Mutiny: Brixton's Tuffest Dirty House Duo

"I have had a couple of run-ins with gangs here though that was a few years ago and happened because I was looking after my little brother. I ended up getting acid in my eye. I think it's got worse, now, though."

As long term residents of London's roughest trendy area Brixton, Mutiny duo Dylan Barnes and Rob Davy are well qualified to discuss the area's downside. Not least since their mate and occasional collaborator Felix from Basement Jaxx was mugged several months ago.

"I do believe I've managed to keep myself out of trouble by being a bit more streetwise," Dylan told Skrufff's Jonty Adderley. "But then again you can't say that if someone's walking home at 3am that it's their fault if someone jumps out of a bush with a knife."

Fighting talk aside, the pair recently emerged from a somewhat unconsummated relationship with Virgin, which appears to have sparked a surge of creativity judging by their new single Ya Self. Snapped up by Darren Emerson's Underwater Records, the dirty house anthem is their filthiest and funkiest production to date, suggesting their gunpowder remains both dry and ready.


Skrufff: 12 months ago, you were all guns blazing with Virgin, what happened-

Mutiny (Dylan Barnes): "We were being told all the time that it was a building process though we only ended up releasing two singles with Virgin. They then started getting taken apart by EMI. I don't know what the internal politics were, but we'd been clever enough to do a licensing deal with them from our label Sunflower, so we decided it was better not to carry on with them. We didn't know what was happening, whether they were going to release another single or not, and we were started to be asked to do things we didn't want to do such as change lyrics, for example. We came out of the arrangement, joined another label and we now feel a lot freer and a lot happier. We've been struggling for a while financially since we needed to cover ourselves in the interim but we've been forcing ourselves through it."

Skrufff: How did the connection with Darren Emerson come about-

Mutiny: "This business is all about character and I realised this more and more as I came out of the Virgin situation. It's not about people with money but it's about character; if you get on with somebody (are friends with somebody) then that's somewhere you can progress with and right from the start both Rob and I got on very well with him. We became good mates and weren't even considering working with his label, then he heard Ya' Self which was just one of the tracks we'd made for our next album. He really liked it and he's also very understanding of the fact that we still want to develop our own label and he's happy taking one off deals with us and pushing our label simultaneously."

Skrufff: Did you create Ya Self, after Virgin-

Mutiny: "Yes. We were doing a lot of DJ sets at the time and we were starting to want to play more of our own music, so the track came up from there. It was after 9/11 and the lyrics were inspired by it actually. 'The world's gone crazy/ You've got to look out for Ya Self.' We weren't aiming for it to be political because we don't try and be political in our lyrics but we do try and put meaning into them, rather than that 'I love you, you love me, let's get together and grow some trees'."

Skrufff: How do you see the health of club culture right now-

Mutiny: "I dispute this argument that club culture is dead, my own opinion is that it's in the best state it's ever been in. Because the commercial side is dying, that's allowing more underground stuff to come through. There are loads of little bars and clubs opening up doing good things all over the place. Here in Brixton you've got the Telegraph, which is rammed every week, which hasn't happened for a few years."

Skrufff: Felix from Basement Jaxx got mugged in Brixton recently, have either of you two had problems with street crime-

Mutiny: "We've lived in this area for longer th Tags

• mutiny