Blastercase – “An epic breakbeat-dancehall-techno-rocking-hip-hop-electro-mind-fuck… Highly recommend grabbing their debut album”
Disco Demos – “You You You has easily convinced me to mention the album on my site. It’s like a cross-section of contemporary music, totally amazing”
The Culture of Me – “There is no such thing as a great electronic record; there is in fact only a such thing as a great record. Mashpop & Punkstep is that great record… one of the best “pop” records we’ve heard in years”
Trash Menagerie – “Full of surprises and a lot of fun”
Extra New Music – “One of the Best Indie Party Albums this year!”
Funky House Music – “With the release of ‘Mashpop & Punkstep’ The Young Punx could well have produced the first dancefloor focused, must-have album of the year…”
Robot Pigeon – “There are certainly tracks that we absolutely adore and will repeat to death”
Feral Party Kids – “We give this album 41/2 to of 5 stars. Young Punx bring the heat”
The Docking Station – “A fantastically thoughtful and mind bending ride, as one never knows quite what’s next… like you’re punched in the face one minute only to be coddled to sleep the next.”
I Really Love Music – “An album that will provide smiles for anyone wanting a simple set of straight to the dance floor grooves.”
Atari Cool Kids – “The Young Punx has put out a storm of thunderous beats and compelling remixed instrumentals their latest Studio Album is a punch to the gut with hard hitting melodies with smooth transitions from track to track.”
On Saturday 23rd January, the world’s leading music industry conference, MIDEM, was kicked off by a panel discussion with Hal Ritson of The Young Punx and Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls discussing the artist’s perspective on new models for the promotion of music in the digital economy. Other speakers following included Pharrell, Ed O’Brian of Radiohead and Fallout Boy.
There has been a lot of press coverage of the event, but here are a couple of examples :
BBC News Website
Bands that took the corporate buck may once have been accused of selling out, but commercial sponsorship is now often seen as a smart way to fund your music.
Hal Ritson sings with Young Punx and is Dizzee Rascal’s live band leader
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So UK dance act The Young Punx accepted sponsorship from beer company Warsteiner, which wanted to raise its profile among clubbers in Germany.
Warsteiner put on club nights where The Young Punx DJ’d and performed live, the company gave away their music, used it in its MTV ads and the band featured the drink in their podcasts.
“They were paying to have us associated with their brand,” says Young Punx singer and Dizzee Rascal’s live musical director Hal Ritson. “We were happy to be associated with their brand since our brand is basically having a few drinks and having a good time.”
During last year’s promotion, according to Facebook statistics, the number of Young Punx fans in Germany shot up and Germany went from being “a territory of no relevance” to third on the list behind the UK and USA.
“That’s a fanbase that came through one year without us maybe selling many records, but with many, many people hearing our music. And we got paid, so everyone’s happy.”
MIDEM(net) Blog
Hal Ritson and Amanda Palmer at MIDEM 2010
Artists are getting in early with their views on digital music innovation this MidemNet – the opening panel on day one features Amanda Palmer (centre, of Dresden Dolls and now solo fame) and Hal Ritson from The Young Punx (left)… It also made history as the first ever MidemNet session to kick off with a ukulele cover of Radiohead’s Creep (Palmer), interpretive dance (Ritson) and a sock puppet (representing Paul Van Dyk).
Ritson talked about his own online activities, saying an artist has to do three things nowadays: first, get people to listen to the music; second, get some emotional contact with them; and third, find a revenue stream from somewhere.
“We’ve totally embraced the point that writers of music blogs are totally taking over as the new tastemakers of music,” he said. So Ritson looks at blogs giving away free music not as a threat, but as the modern equivalent of radio promo. “You’re getting people to hear your music,” he said.
Interview with Hal Ritson of The Young Punx by leading Synth manufacturer Roland :
Hey Hal. You played with Dizzee Rascal at the BBC Electric Proms a few days ago. How did this come about?
I worked for Dizzee on his most recent album, Tongue N Cheek, recording and performing the live music elements that were integrated into the electronic production by Dizzee’s long-term producer Cage. I have a background that spans ‘traditional’ live music such as orchestras, jazz bands, rock etc, and also the underground electronic scene, so I am often hired to help out projects that require knowledge of ‘both sides of the fence’. When Dizzee was invited to perform at the Electric Proms it seemed the natural next step for me to continue the collaboration, taking the music into a live environment, building on what we had done on the album, and also building on the experience of performing electronic music as a live show that myself and my team had gained from working on our own project The Young Punx.
You played the new Roland AX Synth during the show. Can you explain in some detail how you use it to get the sounds you were after?
