Prior to 1998’s "Micro Tour" concerts, KINETIK were interviewed by Ashley Franklin of BBC Radio Derby on Sunday 29th March 1998. The interview was broadcast live during Ashley’s "Soundscapes" programme and was introduced by a short, specially prepared KINETIK jingle which that band had recorded for the occasion.

N.B. The transcript of the interview below includes several factual innaccuracies by Ashley Franklin during the interview (such as the date of the EMMA 4 concert etc.) These are reproduced below uncorrected.

PART 1

(KINETIK RADIO DERBY JINGLE)

D’you like it ? I hope so - you’re going to be hearing that quite a lot over the next few months and years, and thanks to my guests this afternoon, KINETIK for composing and performing that especially for their visit to this programme. KINETIK - they’re playing a week tonight at the Electric Cafe playing music rather similar to this...

("PIPELINE" FROM "REFINED" ALBUM)

KINETIK - with Pipeline, and they’ll be doing a live version of that, a week tonight, they’ve just told me ! And I know that because they’re here, well two out of the three - that’s Colin Jordan and Andrew (let’s get this right !) Slegt.

Hello !

.. Andrew Slegt. That’s Dutch isn’t it ?

It is, yes.

Not very Welsh, even though you live in Pembrokeshire..

He doesn’t ! - He lives in Bath !

Oh ! You live in Bath ?

I live in Bath !

So you don’t all live in the same area ?

No. There’s a gap of 150 miles or so between us. We commute digitally sometimes, and sometimes he comes to take part in recording sessions and band rehearsals.

Right. And the other member we ought to mention - Shirleyann Davies, who is Welsh...

Yes, she is Welsh - she’s the only one of the three who is actually Welsh. She’s recharging her batteries at the moment because she’s been rather worn out with all the intensive rehearsing that we’re doing at the moment for next week.

Right, yes, Intense rehearsing for what is quite a small tour - you’ve called it the Micro Tour because you’re playing in Pembrokeshire and then you’re playing here in Derby.

That’s right. We’re hoping to do another date in Bath - Andrew’s home town, to complete the circuit so to speak. But that won’t be until some time in May.

Now that would suggest that you’re finding gigging opportunities few and far between. One wonders have you tried the university / college circuit at all ?

It’s something that we may investigate further. At the moment, the way things are, this arrangement suits us quite well because all of us have full-time jobs and we’re all involved in other things. Andrew for example, he’s got two jobs. He works all day and then he works all evening as well, so getting the time off to do KINETIK can be quite difficult on occasions.

Right. Why do you do two jobs Andrew ? Do you need the money or what ? I know you’d need the money from one job...

Colin Jordan :

He needs all the money to buy all the equipment we use !

That’s right !

So it’s an expensive operation being a KINETIK member.

Pocket money is always useful !

It’s an expensive hobby !

Aren’t you rather worn out by the end of the week ? You’re not going to fall asleep on me !!!?

No, I’ve got extra matchsticks today !

I mention the university / college circuit simply because of the sound of your music. I know you began (and it wouldn’t surprise anyone to know) as a Kraftwerk tribute band because there are elements there of that industrial, electronic, pop-based sound which Kraftwerk really did pioneer in the late ‘60s early ‘70s. That’s where you began. Those are the germ seeds of KINETIK aren’t they ?

That’s right. I wouldn’t say we were a tribute band as such. We were asked by the organiser of this country’s Kraftwerk conventions to come up with a set for their convention up in Blackpool, so we hastily cobbled something together and we did it two years running and we enjoyed ourselves immensely ! And at the end of that time we thought, well where do we go from here ? - do we spend the rest of our days playing unoriginal material or do we decide to branch out and concentrate on our own material ? And that’s in fact what we decided to do.

So although you wouldn’t have called youselves a tribute band, you were doing Kraftwerk covers.

For the conventions, yes.

There’s an obvious Kraftwerk influence there. Was that the band you discovered as a youngster ?

