FOR FUN: Waze & Odyssey came up with a fabricated backstory for themselves to tell to people. So they came up with “the New York record shop owner who fed us a diet of soul and house music.”

By Geoffrey Rowlands

 

Anyone writing about Waze & Odyssey up until not very long ago would have erroneously labelled the London-based duo as a pair of New York-born orphans adopted by the owner of a record store. It wouldn’t have been bad research as the story came directly from Waze & Odyssey themselves.

“We just did it for a laugh,” smiled Firas Waez, better known as Waze. “We always think DJ biographies are pretty boring. That’s why we’re still not keen on giving away too much about ourselves. But we thought we’d make up something really interesting for our supposed backstory. So, we came up with the New York record shop owner who fed us a diet of soul and house music.”

“Don’t forget about us fleeing to Detroit and getting immersed in the techno scene,” joked Sergio ‘Odyssey’ Santiago. “We just kept adding to the story whenever someone asked about our background. It became ever more weird and gave us a bigger laugh every time the latest twist in our tale appeared in print.”

“I suppose we shouldn’t really have done this,” Firas conceded. “There obviously were people who genuinely wanted to know the truth about us but we hoped everyone would just listen to our music and judge us on what they heard.”

The judgement has been highly favourable. Their work is almost exclusively aimed at the house music club scene where Waze & Odyssey’s original creations and remixes have become enormously popular.

“We founded our own label, W&O Street Tracks, in 2012,” Sergio explained. “This allowed us to market our music directly to DJs and clubbers. Everything was only released on vinyl at first but we have now moved with the times and also release tracks digitally.”

“A track called Love That (Burns Hot Enough) was our biggest hit from the early days,” Firas recalled. “There’s an audio posting of that on YouTube if anyone wants to hear it. I Want You You You was another huge club track from back then.”

Not quite so ancient is their reworking of R Kelly’s classic 1994 R&B hit, Bump n’ Grind. Although it has now become an enormous UK mainstream hit, the track has been filling club dancefloors for well over a year.

“We get asked to do a lot of remixes,” Sergio remarked. “But we sometimes just do remixes for our own pleasure in the belief that the resulting track will be enjoyed by clubbers. That’s what happened with Bump n’ Grind.”

“We played it one night during a DJ set and the crowd went wild,” Firas laughed. “Then we got other DJs asking for a copy and had reports from them about amazing crowd response.”

“It was an obvious decision to release the track as a single,” Sergio added. “Virtually every house DJ played Bump n’ Grind so it’s been an underground favourite for a long time. RCA Records wanted to give it a mainstream release so we figured we’d take a shot and see what happened.”

The track has given Waze & Odyssey the kind of pop chart success they could never have imagined. Do they have plans to capitalise on this new found fame with other releases specifically aimed at the mainstream market?

“We’re house DJs and producers, not mainstream artists,” Firas stated. “If any more of our tracks take off in the same way as Bump n’ Grind then that would be great. But our bread and butter is the club scene. We’ll always tailor our tracks for clubbers.”

 

 

Jennifer Lopez

 

True Love, the first book by singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, has just been published.

Written in the style of a personal diary and containing previously unseen photographs, Jennifer described compiling the book as “a deeply cathartic, personal and vulnerable experience.”

“The initial idea was to write about what happened during my ‘Dance Again’ world tour,” she explained. “I’d never before done a worldwide concert tour so I thought it would be interesting to chronicle my adventures. “But it ended up becoming so much more about myself rather than the tour. I was very nervous about including some of the things I wrote but realised reading about my experiences might help to save other people from the same kind of emotional bumps and bruises.”

A percentage of the proceeds from True Love will be donated to The Lopez Family Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving the health and well-being of women and children.

 

Whitney Houston

 

Singer and actress Whitney Houston never released a live album during her storied career. But the people at Legacy Recordings have put together some of her most memorable live clips on a newly released album and DVD, Whitney Houston Live: Her Greatest Performances.

The cuts span Whitney’s career from her 1983 network television debut singing Hope, from the stage musical The Wiz, on The Merv Griffin Show to her 2009 rendition of I Didn’t Know My Own Strength on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Produced by multiple Grammy award-winner Clive Davis, the audio and visual content has undergone state of the art remastering and restoration.

 

Metallica

 

Next year will see American heavy metal quartet Metallica release remastered deluxe editions of their first two albums, 1983’s Kill ‘Em All, and 1984’s Ride the Lightning. But the band are seeking help from their fans in the form of any kind of memorabilia from that era for possible inclusion in the reissues.

“We want anything and everything,” said singer and guitarist James Hetfield. “Photographs, videos, audio recordings, ticket stubs, fliers, anything which is a memento. We’d also like to hear any interesting stories that fans might have about the albums or seeing us in concert.”

Anyone who could help can email the band at [email protected]

For newer fans, both original albums are posted in full online. Kill ‘Em All is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0ZpIEc5JA

Ride the Lightning can be heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhT0g9jULpw.

In other news, Metallica are giving a ten-year anniversary re-release to their 2004 band documentary, Some Kind of Monster. A bonus documentary, Metallica: This Monster Lives, is included with the reissue which will be available from November 24.

 

Angels & Airwaves

 

Rock super group Angels & Airwaves release their fifth studio album, The Dream Walker, on December 9. Available now though is their new single, The Wolfpack. It can be heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkI6ySenf08

The forthcoming album is part of a much larger multimedia project entitled “Poet Anderson The Dream Walker.” Created by Blink-182 member and Angels & Airwaves founder Tom DeLonge, it will incorporate a novel and an animated film. The four previous Angels & Airwaves albums are all posted in full on YouTube.

We Don’t Need To Whisper is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=THVnTuKGZXk

I-Empire can be heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=a38uXWrxFZ0

Love is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Es3f03WwiU

Love: Part 2 is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCthxK74LLc

 

Ed Harcourt

 

British luxury fashion house Burberry have unveiled their first Christmas advertising campaign. It is based around “From London with Love,” a four-minute video featuring 12-year-old Romeo Beckham, the son of former soccer star David and ex-Spice Girl Victoria.

Inspired by the golden age of cinematic musicals, the video is sound tracked by The Way That I Live, a new song from English singer/songwriter Ed Harcourt. The track will not be released until December 15 but the video can be viewed now at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojBufhpPgMo