Our New Year tips start here

Alan Johnson is not a bloke – and definitely not the postman turned Labour politician you might have heard of. Alan Johnson is actually a Manchester-based duo – Gareth Kirby and Tim Neilan – who mash deadly deep dubstep, gnarly breakbeats and junglist production firepower into a wonderfully trouble-heavy sound that’s all their own. No wonder that the ever eagle-eared Sneaker Social Club have got behind them, releasing a string of early EPs. With their aptly named ‘Ten Year Tonnage’ hitting recently and their debut album set to surface this year, who better than them to kick off our series of 24 tips for 2024?

First things first – where are you as you type this? 

We’re both sat at home on the outskirts of Manchester chatting on a call, it’s a Sunday evening and we’ve been taking in the local festivities of the North West over the weekend in the run up to Christmas. Tom’s nursing the aftermath of a virus – the result of having a toddler in the house and the time of year.

How’s your day been so far?

Gareth: I’ve been at a market in my local town of Stockport, I’ve been picking up a few things for Christmas and some of my friends were spinning records there so I was lingering around listening to their selection.

Tom: Middle of the road day for me, I’ve spent most of the day thinking about what I’ll eat once I’ve shaken off the illness and the rest of my free time working on a remix which is coming along nicely.

Been up to anything interesting?

Gareth: I recently bought myself a Lyra-8 (Soma Laboratory) and have been putting together a few bits of music for my friend’s production company Dsplaced. Also working on an AJ project Tom sent over to me earlier in the week.

Tom: Life is busy at the moment with family, I’m experiencing life through the eyes of a one and half year old who’s fascination with anything that is in any way mechanical and determination to play with it is unmeasured.. my studio is in the house so all studio equipment apart from the heavy duty stuff is on a strict no small fingers lockdown. Every new day is ever so slightly more interesting than the last.

Do we have both of you?  

Yes. We’re utilising all of the technological benefits of the 21st century that allow us to avoid interacting with each other in person; Whatsapp phone call while simultaneously writing this out in a google doc, our ten year old selves (who spent 90% of our time outside the house) would spit on a pavement at the very thought of it.

So, Alan Johnson – spectacular name.  Where did it come from? Do you ever get mistaken for the former postman/Labour minister/writer of the same name?  Not sure he plays a lot of raves these days…. 

Tom: Thanks, it draws a mixed reaction. We have been dubbed the duo with the world’s dullest name.

We think it’s quite a statement and fine line to tread for anyone sandwiched between the opposing namesakes of a fictional character once described as a handsome lothario, utter sleazeball and new-age business guru, and a chap most famously known for being the working class prime minister we never had and a strong opposition to stigmas surrounding council house living – but hopefully we come out on top.

On a side note we’ve actually had a number of requests from people for public appearances or telling us they met us at corporate events.. we used to entertain them when we had more time. On a more serious note, if anyone lives in the South Manchester SK7 postcode and you see the postman can you tell him to stop putting nonsense mail through my letterbox?

The name is a bit of a personal journey, in our early 20s we worked together at a Market Research agency, it was pretty dry. We were harassing people for their time for little to no benefit to them a few days a week to pay the bills while we were writing music.

Around the time we were thinking hard on a name for the joint project but it just wasn’t coming organically.

In our working hours we were hounding a guy called Alan Johnson at some nameless business to try and get a survey from him over some pointless topic for probably four or five weeks, maybe 2-3 times a day with his PA consistently fobbing us off or putting us through to a voicemail. Usually the same numbers wouldn’t come round that often in the calling system because you’d work in teams but this guy must have been in the system twice because he just kept on coming back around for both of us.

We called him that many times that the guy just became a regular joke and the one that nearly got away. We wondered if we’d ever get him on the phone, let alone convince him to spare his time to answer questions about his energy bill or other similarly  mundane topics. We’d spent equally long trying to think of a name as we had trying to get hold of this guy, so much so that we eventually decided that the universe was telling us something and we assumed his name. The first ever Alan Johnson track was called ‘Sitting at my Desk’ – a homage to Alan.

It’s safe to say we have a deeper appreciation for the subtleties of hold music than most, we did our time and we’ve got the stripes. We might put out an album of exclusively hold music one day.

And tell us about your musical journeys so far – what music did family play you, what were your first musical loves? 