I think we’ve all been heavily influenced by all manner of electronic music - anything from Tangerine Dream to the latest ravey kind of stuff. I think on the whole, we’re fans of electronic music in general - we’re fans of the synthesizer as a means of producing music.

There’s a lot of potential though for your sound because Kraftwerk have suddenly become vogue again. It’s been noticed how influential they’ve been. A lot of young bands look to Kraftwerk for the way that their sound has come on. There’s no doubt that they have been massively influential.

Colin Jordan :

Yes, yes of course. They were really the first band to realise that the synthesizer as an instrument could be used in a pop context, so really they were the pioneers from that point of view.

Taking very sucessful British bands like Depeche Mode for example, they really took their cues didn’t they really from Kraftwerk. Gary Numan I think would be another one.

Other bands obviously like the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire... That sort of thing...

Things have now progressed to such a stage where virtually every single piece of music in the charts is now produced by electronic means. All the rave music that’s currently fashionable - that’s all done almost entirely using synthesizers, or drum machines, or samplers and so on. So we’ve reached the stage now where instead of the synthesizer being a very unusual instrument that perhaps appeared on novelty records, it’s now very much the norm. It’s unusual now to hear a guitar in a pop song where as before it was the other way around.

Many of us in this area were introduced to you at the EMMA 4 festival (Electronic Music and Musician’s Association ) get-together at the Derby Assembly Rooms. We’re going back now, 18 months or more to that gig. That was one of your first live ventures as KINETIK wasn’t it ?

Yes, it was certainly our first live performance as KINETIK so far from our home base.

And you went down rather well I thought. I mean, it was a small but enthusiastic audience shall we say !

Yes, it was great to play in Derby because Derby’s got such a strong electronic music scene. In our own locality in West Wales, we’re looked upon as quite something of a real oddity really, because if you’re not playing heavy thrash, heavy metal guitar music or finger-in-the-ear folk, they don’t really want to know. But here, it was so refreshing to find such a strong electronic music scene. People really listened and appreciated what we did - it was great !

People that were there at EMMA were very enthusiastic beforehand and even more so after our performance. The people that we met afterwards, we felt that they really enjoyed the show and the enthusiasm was very apparent in the questions that they asked us and the comments that they made. So for us, that was very, very rewarding and very flattering and we’d like to say thank you to those people that were very kind to come and see us and support what we were doing.

And those same people can come and see you a week tonight at the Electric Cafe as well. And I ought to say, that having played Pipeline, if you enjoyed that sound - For me, you’re an even better band live. I enjoyed the album when I first heard it which was just prior to the EMMA Festival and I was pleasantly surprised at the live sound, because you’ve just got that extra edge, I think, live.

Well yes, when we perform live, we make a point of actually performing everything live. All the sounds you are hearing, we’re creating and interracting with in real-time. A lot of people - they’ll go on stage with a DAT backing or whatever, which is a lot easier. But at the end of the day, that kind of approach is very predictable. You’re very constrained - you have to play in exactly the same way, for exactly the same duration each time. When we play live, every time we play a song, it’s different to the last time we played it. Because everything’s absolutely live, we can interract with the sequences - we can chop and change as we feel.

Isn’t that scary though ?

It’s EXTREMELY scary. The potential for things to wrong is tremendous, but it keeps us on our toes ! It’s great fun to do as well.

Well you’re going to hear KINETIK on their toes now as we hear a track from the EMMA 4 Festival, in fact. This is Haven’s Lament...

("HAVEN’S LAMENT" - LIVE UNRELEASED RECORDING FROM EMMA 4)

PART 2

Back to my guests from KINETIK, that’s Colin and Andrew. The other member is Shirleyann who was born in Wales. The band hail from West Wales, (well Colin is with Shirleyann in the Tenby area and we’ve got Andrew who is in the West Country). In fact, you escaped to Pembrokeshire didn’t you, to get away from the big city ?

That’s right. I was seeking a more rural lifestyle really !

And have you found it ?

