New Single: Iron Prescription: OUT NOW
Genre-bending duo Mid Nite Life are back with their electrifying new single, “Iron Prescription”– a hard-hitting fusion of Rock and Hip Hop, which recently earned the coveted ‘Spotlight of the Week’ feature on BBC Introducing.
1.Who are ‘ Mid Night Life ’
Mid Nite Life are Frankie, producer and vocalist from London, and Will, producer based in Bristol.
2. For someone that is yet to discover you, how would you describe your music?
Genre blending. At a top level we say it’s Indie Dance but the makeup of that also incorporates; Punk, Hip Hop plus various Dance genres in there too.
3. What inspired you as an artist?
Frankie: Quite simply life. I got into music because I was fascinated with pirate radio and wanted to peek behind the curtain, so I got a show on a station. That in turn led to playing in raves and that led to music production. But my life, it’s experiences and watching the actions, behaviours, emotions and psychology of people in general and the world as a whole. People are the best and the worst thing about this planet.
Will: Yeah I agree with Frankie, we both live a life surrounded by music and take inspiration from all aspects of that. I also love live music, festivals and generally that vibe you get from crowds all in the moment. I think that has a huge inspiration to our journey as musicians and thus the sound we create.
4. What is your process for preparing to perform live? Do you have any Diva demands?
We’ve worked together as a DJ/MC combo for quite a few years, so we’re pretty relaxed. We brought in some band mates to take MNL live; Jimmy on drums and Jack on guitar, but they are both relaxed and chilled too. So we have a rehearsal or two and rock out. We like the variation with the band and the new bits of magic that just happen on stage during a gig, you can’t rehearse those because the crowd can influence them Haha diva demands?
Frankie: I’m always hopeful that a Nissan Micra ball pit will be waiting for me when I arrive.
Will: I like Tequila, not the stuff with plastic hats. The stuff that makes you howl at the moon!
5. Where do you feel you fit into the music ?
We both came from the rave scene and have been performing globally individually and together for quite a while. We have solo careers in music but we felt we wanted to do something different, something other than what we might have been known for previously. One night we were just chatting on the phone about who were listening to, who were feeling at the moment, just friends who are both into music sharing their excitement about it, and the idea just came up in the conversation. We are both action oriented individuals so what born out of a casual conversation soon started happening. We’ve always said we want to draw from all our influences and Mid Nite Life does that.
6: What are your favourite musical genres, and are there any you Dislike?
We both have Dance music backgrounds such as Garage and Drum & Bass but we are also Hip Hop heads, it was one of the things we bonded over when we first met.
We also bond over a dislike for Gabba and Electro-Swing. We’ve got some friends in that last realm and whilst we wish them the best with it neither of us can get on board with it as a genre.
7. Is there a story behind your new track?
Iron Prescription is about even though when life is tough and perhaps is a bitter pill to swallow you just have to take your medicine and get on with it.
Frankie: I was watching TV one night and a track came on and it inspired me to make something, the track came together in a couple of hours. I was then talking to my friend soon after and he told me about Charlie Munger and an approach to life; that sad things happen all the time and you have to keep moving forward. An iron prescription as it were. I felt it was synonymous to how I was feeling at the time. It all just felt so fluid and natural from the feeling, the creation and the chat with my friend, it felt right thus Iron Prescription was prescribed.
8. What would you say is your greatest strength as an artist?
Open mindedness and work ethic. Whoever has made or started a track and we are in the studio dealing with tweaks and mixdowns, there isn’t any ego about the music. We always say, “whatever we think is best for that track at that time”. If an idea works great, if an idea doesn’t we aren’t precious about hanging onto it trying to force it to work or trying to crowbar it in there somehow.
9. What would you say is your greatest weakness as an artist?
In the world of social media both of us find it a bit of a chore. We both come from the mind of not just following a trend because it’s what everyone is doing and social media works on that. We also have the experience and past of releasing records and travelling the world rocking shows. The idea of filming a video of a mic hanging from a tree or DJing while sitting on some rocks in the middle of a river just for content is dead as far as we are concerned. But we appreciate it’s part of the game now. But we don’t want to necessarily follow what everyone else is doing just because they are doing it.
10. What can fans expect from your new single ‘ Iron Prescription’
Bass heavy Rock / Hip Hop track with wordplay through the vocals, plus a little switch up at the end.