Gareth: My dad was playing a lot of Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Edgar Broughton Band, Prodigy, Future Sound of London, The Orb and Faithless. My mum was playing classical music, bhangra and some David Bowie thrown in for good measure. Allround, pretty eclectic. Frank Zappa and Tom Waits definitely left a lasting impression on me, especially their more experimental stuff, which I think has shaped my taste in music to this day.

Tom: It’s a bit of a mixed bag for me, I grew up in an extremely soulful house – my dad was a big Northern Soul record collector. Over the years he’s collected a crazy selection of original 45 pressings (Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, loads of Motown etc.), he was part of the Wigan casino crowd as a teen.

I have an older brother and from an early age he used to set a tape recording on a Friday night to catch the Tim Westwood show on Radio 1, it was late 90s. I think the tapes were TDK 180s so you’d only get 90 minutes each side, he’d set it recording then sneak down stairs to flip the tape while our parents were sleeping, none the wiser. We caught a fair amount of it over the years, it was a culture we knew little about and I was young and impressionable but I distinctly remember the feeling of knowing elements of a song that made a song a banger from around that time, I think I must have been seven or eight.

For a time Chris Goldfinger’s show was after the Tim Westwood show and as my brother got older and he could stay up later he’d record for longer, if you were lucky the tape would catch a good half an hour or more of Goldfinger which was a whole new thing entirely. That was my first real exposure to one of the main early influences of the AJ sound in Jamaican/bashment/sound system music (your sound system crews, Sizzla, Lady Saw, Beenie Man, the roots stuff and the more obscure sounds).

What about early bands/projects?  

Gareth: Before Alan Johnson I was making music as Elsewhere and Tom as Stickman. We both put music out on some of the same labels, we had some early 130bpm releases on Ancestral Voices’ Manchester-based Mindset record label and the NZ/Berlin-based drum and bass label Samurai. I’m still active under the Elsewhere alias, I had a couple of tracks out over the last year through Synkro Musik and Bop’s Microfunk label but for the most part we’re both focusing our efforts on the Alan Johnson project these days.

How did you first meet and what did you bond over? 

Tom: We’re both originally from the sunny heights of the Peak District in the North. As you can probably imagine, growing up in the hills with a few thousand people in your local village meant you were limited to the number of like minded people you’d meet.

We went to the same school but never crossed paths, we were introduced by a friend some time around college age, I was smacking out weird drum and bass and Gareth offered to be my tea boy/build my spliffs for me which meant I could spend more time building tech step baselines – I was hardly going to turn him down.

And what have you released as Alan Johnson before this EP?

Gareth: Our first EP was with Blank Mind back in 2013. Around the same time we did a couple of tracks on V/A comps with the same label (their entire catalogue is very solid – check them out).

There was then a four year hiatus whilst I was living overseas in Spain and Norway. I moved to Bristol and met up with an old producer friend of ours Caski who asked if we had any music for a label he was starting. We had a dig around in the archives and put out a two tracker with him on his label Raincloud Records. It’s only really been the last 1-2 years since I moved back to Manchester a couple miles away from Tom that we’ve been more consistent with our output. Jamie / Low End Activist got in touch with us around this time I was in Bristol though to ask if we had any unreleased tracks which lead to a string of releases on his labels, Art-E-Fax and Sneaker Social Club. This was a big moment as we have been listening to Sneaker Social Club since the Throwing Snow EP (SNKR001) back in 2011. Big up to Jamie for helping to facilitate the 2nd coming of AJ!

Do you have specific roles when you’re making music or is it a free for all? 

Gareth: We do our best to work on projects in the same room but these days, adulting often gets in the way. We tend to send projects to each other back and forth via email. A lot of our projects start with an idea then tend to get pretty far from that idea and very messy, very quickly. Projects can often end up with 100+ channels which sometimes take a while to bring back to a place of having a solid mix and becoming a finished track. For the most part it’s a free for all!

Tom: Gareth’s the ideas guy; I make his tea these days.. No, the joy of having two of you working on music is that if you have something you’re working on, then the idea often develops pretty quickly independently. Then you can pass it on and not really think about it or care what form it takes from that point, there’s no overthinking it – if a tune isn’t working then I just usually leave it for a while but a tune not working for me is mostly about mindset when you pick it up for the most part. I think over the years we’ve contributed equal parts across most tracks. One of us might find a sample and imagine it would work well with a specific idea, then the other person gets it and flips it on its head which then informs the next iteration to move even further away from the original idea. It’s quite an inspiring process and I guess there’s a ‘the sum of the parts being greater’ type make up working in the background.

