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Fish Go Deep are simply the founding fathers of the Irish House scene and as Greg Dowling and Shane Johnson have grown their brand since their early successes behind the decks, they have introduced a growing fanbase to their wondrous world of electronic dreams.
The duo has travelled widely, bringing their unique sound to clubs and festivals throughout Ireland, Europe and beyond. During that time they have also hosted many of the world’s top house DJs at their regular Go Deep parties. They have a long history on the airwaves, starting on local pirate stations, before moving to a more legal environment and now they reach a global audience with their Fish Go Deep Radio Show.
They moved from the Underground and came to the attention of all music lovers with ‘The Cure and the Cause’ and since then have gone to dominate the charts all over the world. This week sees them release their third album, ‘This Bit Of Earth’ which moves away from their traditional House sensibilities with a sound that swirls around the broad concept of electronica. Astounding in its sonic brilliance, it is an album that captures today’s turbulent times in magnificent glory.
On a busy day with a number of responsibilities, Shane was able to sit down with us and tell us the Fish Go Deep story.
So first of all, let's ask you how have you both been doing during COVID.
Up and down I guess, a bit like everyone. We're just coming out of five months of lockdown since Christmas really. More of the shops are opening and the vaccine rollout is going pretty well. Most of the older population are vaccinated now and I should be getting mine within the next couple of weeks. There is a bit of hope on the horizon after a very difficult 12-14 months.
As musicians, DJs, and performers, how have you coped with that?
We're very much contained from a studio point of view. We can go weeks on end without seeing anyone. I've a little setup here and the main studio is over in Greg's place, so we figured we could just keep working away; send stuff back and forth. We were in the middle of this album project so we had the time to complete it. There were no distractions because we lost a whole load of gigs over the summer. There was nothing you could’ve done about that. So we decided to really focus hard on the album and get that finished.
But it didn't really come that easily. we found it very difficult to focus and concentrate. I suppose there was so much else going on in the world. So many changes going on around us. It took us a couple of months to really settle back into a routine.
After a couple of weeks of turning on the machines in the morning, and not a lot happening, I started to archive DAT tapes, cassettes, floppy disks full of samples and all our old stuff. I started really mundane and mindless stuff but it was keeping me busy and kept me occupied in my little studio space until things settled down.
I think both Greg and myself had this experience. We just then took a breath and said, ‘Okay, let's get back into this’. And it actually was a really productive summer. We finished off the album and started on a couple of other projects. Stuff that we had lost, so we started finishing those too. So initially our world turned upside down but once you got a grip on the new normal, it was okay.
Obviously not touring and playing your music to people was a huge thing to miss out on last summer but on the flip side, we got a lot of good work done in the studio. We're hopefully coming out of this stronger.
One of the things that I've noticed, and I don't know if you'll agree with me is that dance music sort of changed during this period to be less track driven and simplistic, to be more sophisticated and a better listening experience. Would you agree with that?
I think so. Well, I hope so. I mean, I love a simple dance track as much as the next man especially when you're touring; when you're going to festivals, and you're seeing DJs doing short one hour sets there's no subtlety. If you're playing to a big crowd, you have that pressure. So with that not happening, I think producers are probably saying, ‘Why are we making these types of tracks if there's no one to actually hear them?’ Because if people are playing live stream shows, radio shows or podcasts, they're going to be playing to people, by and large, who are going to be listening rather than necessarily dancing. So I think it has allowed a lot of producers a bit of space to maybe rethink what they're doing. Certainly for us, it kind of steered the album in a slightly different direction. It's not a dance floor album. We weren't planning on necessarily making a dance floor album but I think the situation just steered it even more so in that direction. It's for listening.
So let’s take you back to the very beginning. You’re from Cork?
Yes and Greg was born in Dublin. He ended up in Cork in his 20s back in the 80s. I met Greg when I was still in school around about 16-17 years of age. My older brother was a friend of his. Greg DJed at a club I used to go to. We just got talking and he discovered I had a bit of a collection because I was making trips to London and buying records.
What sort of music was Greg playing?
Well, this would have been in the late 80s. House music in Cork and Ireland was very new then. Although it had obviously been around a few years at that stage, it was till hard-to-get hold of and there weren't that many people with a collection. So he would have been playing whatever house music he could get. Lots of hip hop, funk, disco etc. It was across the board. It wasn't as specialized as it is now. Likewise, I would have been collecting hip hop as well. I was really into Public Enemy Eric B and Rakim and later on De La Soul and people like that.
I find it strange that without the influence of the black community that England had, that House made its way to Cork early on.
Cork is a quirky city. There was a big reggae scene there when I was a teenager growing up. It was just white guys who were really into reggae. They'd have small nights in bars and that, but it was really strong. it's something that Greg certainly said he noticed when he moved to Cork because the people were into totally different music to Dublin. Maybe because Cork was very isolated as it’s a small city on the south coast. Touring bands came in, but not that regularly. So people kind of developed their own tastes.
