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Exclusive interview with the Scratch Perverts on DJ, turntablist and hip hop culture.

T: Turntablink
+1: Plus One
PC: Prime Cuts
TV: Tony Vegas
T: When did you guys start DJing?
PC: I started scratching in '85 but didn't get turntables till '88.
TV: Around the same.
+1: '95.
TV: *Points to PC* Old *points to +1* young! *laughs*.
PC: So when did you start DJing?
T:Um around a decade after you guys

T: Have you guys always been turntablists or did you evolve from club DJing?
PC: For me it was always scratching! Actually the vechicle to get into DJing was scratching, first and foremost. We then started DJing in clubs through that [scratching] and that's the majority of what we do now instead of doing competitions like the DMC or ITF.
TV: It was always a Hip Hop thing for kids our age at the time. Everyone was into Hip Hop when we were kids and we took part in most of the subsections and stuck with one of them, which was DJing. The first time I approached a turntable it was always to scratch rather than a fascination with sticking a record on. I just wanted to fuck with it!

T: Was there anything in particular that got you into Hip Hop?
PC: Not really, I mean everyone was into it! Everyone in my year was into breakdancing. It was just there, it was youth culture at the time so it was an accepted thing almost that if you were around the age of 21 you were into Hip Hop in some way shape or form. It was everywhere in the UK at that time.

T: You guys have always been known as more experimental turntablists. Where do you get your inspiration from?
TV: Being bored more than anything. That's our main inspiration. We're naturally quite curious and creative people. I don't think we set out to be different, we just wanted to be good. At that time there was an element of crossover in that you had to be different to be good otherwise you would probably be worse than the people already there.
T: So your style came about as a gradual evolution.
+1: Yeah, it's not like you're constantly thinking about advancing something. If you do something that changes the world that's nice but you should do it for yourself, change your own world. That's the way we go about coming up with our routines. Even if you're winning titles and stuff, if you're not pleased in here *points to heart* it doesn't really matter you know what I mean?
PC: If you're doing something you're not regurgitating what someone else has done. You can draw influences from other DJ's and also other music and artists. I've got ideas I've never had this way. Like the feedback thing we do with the mixer, the idea behind that was from they way Jimi Hendrix moved his guitar near the amp to get a different sort of sound. I think the Beatles did it years ago as well. We took that idea to our equipment and found a way of plugging the mixer into itself to get all these mad feedback sounds.
TV: Technology is always going to lend its part in the way to do these things. The feedback loop was only made possible when the Vestax 07 came out because it had 2 line-outs, so we could plug one of the line-outs into the line-in. In older mixers you only had one output which went straight into the amp. As mixers develop, should they fall into the right hands the greater the creativity becomes. That's why things progress. It's not just human beings becoming more creative but the technology advancing as well, giving us the ability to be more creative.

T: How did you guys hook up with the allies for the 2000 DMC?
TV: We did some shows in the states through Bomb Records and we were on the same tours and competed at the same time. As someone on the Internet pointed out we were the two biggest shit talking crews on earth! Well, we were but that's just a lot of our personalities and how we develop a stage persona which is aside from us as a person. It's like the whole Tony Vegas thing; my real name is Anthony, which has got fuck all to do with that. Hip Hop has always been about that, kids doing something different from themselves. The Allies did essentially the same thing. Craze talks about "thug this, thug that" but you meet him and he's like this big *sticks his arm out waist height*. A lot of it is an act, and we took that quite far at one stage between the two crews. Off stage we realized we really got along. We had some great battles with these guys. We developed mutual respect, which developed into friendship, then ultimately a desire to get together and create together. Unfortunately when we did we had all mentally peaked in terms of battling. We went to Miami for a month, and were more concerned with opening a beer in the morning than working the turntable to be honest. We did practice, but it wasn't what it could have been.

T: So are you guys still doing stuff together?
TV: We still speak to each other. We worked together on the Allstar Beatdown DJ competition and hosted the European final in London this year and we'll be doing the world final in London next year. Our relationship continues because we got along and had similar goals and ambitions.
PC: It's a bit difficult too because it takes so much time to prepare a routine, plus the fact that there's 8000 miles between us and the only times we got to practice was when we flew to Miami or they came over to London so the time we had to prepare a routine was minute. But to be honest I don't think we worked that hard on it, we were just having fun. The battle circuit is mad intense though. You have to condense six months into a six minute routine and you have to represent yourself in those six minutes.
TV: When we teamed up with the Allies we wanted to do something completely different. But because we fell out from the mentality of practicing every day from not competing it became really difficult. When we announced we were going to team up with the Allies obviously everybody was thinking it was going to be six minutes of the most amazing shit they've ever seen. That was quite a pressure and I think we realized once we opened out big mouths and decided to do it we were like "soddin' hell". It's not that easy to constantly create new shit. Having said that, some people thought it was great and well… we did win [the DMC world team title] *laughs*
PC: Yeah, and now we're trying to channel that creative force into making music. Obviously DJing is still of great importance to us though.

T: How do you approach production from a turntablist point of view?
PC: We just try and be ourselves. We're still trying to find our feet and our sound, but the same drive is there in that we want to be different. Not to be different for different's sake but there's no point putting out an album of Premier sounding beats, we want to try and come up with something new. It's also a lot more fun that way.