‘I had to press the sampler button so much, my finger bled’ – Stereo MC’s on making Connected

Nick Hallam, DJ/producer

Rob Birch and I have known each other since we were kids, growing up as nextdoor neighbours in Nottingham. I moved to London at 18 to do music and Rob followed to study photography. His brother Dave was a session guitarist who played in punk bands and we all ended up sharing a house in Clapham. I was into electronic acts like Yello and Cabaret Voltaire. I started messing around, making tape loops on an old Revox machine by actually looping the tape over a Biro. This was before samplers.

I was working in a restaurant, doing washing up, and would listen to Mike Allen’s rap show on Capital Radio. He played US artists like Trouble Funk. We used to go to Covent Garden to watch all the breakdancing and breakbeating that was happening on the street, in performances for tourists.

We recorded our debut album as Stereo MC’s in 1989 with backing vocalist Cath Coffey and drummer Owen If. When we started getting gigs, we thought it would be fun to have live drums, even if they made the turntables bounce around. But when we went to the States, the US branch of our record company said: “We’re not paying for a drummer to come on tour, because you don’t do that with this type of music.” They assumed we were just a rapper and a DJ, but we insisted – because the drummer was part of the band. Soon we were touring with De La Soul, Living Colour and A Certain Ratio, then we went to New York to do our second album, Supernatural.

Connected, from our third album, came off the back of touring for pretty much three years. We’d moved away from being seen as a rap band and were embracing acid house. The rap scene in London was violent. You’d go out and there’d be fights everywhere. Then you’d go to a rave and everybody was hugging. Connected was one of the last tracks we did for the album. We had the chorus, but had hit a cul-de-sac. Rob and me went to the studio, put the track on and thought: “Let’s see if we can at least get the vibe we need to nail it.” Rob started jamming around the vocal: “Aiii Aiii Aiii.” We looped it up and put it through the whole song. Then Rob went back in and did the rest of the vocals – and that was it.

Rob Birch, vocalist

We had the groove kicking about, but we were a million miles away from figuring out what the track was all about. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I tried rapping but it was like – nah. Then I tried singing and Nick said: “Let’s loop that.” And it became the hypnotic part of the tune. I jammed the rest in two takes. It was one of those moments: drop everything, forget your preconceptions, open up and see what goes.

Connected got played at all sorts of clubs, even at house ones, which is surprising because at 100bpm it’s pretty slow. Somehow, the feeling embraced different vibrations: it had the hypnotic quality of dance music, the attitude of hip-hop, and its vocals were unplaceable. It’s not indie, it’s not rock – it’s a hybrid. We were from the wave of musicians making groundbreaking music by having to re-educate ourselves. When we started getting into rap, we had to forget everything we knew about music because we didn’t know how people made these sounds. In those days, there were no computers or sample packs. It was all in your ears and soul. You had to listen and go: “How can I make that sound?”

We had got ourselves a rudimentary sampler, called a Bel Delay Unit, which we used for the “Aiii Aiii Aiii” bits. It was a godsend: you could get a beat up and running in two minutes flat. I had to push the button to retrigger the sample over and over, until my finger bled on to the machine.

The song has become so recognisable. It was used in ads for The Carphone Warehouse and has featured in film soundtracks. You can make a living these days by getting your music synced to film or TV, but I don’t pay too much attention to that. I’m more interested in our label, Connected, which puts out Afro house – dance music rooted in African origins. And I still want to get out there and play live, even if it makes me nervous as hell. I think of every gig as a once-in-a-lifetime shot. You may never see these people again. So give them something special.