Absolutely ! Where we’re based now is like, in the middle of nowhere. It’s very nice. We’re right on the coast, so we’ve got the famous Pembrokeshire beaches there. It’s very inspiring.

I don’t know how inspiring though, the three giant oil refineries and the power station are, which are what, a few miles away from your studio ?

That’s right. The Milford Haven area is very intensely industrialised. As you drive into Pembroke Dock (which is our nearest big town really), you can’t fail but notice these stark images of the oil refineries on the coastline in front of you. They’re inspiring as well of course. We decided to use the local industrialisation of Milford Haven as the basis of our debut studio album Refined. So we’re drawing on the themes and the ideas that all of this industrialisation generated.

It is a very industrial sort of sound, in a sense, isn’t it ?

Yes, well, when you drive out to these refineries at night like we did, you can’t help but notice that the refineries and the power station - they generate their own sounds and rhythms and we can use these as inspiration as well.

I’m just trying to think if that’s where Kraftwerk found their original inspiration from, because they came from a heavily industrialised area didn’t they ?

It’s very possible, it’s very possible, yes !

I mean, you can almost hear, you know, the tools clanging down on metal ! That’s very much the basis of the electronic pop sound that Kraftwerk pioneered I think.

Yes, yes !

You though, have gone in your own direction. You’ve developed I think, what is very much your own sound. It sounds mainly produced by synthesizers. How easy have you found it to get into synthesizers ? You’re obviously experts because you’ve got some kind of link up haven’t you, with a big electronics firm.

That’s right. We’ve all been interested in electronic music and tinkering around with synthesizers for many years now. When KINETIK were ready to go on the road so to speak, we decided that there was some electronic equipment that really didn’t do what we wanted it to do, so we had a go at designing various bits and pieces ourselves. And as a result of a device that we developed called the Bass Improvizer, (what the Bass Improvizer does really, is allow us to interract and change sequences of notes in real-time so we can change and alter things on the fly, so to speak) It was because of that, that we approached UK synthesizer manufacturer Novation to see if they were interested in incorporating some of our ideas and sounds into some of their forthcoming products. And we’ve a had a very nice working relationship with them ever since.

So is this regarded as something of a development then, in electronic music making ?

Well yes, I guess so !

Especially from a personal basis, in what we do to create our own sound. The ideas that we have incorporated into the machinery that is now going to be available will now be available for other musicians and technicians to use in their own field of music and sound making. It’s helped us, and it will continue to help us with making the sort of sounds and music that we like. And now, it’s going out, in a sense, to a wider audience.

So never mind Kraftwerk, you’ve done your own little pioneering I suppose !

Oh, I’m much too modest to say so !

Because of the way we work live, being able to manipulate sequences and alter MIDI information in real-time is very important to us, and hopefully, this will encourage some other people to try and not rely on the DAT backing tapes too much, to perhaps gain some confidence to go out there and create their own sounds on the fly, so to speak.

(At this point, Ashley Franklin launched a competition for which KINETIK contributed CDs of Refined and the Burning Issue as prizes)

Let’s talk about The Burning Issue concert that you did in your home area. The Buring Issue concert came out of this disaster (the Sea Empress tanker grounding) which happened close to you didn’t it ?

(Actually, Ashley is in error here. The Sea Empress disaster occurred in 1997, a year and a half after The Burning Issue concert (which was held mainly to make people aware of Orimulsion burning) was held.)

It happened in the middle of us recording the studio material for Refined. And really, we had to stop and think about the implications of this because, up until then we had tried to take a very non-committal view - not to be too much on one side or on the other. And partly as a result of the tanker disaster and the proposals of the local power station to burn a controversial type of fuel (which there was a lot of dismay about), we decided to add our weight against this and the Burning Issue concert was aimed at bringing these issues to local public awareness.

And did it ?

Yes, very much so. As a result of the intense publicity surrounding the Orimulsion burning and the oil tanker disaster, there are now stricter guidelines governing tankers in Milford Haven, and the controversial fuel, Orimulsion that was due to be burned at Pembroke Power Station has now been abandoned.

