Last October, in room two of David Holmes’ God’s Waiting Room Halloween party in Belfast, the Never Never DJs were opening the evening with a series of slow, deep and chuggy selections when a familiar sound jumped out of the mix – the unmistakable shuffle and piano riff from one of the best pop songs of the 80s – Talk Talk’s Life’s What You Make It. Mark Hollis’s vocal and lead guitar were intact but it wasn’t the original – the fat bottom end, dub effects and psychedelic synth work were all new. It had to be an edit I hadn’t heard before but Shazam was no help, so I went over to the DJ and asked for the ID – “It’s Random House Project,” he said.
It was a new name to me, and when I found the track on his Bandcamp, it had been released just six months earlier. There are plenty more where this one came from too, with similarly satisfying reworks of tracks from Talking Heads, Killing Joke, Roy Ayers, The Beach Boys and even Phil Collins waiting to be discovered. And that’s only scratching the surface.
Reworking Talk Talk
Gez Dewar – the man behind Random House Project – has been releasing edits at a rate of more than one a month since 2021. He’s by no means the first to put his spin on Life’s What You Make It, but as he explained on a video call from his home studio, he was motivated to take it on.
“I checked out all the Talk Talk versions, and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, there is room for a version here – I can hear something that nobody’s had a crack at doing’,” he says. “I know how in reverie Talk Talk are regarded, so there’s also a bit of pressure – I don’t want to get it wrong because it’s going to really blow up in my face if I don’t do it justice. So I’ll check out all the versions that are there, and see if there’s room for me to move through that.
“I know I want it to be Balearic because I know the history of Talk Talk’s stuff and how it was regarded back in those early days in Ibiza, so the kind of palette I’m going to be using is going to be reverby percussion, stuff that has got a kind of Balearic groove to it. So that helps me narrow it down, which is half of the battle these days because you’ve got so many choices.”
Art college to MTV and Ministry of Sound
Dewar is far from a newcomer – as his Bandcamp bio points out, he’s been “arming the troops with weapons since 1990”. After landing a job at the now defunct entertainment conglomerate Thorn EMI straight out of art college, he moved to MTV Europe for its launch in 1987, got involved in the nascent rave scene and – with his live techno group Doi-Oing – was the first act signed to Ministry of Sound.
“We didn’t really know what we’re doing,” he admits, “and obviously the acts that did go on to do really well, like Underworld and Orbital and people like that, had a much stronger sense of where they were going and what they were doing. We did get an album together in the end, but they weren’t really that interested and let us go after a few years.”
After that, Dewar forged a successful career making music for major TV commercials and games like Gran Turismo and Offroad Fury, while doing his own music on the side. But remixing and editing other people’s music has been a thread all along, beginning with mashing up music videos into megamixes that were shown across Europe in the heyday of MTV.
“I love the idea of taking well-known stuff and twisting it and turning it on its head,” he says. “Really early on, we took Eminem, My Name Is…, and we put it over Fatboy Slim’s Rockefeller Skank: ‘Hi, my name is… the funk-soul brother’.
“That just took off – people at MTV went nuts about it and I gave one to Fatboy Slim who used to play it at the start of his show. I got to hear him play it at the Academy in Brixton and I was like, ‘I can die now. This is brilliant’.”
The familiar and the new
It was the advent of stem separation technology in the last five to 10 years, where producers can easily lift a capellas, basslines, drum tracks or anything else they like without searching the darkest corners of the internet for the original stems, that brought Gez to where he is now.
“I love the familiar and the new,” he explains. “I suppose it’s a kind of pop art. I think of it a little bit like Warhol, you know, you take these famous things and you reframe them. I just get a huge amount of personal enjoyment out of it.
“Also, it’s a kind of homage, I think, to the people that I grew up listening to, getting some of their tracks and repurposing them. I mean, I’m old, and I don’t realise that a lot of people don’t know this stuff. They’ve never heard it.
“Some of the tracks are 40 years old, and to be able to bring them to the crowd and repurpose them and make them ready for DJs that are current is great.”
One of the most unlikely Random House Project edits is his ingenious rework of Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight. This is one of the most famous pop-rock songs of all time, and far from the coolest selection. What made him decide to take it on?
“I don’t know,” he laughs. “I mean, I don’t even like Phil Collins! Sometimes you just hear something really familiar and it just catches you, like the way that light falls on a building or something like that. You just see it and go, ‘Oh no’.
“I’ve got this little fucking devil in my head that’s going, ‘Oh, Phil Collins, In the Air Tonight, what could you do? Can you make Phil Collins cool again?’. So that’s the challenge for me sometimes, to push myself out of my comfort zone, maybe work with something that I’m not that keen on and try and make it work for me.
“Bill Brewster plays that a lot and I couldn’t get my head around it. He played it on one of his shows and said he absolutely loved it. I’m like, ‘You’re a disco and a funk guy, what’s with the Phil Collins?!’. So I don’t know. It surprised me how much people liked it.”
The scene according to Random House Project
The modern Balearic and disco edits scene is well established, led by figures like Dimitri From Paris, Late Nite Tuff Guy, The Reflex, Todd Terje and others, while Dewar cites Hot Toddy of Crazy P (who recently gave him great feedback on his rework of Fleetwood Mac’s Big Love), François Kevorkian, Pete Herbert, and Carl Airsine among his favourites.
With so many producers in such a niche scene, is there a lot of competition? “It’s not competitive, I don’t feel anyway, there’s a lot of support,” he says. “John Balcombe, who runs the Balearic Burger collective, has been a real supporter, but a lot of the DJs on there have got their own shows, and they will pick up my stuff.
“We’re all swapping mixes, sending stuff over, putting them in our shows. So there is a real sense of support and community from that. We’re all old ravers, basically, that still have a licence to go out and move around a bit.”
Aside from his regular Bandcamp uploads, Gez presents a weekly two-hour radio show called Welcome To The Monkey House, where he showcases his own work and that of his peers, and he was recently tapped to remix Crooked Man for Vicious Charm. There’s more in store.
“It feels like it’s bubbling along,” he says. “I’m always looking in DJs’ charts – ‘Have they put one of my tracks in their chart? Okay, great, that’s another one’. It’s like planting seeds, they’re all out there.
“You know, I’m not getting booked to play at Glastonbury this year. I’d love to take Random House Project on the road and play, because why should the DJs have all the fun playing my stuff? Why can’t I?
“There’s nothing that would make me more happy than to be in front of an audience dancing to stuff that I’ve made here in my little room. So that for me would be the next step.”