11. What music artist would you say have influenced your work?
Frankie: Loads. All sorts of rappers from Pharoahe Monch to some of the Grime MC’s. But also acts like Talking Heads, The Prodigy and a lot of Classical music with countless Producers thrown in there too. I grew up around a lot of Rock, Reggae and Classical music, then getting into Hip Hop and Dance music so there are loads.
Will: For me it’s what’s been happening a lot in the scene at the moment. I love bands like Idles, Run The Jewels and people like FatDog and Warmduscher. I was a drummer before I was a DJ, so I guess anything that has that rock out factor. Big bashy bands who know how to fire up a crowd and just do their own thing.
12. Who would you most like to collaborate with artistically?
Frankie: Again there are loads but Kano, Ghetts, Little Simz, Fraser T. Smith or Run the Jewels would be wicked.
Will: Idles would be one for me but I’d love to hear what someone like Chase & Status would do with our sound.
13. What was your worst performance?
Frankie: Haha I blacked out on stage in the mountains in Transilvania one time, I’d been drinking some moonshine with the locals and it was freezing, well into the minus numbers. I stepped back onto stage, having been standing on some bass bins down the front and thought I felt a bit light headed. Next thing I can too at the back of the stage having fallen over a speaker stand. I smacked my leg, it swelled up. I couldn’t get my trousers past my thigh when I was back at the hotel after the gig.
Will: We played for Red Bull in the Hungarian countryside a few years ago for their cliff jumping championships. A Lightning storm came in and the power went off 5 times in the set. That was very stressful but we laughed our way through it before making a mad dash back to civilization in the pouring rain.
14: What was the most difficult obstacle you have ever faced and how did you overcome it?
Frankie: I’ve known what I wanted to do since I was 17, I found music and it just took hold of my soul. Several years ago I was going through an existential crisis and normally music would help with anything bad, like breaks up, heartache, tough times mentally. But in this period not even music helped so I found it pretty tough.
Will: Parenthood will always be one of the biggest challenges for me. My daughter came to live with me full time when she was 9 and I was very much the party boy DJ at the time. So it took me a while to break away from that and put her first. 9 years later I’m lucky to say she has grown into a beautiful young woman and I never went back to the party lifestyle. It was and is one of the best things to happen to me in life. Nothing like the focus a child brings into your life.
15: What is your creative process when making music? Do you work with others or is there just you?
On the whole it’s us. We are based in different cities so either one of us will send an outline, idea or a whole tune over and see what the other thinks. We then get together in the studio and either finish off the outlines / deal with mixdowns or any tweaks. When we first started the idea of MNL, we had a Dropbox folder of about sixty ideas working out where we wanted to go with it all. We’ve been working on a lot of music since and this year we had twelve releases, one a month the whole year. We even have things in mind for the beginning of next year too.
As for collabs, our engineer Mark Yardley is like the third studio member of MNL. He’s great on the buttons and has really helped us attain the sound we wanted when we started out. Plus he’s added ideas along the way and has production credits on a couple of tracks because of it. Also Jack, our guitarist, will chime in on occasion if we ask him.
On the whole most of our releases have just been Mid NIte Life but this year we have some great collaborations coming with various artists in other genres, including some of the genres we did prior to Mid Nite Life. We are calling them our “After Mid Nite” series as they will mainly focus on club orientated music.
16: Where do you see your musical career in 10 years?
Frankie: Obviously we want Mid Nite Life to be the best and biggest it can be. I would like to have a legacy fan base, to know the music resonated with people still years down the line. Professionally, I love being on stage and in the studio but I would also like to produce and write for other artists.
Will: I’d love to be in a position to focus just on the music and writing all the time. You wear a lot of hats as a new artist as you have to do a lot of different aspects of the music business to break through. So I’d like to be in a position to leave the business to someone else and just focus on what we do best, which is writing music and creating havoc on dance floors.
17:Your Top 3 Overrated Musicians, who when you hear them you think ‘ How The Fk…….?
This is going to sound like a cop out but both of us have done this enough to think if you’re up there / out there and succeeding, even though we might not rate them, we have a ‘fair play’ attitude that they are actually succeeding.
We’ve definitely been at events and someone we’ve seen someone playing said to each other, “what the f*** is that about” or maybe, “they’re sh*t”. But if we weren’t feeling it we probably didn’t hang around to find out who they were. Also we know we won’t be everyone’s vibe, and that’s cool. We’re too busy concentrating on what we’re doing to worry about what someone else is doing. We just hope the people who are feeling us, rock with us and join the journey.