The bands that came out of Cork were very much of Cork, they had a distinctive sound of their own. They weren't really trying to be the next U2. They weren't copying what was coming out in London at the time, because they didn't really have access to it; certainly not live.
I got lucky, there was always music in the house. My dad was a big jazz fan. So there's all this jazz playing when I grew up. My older brother was a DJ too in college here. So he had a big collection of records that I rifled through and I picked up on early hip hop stuff and funk stuff and all of that.
That's probably the beginnings of my tastes in music. I was collecting all these early house tracks that I could get my hands on towards the end of the 80s. Greg knew I have this collection and invited me to join him. I played once in a while on a school night in the club he was playing at. Then he was eventually headhunted by another club called Sir Henry's. After six months into that residency, he asked me to join him and we've been playing together ever since.
Why Fish Go Deep?
It's pretty straightforward. We had a record shop in the very early 90s in the English market in Cork. It's a covered fruit and vegetable market. The cheapest rent in the city was in the fish section. So we had a little record stall there every Saturday and a bunch of ravers hanging around much to the consternation of the fishmongers. So we were known as Fish Records.
A few years later, when we started producing some music, we got a track signed to a Dublin label, and they needed an artist name in a hurry which we didn't have. The EP was like a tech driven, harder kind of sound, so we called it Fish Go Tech. And if the next EP was jazzy, we were going to call it Fish Go Jazz and then the next one after that Fish Go Soul etc. Just keep changing the last word of the name. But after a couple of releases, we realized that was just stupid. It was not a good way to build a profile when you keep changing your name. So we got as far as Fish Go Deep and stuck at that.
Did you have any other odd jobs?
The only other job I've done is work in a bar. I went to university here for a year or two, but it wasn't really for me. At that stage, I was already making a bit of a living from DJing. It wasn't the plan to do it full time as a career because back then it wasn’t even a career.
Have you had a musical education?
Greg plays guitar a little. I play fairly basic studio keyboards. I can find my way around machines, but I'm not a player. You can’t stick me onstage in front of a crowd and expect me to wow them.
Who mentored you to get around that space?
It's a bit like becoming a DJ. When we started DJing, here in Cork, there was nobody really doing it. We learned on the job. We were lucky enough that we had a club with a really good sound system and they had an open-minded musical policy. Then later, when we got some keyboards, a sampler and a computer, (probably about the mid-90s), there was literally nobody in the city making this music at that stage. So again, it was sort of trial and error. Initially we were basing our music on producers that we liked; particular songs and aimed towards that level of production.
And how would you describe the early Fish Go Deep sound?
Probably like most bands, or most artists, you're just trying to copy your favorites, or you're trying to just do a version of that. I think that can be really useful for a band or an artist if you've got good taste. Then you can develop beyond that. But we were all over the place musically. As I said, our first release was a kind of techie number which sounds really basic. The next release was quite a deep track, which still holds up and is just about to be reissued by a Dublin label on vinyl, which is nice. 25 years after it first came out!!
I think it took us three or four years to find a sound of our own that wasn't just copying New York, or Chicago. I think the batch of releases on I-Records at the end of the 90s were probably the first tracks where we could say, ‘Okay, this is something distinctive. It's our own sound.’
So let's talk about ‘The Cure And The Course’. How did that come about?
Tracey K is originally from Kerry and we met her in Galway. When we played up there, she'd come along to the gigs. We got friendly with her and we knew she had a great voice. I think it was probably a couple years after we first met her that she sent us some music. She came down one weekend and we recorded three or four tracks in the studio. They turned out well and we kept up doing that every few months. We record a few more and aimed towards making an album rather than just put out a single or an EP.
So over the course of the next year, we recorded a bunch of tracks, one of them being ‘The Cure And The Cause’. It stood out as a great lyric. Tracey’s writes wonderful lyrics and clearly she's got a great voice. Immediately we fell in love with her lyric and we wrote quite a traditional soulful house track around it. Then we eventually packaged up the album and released it at the very end of 2004. The first single off it was ‘Battery Man’ and the second was ‘The Cure and The Cause’.
When we released that we decided to use Dennis Ferrer to remix it because he had been on an incredible streak over the previous 2-3 years. It took a long time to come back because Dennis was ill for a couple of months and then he wasn't quite sure about it as he said it wasn’t like anything he’s done before. When he sent it back, we could see what he meant. It was just so different to the original and from anything Dennis had done up to that point. But we loved it, and put it out on our own label initially.
By late summer 2005 we started getting reports back from New York that the record shops couldn't keep it in stock. It was flying out. Everyone was playing it from Louie Vega to Tony Humphreys. It was blowing up. We were delighted with ourselves. Then Simon Dunmore from Defected got in touch about licensing it. We just figured that they could get it to so many more people than we could.
There's no denying that Simon has got one of the best ears in the game.
