Tayo dubsteps down with us
Tayo’s come a long way in ten years of making music - from starting the first nu-school breaks night, Fricton, with Adam Freeland and Rennie Pilgrem, to hosting a seriously dubby breaks and bass show on Radio 1 – and in that time his sound has been constantly evolving to involve new elements like dubstep, as well as classic older tunes.
To begin with, Itchy asked Tayo just what draws together his diverse musical tastes?
'Bass culture,’ the dreadlocked DJ promptly replied. ‘That's the thread that runs through everything I play, the music that's on the mix I've just done for Fabric and everything else. That description is also a way of keeping it away of being genre specific – bass is eternal, in every kind of music, but I was trying to avoid some of the obvious labels that will end up being thrown at me anyway.'
Genre labels don’t go down well with Tayo, it seems. Indeed, he proved this suspicion of Itchy’s when we asked him about his recent flirtation with Croyden’s own hybrid music, dubstep. 'I've been playing dubstep as part of my sets for about two years now,’ Tayo happily explains. ‘That’s not because I've been on the sound from day one, but because my old producer from my days on Kiss, Chris Blackley, is massively into it. And one of my studio partners, Andy, is from Croydon and he's mates with all the dubstep guys. Anyway, he kept trying to get me to come down to DMZ in Brixton (now at Mass) – and as I DJ at the weekends I could never go, until one weekend I just said, "Right, you know what? I'm going…" And it really was as life-changing as they said it would be. I mean, I'm a dub head and I like breaks, well a breakbeat - I'm not so keen on the term "breaks" because of what it tends to mean now- but to hear that kind of music, played at a dance music tempo of 138 beats a minute (BPM), to hear the bass pounding your chest like that was a real revelation for me.’
Tayo’s DJ sets are a lot more influenced by dub and reggae than most breakbeat, a fact that he’s very proud of. 
‘I play on breakbeat bills with the likes of DJ Friendly and Rogue Element, but I don't play their music and they don't play mine. Freq Nasty, now he can play the way I do, but they play very different stuff.’
Instead, the dub and bass fanatic sees his approach as that of a ‘Trojan Horse DJ’, playing on a breaks line-up but playing music that’s different to most of the stuff on offer – will make clubbers curious enough to expand their tastes with, ‘… perhaps a dubby beaks tune, a twisted beat, not just dubstep. I’m not forgetting what I’ve done before, I’m just trying to add to it.’
The thoughtful ‘Breaks Don’ (as Tayo called himself, half joking, on his Kiss show) has something to say for some of his musical peers – and it’s a list that might surprise the breaks purists, a group whom, Itchy realises, Tayo is not a part of. He particularly enjoys ‘… seeing Switch or Sinden play as they're playing some of the same records I play, but also very different stuff too. Erol Alkan's made breaks records, but he doesn't then say that he's only going to play records from five labels and that's it. The purist will always only play the one style, whereas I like a lot of stuff so I play different things. Simple as that.’
Simple indeed – and we end the interview with Itchy agreeing that without a mixture of those purists and more experimental types- like Switch, Sinden, Tayo himself and Smith & Mighty, the Bristolians who produced the first Massive Attack album, and whom Tayo refers to as ‘modern day heroes’, dance culture wouldn’t be half as interesting a place as is now becoming.
http://www.myspace.com/djtayo3000 (Tayo’s myspace - why not say hello?)
Pics of Tayo courtesy of Fabric (dark shot) and BBC Photography Dept (Tayo in old-school tracksuit).
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