In a live context I tend to alternate between playing bass guitar and playing keyboards. It can be very frustrating in that when you are playing bass or guitar you can interact very physically with your instrument, move about the stage to interact with the band and the audience etc. Then as soon as you start playing the keys, you are rooted to one spot and become much more physically isolated from your performance. Read more
Good interview with The Young Punx ahead of their upcoming Dubai gigs:
(Excerpt)
What’s your set going to be like out here?
The Young Punx DJ set represents our influences from the club scene, so there’s a lot of breakbeat, electro and house. Depending on the crowd, we can go into dubstep and drum ’n’ bass, but the set is mostly solid, good-time music with grooves and funk. Someone recently told us that our sets are stylistically all over the place and shouldn’t work, but somehow do. And that’s a compliment because that’s what we try to achieve, really.
Read more
from M8 magazine, December 2007
- Hal Ritson of The Young Punx has performed, written or produced behind the scenes on over 150 dance records in the past 4 years, including playing keyboards on Eric Prydz’s “Call On Me”, singing the “Jimmy Somerville” lead vocals on Supermode’s “Tell Me Why” and co-writing 2 tracks on David Guetta’s platinum selling “Poplife” album.
- The Young Punx’ album “Your Music Is Killing Me” contains no audio samples of music – despite sounding like most of the tracks are sample-based. To produce their trademark mashed-up sound the band painstakingly record many different pieces of retro music – big bands, orchestras, 80s pop, surf rock, heavy metal etc, all in historically authentic ways, then ‘sample themselves’. They are always getting asked “I can’t work out what the samples are you used in ‘Fire’ and ‘Drum and Bacharach’”. There are no music samples. That said, the re-edited “Shipping Forecast” vocal on the track “Rockall” IS a genuine BBC shipping forecast, read and endorsed by Radio 4 announcer Alan Smith!
Album of the Week
The Young Punx
‘Your Music Is Killing Me’
(MofoHifi)
This refreshing and at times startling debut from Hal Ritson and Cameron Saunders is the sorta record Fatboy Slim should have made to follow-up ‘We’ve Come A Long Way Baby’. It’s phat, funky, quirky, in-ya-face and above all fun. Stompers like ‘Wake Up, Make Up…’, ‘Rockall’ and ‘You’ve Got To…’ rub shoulders with the ‘80s disco boogie pastiche of ‘It Doesn’t Stop’, and the electro pop of ‘Young & Beautiful’. There’s also the kitsch: ‘Interplanetary’ (a remake of the Carpenters hit), and neo-classical title track along with and the Eric Prydz-like ‘Fire’. In fact there’s a staggering 17-tracks on show, with many, past, present and future single among them. By refusing to adhere to any one musical style, the Young Punx!
may well become one of the most misunderstood artists of their generation, yet despite this, expect this totally absorbing debut to make its mark on the end of year ‘best of’ listings. (Lewis Dene) 5 dancin’ men
Update Magazine, Sept 26th 2007. Update is a leading tastemaker magazine for the dance music industry. Lewis Dene writes for Update, DJ Magazine, Record Collector, Blues and Soul and the BBC.
The Young Punx – Hal Ritson and Cameron Saunders – started carving a name two years ago with raucous remixes and audacious mashups which weren’t afraid to take on such unlikely targets as Motorhead. The contagiously cheeky ‘Young And Beautiful’ – first release on the new MofoHifi imprint- is showing all the
signs of crossing over while the Mylo-inspired ‘Destroy Celebrity Crap’ is causing ructions in the underground.
The Cambridge-based duo have also achieved the impossible by giving a monstrous new slant to De’Lacy’s ‘Hideaway’. It’s one of the most original remixes of the year and typical of their original, no-rules approach. Meanwhile, Hal Ritson is also part of Medcab who are set for a major release of ‘Dance’ – the car advert-hoisted cover of ESG’s early 80s classic. They’re so at home in any number of dance music boxes that they’ve created their own, which the world seems to love. Do you feel lucky today, Punx?
Did you take your name from The Clash’s ‘All The Young Punks’?
No. We actually saw it written on a wall in Italy in a piece of graffitti and thought, “That would be a good band name”. There’s some punk attitudes in the way we approach dance production: a kind of homemade don’t-give-a-fuck, we’ll-do-what-we-want kind of approach. There definitely is some anarchy in there.
THE YOUNG PUNX
Dance music is known for its inherent lack of humour. In these days of po-faced minimal techno posers, a hamster burp and a beat can be hailed as the latest manifestation of genius, with the prankster antics of The KLF seeming like a distant memory. But all is not lost: enter stage-left court jesters The Young Punx – also known as Hal Ritson and Cameron Saunders – whose way with a groove is only matched by their gleeful sense of the absurd. Their debut album, ‘Your
Music Is Killing Me’, out now on Mofo HiFi, thinks nothing of fusing firing electro house with rhythmic samples of the shipping forecast, or recasting Karen Carpenter as a sampled space-age house minx. The Young Punx are all about upsetting the applecart in any way possible.
