Continued from Part One, MistaJam.com writer Sam Moir continues his chat with Will and Saul about their sound in 2010, future ambitions and ‘selling out.’

In the time since Chase & Status released More Than A lot, the dubstep genre has exploded throughout the United States, culminating in last summer’s Dubstep LA mixtape that featured Benga, Caspa, MRK1 and Starkey, alongside lyricists such as Ras Kass, Murs, Grouch and Snoop Dogg.

Having explained how Snoop jumped on Eastern Jam, they also spoke on their role in helping the genre progress stateside.

“We were the first people to do it with them, so in that case we were the first but it’s just the movement. Benga’s worked with Eve, the Magnetic Man project is going to be huge, Benga and Skream individually have got fantastic things coming out and Rusko’s absolutely huge in LA right now.”

Skream’s In For The Kill remix took the sound to the masses in 2009 but the evolution of the genre took place between 2003 and 2005. When Hatcha pioneered a new direction for dubstep on Rinse FM, he played music from new producers, including Benga and Skream. The boys acknowledged the impact those two artists have played, not only in their own music, but the genre as a whole too.

“Benga and Skream have gone on to be the Fabio and Grooverider of dubstep; the originals, the daddies. It’s them as characters as well that has really propelled dubstep. If they never made music again, they’d still be known as Benga and Skream. People love to party with them and have them play at their party, and they just happen to make wicked music as well.”

While dubstep has exploded, with tunes such as Eastern Jam and Saxon becoming seminal anthems in the genre, for some, d&b has been left in the shadows. Not so for Chase & Status. “We still love d&b, it’s what we cut our cloth on, and it’s where we’re from.”

“That’s the scene we wanted to break into and it’s still is the most exciting thing in the club.”

“Dubstep is absolutely killing it but you go around the world and trust me, d&b is still big. We play a lot of music in our set and it’s the d&b that gets people going crazy.”

“Music goes up and down but, like always, d&b will remain there and someone will come with a huge tune and change it all again and the cycle continues.”

When the Guardian’s Paul Lester reviewed them as the ‘New band of the day’ ahead of their End Credits release in October 2009, he said, they were ‘most likely to gain sales’ but ‘least likely to gain status’’ a reference to some people who believe they have sold out. So, have they?

“We don’t think so at all. Since the album, what have Chase & Status done? We’ve done the Jay-Z remix, which is the opposite of selling out, the Heartbeat remix was getting played by Caspa and Skream in dubstep raves.”

“Wait until you hear the new album and then judge,” they request. “If you think we’ve sold out then go to press, but until then we haven’t done anything to sell out.”

It is all about progression and it is difficult to imagine any producer rejecting the opportunity to produce for arguably the world’s biggest pop star, in favour of staying in their bedroom making underground beats. “We can’t think of any producers who have got the technical skills to say no to that.”

“Obviously people are going to say it’s for the money, but it’s just inspiring and an amazing experience. We’ve been in Los Angeles writing songs for artists with songwriters who have written for Michael Jackson.”

“I don’t think we could sell out. It’s not really in our heads to make music for money, and the minute you try and do that, it will probably backfire and people won’t want to listen to your music anymore.”

When End Credits, their second collaboration with Plan B, was released in October 2009, reaching a career high of number nine on the UK charts, they did stress that the single was not indicative of their new sound. “End Credits was a song we wrote for a movie, and of course they wanted something a bit more deep and cinematic. That was a single from a movie track, not our new album.”

“Now everyone thinks that’s going to be the sound of the new album. It isn’t. That’s just something we did for that movie.”

Since then, End Credits has been confirmed as one of three tracks from their forthcoming, as-yet untitled second album. Certainly, it is easier to promote and sell an album that features a top ten single. However, the boys believe End Credits represents a growth in their music.

“We are in a different place now. We’re more musical and we have got a whole heap of fantastic vocalists we’ve been working with to up those musical stakes. We’re trying to do something a little bit different, we can’t just write the same record again.”

