I first met Budd (aka UCallMeSir) back around 2000 when we were both on the shambolic and utterly useless "New Deal for Musicians" dole course. We sort of did a collab there – I badly played some piano over a drum track someone else programmed, and Budd rapped over it. Given how badly disorganised the whole thing was, it literally took 6 months to do this one track. I never actually got to do anything at all of my own in the studio.
We bumped into each other again a couple of years later on yet another dole course (I was chronically and willfully unemployed in those days) and started knocking around together. As he was a rapper and I a "producer" of sorts, naturally I started making beats for him. This seems to have been around October 2005. Initially, these were literally just beats: ie, drum tracks. My thought was that he could freestyle over them and depending on what madness resulted, I could write the rest of the track to fit it. My aim and idea was to make it actually a collaborative process in which we could creatively bounce off each other. In practice though that never worked, so I started writing full tracks. This was a bit of a challenge for me, as at that time I was still entirely instrumental in my own work and so had no idea how to make backing tracks that left room in them for a vocal. The other big issue was that I had no real background in hip-hop, so everything I was doing was out of step with how hip-hop typically sounded at that time (and maybe since). I don't remember if many of those early attempts amounted to finished tracks. There seems to be at least 12 surviving beats from this period, some of which had titles, but none of which have any vocals.
So far as I can see, the notion of attempting to make a full record together emerged from out of this process: the oldest of the tracks that do have vocals is from late Jan 2006. It was Budd who suggested the name Dementia 13, after the old horror anthology film, as well as the album title and the general concept and direction of the project. As I remember it, I was tentatively writing beats and always putting undue stress on being able to change and redraft ideas to fit whatever lyrics he wrote, though in practice, I don't think it ever happened like that. We recorded Budd's vocals at Washington Art Centre and in hindsight, I really wish I'd taken the opportunity to mix the tracks there, as at home I was still using PC speakers and the couple of times I heard my tracks being played over a live PA system when Budd played gigs, the mixes always sounded fucking awful.
I should probably briefly note as well that we also had plans to set up a small record label called 5 Finger Discount Productions, and looking back, I think that was what probably nixxed the first Dem13 album. We came up with a full album of material – fourteen tracks or so and had a website set up where it was announced it would soon be released, and yet... it never was. To the best of my knowledge, there is no master copy, no finalised tracklist. Just a bunch of song files on an old hard-drive, a cover and an album title: Strange-Tasting Council Pop. I think the problem was that the Dementia 13 album was intended to be the first release on our label and for some reason I don't recall – maybe lack of money – the label never actually got off the ground and became something more than an idea.
Somehow, despite this failure of STCP to get released, we did later start a follow up, called Rot and intended as an EP. This was, I think 2013/14. I wrote 5 or 6 beats – all of which I was enthusiastic about and even wrote and recorded a verse and chorus for one track ("Aiming For The Iceberg"). However, it all then juddered to a halt as Budd kept scrapping and re-writing his lyrics before we ever got a chance to record. Despite my sporadic attempts to reignite it, Rot seemed to be a dead project, with it essentially being dropped and forgotten for 7 or 8 years.
It wasn't until 2021 that we came back to talking about a collab project and as I was still fond of those beats from 2014 I suggested we try picking it up where we left off. And so we did, with me once again writing beats, but now also chipping in with lyrics and vocals and more firmly taking charge of the overall production. The album was recorded in my flat over the course of about 18 months. We not only completed the old tracks but wrote a bunch of entirely new ones too, getting really hyped up and excited with how it was sounding in the process. At last it was released in Dec 2023 whereupon it immediately sank without a trace. Which was a shame as I think it's actually a pretty solid UK hip-hop album and one of the best things I've ever done. I'm still uncharacteristically proud of that album.
Discography
 Rot Dem13 [2023] |