Bodyrockers 'Bodyrockers' album

It’s rare that you hear a record so instant, so instinctive, that you know it’s going to take over the world without even breaking sweat. ‘I Like The Way’, by British/Australian duo BodyRockers, is one of those records. An uproarious collision of styles Bodyrockers call “rock ‘n’ roll with electronic soul”, it took four hours to make, caused mayhem throughout Ibiza despite only three copies being in existence and netted BodyRockers a five album deal.

Erick Morillo, who was the first person to play it the same night it was finished, offered BodyRocker Kaz James his wallet if he’d let him keep his master copy, while Pete Tong immediately made it his essential new tune. That was back in September. Now ‘I Like The Way’ is igniting dancefloors and radio stations from here to Sydney, ripping up territories faster than BodyRockers can visit them. The single, and the rest of their amazing music, is a triumph of gut feeling over marketeering, of perspiration over calculation, of ass-shaking over chin-stroking.

“If an album takes a year to make there’s something wrong,” says Dylan Burns, BodyRockers singer and multi-instrumentalist, in the converted South London crypt he calls home (and work – it has a studio ‘The Beatles’ entire output took seven years! If it feels good, just do it, get it out, and keep your emotions in there. A lot of stuff is over produced and over thought. Ours is raw.”

BodyRockers formed a mere six months ago, when Kaz and Dylan met in Australia. Ever since vowing when he left school at 16 that he’d never make a penny from anything other than music, Canterbury-born Dylan had spent over a decade in the netherworld of one off dance hits and fly-by-night projects including Coloursound, Essential and Carpe Diem, with whom he had a one off number one in France. Kaz, from Melbourne, was a 22-year-old whiz kid DJ who’d played everywhere from Miami to Tokyo and a protégé of house legend Frankie Knuckles. While touring Australia as Coloursound, Dylan was hooked up with Kaz, who would DJ while Dylan was singing. Kaz suggested that as well as singing, Dylan should play his guitar (a see-through Perspex purple [MAKE] straight out of classic-period Prince) over his DJing set. “I plugged my guitar and the musical chemistry was just phenomenal – we were jamming like we’d been playing together for ten years,” remembers Dylan. “The gig went down an absolute storm and there just seemed to be a musical intuition there.”

A tour followed, culminating in two nights in Bali, after which the pair flew back to Britain and made ‘I Like The Way’, their first ever track. “Kaz had a plane to Ibiza to catch,” says Dylan. “I said to Kaz ‘what shall I sing about?’ and he said ‘you’re joking, we’ve just been on tour for six weeks – sing about the groupies!’ I just went in there and blurted out a load of stuff about what I like about a particular girl. It just wrote itself, it was a one-take vocal.”

Kaz took the CD to Ibiza and mayhem ensued. “We had all these offers coming in from all the dance labels, and then the majors started coming in,” says Kaz. “Then this guy comes on saying ‘I’m a manager, I’m gonna make you a star. What do you want?’ So we said we wanted an album deal and he said ‘We’ll get you two tomorrow’. I thought ‘yeah, heard it all before’ but he calls in the morning and says ‘get in the car’. We went straight over to one label - bang, a record deal. We went over to Mercury – bang, another record deal. Within two weeks the whole thing had been signed, sealed and delivered.”

“We got right in the studio because we’d just signed an album deal and we’d got no album,” says Dylan. “But I’ve been waiting for this project all my life so I was sitting on a lot of songs.” They reworked some of them in BodyRockers’ rock/house/electro style, while others were written together in the studio. “In the studio Kaz is very much the beats side of thing,” says Dylan. “Being a DJ he’s very rhythmic, and we write a lot of the lyrics together. A lot of the time I might write the crux of the song and Kaz’ll come up with a killer hook.”
“‘I like the way you move!’” sings Kaz by way of illustration.

The album, marries the aggression of rock record to hedonism of dance in a way that’s never been done before. Second single ‘Round And Round’ sounds like AC/DC jamming with Armand Van Helden, while ‘Losing’ is stadium rock transplanted to a nightclub. “It’s the CD I’ve always wanted in my collection but which was never there,” says Dylan. “You get dance acts who do a few little live things but there’s never a frontperson, there’s never an act, it’s a couple of producers who get people in.”

As such, BodyRockers are destined to appeal to old ravers and young rockers alike, the strong songs which underpin everything they do making them hugely appealing to music fans from one end of the radio dial to the other. Making good on their promise to present themselves as a proper band, they’ve recruited a drummer and bass player and are ready to unleash themselves on the live circuit as soon as possible. Expect a riotous performance and some outrageous outfits from Dylan, who confesses “I’m a right tart. I do like to dress up. I’m worse than a girl in that respect.”
“I generally look like I’ve rolled out of bed and got a T-shirt and jeans on,” says Kaz.
“I’ve never been in a project where everything has just happened,” marvels Dylan. “I’ve been struggling for most of my life. I’ve had hits before but I’ve paid my dues. There’s a chemistry between Kaz and I that just seems to make things very easy.”
It’s a chemistry set to explode when the album is released in April. Stand back, and prepare to be rocked.

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Bodyrockers - Bodyrockers