DJ Fresh's huge hit 'Louder' (ft Sian Evans) is absolutely smashing it this week - having topped the iTunes chart within a few hours of its release last Sunday, it's also #1 most-played record on Radio 1 and we're delighted to announce that it's gone straight in at a very strong #1 in today's midweek charts! And it couldn't have happened to a nicer or more hard-working artist, so we asked the main man himself to tell us all about 'Louder', festivals, his upcoming US tour, his new album and more!
"I started 'Louder' at the end of last year, it began as an instrumental though it was always supposed to be a song with a vocal. I played it out at a festival in Belgium and the crowd went nuts! Sian Evans (who I knew from her days as frontwoman of Kosheen) and I had been talking about working on something together for a while and it seemed like the perfect track. I had a muffled recording of the chorus (with slightly different words), and I'd excitedly got out of bed to sing into my phone at about 3 o'clock in the morning one night. When Sian started scatting around it it worked perfectly, we changed a few words, notes etc and then wrote the verses, the whole song was written like that in just one night!
The response to the tune has been insane; it's so cool that at the moment real UK bass music tracks are breaking through and getting the attention they deserve; Nero, Pendulum, Chase and Status are all bringing cool forward-thinking ideas into the larger world of music.
'Louder' came to be used in the Lucozade Sport Lite advert after the Lucozade team saw the video for 'Gold Dust' and heard my last single 'Lassitude'; they then approached me and Ben Newman, the video director of 'Gold Dust' to work together on the 'Louder' video and Lucozade ad. I think that even I have managed to catch the advert on TV - I hardly ever get time to watch TV so thats actually pretty amazing!! The Lucozade 'Louder' launch party at Ministry of Sound on 8th June (which hopefully some of you were at) was tons of fun too, although I had to giggle as Kilian Martin (champion Spanish freestyle skateboarder) had to come up with a million moves that involved being on a static dancefloor! He was sick, those guys are so used to having ramps and rails etc to skate off that must have been tough to pull off (although the dude's such a pro that you would never have guessed it)!
I'm also doing tons of festivals at the moment - so far this summer I've done Glastonbury, LED, Parklife, Isle of Wight, I just got back from VOLT in Hungary and I've been getting a wicked reaction from playing 'Louder' out now that everyone is starting to know the words. There are tons of other gigs and festivals coming up which you can check out on my Facebook page.
I'm about to head off to the States at the end of July for a two week stint, I'll be playing at Shambala in Canada and Audiotistic in LA amongst quite a heavy schedule of gigs round the US, also dropping in on the legendary DJ Shadow while I'm in San Francisco to mess about in the studio. Speaking of which, I'm working on my new album at the moment and I've got some cool stuff in the pipeline including a couple of collaborations with Flux Pavilion, a couple of new tracks featuring Sian Evans and some other cool features. I'm also getting together the live show for the end of the year which should be super exciting, and preparing to perform in Radio One's Live Lounge in a couple of weeks...check that out!
Hope you all enjoy 'Louder'...and thanks for all the support...watch this space! :)"
'Louder' is out now - get your copy from iTunes here! And more updates from DJ Fresh, follow him at:
www.facebook.com/djfreshmusic
www.twitter.com/djfreshdnb