That’s good, well done ! So as a result, you’ve become world famous in West Wales, have you ?

Colin Jordan :

Well, infamous more like !

Let’s hear a track called Generation. Tell us a little about this, because I’ll be hearing this for the first time won’t I ?

We performed this track live at EMMA last year. This particular mix of Generation is an early test mix from the version which appears on the Refined CD and it has a different atmosphere, it has a different feeling to the eventual version that was released, so it might be interesting for some people that are familiar with our music to compare the two.

The music of KINETIK then, here on Soundscapes, BBC Radio Derby. The remix of Generation, the kind of music that you can hear a week tonight at the Derby Electric Cafe.

("GENERATION" - UNRELEASED TEST MIX)

PART 3

We’re going to hear a track now called Industrial Technology. Colin, this is your favourite I understand.

Yes. Off all the tracks on the album, this is the one I’m the most satisfied with.

In what way then ?

Just the general sound texture on the finished result. It went through lots of trials and tribulations when we were recording it. It has a recording history of nearly a whole year and we kept chopping and changing it. At the end, I think the result is satisfactory - from my point of view, at least !

Ashley Franklin :

Do you have a particular aim when you put together a piece of music for KINETIK ? What’s the philosophy behind the band, if there be one ?

It varies. Sometimes we’ll sit down and we’ll plan it all methodically. You know, we want this type of sound and this type of sound. Very often, when we get together with Andrew and we’re just jamming along, sometimes something will gel and we’ll have a little sequence running and we’ll think "that’s good !- we’ll make use of that somehow". And then we’ll structure whole songs sometimes, around jam sessions.

Sometimes we find that, when we get together, we already come together to a session with an idea, or something that’s given us an idea, a situation or something that we may have seen. And that sometimes, does help us to come towards an end product.

So you all toss something into the mix then ?

Yes, yes. We all contribute, even if we don’t all play on the one track. We all contribute ideas and opinions. It’s very much a co-operative effort.

A highly structured sound that you have as well. There’s thought going into every single beat and noise isn’t there ?

Yes. It’s what I like to call a refining process !

From the album Refined then, this is Industrial Technology. The music of KINETIK here on Radio Derby, Soundscapes.

("INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY" - FROM "REFINED" ALBUM)

That had all kinds of interesting noises going along there. I think you were saying to me that some of those noises actually came from your mum and dad’s factory.

Well it’s from my grandparents. My grandparents are directors of an engineering works in London. And one afternoon, Shirleyann and I turned up with a DAT player and a microphone and we started banging things with spanners, sampling power press noises, angle grinders and arc welders and all sorts of things, some of which made it onto the final track. But my goodness, we got some funny looks by the people that were working there !!!

Ashley Franklin :

I bet you did ! You sample sounds all the time as well, don’t you ? This is something of a speciality of yours isn’t it ?

We tend to sample sounds that we’ve created ourselves. A good example would be some of the voice synthesis that we do. We’ll sample words or phrases and that makes it a lot easier in a live context to just slot those sounds in when we’re playing live. We don’t tend to sample other people’s sounds or music. We prefer to create our own.

Right, so virtually everything we hear has been created by yourselves.

Absolutely !

everything !

We really must mention the other member of the band, Shirleyann Davies. She is the one member of the band who’s Welsh, and me being Welsh, I’ve got every time for her ! She really impressed me as well live when I saw her in Derby, because at one point she got up and played in a true virtuoso manner, an instrument called a wind controller, where she basically had this sort of keyboard instrument which she played through her mouth ! - almost like she would play a clarinet, which is her main instrument, isn’t it ?

That’s right. By trade she’s a clarinet and saxophone tutor. She finds it a lot more natural to be able to control electronic sounds by using a wind controller. It’s second nature to her, rather than playing on a keyboard.

So it’s like playing a synthesizer via a woodwind instrument.

That’s right. It’s just a different way of sending MIDI note messages. We also use drum pads which operate in a similar way - when you hit a pad with a stick, it will send a NOTE ON message. It can trigger a sample, or a drum sound, or a synthesizer note or whatever.