The selling out accusation is one that follows every underground artist that achieves commercial success, just ask Dizzee Rascal. And as Saul adds, “Let’s say in a few weeks time we come with some big d&b tune that’s disgusting and everyone’s like, ‘Of course you haven’t sold out!’”

While the follow up track from End Credits may not be that ‘big d&b tune’, their collaboration with Dizzee Rascal, Heavy, should silence those accusing them of selling out, for the time being at least.

Heavy is a fusion of dubstep and grime, taking Dizzee Rascal back to his roots. “Dizzee gave us a call and came down to our studio. He said he’s not really the kind of guy to just jump in the booth. He likes to take the tune home and live with it.”

“We were cool with that, but after half an hour he goes ‘I’ll just jump in the booth now and try something out’. Four hours later and everything was done.”

Having worked on Rihanna’s album, and submitted beats for Jay-Z, Chase & Status could be forgiven for seeking more lucrative production placements on other high-profile albums. They have certainly had offers. However, they have turned these opportunities down, instead choosing to focus their own album. “We’ve had options and offers to work with people in America but in terms of the Chase & Status project we’re trying to push now. There’s so much great talent and music in the UK, it’s all about showing it off to the world.”

“We’re in a position now where people are listening so we might as well unleash the best we’ve got over here on the rest of the world because we have the most exciting music.”

The new album is due in November, and as the final body nears completion, are the boys feeling pressure to deliver a worthy follow up to their successful debut? “Of course. But the pressure is coming from ourselves. We know we have to deliver; we want to do something bigger and better.”

Having signed to a major label, dined with Rihanna and become the most successful crossover act since Pendulum, the duo are now beginning to gather a following more akin to a pop artist. “It’s peculiar. We now have people hanging outside the venue waiting for autographs.”

Indeed, as this interview takes place on their tour bus, several hours before their live show, there are already two fans waiting outside for a glimpse of the boys. “But it’s great because as well as doing this, then we get to shuffle off and just be the producers in the dark.”

“Before our last tour, the last few weeks have just been in my house, studio then home – studio. It’s like we’re no one, like we’ve never had a release before. You’re just in your own tiny dark bubble.”

Despite gaining recognition as artists, they reaffirm the studio will always be their first love. “Without making the music, we wouldn’t be sitting on this bus, we wouldn’t be doing anything. It’s all about making the music, it comes before anything.”

Their task is to create the perfect album, one that will satisfy fans who liked End Credits,  but also one that someone who likes Duppy Man can relate to. When the record finally drops, it will be fascinating to hear whether they will be able to incorporate all of this, without sounding all over the place.

“We’ll try and cater for all our fans. If you’re a fan of the artist, you go along with them on their journey. If you just like an artist for one particular song, then you don’t really like the artist. You just like that one particular type of tune and therefore that artist isn’t for you.”

“We are conscious we don’t want to lose the fans who know us from the beginning, but fundamentally if we love the music then hopefully other people will, but if other people don’t and we still love it, then we’ll still be happy. If we put something out that we don’t really like but the masses love, then that’s not what it’s really about.”

“We’ve managed to get quite a lot of success and a big fan base from just doing what we’ve been doing so we’ll just do that for the second album and hopefully it will continue.”

“It’s because we’re Chase & Status as to why we got these opportunities to work with these artists. We didn’t just write pop music and send it around, we wrote things like Saxon and Eastern Jam.”

“If we suddenly just don’t become us anymore then we’re finished.”

Only Will and Saul know what the finished album will sound like. They have spent 12 years honing their craft and are constantly listening to music, both new and old, ranging from folk, indie, stuff from the 80s and even pop. “You hear bits of music and think how you could somehow blend that with the d&b scene.”

“It’s really hard to create something new now, with d&b everything’s been done and a lot of it is being regurgitated, it’s quite formulaic.”

“We want to try and come with something that really blows people’s minds.”

Let You Go is out now with remixes from Nero, Brookes Brothers and Chase & Status themselves. The highly anticipated album will also feature Heavy, with Dizzee Rascal.

The album, due for release in November, also features End Credits, their top 10 hit with Plan B and an appearance from White Lies.

Chase & Status are back with a new single, the ferocious Let You Go which features new talent Mali and is released on August 15.

