Dino Lenny- I Will Survive (and I'm Still Smiling)
Author: Jonty Skrufff
Monday, March 1, 2004
Applying his philosophy directly to his latest project-Bucci Bag's More Lemonade- Italian expat Londoner Dino Lenny is right to be optimistic, as his latest single shapes up to be one of the biggest (and best) club records of the year. Featuring the unforgettable hook line 'No-one is allowed to touch you in your bathing suit area', the thumping disco monster has also been spiced up with the addition of two remixes by men-of-the-moment The Scissor Sisters, whose falsetto vocals light up an already sizzlingly hot club track of genuine raw power.
Despite partially welcoming the cull currently decimating the music business, he's also keen to express his sympathies for the many talented people also slipping through the cracks, as the internet and changing fashions, begin to rewire the system.
"I'm seeing a lot of my friends who were in the music business, are no longer remaining in it and it's difficult to come back in once you're out," he points out.
"To survive, you need to have autonomy, so you can show that you can deliver and be productive in the good days as well as during the bad times. You also need to be prepared to maybe earn less if the market keeps on going down. But having said that, once it's cleaned of all those people who shouldn't have been there in the first place, I think it will be even better. If the market had stayed as it was when dance music was really popular three years ago, then today I'd be laughing, but as it is I'm still smiling."
Ever since releasing Ibiza Balearic anthem Cocaine in the summer of 1989, Lenny has been one of house culture's most prolific and successful producers remixing the likes of INXS and Underworld, while releasing scores of tunes under numerous aliases including The Heartist, Adam Dived, White Trash and B.O.D. He even collaborated a couple of years back with New York hip hop crew the Wu Tang Clan though it's his latest project Bucci Bag which is the current focus of his attention.
"Bucci Bag originally came out last year, though then it was the title of the record, released by Andrea Doria," he explains.
"Whereas now it's the name of the act, and More Lemonade is the follow up record. We kept it because we liked the name so much."
Skrufff (Jonty Skruff) The press release says the name Bucci Bag is inspired by 'today's culture of fakeness', what's that about-
Dino Lenny: ""Actually, some people said to me I should call it Gucci Bag, to try and make money out of Gucci and I basically said 'it's not about getting money like that, it's about taking the piss out of those kind of people'. We kept the Bucci theme and also made some of our own bags and gave them away to some girls in the dance business. We only made ten though, they were very expensive."
Skrufff: Did you hear the sample 'No-one is allowed to touch you in your bathing suit area' first or make it some other way-
Dino Lenny: "No, we came up with the idea of the sample ourselves, though I initially recorded it for another record last year. We recorded the vocal but it was too long for that track so we took a piece of the remaining part and used it for this record. The line goes 'No-one is allowed to touch you in your bathing suit area' and you don't hear that kind of phrase very often in a record. Good or bad, we like to be different, it doesn't matter if some people don't like it."
Skrufff: The music industry seems broadly split between optimists and pessimists right now, where do you stand-
Dino Lenny: "I'm basically going back to my roots, making the best records I can and not even thinking about the market any more. I don't think there's a formula for selling a mill Tags