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It was galling for the UK d’n’b community that it took two Australians – Pendulum – to revitalise the scene’s fortunes. Will Kennard and Saul Milton have since restored the local team’s honour. They’ve graduated from a distinguished underground career to produce tracks for Rihanna, while second LP ‘No More Idols’, a blast of feral dubstep/drum ’n’ bass crossover energy, got to Number 2 recently. Few dance acts can match them for sheer energy. 

Defining moment: Their rise truly began when they got to No. 9 with ‘End Credits’ feat Plan B in 2009. 

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Mixmag caught up with the duo back in May 2009. Check out the feature below.

Chase & Status have rewritten the drum 'n' bass rulebook, become one of the most sought after production teams on the planet and released some of the year's biggest tunes. That's as well as rocking the living crap out of dancefloors across the world. These two are going places. Fast!

Will Kennard – aka Status – is walking into the posh Hyde Park Hotel with his stomach doing somersaults. He should really be brimming with confidence: after all, he and partner Saul Milton (Chase) are at the vanguard of drum ’n’ bass. Already respected DJ-producers within the scene, boasting killer remixes for the likes of The Prodigy and Dizzee Rascal, the duo’s 2008 debut album ‘More Than A Lot’ rewrote the game, taking in funk, dubstep, r’n’b and a whole lot more. Even across the Atlantic the Americans have sniffed fresh talent – Snoop Dogg has even released a version of their track ‘Eastern Jam’ – and US hip hop mogul Jay Brown is in town. Kennard is walking into the garden restaurant of the luxury hotel to meet him. And his business partner. And his business partner’s girlfriend.

“Right in front of me is Jay-Z,” recalls Kennard, “I walk up to the table, hands all sweaty, saying to myself, ‘Play it cool, play it cool’. Jay-Z was lovely, humble, polite and funny – no ego – then he says, ‘Hey, this is B,’ and Beyoncé turns around. My voice went up about two octaves – her beauty just blew me away – and I squeaked, ‘Hello,’ like I was on helium!”

When Will regained control of his voice box, Jay-Z requested some beats. He wasn’t the last. Since then Pharrell has come visiting, Rihanna has asked if they’d work on her album, and X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke has bagged a track. But, despite the rain of megastars, as they sit in the walnut-veneered lounge of a sumptuous tour bus parked behind The Old Fire Station venue in Bournemouth, Saul Chase and Will Status agree that their biggest fan remains Saul’s 89-year-old granddad. The last time he visited the Royal Albert Hall was for the Proms, but in October he came to see Chase & Status play the Orange Rockcorps event alongside Nas, Nelly and Razorlight. “He was raving more than anyone,” remembers Will, “And the songs he likes are always the hardest, most nuts ones. He even knows the words.”

Saul’s family may be supportive now, but his mum wasn’t so keen when the duo dropped out of Manchester University to try their luck at music production. “She told me to stop bumming around smoking weed and get a bloody job,” he laughs. Instead Saul blagged a credit card with a massive limit and immediately stumped up a year’s rent on a basement studio in central Manchester. The pair, with almost Zen-like discipline, set about becoming producers.

“We disconnected from the real world and became walking zombies,” says Saul. “We’d wake up, go straight to the studio, all day and all night. That’s all we did for five years.” To make ends meet Will took a job as bell-boy at the huge Palace Hotel. “It was the worst job I’ve ever done,” he says. “I’d get up at four am on a cold, dark Manchester morning and by five I was serving breakfast in people’s rooms wearing a bow tie.”

Slowly they learnt their trade. Their studio was next to that of d’n’b duo Future Cut, who became their mentors (and later had major success producing Lily Allen’s early material). Chase & Status – names derived from their old graffiti tags – surfaced in 2003 with the dubstep double-header ‘Like This/Blindside’ (Vehicle) but made their first mark on drum ’n’ bass with their next release, ‘Wise Up’ on DJ Zinc’s Bingo Beats label. Soon they were firing out genre classics such as the ragga-tinged ‘Duppy Man’, the ballistic ‘Ten Tonne’, the soulful ‘Love’s Theme’ and the bouncy jump-up of ‘The Druids’.

They also perfected their distinctive look. Saul veers towards late 70s mod, sporting a white Fred Perry shirt, brown trilby, fitted jeans and Vans. He describes Will as “the gentleman of the group”, an accurate visual assessment. With a foppish blond coiffure and pale blue eyes, he’s clad in a candy-striped blue shirt, dark jeans, tassled loafers and a grey cardigan from the Reiss 1971 Collection.

“I suppose the English old man look is my fashion angle,” he laughs. “It’s the antithesis of the jungle look, but there’s something enjoyable about dressing the complete opposite of what you do. People think I work in a bank, but they find I’m in
a drum ’n’ bass group.”

It’s also down to his addiction to golf – “If I could wear golf clothes all the time, I would” – and he claims that his golfing average is “87 or 88, 17
over par with a best handicap of 18”… whatever that means. Saul laughs, and moves the conversation quickly away from golf, enthusing about a recent night out dancing at “a Roots Manuva thing in Shoreditch. They were playing The Specials, Madness, Jimi Hendrix, reggae, so I got drunk and started shacking out – it was wicked…”

Saul was born in Paddington, London, in 1981, and raised by his mum. He discovered music early and was a Nirvana fan at 12.

