Spectre are Nick Raphael and James Style and, with "The Missing Two Weeks", they have produced an album that takes dub reggae and cross pollinates it with many other strains of dance music. Nick spoke to Tim and explained how it all came about....

How did Spectre form?
I was making more conventional dub music with a group called Manasseh, which is a sound system too, and the dub scene is generally quite conservative. I joined up with my oldest friend ever, James Style, to give us an outlet for something where we can experiment much more, musically and subjectively, which would keep us more interested, rather than being bound by the conventions of the mainstream roots scene. And although I love all that stuff and will continue to do it, it's nice to have an outlet where you can indulge your most eccentric whims. So we found out that the Stereo MCs were looking for people for their new label, so we went to see them, had a good chat and decided to do it, basically.

What's happening with the Stereo MCs at the moment?
There really deep in their...fourth album, I think. They're in the studio.

Does the fact that you're involved in the sound system affect the way that you make music with Spectre?
Yeah, I think it does. It's bound to really. I always spend a lot of time working on sounds, like the bass sound, so that they'd work at a sound system. You know, get the bass sound right so that it makes a heavy bass on the sound system. There are quite a few tracks on the album that I'd play there.

Apart from being plundered occasionally by the trendier dance acts, dub reggae doesn't really gain much exposure. Why do you think that is?
I think because it doesn't want it. The stuff that might get exposure is usually the harder, verging on techno stuff, but the majority of roots stuff is quite conservative. The crowds who come to clubs are quite happy with the level of exposure that it's got. I think the great thing about the seventies reggae scene was that it opened itself out and got more people interested, but the old crowd were all, like, "it's not the same". Which is going to happen with any club, really.

Do you think Spectre can break through all that?
I don't think we're trying to. It's more to please ourselves than to please anybody else.

The assassination of President Kennedy seems a strange subject for a 90s dance act to be writing about...
It's been a favourite subject of mine for a long time. For me, the assassination of President Kennedy has all the elements of a modern Greek tragedy. It was, like, the loss of innocence in America. It annoys me that people think that there are only so many things you can write music about. I like to take inspiration from all over the place. I really like that Joan Osborne song in the charts, not so much musically, but because of the mad lyrics about God. I'm getting fed up with love and teenage angst.

So are you a conspiracy theorist?
Every time. I think that kind of stuff is almost turning into some kind of new religion.

There's quite a heavy jazz element on the record. Where did that come from?
Practically speaking, that came from the fact that I've been doing lots of work with all sorts of different bands around London. The jazz scene is quite big in London, there are lots of sort of musoey people around and I wanted to work with some of them. There's one band I work with in particular, Pushmepullyou, who are a funk band and are basically a pool of brilliant musicians. And I just love working with them. I really like their style. And it also comes in from my love of Seventies stuff, like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Again, it's to please me. Also, I think if you listen to old abstract jazz, it is pretty much dub. It's the same sort of emotion. Maybe not classic Jamaican dub but there's certainly a link.

Where do you stand on facelessness in dance music?
I think in some ways it's a bad idea. I can understand why, if all your music is coming from machines and sequencers, there's an understandable desire to step back from the limelight or whatever, I suppose because in a way there's a feeling that a lot of computer music is not an amazing achievement, that a lot of people could do it, in a way. So a lot of people don't want to put themselves forward, maybe. I certainly identify with it myself, there's nothing nicer than just getting on with it in the studio. The idea of going out and doing gigs is quite scary, especially if it's just going to be computers and stuff.

So how are Spectre going to approach that side of things?
Well, the concept of Spectre sort of evolved as we were doing the record and what we'll do is probably leave that until we've finished the next one, which we're starting now, and we'll do it in such a way that it's able to be performed by a band. I think there are already tracks that could be really well performed by a band and we'll do more, get other singers involved and stuff. It's something I would like to do, but I want to do it properly and I think that that would be a really good way of doing it, to combine live jazz performance with dubbing techniques. It'd be exciting.

Is there anyone around at the moment who you identify with?
I can't really say, because I don't really listen to that much of the stuff that people might compare us with. That's not through dislike or snobbery, just that I'm really busy doing music and when I turn the studio off, I don't tend to want to listen to new stuff. So its kind of a practical thing. And I'm also finding more and more now that I can't really listen to looped music. I like listening to music that's continually changing, so I possibly switch off a bit when it comes to new stuff. I shouldn't really, I should keep open ears. I do hear some new stuff, because I do a radio show for Kiss FM, but that tends to be more straight- ahead roots stuff. Which is great for the radio, but I wouldn't necessarily listen to it at home. Which is perhaps another theme behind Spectre, that we want to make albums that are fun to listen to at home, and don't need a great big dancehall and huge sound.

Does that mean you feel that technology can make things stale?
I think it does, in a way, yeah. When used at its most creative, in conjunction with live instruments, it can be amazing, because suddenly, you can edit. Say you get a sax player or a guitarist in and they're sort of soloing all over the place, you can use samplers to edit that and move it all around in a way that you could never do before. It can be brilliant, I know how brilliant it can be in certain circumstances, making small studios work way beyond their previous capacity, if you see what I mean. But I think it's overused. Too often you hear the same snare-drum sample fifty million times in one record. People seem to think they can't just get in a snare-drum and actually play it. I regularly try and play things all the way through tracks rather than just loop them. So it can make things stale, I think. If you look back at the history of dance music over the last four or five years, I think there's very little that will really stand the test of time and I know an awful lot of people who don't listen to modern music anymore because of that. I think that's what's been good about the Britpop bands, that there's been such a good live element to them.

What happened to the missing two weeks?
'The Missing Two Weeks' refers to the editing period of the album, when we basically lost all sense of time and direction and got involved in listening through about a million different mixes of each track and choosing different bits we liked out of each one. I'm a great fan of analogue editing, I love editing on two-track and I think that that's basically what happened to that time.

Nick Raphael was talking to Tim, in March 1996.