How Layo & Bushwacka! first met can best be summed up by the title of the Smashing Pumpkins song, The Beginning is the End is the Beginning. Sounds confusing? Well let’s try and clarify matters. When Layo first started promoting his own parties and Djing he became friends with a geezer by the name of Richard, also known as Mr C (Shaman frontman best known for Ebeneezer Goode). Layo helped Mr C turn his pipe-dream of opening a club, the now famous The End, into reality, on the site of a recently closed down Post Office in the mid 90’s. Fast forward a couple of years and Bushwacka!, the engineer at MR C’s studio, is introduced to Layo by Mr C who suggests their styles would compliment each other and they should try their hands at creating some tunes for End Recordings. So as you can see, The End really was the beginning for Layo and Bushwacka!

“I’m glad I didn’t have to tell that story again,” says Matthew ‘Bushwacka!’ Benjamin with a laugh when confirming my fact-checking question. However, there were a couple of tales I wanted to hear straight from the horses mouth so to speak, such as the story of their first live gig and the origins of their most famous track to date: Love Story. “Our first live gig was in Brazil in front of 40 000 people and headlining a festival,” recounts Benjamin. “We did the last hour on the main outdoor stage. There were six other stages and they all closed at 8pm and everyone converged to the main stage where we played from 9 to 10pm. And it completely bombed man! Most people start doing live gigs in pubs. We started on the biggest stage you’ve ever seen in your life. We came on and within five minutes we knew it had gone wrong. We started off with nice, mellow, slow chords and the DJ before us was playing techno which was just like ‘boom boom boom boom boom’ and all you could see was thousands of people leaving while we were playing. I didn’t realise that the exit was actually at the back of the field and they were leaving anyway. It was a nightmare but a good starting place in a way.”

So you’d surmise from this that Brazil is not on Layo & Bushwacka’s hot list wouldn’t you? “Brazil is my favourite place in the entire universe to go and play,” Benjamin excitedly corrects me. “I’ve been to Brazil twenty four times in the last five years. We coined the title for our track Love Story in Brazil. It’s named after a very seedy club there. The track came out on a black label, untitled. 1000 copies went out and people got hold of it all around the world and started naming it themselves. In Israel it was called Love Song. It was massive everywhere, but in Brazil and Argentina in particular took to that tune like a fish to water. It was their anthem and I think it still is. Over there people sit down when it is being played rather than dancing out of respect for the tune. I played a gig in Brazil a couple of years ago and did a five hour set on my own and didn’t play it. At the end of the night when I played my last record and it wasn’t Love Story everybody stopped dancing and just looked at me and I thought I was going to get killed. Luckily the next DJ had a copy so he handed it to me and said ‘Quick! Put it on, put it on’ which I did.”

Love Story formed part of Layo & Bushwacka’s hugely successful second album ‘Night Works’, which was more recently followed up by their debut mixed compilation titled ‘All Night Long’ on who else but End Recordings. So what’s next for the duo production-wise? “We’re about two weeks from completion of our third album,” confirms Benjamin. “We’ve been on it for about eighteen months and put a lot of work into it. We’ve got a little but more to do before we hand it in to the record company. Then we’re coming over to see you guys for the Good Vibrations Festival which I’m very excited about as we played at it a few years ago when it was called Vibes on a Summers Day. I’ve had a look at the lineup for this year and it’s very stylish, very funky, very eclectic and cheese-free. After that we come back to the UK and ask the label what they think. We spent a month in New York and that had a major part to play in the new album. There’s a lot of jazz influence in there, a lot more guitar and a live feel. I played bass and drums in a lot of the tracks and it’s a bit different. We worked with some amazing musicians but most of them aren’t names that people would recognize. They’re just off the street like the pizza delivery boy who plays saxophone in his spare time.