Without Bloc Party There'd Be No Skrillex, HARD Parties or EDM

Disclaimer: In the US, VICE Records released music from a variety of the bands mentioned in this article

It’s Saturday afternoon. Late of the Pier’s “Bathroom Gurgle” plays off your iPod. Your iPod is kept in one of those sock things because your parents accidentally bought you the limited-edition U2 one. Topman skinny jeans finally come in red as well and you’ve got a 24/7 booze delivery card in your wallet. Klaxons are your favourite band. It’s obviously 2007.

The mid-2000s indie resurgence and its nu rave mutation – essentially indie but with more neon and synths – belted out a last hoorah of the indie disco years. It was a time when guitars and electronic music lived side-by-side and people danced to both. Yet what felt like a quintessentially British youth culture phenomenon – Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party blasted out at Trash or Liars club alongside Crystal Castles; everyone decanting to a grotty house party to do lines off a Soulwax compilation CD cover – created ripple effects elsewhere. You can’t really talk about American EDM (and the Spotify-core EDM-pop it then created via the Chainsmokers) without tracing its roots back to the same place: British indie and nu-rave. Speaking to some of the people who played in bands, DJed and threw parties at the time, it becomes clear that what can easily look like separate scenes share tangles of unspooled DNA.

“It's obviously linked,” says Steve Aoki, the cake-throwing label founder and performer who rode the 00s superstar DJ trend like a pro. “It's part of a long evolution.” Back then Aoki, speaking to me now ahead of his current UK tour, was a DIY promoter putting on gigs in his front room and releasing punk records on his Dim Mak Records label. After signing The Kills, he began to show up on the radar of UK bands. “He was the go-to guy,” recalls Jamie Reynolds of Klaxons. “A whirlwind of energy and passion. He was all over the British music scene.” In 2003 Bloc Party’s manager sent Aoki the 7-inch of “She’s Hearing Voices”. “I was fucking blown away,” he remembers. “My passion was bleeding through in my letter back to them.” He signed the band and they soon took off. “There are phenomenons that happen in music and take people by surprise; they come from nowhere and shift the culture – Bloc Party was one of those. They were the first band that had that very British sound that people in the US flipped the fuck out over.”

Aoki put out more records by British bands (The Rakes, Whitey, Mystery Jets, Shitdisco, Klaxons) and also DJed at his Dim Mak night, playing these acts. “It was a new England invasion,” he tells me. “A flood of English bands were coming our way after Bloc Party.” Reynolds recalls him being a magnet. “If you were starting in America, Dim Mak was the perfect platform because there was an underground scene there. It was the ideal introduction.” ”America made more sense to Bloc Party’s Russell Lissack at the time, too.

“It felt like what we were doing was a reaction to how disinterested we were in contemporary British music,” he says. “So it was incredibly exciting to be playing in America.” At this point Aoki was playing to a few hundred people a week in a sweatbox club in Hollywood. “It wasn't about the DJs back then,” he says. “The headliner was a band Djing. That was the party: Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, The Killers, Bloc Party. The music was a mixture of British bands and dance stuff. Plus, you had the remix culture of dance and indie meeting over. Erol Alkan remixing Franz Ferdinand etc. I was remixing whatever I could get my hands on. We would all be playing these indie remixes and it led to a sort of culture. It created a community and a whole new subsection of electronic music.”

Reynolds remembers a real sense of crossover, where “you had people like Death from Above 1979 who were also doing MSTRKRFT. It was a totally creative free-for-all. It was happening in different countries on all different levels but under the same ethos of making music to go out and do some drugs to and have a fucking mad one.” For Chris Taylor of Last Gang Records, that era feels like a singular moment. “It was about a generation wanting to embrace music that they could call their own,” he tells me.

But if we’re drawing a line between the gargantuan monster of EDM and nu rave’s niche, how did we get from one to the other? Well, HARD events founder Gary Richards is the man to ask. “It was kicked off by going to these parties and hearing Steve play Bloc Party, Klaxons and Justice. He was tapping into something. However, nobody was doing it on a big scale. I was looking at the kind of shows Tiesto was playing and thinking: ‘why can't we do that but with these other acts?’”

And so on New Year’s Eve 2007, the first HARD Music Festival took place, featuring the likes of Justice and Peaches. “Steve had tapped into this really cool thing but I wanted to do for 30,000 people instead of 300.” The first couple of HARD events drew crowds of around 5,000 but were financially disastrous. “I didn't know what I was doing and it was kind of a mess,” Richards says, coming from an A&R background. “I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the second one but I knew I was tapping into a scene that was untapped and something special was going on. For the third one it went from 5,000 to 15,000 and really started to take off from there. I lost about half a million dollars before it did though.” By 2013, his work propelled him into annual music business ‘most powerful people in EDM’ lists.

Sonically, EDM boomed into maximalism as well, courtesy of Skrillex and his shift from Sonny Moore the emo kid to the soundtrack one of the biggest names (the signature hair didn’t hurt). “When Skrillex and Diplo wanted to play, it just exploded,” Reynolds remembers. Post-2010 British music had kind of served its purpose. Beat-dropping, theatrical DJs became the new headliners. “I think there was a transition taking place and we were at the peak stage of it. The full transition took place after us, we missed it. I remember having conversations with people saying we should really jump onto EDM but being like, ‘no this is shit.’ Then all of a sudden it took over. It felt like a naff interpretation. It’s party music for people who don't like music. I’m proud of us for not getting involved.”

So why the shift away from bands, indie remixes and British music? “It’s just the nature of music,” Aoki says. “As soon as things are really popular things can only go down. It's life. It's like a stock market guy screaming ‘get me the hell out’ at a certain point.” Aoki started to sign acts that reflected this change – enter electro-bro outfit The Chainsmokers. “With Dim Mak being an independent label with not very deep pockets, we can't sustain heavy financial blows when trends cut out and all our artists becoming a dying trend,” Aoki says. “You always have to be on your toes and thinking ahead. There's so many amazing labels that get stuck in a genre and then the genre dies and they die too. I'm proud that Dim Mak dodged those bullets.” Others might see that as a lack of loyalty, picking economic viability over a commitment to a certain style. But Aoki’s survived as a name, adapting from guitars to synths, while staying relevant – so maybe that speaks for itself.

Bloc Party’s Lassack says he can see that “the culture of remixes and DJs from that era were a gateway to EDM,” while for Reynolds the step from indie to arena-sized EDM “completely makes sense to me. I can see a lineage there.” Despite Aoki’s status as one of the highest earning DJs in the world – making $28 million between 2017 and 2018 – he looks back on the days of DJing UK indie in a sweaty club as pivotal. “It was a golden era. It was pre-social media so you had to be there to experience it.” Reynolds too looks back fondly. “It just puts a massive smile on my face when I look back on that era – how great the whole thing was. The Soulwax remix of 'Gravity's Rainbow' still kills it too – that one brings a little nostalgic tear to the eye.”

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