Always a tough question – how do you describe your style?   

Tom: Easier to answer than most I guess.. style is ever changing for us. The style is that we somehow manage to make a piece of music that we’re both happy with by the end of the process and somehow other people might enjoy that as well.

The more proficient you get through training in doing any hobby / art I think it becomes less about the strokes you make and tools you use but more about the intention for me. I wouldn’t say we really put any intention into this being a long term project or limiting ourselves to a certain sound from the off. It was just fun to work on something different, then we turned a corner and found a sound and a feeling within what we were doing which was easily discernible from our own productions. We’ve never really been that introspective over this project, we just went where the music and exploration took us with little influence from anything other than our senses. What we’ve been able to do over the last couple of years though is work on the project more, develop our musical language and communicate better, refine and understand more about our abilities and what we’re capable of in the age of excess access; access to everything via the internet and mid-life freedoms to expand to physical gear, gear hoarding etc.

I don’t listen to much new music myself or really any new electronic music regularly, I think that has some bearing on how I approach making music but I think our style is characterised by the palette of sounds we most commonly or haphazardly end up drawing for. 90% of the music we make is vocally-orientated and I’m not really sure why that is but it’s likely because it provides that tool to tell a story. We never approach making music in the same way twice, one of us might start with an experiment to see if we can make an entire song from synthesis for example then drop that into another idea that already exists. A good example of how diverse we approach making music is a project that Gareth sent over to me last year, the mix was amazing, drums were tumping and it just needed a little more life in it – some creativity. The end result was admittedly myself getting very carried away with a new idea inside the existing project and eventually replacing or removing everything from the original track apart from the kick drum and some tops layers, maybe some automation.

The point is, we aren’t really precious around how we get to the end result most of the time and taking an objective view while knowing bits removed from projects can be reused or make new projects, I think, is a healthy view of time investment in the creative process.

Our style has seen a few different phases but the next phase sees us covering more ground in terms of creative reach.

Sneaker Social Club is known for music that echoes the classic days of hardcore rather than being a specifically a house/jungle/dubstep/whatever label – that must have been appealing as artists 

We really stumbled into the whole SSC release conversation, we really make music for ourselves and most of the releases we’ve put out over the years have been music that we’ve made and has just been sat around.

As with anything that you create personally yourself and have belief in, we feel it’s important that you’re able to find a like minded and uncompromising home for that creative outcome, SSC and Jamie in general has it down. His belief is quite unbelievable and looking at the catalogue for his various outputs, his vision and ear is firmly grounded in taking risks and stepping into areas rarely seen by the play it safe labels.

Talk us through your latest release ‘Ten Year Tonnage’ 

Gareth: Ten Year Tonnage is in some ways the closing of a chapter in our music. The title track gets its namesake from the last of our archival output, the track is over ten years old at this point with a few minor mix updates to bring it into this decade. Muay Size is even older and was originally one of Tom’s tunes. He sent me the project and again was updated with a new mix, swapping out a few hits and an updated section in the middle of the track.

The same thing happened on our previous release, Tom took one of my old tunes which eventually became the track ‘Pleasure Principles’ on our ‘Stillness’ EP. ‘Shapeshifter’ and ‘People of the World’ are much newer tracks that we made to compliment the older material. At this point we have extracted pretty much all the old unreleased fully fledged tracks we had knocking about on our old hard drives. Anything that you hear from us in the future will likely be coming relatively fresh from the kitchen.

And finally, what’s next for Alan Johnson? 

We have a six track EP set for release with another amazing label YUKU which is our largest project to date, that’s due out in early 2024. It’s a split release which really represents a new age and deviation in our sound. Half of the record is grounded in references to the past and the other half is facing outward to a future less steeped in sweaty basements and eyesdown shuffles, something completely different. We’re also refining the live show which we took to Berlin this year, with a view to write more music around live performance and look at bringing that to clubs. Also hold tight for the album as well.

Buy your 12″ vinyl copy of ‘Ten Year Tonnage’ – click here