Mystery Techno Act Blacknecks Reveal Themselves—and It's Not Disclosure, or Skream

If there's one thing I know about techno it's that techno is serious business. Nobody knows this better than Blacknecks; the enigmatic, previously anonymous dons of serious techno. So serious and mysterious are Blacknecks that rumours about their real identities have been rife in techno-land for a while, inspiring raging debate and some epic forum threads. The press release for 2013's "Untitled" called them "The new, anonymous side project of two prominent UK garage producers & remixers, known for remixing a string of top 40 singles, as well as having their own minor hit in the late naughties."

Word on the street was that Blacknecks were Skream, or Burial, or Disclosure (thanks Mary Anne Hobbs)—or even the dark lord himself, Cliff Richard. With that in mind, many serious techno heads crammed in to see Blacknecks live debut at Brimingham's legendary House Of God club recently—and were shocked to discover they were none of those people.

Blacknecks are in fact two white blokes, Gary Diablo and Salso Fontes, accompanied for live shows by a cross-dressing, ginger bounce MC called Joyce.

In this THUMP exclusive, I caught up with members Gary and Salso to get, as they call it in serious music journalism, the "low down." And it turns out that they're serious fellas alright - seriously lovely, that is, great to chat to and really down to earth.

THUMP: Who are Black Necks?

Gary Diablo: We are. And it's Blacknecks, not Black Necks.

How did you meet and start making music?

Salso Fontes: It's quite funny because we actually met in Wycombe in 1997, at some awful short lived drum 'n' bass club in the suburbs. I wasn't a drum 'n' bass DJ, but the fee was enough to buy two hours' worth of records for the gig, and have enough left over to pay part of my council tax bill for that month. We had a good chat about musical integrity—which I said I was in favour of, and he agreed. We hit it off. We started working on a project together that day. Gary dealt with the technical and engineering details—the arrangement, the mix-down, the musical ideas and so forth—and I oversaw the whole thing. There was a real chemistry from day one.

GD: Symbiotic.

SF: Yeah, symbiotic. And I knew a guy at Sony. All the ingredients were there.

What are your formative musical influences?

GD: I was never really into music much in the early days. It's something that just found us. In that respect, you could argue that we've had more of an influence on music than it's ever had on us.

SF: I remember growing up, when pop music in the UK was at its most cutting edge: Kraftwerk, Afrika Black Mambazo, Del Amitri just released "All I Ever Wanted." I remember my dad being a big fan of Slik. It's pretty much circling the toilet bowl now. It has been ever since we started making music, anyway.

GD: Gary Numan…

SF: He wasn't British was he?

There is a lot of rumour floating about that you are not really who you say you are. That you're actually Disclosure in disguise, jamming with Liam Howlett. You must feel very insulted to be compared to such shite?

SF: I'm not aware of Liam Hallett's work, but I do like what Disclosure are doing.

GD: I don't think anyone ever thought we were them, but I did at one point suspect that we may be someone like Zomby, but it turns out it was a few people with some kind of agenda putting that about. It actually turned out it was us who made the records. It was Blacknecks.

SF: The clue was in the name.

Having said that though, it's pretty obvious you guys are really techno fakers jumping on the techno revival bandwagon. What's your favourite Steps track? And who else on this rickety bandwagon do you rate?

SF: When we made our first record as Blacknecks, Gary accidentally left the +20db switch on on a DI box. By the time we realised what had happened the record was already mastered and cut, so we decided to just go with it. Believe it or not, Blacknecks was supposed to be a deep house project.

GD: Turns out it was a stroke of luck that we've been forced to go down the techno route, as we both now realise that deep house has pretty much run it's course - whereas the whole techno bandwagon is pretty buoyant. No sign of it going off the rails anytime soon.

SF: We stopped working as garage producers in about 2009. To be honest. it dried up. We tried to sneak some backmasking into a remix of one of the bigger girl bands of the day, for a bit of fun. Nothing sinister, just a little silly thing. I forget the exact wording, but there was a bit of a mix-up. I had a toilet break, Gary had a toilet break immediately after…. long story short, we reversed the vocal twice.

GD: And there was a bit of a fuck up on the mixing desk as it recorded, because only part of the vocal came through. So the back-masked vocal ended up playing forwards and only a snippet was present. That snippet taken out of context sounded slightly racist, and apparently a bit woman-hatey.

SF: So the remix was rejected, we got dropped, there was talk of two of the girls suing us for slander, or libel, whatever. Even though for one of the girls the snippet was factually accurate.

GD: I've got a brilliant story about Dane Bowers actually, but it'll have to be off the record.

SF: That weekend we played the track five times between us in various clubs before we realised, so eventually gigs dried up a bit. Especially after Gary got stabbed in the ankle in Elephant & Castle on the Sunday, and we ultimately decided it was a good idea to listen to a track at least once after it was recorded. But the move to techno was purely for the creative possibilities. The potential with new rhythms, new textures, the energy of the audience, the fees, the pursuit of new sounds. The switch did genuinely come from a very honest place.

