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Music

Rick Ross's Secret Weapon is From the Lake District

Meet Edward Nixon, the brains behind J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League's luxurious sound.

Photo via Metropolis

Even if you’re not a Rick Ross fan, it’s difficult not to be blown away by the song "Maybach Music III". While Ross is a pretty average rapper, he’s got an almost supernatural instinct for picking good beats, and this is one of his finest moments.

It has enormous drums, a whole orchestra of strings, gorgeous horns. At one point –right at the moment when T.I, Jadakiss and Erykah Badu get the hell out the way and Rozay mumbles “Cigar, please”– the track drops a whole key. Engineering it required a combination of balls, brains and backbone. But when producers J.U.S.T.I.C.E League needed to get it done, they didn’t turn to a veteran to help them out. They turned to a kid from the Lake District named Edward Nixon.

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At the time, Nixon was eight weeks into a studio internship in Atlanta, and a few days earlier, he didn’t even know who the J.U.S.T.I.C.E League were. “Although I wasn’t immediately familiar with them, I quickly realised that almost all of the records I’d been enjoying the whole time that I'd been in America were in fact their records,” he says. “Maybach Music was a huge challenge, but one that I learnt the most from. When you feel like you’re out of your depth - that’s when you learn a lot.”

Nixon is now the J.U.S.T.I.C.E League’s chief engineer – and ended up engineering a huge chunk of Ross’ Teflon Don album. He and Ross hung out at the Grammys, and he’s since worked on joints for DJ Khaled, Angel Haze and Usher, and sat in studio knocking back vintage bourbon with Drake. Although he still lives in the UK, he spends a good deal of time in the States, working on JL records.

It was improbable that Nixon was even in Atlanta in the first place. He’d spent almost his entire life in the Lake District and the Cotswolds, growing up in Keswick and Workington. Although he originally wanted to be a musician himself, he found himself drawn to sound engineering. But most studios he tried to get into turned him down flat, and he decided to head for the States, knocking down doors until he secured his internship. Two months later, he helped make hip-hop history.

JL member Erik ‘Rook’ Ortiz says that the crew threw Nixon right in the deep end. “He seemed like the kind of person who had all the answers,” he says. “And when we made "Maybach Music III", we put that motherfucker to the test! It was hard, he was stressed out, but he exceeded expectations. Recording a whole orchestra - strings, horns - that is a hell of a test. But the way he carried himself, he acted like he can do that shit.”

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Before long, Nixon was sharing a house with the trio in Atlanta, where they had three dedicated mixing rooms set up. They gave him the nickname ‘UK’.

There’s a reason Nixon has got to where he has - and why Ortiz is so willing to cosign him. He is absolutely committed - obsessed is probably a more appropriate word - with audio perfection. The standard he holds himself to is just staggering, and he refuses to let something go until he’s completely happy with it. Asked to name the track he’s most proud of, he ums and ahs for a good thirty seconds, before settling on My Time, a song he engineered for UK rapper K Koke - “but my mix, not the final master, I don't listen to the master.”

“I never want to turn around and say that I wasn’t in a good enough [studio], or that I had an excuse of any kind,” he goes on. “No excuses, whatever it might be. It has to be all on my shoulders.”

“He helps us put the final edge on our shit,” says Ortiz. “He’ll prove himself. When he’s in over his head, he’ll bust his ass to prove himself. And that’s rare.”

Follow Rob o Twitter @robboffard

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