In the first of a two-part series, MistaJam.com writer Sam Moir caught up with the duo, who talked about everything from their early beginnings, the success of their debut album and the pressure of working on its follow up.

For the past few months, Chase & Status have been balancing their time between DJ sets, two live tours, and crucially, extensive studio sessions, as they continue to craft the much anticipated follow up to their debut album, More Than A Lot.

But let’s go back to the beginning. Will and Saul met through a mutual friend when they were both 18 years old. “My friend said Will had a nice set of decks at his house, a good mixer and you can smoke in his room. At 18 years old, that’s all you need to hear, so I dropped round his house after college with a bag full of records… I didn’t even have a record bag.”

“We started going out to The End, which was a seminal night club in London, which has now unfortunately closed. We would see each other at all the raves and then I went up to Manchester. Will did about a year later and we were just DJ-ing everywhere we could, thinking we were the best DJs in the world.”

It was at university that they became serious about their music, ultimately deciding to quit their studies in order to focus solely on their careers as producers. Having dropped out, “We just spent five years underground in Manchester, writing beats obsessively and not doing anything else.”

A watershed moment for the boys came in 2003 when their first piece of production, Like This was released on Vehicle. “That first release was obviously a big high for us.  It was a time when we were trying to get our foot through the door. It’s very hard when you’re coming through and getting people to hear your records, let alone get them signed.”

Following this breakthrough, they began working with Tempa and Bingo. “Shortly after that, we met DJ Zinc who wanted beats and at the time, we were young and unbelievably buzzing. That was massive and we just jumped on the opportunity.”

It has been a whirlwind seven years for the duo ever since. In reference to their early releases on DC Presents, Vehicle, Bingo and Hardware, Saul tells me, “Every year, we’ve had a key moment, a batch of songs that have really opened us up, culminating in the album in 2008, which has opened more doors than we could have expected.”

An album that, according to Beatportal, is ‘packed with differing musical flavours that represents the changing face of breaks-led electronic music.’ Eastern Jam still gets that precious rewind in the clubs.

“That album wasn’t just a couple of weeks in the making; it was two years of our lives, there was another 13 tracks that got scrapped and these ones are the ones that stuck.”

“Your interests change, what you’re into changes, the dynamic of the scene changes. You might have written a song at the beginning of the campaign but by the end of it think, ‘That’s not what I’m in to and it’s outdated, so scrap that.”

The album is a combination of d&b, dubstep and hip, but one aspect that they also focused on was the use of vocals. The reason being: “You can go to a record shop and say, ‘Have you got that song that goes ‘Take me away?’ It’s much easier to invest yourself into a song that’s got something you can remember.”

They decided on using strictly up-and-coming UK vocalists very early on. “We wanted to include UK artists that we were really excited about but weren’t from the d&b scene.”

“We had lots of d&b vocalists approaching us, and as much as we like them, they’d already done a lot of work with other artists.”

To use artists who were not synonymous with that genre was perhaps a bit of a gamble, but Will steps in, “It was exciting to try and do different stuff.”

“With Plan B, he’d never done a d&b track so taking his soulful edge and angle and taking his song writing skills and doing something completely different with him was really exciting for him and for us.”

Their collaboration with Kano, Against All Odds, reached number 45 in the UK charts in early 2009. “We came across the sample and at first, thought about giving it to American people but we thought, let’s see if Kano could do something with it and he loved it.”

With Kano’s new album, Method To The Maadness, featuring a track, Spaceship, produced by Will and Saul, it appears their loyal relationship with the UK scene remains true to this day. It’s a relationship that describe as “that whole UK thing; everyone helping everyone to push it forward.”

“Kano’s been coming to our shows now and he’s been saying he didn’t realise he could be into d&b like he is. Now he’s coming to our shows, dancing around and knows all the songs.”

In May 2009, Chase & Status announced they had signed to the major label, Mercury Records, a move some people interpreted as the duo turning their back on their independent, underground roots.

“It was really important for when we signed a deal with a major, to keep that relationship with the underground and RAM. We had a great thing with RAM Records and we didn’t want to say bye to that. We don’t want to lose our roots and where we come from.”

