CityLife

Styles brings hardcore flavours to Apollo

CLUBLAND MASTER: Styles

DARREN Styles and Mike Di Scala of ‘Ultrabeat’ are a marriage made in hardcore heaven.

Their previous collaboration lead to commercial dance track ‘Pretty Green Eyes’ storming the charts in 2003.

After Styles winning several awards, including Best DJ, Best Producer, Track of The Year plus a top five album, the two hardcore geniuses have come together for a brand new tour.

With support act ‘N-Force’, they have already sold out Manchester Apollo on July.

CityLife caught up with them preparing for the tour..

Where are you at the moment?
M: We’re both at my house in Liverpool, just working on a few bits and bobs for the tour.

How did the Styles and Ultrabeat collaboration come about and what should we expect on the tour?
M: I knew Darren from when we did ‘Pretty Green Eyes’, we decided to hook up, see if we could do something new together. We did ‘Disco Lights’ together, it was one of the biggest dance tunes from the last year, so a tour was the next step off the back of that success.
D: We’ll playing all the obvious ones, there is a couple of surprises in store, new tracks, some of our individual work, it is going to be completely different from our separate shows, We have N-Force supporting us who we’ve worked with before but this is new to us and it’s a learning curve, it’s going to be good fun, we’re hoping everything goes smoothly!

Having played the M.E.N. Arena and the Apollo before as Ultrabeat supporting Cascada, how do you find Manchester and the music scene; which is predominantly indie?
M: For our style of music, we has a massive following in Manchester. When we played the M.E.N, 15,000 people came. A lot of people come over from Liverpool which is great because I get to play to a home crowd, it’s always exciting playing Manchester, it’s the big one!

Hardcore and commercial dance music is incredibly influential, it has won you a lot of awards too...
D: (laughs) Yeah, well, that’s always great, I thought we’d be lucky to get into the top 40 but the record company believed in it. Coming from the hardcore scene and not being that developed in the commercial scene, we didn’t know how it was going to be taken. Obviously it’s nice to have your music recognised but winning awards isn’t the be all and end all, it’s about people liking the record.
M: It’s about having a good time, the whole point of going on tour is to see people on the dancefloor, we want people to dance and have a good time and it’s such a buzz when they’re doing it to your record.

You are obviously passionate about music, what else are you passionate about?
D: The Mighty Boosh. We love the Mighty Boosh, we went watching them live, Noel Fielding’s a genius.
M: Musically, I love Kings Of Leon, that was the last gig I went to... apart from my own, but, I was always into dance since being a child.
D: I was an '80s kid. I listened to ‘Pet Shop Boys’ and all the terrible cheesy stuff that was around at the time but it’s good to listen to different bands and styles and genres, that’s how you pick up your influences and develop your own style.

What’s next for Styles vs Ultrabeat?
M: We’ve just been filming in New York for the video for our next single, apart from that we’ve got the tour, checking out up and coming acts like, ‘Infection’ and apart from that, we just looking forward to the tour!

Catch Darren Styles vs. Ultrabeat at the Manchester Apollo on Saturday, July 4. Call 08444 777 677 to check for returns.