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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Foreign Beggars
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 2 December 2009
Comprised of rappers Orifice Vulgatron and Metropolis, DJ NoNames and producer Dag Nabbit, London hip hoppers Foreign Beggars have roots based in jazz and classical music, as well as years of experience writing, recording and performing hip hop, death metal and drum n bass – resulting in the explosive live performances the group are renowned for. Individually, the members of the group have collaborated with the likes of Björk, Gorillaz, DJ Vadim and Scratch Perverts. Their fourth album together, ‘United Colours Of Beggattron’, is out now on Dented Records, while the band are set to support The Prodigy in the New Year. We caught up with Metropolis to find out more.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
We all came from different musical backgrounds. Orifice is the son of a serious rocker who exposed him to mad dope rock from a very young age, so that kinda explains a little why his musical personality, no… in fact, his actual personality, is so ‘out there’. He was making death metal with his twin brothers in Dubai before he started getting into drum n bass and its whole MC culture in his teens. He was close friends with Dag Nabbit, and they started making music and putting on parties from a young age.
I met Orifice through NoNames at university. He had decks, so I would bunk class to go get high and freestyle, which eventually led to me dropping out! I’d been rhyming since I was twelve – I gave up on the keyboard, drums and guitar lessons and picked up the pen and pretty much stuck to it. NoNames, who’s first real experience of rap was a Fat Boys tape he somehow found when he was living in Kentucky as a kid, met OV doing the sound for an ‘Alice In Wonderland’ play where he was cutting up sounds and OV was doing the lighting. He introduced us all to each other and our first gig as we are now was back in 2003. Haven’t really looked back since!
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Since we dropped [second album] ‘Stray Point Agenda’ in 2006 we moved studios and just kept writing tunes and collaborating with different artists. We’d been touring a lot and meeting so many new dope producers and artists from all over the world like Noisia (who we’d been flying out to Groningen to do a project with) and Guilty Simpson whose music we were all crazy into, so we wanted to make something that kinda reflected how this hip hop shit is global, hence the title!
At some point we started wondering whether we really wanted to make another straight hip hop album cos we were all getting into varying forms of dance music, like dubstep and Detroit house. We decided to stop work on ‘United Colours Of Beggattron’ and maybe go in another direction but the joints we already had were too strong and we kinda felt we had to finish it. Man, this album almost never came out, but we stuck with it and we’re all really happy we did, cos we all feel this is our best effort to date!
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
That varies. It almost always starts with the production. For a lot of the joints on ‘…Beggattron’ we were getting beat CDs from Ghosttown, who are hands down the best rap beat makers in the UK. There were something like 40-50 odd beats on each CD, so you can imagine what a bitch it was to actually get working on something! “Yo this one is dope, but so is this… and this… damn!”
I guess the process is to listen to a beat. I always found a beat tells a story and its up to me as an MC to try and translate its sentiment into words. A lotta times me and OV will just skip through beats ’til we find something that works for both of us and get to writing, then whoever finishes first steps into the booth, that’s why OV comes up first in a lot of tracks. Cos, boy, he writes fast!
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Well, we’re inspired by a lot of different artists from a lot of genres. Hip hop-wise, I was always into deep dirty east coast hip hop like Company Flow, Cannibal Ox and Tribe Called Quest (Midnight Maraiuders, in particular). Nowadays it’s all about MF Doom, but I get a lot of inspiration from the grime guys like Ghetto, who is the sickest MC in the UK right now.
Our live show is definitely influenced by a lot of the rock shit OV is into, that’s why we always gotta rock out. I think a lot of performers are so caught up in their own music they forget they’re actually there to entertain the crowd. We take influence from dudes like Napalm Death in that respect. We ALWAYS try to rock the crowd!
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
I would say thanks so much for giving us a listen! Our music is really varied, we do a lot of party tracks, a lot of deep introspective tracks, and a lot of straight up goofin tracks, so don’t try to fit us into any particular box. Just know we’re all about good music.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
We hope this album has truly global appeal and will get us recognised as a solid force on the global music scene, and I believe it will do that.
In the future, you can expect more craziness from the Beggar camp, more dope live shows and more interesting takes on music. We plan to take it further and further out there in our music, to keep pushing the boundaries. In fact, we’re dropping a remix album featuring a bunch of dope producers’ takes on tracks of this album and a few new joints featuring the likes of Noisia, Machinedrum, Gothtrad, SBTRKT, Onra, CTRL Z, Gifted and Blessed and L-VIS 1990, to name but a few. So, you all need to look out for that shit.
MORE>> www.foreignbeggars.com and www.myspace.com/foreignbeggars
