Pepe Deluxe 'Beatitude' album

“I predict in three years there won’t be any music with beats, it’ll all just be violins and cellos.” James Spectrum
“We are wizards!” JA-Jazz

It’s probably best not to take either of those statements entirely seriously, but you’d be foolish to do the same with Pepe Deluxe. The last time we met them they were sound-tracking the hugely successful, continent spanning soundtrack of the Levi’s Twisted Jeans campaign. But so much has happened since then that, frankly, everything we thought we knew is now wrong… So let’s start again.

Beatitude is going to be one your most cherished albums of the year, you just don’t know it yet. You’ll almost certainly be drawn in by the head-wrecking funk lunacy of Salami Fever, but you’ll stay on just to have another listen to the languid sexiness of the very beautiful Lying Peacefully. You’ll stick First Goodbye’s deep, cinematic blues on a mixtape and possibly even get a shag because of it. You’ll hear future single Girl in every high-class, late-night drinking establishment you frequent from here ‘til Christmas, but you’ll never tire of it. Within days of listening to Beatitude for the first time, you’ll imagine DJ Shadow throwing his windows open, realising what a fucking beautiful day it is, and deciding to spend it having a noisy, drunken BBQ with actual human beings rather than picking dust off his sneakers in a record shop basement. Again. It’s that type of album.

But how did we get here? Well, in 1997, James Spectrum and JA-Jazz – along with the now departed DJ Slow – recorded a tune called “Woman In Blue” that sampled Tony Hatch (the man responsible for, among other classics, the Neighbours theme) and Nina Simone. Everyone thought it was great, including Levi’s. Simone’s record company cleared the sample for the album, but not for the advert. This turned out to be a Very Good Thing Indeed as the group obsessively developed their skills at replaying and recreating original sounds and textures where they would have once just used samples.

Consequently, three things happened. Firstly, the process made Pepe Deluxe realise what they were capable of doing themselves. Secondly, this realisation pointed the way forward to their new record and thirdly, it gave the group the financial freedom to give up their day jobs and concentrate fully on their music. Tony Hatch isn’t complaining either – he still made, um, crazy bank.

“It sped things up,” admits James. “We loved music but we couldn’t invest more time in it.”

“It was a job,” reckons JA. “It just so happened we weren’t getting paid.”

Anyhow, the success of the advert also meant that every time the band thought they could get back to the studio they’d be called out for another round of promotional duties, but in Summer 2001, more than three years after the album “Woman In Blue” had been taken from was released, the phone finally stopped ringing and Pepe Deluxe were ready to make new music.
With Slow off doing his own projects, James and JA faced the huge process of going from three guys using samplers and decks to two guys learning how to record and build a studio that would end up utilising the talents of more than 34 different musicians from around the world. But they did it, and how…

“Everything’s taken so much time because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. But we do now,” JA

“We built a studio not to get the sounds of today, but to get the sounds of the samples we loved,” says James, a part-time physics student so obsessed his new studio toys he can – and will – happily talk for hours about spring reverbs and archaic, long since out of production pedals and FX. “I’m not after the modern best,” he says, “just the craziest. The whole concept of the album is trying to be the best of everything.”

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Pepe Deluxe - Beatitude