Jumping from rap to rock

There's always been rap, it seems, and rock even longer. Plenty of bands have mixed both - Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine et al - but none with the pop panache of Pontypool's Kennedy Soundtrack whose dynamic bounce between the two is unique to South Wales, at least.

Every song jumps from rap to rock, sometimes from the verse to chorus, others more frequently within a song, exchanging lines like Eminem and Dr Dre but with melody taking half the act.

The sound the performance makes above the dub hip hop rhythm and metal and indie rock guitar leanings is fresh and unlaboured. In short, Kennedy Soundtrack makes it look easy. But it hasn't always been this way.

The band formed two and a half years ago in the early summer of 1999 when its members were students at Cross Keys College, taking b-techs in performing arts. Four of the five took music while the rapper Nick studied drama.

"We all got together towards the last year of college, doing stuff with different bands," said bass player and backing vocalist, Elliot Blake. "We met up there bar me and Rob Giles, the guitarist, who grew up in Pontypool together."

The rest of the band is from around Gwent and Torfaen. Dave Challengar (guitar and lead vocals) is from Risca, Troy Marshall (drums) Caldicot, and Nick Havard (rapper) is from Blackwood.

The band fell easily into a rock vibe with occasional forays into rap. One particular track three of the band made for their b-tech became the blueprint for the two years work that followed.

"We originally planned, me and Nick to do a cover song with him rapping for a performance workshop in college," explained Elliot. "It was actually an Oasis song, so we won't go into too much detail about that (laughs). We discovered it worked over any chords and I came up with a new chord sequence and put our first song together like that.

"He (Nick) had this banging set of lyrics he'd written out. The chord sequence was a minor chord sequence, which suited the rap hip hop thing like Eminem did with the Dido track. But this was done a long time before that. It's what kicked it off."

The song is still part of the Kennedy Soundtrack canon of songs although they do not play it live any more. Currently, it forms an interlude between songs on their album planned for next year.

From the start, Kennedy Soundtrack was no band of amateur muffins acting on idle fantasies of rock stardom with one domineering mastermind blindly leading the way.

Their philosophy was mature for a group of musicians just starting out.

"We all felt that, because we all worked together in college, that we weren't going to have a set way of working," said Elliot. "We weren't going to have one person writing the songs and writing lyrics but we'd all have our say and input on things that we wanted to do. We got away with just letting anybody do pretty much whatever they wanted to do when we started.

"It just clicked. We wrote song after song after song after song. It just kept growing.

"We knew we wanted to be in a band together, we knew we had to write songs. Good songs and catchy tunes. And that's what we basically did. But we wanted to do it in our own way, we didn't want anybody being the one person of the band saying, 'this is the way it's going to be boys'. We all share writing credits and things like that."

But when they left college, Kennedy Soundtrack were yet to be named as such, and its members were stretched through several bands. They had the foundations but many levels still to add.

"When we left college our singer was singing for another band called Jettison," said Gareth. "Our drummer and guitarist actually left so we had to find another drummer. We weren't really bothered about the guitarist as we had three already!"

The five piece was completed with Troy, who had also been on the b-tech at Cross Keys College, but they had yet to be named and their set still wasn't the tight rock rap performance it is today - but these, too, were about to change.

Kennedy Soundtrack - the name came partly from a horse called Soundtrack they had read about in a paper, and a drunken night in a pub when Dave had decided he liked the name Kennedy. At first, the name had no meaning to the musicians it labelled, other than it had a certain ring to it but as time wore on it came to symbolise the music being a soundtrack to "the way we are", Elliot said. At that time, the rapper joined the band for two songs in their set but sensing it was the path to follow that would most likely lead them to glory, they: "dumped a lot of the older songs because they were more rocky than rappy", said Elliot.

"We thought music in general was going more towards rock rap. And we do it in a very unique way compared to what was out there at the time. We write more tunes, more songs, more melodies as more a band would than a hip hop artist would."

The band is not easy to categorise, a good trait but one that would lead to contradicting reports from fans and press as they played venues in South Wales. But this didn't bother Kennedy Soundtrack.

"We get classed as nu metal, some people say we're hip hop, we just like to think we could be anything we want to be," said Elliot. "It just depends on what song we want to write. If we want to write a song with heavy screaming in the background then we'll do it. But if we want to write a song with just a good fat bass line, a bit like gangsta rap, then so be it.

"We like to be open-minded about the music, as long as it's a song and a tune rather than just a noise."

Kennedy Soundtrack were not long out of college when a local gig brought them to the attention to Pontypool's 24-7, a studio that would come to have a major influence on the subsequent development of the band.

"We did this battle of the bands in Fairwater Social Club, in Torfaen. It was a nightmare," said Elliot. "We hadn't completely defined our sound as a rap rock band and were still doing, like, a rock set with Nick up on stage for two songs. We entered this battle of the bands, really determined to win, to be quite honest, because we'd all decided: we are not going to university, we're not really university material, we are a band, we can make it big, we know we can write songs - so we just went ahead and did it. 24-7 were doing the rig for that night and they offered us a gig in the Riverside with a band they were friends with anyway, who gave a good report back."

The management and band discovered they were on the same wavelength, and a new, fruitful relationship began, a year and a half of the band working in 24-7 studios, while the management approached different labels.

"It's very odd talking to labels," said Elliot. "Some of them will take you out to lunch and you'll never see them again. Some of them won't speak to you for two or three weeks, then they'll phone you up and ask you how things are going. So you're never quite sure what's going on in their heads. A lot of managers think they do. I don't think they do, really.

"We had lots of meetings. It was a difficult time. We didn't get the deal from any of those people we had been wined and dined by."

Kennedy Soundtrack spent possibly the most important year they will have together at 24-7, refining their sound and learning about the music business from their twin managers Mervin Crannon and Leon Michael, the latter of which still manages the band.

Mr Crannon and Mr Michael were in partnership with 24-7 at the time, and when they split from the studio the band followed them.

"They'd organised some cracking gigs for us," said Elliot. "Like the Reading festival, which we played last year. It was my first festival and I was playing there! I got to see Rage Against the Machine from the side of the stage, and Blink 182. Sat at the back with all the stars and ate lunch. I was a bit star-struck to be honest. It was a good day."

It was at one such gig in London that the Instant Karma label came across the band this year.

"They were great," said Elliot. "Their A&R woman, Carey Boothe, came down to the 144 on Charing Cross Road. A new Barfly venue. It's closed down now but it was open briefly. The soundman didn't have a clue what he was doing - it was his first night. Dave was getting extremely frustrated because he couldn't hear himself on stage. But she loved it all, the atmosphere; apparently the band played well.

"We went down there the next week to meet the head of the company, Rob Dickens." And the rest is history.

Mr Dickens is a legend in the music business. He was head of Warner Europe and was given the money by Sony to set up Instant Karma. Next year he will release the first EP by Kennedy Soundtrack, which has the working title Killing Music. The band has been recording four songs in London and in Strongbox Studios in Penarth, which will form the EP.

The deal Kennedy Soundtrack struck with Instant Karma will allow them to release two EPs, but the signs are that an album deal will follow, although the band isn't counting its chickens...