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By mixing house with dub and reggae, Rockers Hi Fi's third album, Overproof sounded like a breath of fresh air upon release late last year, appealing across the musical board to Daft Punk and Massive Attack fans alike: Which augers for an interesting cross section of a crowd when Basstech present Rockers Hi Fi in New Zealand in July, playing Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland, as well as four Australian dates.

According to Richard 'DJ Dick' Whittingham, who founded Rockers Hi Fi with partner Glyn Bush; reggae and house are natural bed partners. "If you listen to dub and reggae, a lot of it has a four to the floor beat so if you put it with dance music, it works perfectly," Whittingham tells me when I speak to him from his home in Birmingham, England.

Whittingham and Bush first met in the early eighties but it was the advent of acid house late in the decade which really galvanised them to form Rockers. "I'd been djing around Birmingham for a while and Glyn was into jazz and stuff," recalls Whittingham. "He was playing more of a Latin thing and I liked bits of that. He was also in a band called Big Moment and he asked me to dj at one of his gigs. As time went on and acid house started to happen, we started bumping into each other at, for want of a better word, a rave. I was surprised to see him there and he'd say 'I'm really into this stuff'. He'd bought himself a sampler and a keyboard and I had a computer. We just said 'let's get together and have a go' so I brought around the computer and a few records. Push Push was the third track we wrote. It set the tone really. It was through me bringing around my dub records, especially Scientist, and some American house records. We put the two together. They were like brother and sister."

With its hybrid house/dub sound, Overproof represents a return to Rockers Hi Fi's roots. "With Overproof, we made a conscious decision to go back to our first album, Rockers to Rockers, which was really influenced by reggae and house," continues Whittingham. "Whereas Mish Mash, our second album, was literally a mish mash as we had so many big ideas: We wanted to do film scores, hip hop... Even with the first album, we didn't really have a direction so to speak. We just kept writing until we had an album's worth of material. With Overproof, we really wanted to go back to the first album's dubby feel. Also at the time of writing Overproof, we were really into deep house and Scuba (alias King Britt). We also wanted to make it more soulful so we brought in a new singer, Kevin Tweed."

Although Rockers Hi Fi are signed to Warners, Whittingham and Bush also run their own label, Different Drummer, which recently released Spliffen sie English, a compilation of German electronica. "It was an idea we had when we were touring," says Whittingham. "We'd met so many talented people in Germany and thought it would be good to put out an album of German music. We were always going out there. Germany is like a second home as we're signed to Warner Brothers Germany and Germany's one of our biggest markets. It's worked out really well because when we started German artists weren't being talked about but now all of a sudden, all the English magazines are about people like Jazzanova and the Compost label and they're all on the album."

Rockers Hi Fi, meanwhile, have also contributed to K7's impressive DJ Kicks series, releasing The Black Album: A title inspired by problems with Warners. "They didn't want us to do it and wouldn't let us use the name, Rockers Hi Fi on the cover," explains Whittingham. "But it slowly got sorted out and we were able to use the full name."

The Black Album also serves as a perfect introduction to the Rockers' live sound. "The Black Album was made in two takes," claims Whittingham. "I put a dj set together and played it to Glyn and Patrick. We just turned the dat machine on and took it from there. I changed the odd record throughout the mix That's how we DJ. We freestyle, we don't rehearse."

copyright Stephen Jewell @ Pavement Magazine 1999