The Steps guys and girls are lovely, so it'd be unfair to talk about their music. We're big East 17 fans though. We liked what A1 were doing in the early days, before the whole Hindu mysticism thing (it's subtle, but it is there if you know where to look). Little known fact about Christian from A1: he actually performed a couple of times with Peccatum before they split up. As far as I've heard it was just a couple of songs he joined in on, but it's interesting that you don't get that kind of crossover in UK music. That was the aim with out debut gig, actually.

Obviously you are very shrewd business men, cashing in to make a quick buck. What is it that has made the techno revival so appealing to the nation right now, and so well paying that you recently jacked in your day jobs?

SF: As I say, it's the creative potential of techno that's the attraction. We've turned down a lot of lucrative work, production for various people. We're refusing to do any interviews (besides this one obviously, and a few better ones) because they don't excite us.

GD: It's never been about money or fame, it's always been about respect; respect for the music, respect for the people who enjoy it, and the respect we happen to get as a result of the money and being known—which we actually can't do anything about.

SF: But to answer the question that I think you meant to ask: yes, creative freedom is a wonderful thing, but with that comes a great deal of responsibility. It'd be, shall we say, "ungentlemanly," to go out there and be far more creative than anyone else (which we do), but you have to give your peers a chance to catch up.

GD: That's why the records have been getting steadily worse, for want of a better word, since 000001. You've got to give a little back.

SF: That was the main thrust of our House of God gig too, giving something back.

Salso, you recently appeared on the Jeremy Kyle show to tell the nation that they are "cunts." What is it that makes the nation such cunts?

SF: We said we weren't doing this bit, so we'll leave this blank. I see your idea, but it just seems a bit like you want us to say "The UK is a nation of cunts" or something so you can take it out of context and use it as a headline. People will see right through that. So we'll delete this question, yeah? We'd rather get onto talking about the debut gig and wrap it up.

Do you feel this misanthropy comes across in Blacknecks' music?

SF: That's a bit of a loaded question. We're not misanthropes at all. If that's something that comes across to the listener, then the listener's a fucking idiot. Again, it's a misconception that it's this kind of punk thing, that we're deliberately antagonistic with our music and that reflects our personalities.

GD: And that's not the case at all with us. We like people.

SF: It's about the joy and pain of the extremes of the human experience. I know that sounds a bit grand and pretentious, and it is, but it helps paint a picture. We see ourselves as artists. Brian Eno once said "It's only art, it's not going to change the world," and that's fine for him and what he does. We're not saying we're better.

GD: Maybe it's higher art in a sense, maybe not. With these curve-balls you've thrown, it's difficult for us to hone in on what we want to say without us sounding like wankers. I appreciate you're trying to make this interesting and we do want to co-operate, but we've gone off-piste somewhat. I don't know how to respond to your question.

SF: Between this and the cunt bit, I don't know… I wanted to get onto our recent gig, but you've missed a few good lead-ins to that already. Shall we just call it a day?

Tell me about your recent, controversial, live debut at House Of God?

SF: Finally. Crikey, I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up! Yeah we had Joyce MCing for us. That split the crowd a bit. We saw her on Harry Hill doing a Nik Kershaw cover or something, and we knew we had to have her. She waited until the afternoon of the gig to ask us what an MC was. So she ended up singing one song, then spent most of the set just shouting the word "CLUBBING!" over and over. If I was of a mind, I'd say it was quite a cool inversion of "Discipline" by Throbbing Gristle, but I haven't heard that song.

GD: It was a transvestite (who didn't even bother to drag up on the night - leave your parochial gender preconceptions at the door) chanting one word repeatedly. An English graduate, a verbose and highly intelligent individual, an experienced and consistently excellent performer—unable to do anything but chant one word over and over. I wouldn't say controversial. I thought it was great.

SF: I sat in front of a couple of women on the train home who seemed to hate us, and it turns out a few people have been quite vocal about how awful it was.

GD: A lot of people loved it though. Surgeon was saying how much he enjoyed us. That is, he was just about to, but then he had to unexpectedly go stand somewhere else. Really top bloke, really down to earth, always got a packet of wafer thin ham on the go, protects it with his life.

SF: Fame hasn't changed him.

What's next for Blacknecks?

GD: Our last record will be out soon, and we'll be playing a few more gigs in the near future, but our long term aim is to end the project on a high. Granted that the optimum time for that was a few months ago, but we're confident that the sixth release will be the best. Even though (as I said earlier) we are making an effort to not make it too good, to keep us within reach of our lesser peers. Naming no names.

SF: Most of them, really.

And what next for the industrial techno revival bandwagon?

SF: You'll have to ask the bandwagon. Are we done now? Stick a paragraph at the top about how down to earth we are, but don't make it too obvious that we told you to.