'd be very happy to get similar praise from Prince?

Simon Ratcliffe : Actually, we even were offered the opportunity to work with him: we were asked to remix one of his songs. Unfortunately we were just in the middle of recording [their new and quite honestly fantastic album - BVH] "Rooty" [out at the end of June 2001 - BVH] so we had to turn him down. Maybe for the best, because to be honest I wasn't exactly thrilled to be asked. Simply because Prince has always been some kind of a demigod for me, certainly in the past. But the last few years his music has become a parody of his earlier work and thus it would have felt very bad to do a remix of one of the lesser songs of my hero. I'd rather leave my nostalgic image of him as a demigod intact instead of being part of his downfall.

By the way, one of the reasons "Rooty" is relatively short [the album lasts less than 45 minutes - BVH] is because Prince's greatest records -- and other people's too -- aren't that long either. After little more than half an hour it's finished. That's when we discovered that a great album doesn't need to last that long. To the contrary, that actually forces you to concentrate to the essence of the songs. That way, the listener will keep going back to the album and play it again and again.
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