Fragmenté

If the world of fishing owes a considerable debt to the Yellow Pages then so does dance music. JR Hartley, of course, located a copy of his long out-of-print copy of Fly Fishing there. Less auspiciously, but of more obvious cultural importance, was the Artful Dodger’s fateful formation in the 1990s.
Pete Devereux, a Southampton DJ and classically trained piano player, inspired by rave, thumbed through his local Yellow Pages looking for a studio and alighted upon the name of Mark Hill. “It was the only studio around, basically,” chuckles Devereux. “I booked some time, paid him £10 an hour to engineer some stuff but we got on and started making tunes together.”
The ‘stuff’ that Devereux whimsically refers to began with discovering and nurturing pop idol Craig David, enjoying a run of top ten pop hits, notching up half a million sales for the Artful Dodger album It’s All About The Stragglers, two Brit nominations with the success reaching its dizzying apex with an Ivor Novello award for Woman Trouble. “Stevie Wonder was hosting the Ivors,” recalls Devereux. “The room was just wealth. That’s where the money is. And we won it. I still remember it now, it was so surreal. It didn’t sink in for years.”
Devereux has indeed come a long way since his teenage days of youth orchestras and piano grades. A career in classical music seemed set. He moved to London to study music but also immersed himself in the rave scene, by day running scales and studying Rachmaninov, by night raving or with ears glued to seminal pirate jocks like The Brainkillers on Innocence FM. “I lived in Islington round the corner from Paradise Club so I was in there all the time, thinking ‘Yeah! This is music! I feel alive in this music!’ I’d never felt that with the music I’d been doing.”
Devereux resolved to become a DJ. He spent his student loan on a set of decks and then went to Black Market Records in Soho and handed over his student grant in exchange for some virgin black vinyl. He dropped out of college and moved back home to work as a DJ. His head, though, was a jumble of ideas and sounds and tunes. Which is where Yellow Pages stepped in.
But it was Devereux and Hill’s encounter with Craig David that unleashed their creativity. He approached them in a club. “He kept saying, ‘Gimme the mic, I’m a rapper and a singer’,” recalls Pete. “We were like, ‘Oh fuck off!’, but by the end it was easier to just give him it to shut him up. But he was really good. We thought we need this guy in our studio. It was a match made in heaven.”
The rest, as they say, is hysteria. Artful Dodger were thrust into the roles of pop stars rather unwillingly, seeing themselves as studio-bound producers rather than Cristal-swigging popstrels. By the end of their brief, but all-encompassing, ball of fame Devereux was exhausted and washed out (and neither was it helped by some bad business decisions that cost many thousands of pounds). He turned his back on music and took up, er golf. “I played every day for a year,” he laughs. “I had no interest in going in the studio and making records.”
Today Devereux is relaxing in the back garden of a bijou 1920s house in the Southampton suburbs. Chickens loiter happily and a dog sits lazily in the afternoon shade. He looks happy – as well he should. As one part of house trio Fragmenté their first production, Transistor Radio, has already been made One For The Weekend on Pete Tong’s show and is nudging up the DMC Buzz Chart.
He is joined by Scooby Jones and Ollie Knight, two young turks from the local Southampton scene. Scooby has done time as singer and MC with a variety of projects including the vaunted Pickpockets, who toured with Black Eyed Peas and Ice T and has also worked with Craig David and Mark Hill. Ollie Knight has been involved in music since he was still at school, working variously as a DJ, drum and bass promoter and sound engineer (his first love). Although the young ‘un of the bunch, he has worked with well-known local singer Aaron Soul and even briefly worked with Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green.
So what the hell is Fragmenté? They acknowledge debts to both the French and US house fraternity but in truth though there are certainly echoes of both, the Fragmenté sound really is distinct and different. It is unquestionably commercial – as in: lots of people will like it, rather than cheesy old shite. What sets it – and Fragmenté – apart from the pack is their ability to nurture gleaming hooks out of the primordial mess of sounds that tumble out of the speakers.
“This is definitely an album rather than a random bunch of singles,” avers Scooby. “I think of this as an album based project.” “Artful Dodger was about being a pop star,” adds Pete. “This is about being a musician. It’s got depth. We’re not jumping on bandwagons. If anything we’re referencing records from five or ten years ago, rather than making electro house.” “I’d love it if one of our records reminded people of their summer,” enthuses Ollie. “So that each time they listened to it and it takes them back to their holidays.” They are fiercely ambitious and yet strangely relaxed (as you would be if you lived in suburban Southampton with chickens lolling about at your feet). Yet despite their experience at dance music’s coal face they are still fresh enough to be enthused about hearing themselves on Tongy’s show. “It’s great to be excited about being in the Buzz Chart and hearing my tunes on the radio again,” says Pete. “I wasn’t really excited about a lot of the Artful Dodger days.”
Fragmenté’s music would not only bounce happily out of the speakers at We Love Sundays in Ibiza but also cuddle up to Mika and Calvin Harris on a Radio 1 Big Weekend without sounding remotely embarrassed. It’s music that says, ‘Come in you big Jessie, the water’s lovely’. And for that we should all be grovellingly grateful.
“I feel like we’re at a point where we have a sound now that is interesting and different,” claims Scooby. “It’s our sound,” adds Ollie, defiantly. He’s not wrong.
Words by Bill Brewster.