“I went round to the house of my old friend Andrew Shaw,” he recalls. “He had an acoustic guitar with two strings, E and A, and said, ‘Look at this,’ then showed me Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’, followed by ‘Polly’ on one string. I thought, ‘Wow! I need a guitar’.” He purloined one from his older sister, bought a book of chords and “quickly realised there was nothing else I wanted to do other than make music.” But when he heard a ‘Jungle Mania’ compilation in 1994, the guitar went back in the cupboard.

Will was born in Hammersmith, London, also raised in a single parent household by his mum, alongside a younger brother. Music fandom started with New Order and U2, moved quickly to early Prodigy, then on a whim in long-disappeared chain store Our Price he bought a cassette called ‘Grooverider’s Hardstep Collection Vol II’ (Kickin’, 1995). “That just blew me away,” he smiles, “I listened to it on repeat for a year.”He also developed an interest in hip hop turntablism and put together a bedroom set-up where he’d mix late into the night, smoking weed. A local MC named Spider occasionally joined him on the mic and they made mix-tapes together. Spider was also a mate of Saul’s and introduced the pair at a rave, later suggesting Saul should check Will’s place, with its Vestax mixer and relaxed attitude to smoking. Saul duly dropped round with a Boots bag of 12”s. 

The pair became firm friends, regularly hitting drum ’n’ bass nights at now defunct venues Bagleys and The End, DJing at house parties across London “playing
to no-one for nothing”. Eventually they headed to university in Manchester, separately rather than as part of a plan, and ended up in their cellar studio. “We used to smoke ridiculous amounts of weed,” admits Saul. “It’s probably what got us through having no friends, no girlfriends, no life, spending twenty hours a day together in a dark room underground.” The pair’s feelings about marijuana are mixed, and they spend some time debating its merits and downfalls. “It’s useful for catching a vibe and having ideas,” concludes Saul, “but makes it much harder to break new ground technologically. You won’t get a tune sounding as phat if you smoke weed for the mix-down.”

They’re uncomfortable with the idea that there’s a drum ’n’ bass revival, reckoning it a media perception. “It’s back… though it never really went away,” states Saul. In brief, an anticipated drum ’n’ bass crossover circa 1997 never really happened for a multitude of reasons, and the scene went back underground for years. Then along came Pendulum… “Their success opened up the whole world to drum ’n’ bass,” reckons Saul, “and we sneaked through that door.”

They did so with the help of Ram Records, who signed them in 2007. Label boss Andy C, a longstanding mutual hero, allowed them the freedom to experiment on their debut album. Indeed, the first track they played him was the funk tune ‘Against All Odds’, featuring Kano, but C was unperturbed. The resulting album, which ran from humorous kitsch to bedroom r’n’b via tasty club monsters, was the making of the pair. Its centre-piece, perhaps, is ‘Pieces’, featuring East London songwriter/rapper Plan B, who strums an acoustic guitar on a mournful break-up ballad which bursts into a furious junglist assault. Plan B also directed the video, a YouTube sensation, wherein an ex-girlfriend has an insane Skins-style party in his apartment, puts his cat in the oven and waves a used condom about.

‘More Than A Lot’ opened unexpected doors. Saul found himself getting 5am calls from Rihanna saying, “I love [dubstep monster] ‘Saxon’ – boy, that’s my track,” then further down the road, Chase & Status worked with her in a huge West London studio surrounded, they say, by her 20-strong entourage
of “top line songwriters, PAs, managers, managers’ managers, all on their Blackberrys and i-Phones”. Just as importantly, their core following remains loyal, recognising they’ve branched out from their roots rather than deserting them. Their new MTA label, for instance, is a launch pad for rising talent such as Cotti & Doctor, 501 and the vibrant Nero.

Their first live tour has also been a success. In Bournemouth, though, things don’t look promising at first. It’s Freshers’ Week and a late teen crowd goon for camera-phones, high on alcopops, some repeatedly singing ‘Happy Birthday’. The atmosphere’s closer to a school party at TGI Fridays than a rave. But when the duo fire up their keyboards and their hype man, MC Rage, starts his call-and-response chants, the place suddenly erupts into a giant mosh-pit. Hefty drum ’n’ bass is interspersed with dubstep, much-loved tunes such as ‘Smash TV’ and their remix of Nneka’s ‘Heartbeat’ blast out, stomach-rattling basslines a-go-go. For their encore they’re joined by Plan B for ‘End Credits’, their poppy new single from the Michael Caine film Harry Brown (in which the rapper also stars). The crowd respond wildly: someone even crowd-surfs while waving a two-fingered devil salute.

The sonic force that made Rihanna teasingly say to them, “OK, play me something harder,” and that persuaded Jay-Z to let them remix ‘D.O.A’, also sends hordes of flushed, perspiration-drenched students pouring into the Bournemouth night chatting animatedly about the music. With one foot in the underground and the other heading for the charts, Chase & Status are coming. 

Originally published, Mixmag December 2009. Words: Thomas H Green