Jamie Catto (of Faithless & 1 Giant Leap) says: “The Happening” was a tithe or a thank you gift to the goddess of music for letting me make a living from music in which I invited all my favorite diverse artists to Dave Stewart’s place (an old church [+]Jamie Catto (of Faithless & 1 Giant Leap) says: “The Happening” was a tithe or a thank you gift to the goddess of music for letting me make a living from music in which I invited all my favorite diverse artists to Dave Stewart’s place (an old church in Crouch End London where we did a lot of Dido’s first album there too including ‘Thank You’). During the 3 day recording session, not one track was played more than once and everything was improvised around ideas in my head. I’d heard about Miles Davis when he made “In a Silent Way”, he just laid down the vibe verbally to the guys, who were so hot they could just go for it. So that’s what we did. One one of my favorite tracks is ‘Chances Are’ where an African xylophone player and DJ Swamp from Beck’s group do a very unique duet, just the kind of thing I wanted to happen.
We had the Faithless rhythm section, other percussionists from different disciplines, the keyboard player from Oasis, the singer from the Sneaker Pimps, the scratch DJ from Beck’s band, DJ Swamp (who’s also the USA champion!), and Lévon Minassian (the duduk player from Peter Gabriel’s Passion’ album & who’s featured in and on the “1 Giant Leap” CD & DVD, and is actually a jeweller who lives in Marseilles, France) and a Canadian, Paris-based clarinetist called Carol Robinson (who is deeply avant guard and plays the Lituanian birbine too on track #3), Liam, the singer from The Hothouse Flowers, singer Pauline Taylor and Dave Randall on guitars, sitar & programming.
Nick Raphael, who is the root of the most successful UK Reggae Sound System, Mannasseh was my brother’s roommate and I always wanted to do something with him. He brought the rhythm track along so we thought we’d do a straight, down the line, reggae track just before we set to the track. A couple of the guys had been to a local record shop with DJ Swamp to find some new stuff to mess with and they’d brought a reggae record which, in the old style, had the full track on side A and just the bare vocal on side B. Dave Randall decided to play sitar to make it more interesting and DJ Swamp scratched the vocal up “Brothers and Sisters good day! How ya doin? I hope you’re doing fine. Round and round - Irie! At 3:10 PM we were feaking out YESSSSS!!!! and the band just picked a key and
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