NEW YORK (EBTG Fans Website) - It only involves two turntables and good old vinyl, but crossing over into DJ culture isn't so easy. Just ask former porn star Tracy Lords, who tanked as a rave jock, or karma-chameleon DJ Boy George, who has been criticized for his iffy mixing skills.
The UK's Ben Watt is a rare outside success: He's thriving as a DJ despite having been behind
Everything But the Girl's love-it-or-hate-it 1995 pop anthem "
Missing" ("like the deserts miss the rain"), which later found its way into the popular nervous system through "Saturday Night Live's"
Mango as it also became a No. 2 hit stateside.
His reverence for house music, his headfirst dive into the scene and his perseverance (it's been six years since his decision to eschew traditional pop instruments in favor of Technics 1200s) have transformed Watt, 40, into a hero to hard-to-please house heads. In fact, spinning with DJ partner Jay Hannan at their own Lazy Dog nights in London and touring in support of the duo's second mix-CD, "Lazy Dog Volume 2," Watt has become a guiding light for deep, tasteful dance music and a defender of the DJ-as-musician.
"Whether you're spinning records or playing guitars, you have to take your audience on a journey and have them feel what you feel," says Watt. "Until I started deejaying, I never realized the intimacy you have with an audience."
It was a phone call in 1994 from members of Massive Attack that sent Everything But the Girl on a new path, taking the duo and longtime couple from "lite jazz" to e-music stardom as partner Tracey Thorn placed her delicate vocals above the trip-hoppers' lush, emotional title track, "Protection."
"That reawakened interest in Everything But the Girl and re-energized Tracey's voice," Watt says.
Recovering from a rare autoimmune disease, Watt was encouraged by legendary British producer Howie B to hit the decks. He began spinning drum-and-bass and the kind of Brazilian- and jazz-flavored down-tempo that brought him and Tracy together in the first place in 1982.
"When we started in the '80s, the London scene was into that whole soul-jazz-bossa sound," Watt says. "It really influenced people like Sade and EBTG."
Watt paired up with Hannan, an accomplished BBC and KISS-FM jock and house head who ran UK promotion for Chicago label Guidance. By the end of the '90s, Lazy Dog was giving a smooth, New York feel to tracks by Sade, Maxwell, Meshell N'degeocello and even EBTG's own "Tracey In My Room," a heartfelt redux of 1996's "Wrong" that frames Thorn's voice with gorgeous guitar and lush synth washes.
While Thorn remains in "semiretirement" tending to the couple's children, Watt tends to his duties as co-owner of London nightspot Cherry Red, does production work (including much of Beth Orton's latest, "Daybreaker") and continues to rinse house that is "really deep, epic and sweet," to put it in his words. For Watt, music is revolutionary, not evolutionary.
As he once wrote, in a 1998 house classic from Deep Dish featuring EBTG, "The future of the future will still repeat today." " 'Future of the Future' tried to capture that feeling that you won't be helped out by your past and the expectations people have of you," says Watt. "You're going to go out into the night regardless of what people say."
