Interviewed september 1997 at Nighttown in Rotterdam

His real name is Graham Sutton and he’s sitting in the backstage area at Nighttown in Rotterdam, catching his breath. He has just rushed in here, way too late. He missed the plane he was supposed to catch, but was able to take another which took him to Eindhoven instead of Schiphol, so it took him some time to get here. Just in time to spin a few records before Lamb played. Boymerang is a small but tough looking guy, about 25 years old, if I didn’t know who he was he would just be like any English football supporter. Unshaven, earring in his right ear, wearing a football shirt, talking with a London accent. Not the image you’d expect of a drum’n'bass hero.

SNOBBERY

But he is, under the name of Boymerang he has released many important EP’s throughout 1997 and one amazing album “Balance Of The Force”. By doing that he has become one of the leading forces in the British drum’n'bass scene. Even in his own country people still find him a bit strange. Jokingly Graham remarks: ‘For some people of the music press in Engeland it’s a bit hard to swallow, yeah. It’s a form of reversed snobbery I guess, because I’m not black and because I used to sing and play the guitar.’ Graham can already look back upon a music carreer. When he was just sixteen years old, he and some friends started a band, Bark Psychosis. This band was one of the most awesome guitarbands of the early 1990’s. A band which made some beautiful almost abstract and stylish songs which usually got compared to the work of Disco Inferno, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk and The Blue Nile. Graham: ‘It’s so long ago since I’ve talked about that band. Not too many people know of my past. Still I see it as a real important period in my life. I was just as serious about music back then as I am now.’ The music of Bark Psychosis was made with great care, that’s what made them so evidently special. The five EP’s and the album “Hex” that crowned their career, contained a richness of sound and complexitity that is rarely heard. Graham: ‘Making “Hex” cost us a year, even back then we worked the same way I still work now, using a computer. Not many people realise that when hearing the record, that for the most part it is made on a machine. All the bass and the drums are samples and are played by the sequencer. That was a lot cheaper for us to do that at home than by going into a studio for months and months to make it perfect.’ Not long after releasing the album the band split up, that was almost four years ago. After that Graham got interested in dance music, the many clubs in London and especially the rise of jungle music. So he started making music on his own: jungle music. Graham: ‘For me it was a logical progression, I never start working using a plan, I just take whatever I’m influenced by, just by listening to music I came to making the music I’m making right now. I really have no idea where it could lead to next.’

TERRIBLE

For someone with a rock background, Graham has been adopted in world of drum’n'bass pretty easy. Graham: ‘It’s such a small world, everybody knows each other in the drum’n'bass scene of London, Goldie, Grooverider, Fabio, Luke Vibert, Peshay, J. Majik, they’re just my friends. Still I’m quite happy, they’ve accepted me. People liked my first two EP’s on Leaf recordings and they both got played by Goldie, and since then they’ve all been interested in whatever I do.’ The appreciation these key figures have for Boymerang can be seen in the way they use his records, on the dancefloor, to make the crowd go wild. Boymerang’s “Still” was for months the highpoint in sets of influencial English deejays like Grooverider and Fabio. And once Goldie called up Graham in the middle of the night after hearing a Boymerang mix at the Blue Note saying: ‘That was fucking terrible’, meaning to say it was fucking incredible. Graham: ‘If someone like that says a thing like that in the small circle of people he’s in, than in no-time you get excepted by the whole crew and they want to hear more. And that’s what happened to me when I started working on the album.’ Making the kind of drum’n'bass Boymerang makes is a lonely job and has to be done precise. Boymerang belongs to the kind of producers that can work months on just one track until the microtonal differences of the sounds and the timing of the rhythm is just right. Graham: ‘I don’t mind working alone. It’s actually a lot better compared to working together in a band. You never dissagree or have to do consessions. Thanks to the computer and the sampler making music has become a lot easier. Sometimes a bit too easy I think, if you hear the kind of junk that people send out into the world. But I think it’s alright, a lot more people now have ways to express themselves because of better and cheaper instruments and equipment.’

TALK TALK

The only problem that’s left is how to present this kind of music live. Graham: ‘Yeah, it’s less easy, being on your own. But even when I was in Bark Psychosis it wasn’t easy to do, after spending months in the studio and programming a lot of the music, we had quite a hard time re-enacting that onstage. I haven’t really thought about playing this music live, making records people can play and being able to spin records myself is fine by me.’ Didn’t Mike Paradinas suggest starting up a d’n'b supergroup with Luke Vibert and Graham? Graham reacts as if he’s stung by a bee: ‘Yeah, I’ve read something about that! No fucking way! I would never agree to do that. I don’t know why he ever suggested that. It’s not a good idea. I rather do this alone.’ And doing it alone is working out just fine. Graham: ‘I’ve just started working on my next album. And I have no idea yet what it’s going to sound like. Maybe drum’n'bass, but maybe something completely different. At home I seldom listen to dance music. The last few months I’ve only listened to one record over and over again, the new one by Mark Hollis (Talk Talk). Yeah, it’s true, Mark Hollis has made a new record all on his own, using a computer. The music is less extreme as on “Laughing Stock”, but it’s beautiful. If the record company finally decides to release it, it should come out early 1998.’ Who would have expected it, a drum’n'bass artist influenced by the stylish popmusic of Talk Talk. Graham: ‘As a sixteen year old I skipped school for a day just to buy “The Colour of Spring”‘.