It must have been really extrordinary for you, to actually find a Kraftwerk lover who by day was a clarinet teacher !

Well, if we hadn’t shared the same kind of interests, I guess she wouldn’t be part of the band today ! But yes, it’s really rather strange. All of us in the band have similar musical tastes. We all have similar experience of using the same kind of instruments and so on. It’s really quite strange, but that’s the way it’s worked out.

Almost as if it was meant to be that you three came together.

Where do you see the band going from here ? Because as you’ve said, you’ve all got your day jobs. Shirleyann has continued as well, to teach, so she’s teaching accoustic instruments by day and at night she breaks loose in an electronic environment. Would you like to pursue it full-time ? I would imagine that there is the potential appeal for you to make a go of it as a professional band.

We don’t see KINETIK as a profession. This is a very important point really - it’s our hobby. It’s a very expensive hobby, especially when you buy several thousand pound’s worth of equipment, but at the end of the day, it’s a hobby. If it became a day job, then perhaps we’d get into the nine to five routine of doing it and then it would loose it’s appeal.

I think that’s quite refreshing actually, because if you do treat it as a hobby, as you are, you don’t have any of the angst that goes with being a professional musician thinking "am I going to make enough on this album to be able to make the next ?" or "are enough people going to come and see me live on my next tour ?" The worries that you would have !

For us really, it’s a way that we express ourselves. It’s something that we like to do. Everybody has something where they finish their normal everyday job.. from their place of work.. and they like to go and do something - whatever appeals to them, their own little hobby.

Colin Jordan :

Some people stick stamps in albums. We make bleeps !!!

I suppose it must be bad enough having the normal stresses of a day job, but if you had to share them with the stresses of being in a band, you wouldn’t be here today probably. So it’s your way of relaxing really I suppose, isn’t it ? Having fun.

It’s a creative hobby I guess, Yes. It’s the way to look at it, I guess.

But you are constantly moving on. You’ve got a new album in the pipeline, yes ?

"In the pipeline" - that’s a good one !

Yes. We’re working on material for the next album which we’re tentatively saying will have a pre-millenium release ! We’re going to explore digital themes. It struck us that in today’s society, nearly everything can be reduced to ones and zeroes. The music is digitally recorded, the MIDI information is stored in a sequencer digitally, we’re about to embark on digital TV and radio and so on. And the digital culture is increasingly going to become a very important part of everyday lives. When you look at digital information at a microscopic level, all you see is a series of ones and zeroes. Those ones and zeroes could represent anything ! They could be pixels in a picture, bytes of a computer program or they could be little snippets of audio data. And it will be nice to, perhaps explore the possibilities of perhaps interchanging these ones and zeroes. So we could use a graphic picture to create music and vice versa. So those will be some of themes we’ll be exploring in the next album, hopefully.

Right, well let’s hear your current music. We’re going to hear one more track. This is a piece called I.S.D.N. That’s a term that’s come to us here at radio. I’m trying to think what it actually means. What does I.S.D.N. stand for ?

Ha ! I knew you were going to ask me that !

Integrated Services Digital Network !

That’s right. Yes, we conduct a lot of interviews now via I.S.D.N. because obviously, it’s better a quality than the telephone and it’s helped us enormously. Why did you give it this title, this piece of music ?

It was a snappy acronym, I Guess. I think Andrew picked it really, because it can rhyme with "modem" !

OK. We’ll look ahead finally to your gig next week at the Electric Cafe . And we’ll also be announcing the names of the winners of our competition. That’s the other side of this track which was actually recorded live once again, at the Derby Assembly Rooms

This was the first time it was ever played !

Let’s hear I.S.D.N. from KINETIK, here on Radio Derby Soundscapes.

("I.S.D.N." - LIVE UNRELEASED RECORDING FROM EMMA 4)

(Ashley Franklin announced the winners of the competition and thanked Colin and Andrew for coming in.)