Simon's lyrics tell small scale tales of young urban life: micro sagas of street corners and party politics. "We write songs about everyday life," explains Simon, "just what you get up to. Try to tell a little story, about what you see around you."
"We just write songs about the things that have happened to us at the time," explains Tom. "'We Don't Care' is influenced by our friend who died, but others come from somewhere when we're in a good mood, jokes, just let it happen. There's no agenda for any one track - we're not trying to make a deep house tune just something that goes with the mood." Hence a track like the searing 'The Snow' can sum up the kind of Suburban coke nightmare that's already an everyday occurrence in most British cities, but that most artists prefer to sweep under the carpet. While 'I Go To Your House' and 'Hit The Ceiling' might be the nearest they come to a love song, but they both deal with suburban dating politics and romance with a refreshingly real straight from the shoulder honesty.
Simon grew up in a musical household, with a guitar-paying, song-writing father encouraging him to play piano and drums from an early age. "It was my drumming teacher who showed me how easy it was to put together a track out of samples," he says. Fuelled by jungle, house and garage pirates and raves he was set on a mission to make beats.
The DJ half of the Bullys, Tom had his decks at 16 and was a resident at London club Milk N' 2 Sugars when he was 17. "I went from house into hardcore and back into house again," recalls Tom. Tom has more recently been spotted devastated the dancefloor at the City Rockers club night, mixing the Kinks over Leftfield's 'Phat Planet'. "I play a lot of my own stuff now," explains the shy superstar DJ in waiting. "A bootleg of something here or there, house, hip hop. I'm not too worried about clinical production as long as it works."
It's the same shouldn't-work-but-does dot-joining exercise that informs their songwriting. The desire to marry the meaningless nonsense of George Clinton's early 80s electronic funk sagas or a Suburban Base record to the wider concerns of a band. Dance music made without recourse to the rulebook, reflecting both an ear for a classic hook and an eye for the dilemmas of life as a young man growing up in London.
The Audio Bullys are no London music industry lab rats: like 1977's Bromley Contingent or the swaggering Berkshire and Essex crews that fuelled both rave's first flush of youth and drum & bass' explosion, Audio Bullys are the proof that the capital's suburbs have no need of 0207 area code trend obsession: this is music born of bored youth's enthusiasm. Doing for West London's less glamorous suburb's what Paul Weller did for Woking and lobbing the same grenades the Damned chucked at Croydon. Sometimes the suburbs just say it right with no help from those inside.
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I'm In Love..with Audio Bullys