“It’s a dream deal for us really, we’ve got the funding, press, promotion, photo shoots, and everything’s just done to a new level.”

I ask them, considering their meteoric rise, how do they describe their sound now?

“It’s really UK. We don’t want to be pigeonholed, we make music all across the board and we don’t want to be typecast in d&b or music in general. Everyone always says they find it hard to describe what category we’re in, and we quite like that too. Hopefully we can just write cool music that everyone’s in to.”

By November 2009; they have sold over 60,000 copies of their album, hooked up with Snoop Dogg, remixed for Jay-Z and produced three tracks for Rihanna’s Rated R album.

“We got a MySpace message from Snoop Dogg which said, ‘Yo, this is Snoop, I need a good copy of Eastern Jam, I want to spit some lyrics on it,’ and we thought someone had pranked us.”

After a couple of checks to verify whether it was the real Snoop, the track was completed and revealed to the world within a week. The duo had mixed feelings about the tune dubbed Snoop Doog Millionaire. “It was frustrating because we didn’t get a chance to work with the making of that track, but it was so exciting because off the back of that, it helped our profile in America.”

While working on the dubstep LA mixtape last summer, dubstep producer Plastician predicted the US would embrace the scene once they heard that Snoop had jumped on a dubstep track. He was right, Rihanna deciding she wanted to Chase & Status involved on her album after hearing Saxon.

“Her project is an absolute rollercoaster; she’s got the pick of the best producers in the world.”

Considering the amount of big name producers involved in her project, it is a massive compliment to the boys that Rihanna described their work as being the backbone of her album. Three tracks, Madhouse, Wait Your Turn and G4L made it onto the LP, which has gone on to sell nearly three million copies since its release last November.

“That little quote came about a couple of times. We went out for dinner one night with her, Jay-Z and the whole of the Roc Nation crew. She got a glass and said she wanted to make a toast to us and the fact we were in on the album. We were flattered and speechless.”

A case of bad timing meant they just missed out on any production credits on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3, but they have now supplied him with two beats for his new project, a move that landed them in a bit of trouble. “One track we gave to Rihanna; we didn’t realise that if you show something to someone at the time, it’s theirs. So we’d already given the track to Jay, not releasing he wanted it, and then showed it to Rihanna, who went crazy about it.”

“It ended up with us getting a little talking to from someone, and Rihanna and Jay-Z having a conversation, with Jay saying, ‘It’s cool, you can have that tune and I’ll get something else off them.”

Not bad to have two of the biggest artists in the world wanting your beat, is it?

In Part Two on Monday, I discuss their future ambitions and what they make of accusations they have ‘sold out’.

Plastician spoke about it on my show last night… here it is in it’s full glory:

Download all 28 tracks in a nice updated link here

**UPDATE – Some people are finding that a password is being asked for when trying to unpack the zip. There is no password, if you use WINRAR on a PC or Stuffit on a mac, you should be cool. Either way, I have upped a brand new zip of the mixtape with definitely NO PASSWORDS. Thank me later…**

“After hearing Chase & Status ‘EASTERN JAM’ via a mutual friend, Snoop Dogg and US production team Wild Animals created something really special. ‘SNOOP DOGG MILLIONAIRE’ – It’s a ground-breaking moment for dub-step showing the genre’s potential as a chart-topping form of music on both sides of the pond.”

This is nothing less than major and a great look for not only Chase & Status who are smashing EVERYTHING to pieces at the moment but also the dubstep scene. Now, all we need to do is convince Jigga to jump on Rusko’s “Cockney Thug” and 50 to jump on Magnetic Man’s “Cyberman” and we’re set!

If you want to hear it, check me on 1Xtra tonight. I’ll play it around 7.45pm.

UPDATE: Everyone else has posted it so in the words of George Clinton in House Party, 2 tears in a bucket, f*ck it, let’s take it to the stage….

I’ll still play it tonight along with Goldie’s new dubstep track but if you can’t wait, download here

Released on RAM on 23rd Feb. Go support.