Completely. The longevity of the label at that level has been really impressive too. They released it about 9 months later. We did all this PR stuff. We were in London for photoshoots and Tracey made a video over there. All Star stuff. We were not in our usual Deep House circles anymore. By that point it had become huge and big in the UK garage/funky underground scene in London and Birmingham. Then it got into the pop charts and you heard your name on TOTP.
What does it mean to you now and do you think you have to eternally live up to something because of the rampant success of that track?
I love the song. And so do a lot of other people that have brought out different versions. I think it's a sign of a good song that it can survive all the different remixes. The core quality will always shine through pretty much and there's been some beautiful versions. I've loved a lot of them. The original is still the track that is popular in Ireland. The DJ Meme remix is a beautiful disco kind of mix and Dennis is obviously huge in the UK.
The song kind of has its own orbit in outer space that’s independent of us and occasionally we run into it, and it's of nice to see it. Recently Defected sent us silver discs for of sales in the UK. We've nothing but joy and love for the song and initially, after it came out, we felt there was an expectation that we’d just do similar stuff. But, you can't. I think if you go into the studio and say, ‘Oh, I'm going to make a follow up to this song, or I'm going to do this particular thing’. Inevitably, you fail.
So since that time, you've been consistently releasing music and making music as a duo. That has brought you full circle to this album ‘This Bit of Earth’. It is very languid. It's not a typical dance album like we said before. The musicality behind it as well is very ethereal, space driven, I would say, with some lo-fi funk in it. How do you view the album?
It's very much of its own time and place. It's a good snapshot of where our heads were at over the last 18 months. This is our third album and its really hard to find the time to do them normally. We're constantly releasing EPs and we do remixes but to actually spend a chunk of time, several months or even a year putting an album together, just puts you in a totally different head space. It's more of a reflection of where you are and who you are at that time. So, when we started the album in 2019, we knew we wanted to steer away from what we normally do. We can do House tracks with our eyes closed. We know how to make a House track. But to stretch yourself and not use the formula familiar with; That's what excited us with the album. I think it's still recognizably us. But it's also different.
Disco house and all the edits. How do you feel about that genre and do you think it's coming to a place where it might have run out of steam?
I hope so. House by its very nature is very generic. I suppose 90% of all music is derivative and generic. It depresses me sometimes when I'll spend maybe a Monday or Tuesday morning going through new releases for our radio showing and seeing how much rubbish is out there. Just loops taken from splice or one of the services just tacked together with a disco sample. They predominate and it's increasingly hard to find the gems but they still come to you. But you just have to sift through so much rubbish to actually get to them. It can just wear you down and give you a general feeling that maybe the music's played out, maybe there's nothing left to say. But then you'll find one which totally contradicts that and restores your faith in music.
So now the album is done have you let the baby go now?
In the lead up to the release at the end of the month, we're doing a few interviews and we've got a few mixes to do, so there's that side of things. It's coming out on vinyl at the same time as digital, which is a little bit unusual for us now. It's hard to coordinate with the pressing plants. We're working with a relatively new plant in Dublin and hopefully, if that all goes well, we're going to start working with them regularly on maybe reissuing some of the music from the last couple of years.
If you'd said to me 15 years ago that vinyl would be where it is today, I wouldn't have believed you. It is incredible. Even through lockdown here in Cork, there are three or four different shops selling vinyl and surviving because of the demand. It's brilliant because it's a beautiful format. Will it get bigger? Yeah, probably a little bit. But I can't see it becoming the dominant format again.
And records grow old with you and have memory.
Yeah even particular scratches. You remember when you did that. Our records that we used in clubs; they are all wrecked because you would just take one off and throw on the next one. Someone would spill a beer or ash on it lol. It's easy to figure out if a collection is a working collection or just purely one for collectors.
So you said you've got all these projects coming up. Is that more traditionally back to the dance floor or is it going to be something different?
Well, let me explain. This Cork writer, Lisa McInerney, she's a novelist. She was commissioned to write a story for various locations around the city. It's a loose kind of love story traveling to five different parts of the city. It's been narrated by a local actress here, and we're providing the soundtrack. So people will go to the locations and listen on headphones to various stories. That's been really exciting. We've been doing that for the last couple of weeks. Walking around the town, recording some field audio at various locations, and then mixing some music and blending that with the story narration. We've done some soundtrack work before, but it's been more to picture. Whereas this is to words
It's nice to on a Monday, knock out a house track. Tuesday, do something for a soundtrack. On Wednesday, maybe do an ambient number.
Diversity is the spice of life, right?
Yeah, absolutely. It just keeps you interested in everything. If you're just doing the same thing, day after day, no matter what it is, whether it's creative or not, you're just locked in the same groove the whole time. Life just seems so flat. That's why so much of lockdown for so many people was flat. You just feel like Groundhog Day.
Lets hope we can put all that behind us soon and look to the future now. Thank you for sitting down with us and good luck with the album.
Thank you. I really enjoyed this.
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