Basement Jaxx’s Kish Kash was a consolidation and expansion of their distinctive sound

Original release date: 20 October, 2003
Label: XL Recordings/Astralwerks

A decade elapsed between Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe first meeting in a pub in Clapham and the release of their third album as Basement Jaxx, Kish Kash. Ten full-throttle years that rocketed by. First came the cult following, established from 1994 onwards at their Basement Jaxx club nights in Brixton and burnished by a steady stream of EPs showcasing their schooling in Chicago and New York house; EPs that found the support of their heroes, such as legendary New York DJ Tony Humphries and Nuyorican production duo Masters at Work.

Then, in 1999, came the release of Red Alert and the sudden bump up to international concern. A barnstorming instant classic, it set the blueprint for what would become their signature sound and paved the way for the huge success of their first two albums, Remedy (1999) and Rooty (2001). Rendez-Vu, Bingo Bango, Romeo, Where’s Your Head At, Jus 1 Kiss and Do Your Thing were all club hits that burrowed deep into the mainstream consciousness, appearing in Coca-Cola and Nickelodeon ads, video games, and movie soundtracks including Bend It Like Beckham and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

It was this cultural cachet that ensured Buxton and Ratcliffe had the pick of an enviable cast of talent for Kish Kash; a guestlist of vocalists that included a 19-year-old Dizzee Rascal (before he released his Mercury Prize-winning Boy in da Corner), punk icon Siouxsie Sioux, JC Chasez of N-Sync, and Meshell Ndegeocello. It was also their least club-friendly record – a deliberate move to eject themselves from the waning big beat scene and the house explosion that defined the 90s. “We were listening to what other people were doing and realising it was all pretty stagnant and uninspiring,” Ratcliffe said at the time. “We had to do something new.”

Kish Kash was a consolidation and expansion of Basement Jaxx’s distinctive sound; an everything-including-the-kitchen sink approach to production that was deceptively considered, intricately layered and incredibly polished. The melting pot that was Brixton culture back then lives and breathes in Basement Jaxx’s music, especially on Kish Kash, where Indian strings (Lucky Star), a 16-piece orchestra (Good Luck), a 70-year-old Bermudan man (Benjilude), bluesy harmonica hoedowns (Supersonic), electropunk (Cish Cash) and flamenco-country (Tonight) coexist harmoniously, a tangle of disparate elements made effortlessly cohesive in Buxton and Ratcliffe’s expert hands.

The album’s biggest single was Good Luck, a stunning, bombastic rock-opera that cedes the spotlight to vocalist Lisa Kekaula delivering the sweetest of kiss-offs. But while Kish Kash wasn’t as flush with hits as Remedy and Rooty, it was more consistent than both of those records, loaded with deep cuts like the P-Funk indebted Right Here’s the Spot, the deep, strings-driven breakup ballad If I Ever Recover, and the proto-Metronomy indie rock jam Living Room, featuring Buxton on vocals. The seven-and-a-half-minute quiet storm closer Feels Like Home was their most daring (and perhaps sparest) move yet, a nod to the Purple One built around gentle funk guitars, negative space and Ndegeocello’s smoky murmur.

Kish Kash was included in several end-of-year lists, received a nod for the 2004 Mercury Prize, and went on to win the inaugural 2005 Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album. The United States was a difficult market for the pair to crack, where their impossible-to-categorise productions perplexed a scene that was still yet to embrace dance music in a meaningful way (being dropped by their US label Astralwerks before winning the Grammy surely didn’t help). But those who knew, knew. In 2001, Sasha Frere-Jones predicted in the New Yorker that Basement Jaxx, who used “actual human vocals and wove a wide range of references into their music”, would go further and last longer than Daft Punk.

Turned out he was wrong. Their one-time tourmates would cleave to the zeitgeist faster and stronger. Still, there’s a strong argument that nobody before or since – not even Basement Jaxx themselves – has presented a vision of club crossover music as wackily maximalist, ambitious, precisely realised and effective as the that found on Remedy, Rooty and Kish Kash (though later acts such as Simian Mobile Disco, Disclosure and Hudson Mohawke all have traces of Basement Jaxx in their genre-mulching DNA). The end of Basement Jaxx’s most glorious run would coincide with the last days of UK club music’s boom years, ending a period of thrilling inventiveness and vitality that saw the radical ideas of the underground embraced and adapted to the world stage.