To complete my review of Ola Onabule’s fabulous new album In Emergency, Brake Silence here’s an in-depth interview with Ola about his music. Many thanks to Ola for going into details.

Q: Your album In Emergency, Brake Silence is available for a few months now. How are the reactions from critics and fans so far?

Ola Onabule: Firstly may I say thank you to Dirk for asking me to do this interview. It’s good to have you back on the scene. [thanks, Ola :-)]
In answer to your first question, I think it would be fair to say that reactions to ‘IN EMERGENCY…’ are the best they have been since my first album MORE SOUL THAN SENSE, almost ten years ago! The ‘old’ fans seem to be discovering new favourites and the new ones are attracted to older albums because of this one. The critics have been very kind to us in confirming almost unanimously that this is our finest work to date. It’s a good time to be.

Q: Your new album will be released in continental Europe by ZYX, a label that on the one hand issues records by jazz labels like Fantasy and on the other hand throw-away dance trash. Please tell us how and why you’ve hooked up with them.

Ola Onabule: The album is actually licensed to Blue Cat for Germany, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg and will be distributed via ZYX. They have such expansive ‘know how’ and expertise regarding the European market in all aspects and genres of the biz. We are very excited about their involvement.

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Joey Negro In The House is available these days from Defected Records. With three CDs this is somewhere inbetween value for money and music overkill. There are two mixed CDs offering 33 songs between disco, deep house/garage and funk with Notenshun Feat. Sandy Mill, The Two Tons, Blaze Presents Underground Dance Artists For Life feat. Barbara Tucker, Sydenham & Ferrer, Kings Of Tomorrow, Imagination, Fred West & The J.B.’s, or Martin Solveig to name but a few. The third CD includes bonus material (like a discography, biography, interview) and some special re-edits by Joey Negro. If you ever wanted to have a Joey Negro version of Roxy Music’s Angel Eyes, you’ll need this record. Other re-edits include the Kings Of Tomorrow’s Finally, Don Carlos’ Alone and The O’Jays’ Put Your Hands Together. By the way, the original version of the O’Jays song appears on their Ship Ahoi album that is a must-have for any soulboy with its dramatic title song and the famous For The Love Of Money.
So all in all Joey Negro did a good job with the songs he selected and mixed…as if we had expected something else :-)

Why not let Joey Negro explain his motivation behind this compilation?

Here’s an interview Toni Tambourine (Defected Records) did with him.

Q: How did your career start?

Joey Negro: I’ve been DJ’ing since the late 80’s but what really started me off was making music. I’d always been a big music fan. I managed to get a job in a record shop in London in 1986. I moved from Clacton on Sea in Essex down to London and got a job in just around the time house music was really kicking in. It was the time when tracks like Jack Your Body and Fingers Inc had come in but hip-hop and rare groove was really strong too. It was a really exiting time to be in London and I met a lot of people like Jonathan Moore (Coldcut) and Trevor Nelson, who was working on one of the vans that sold us records, it really seemed like there was a new school of people coming through. I stayed in the record shop for about 9 months before getting a job with a record distributor (Rough Trade), which taught me a lot about the business. I then started my own label called Republic, we put out a lot of early New York garage - things like Blaze and The Turntable Orchestra. At the same time I started making my own music, something I’d always wanted to do. My first release was a track I’d done with a friend called MDM - Get Busy on Republic. I started Z records in 1992 which was set-up to release my own records or stuff that I really liked. Out of our 75 releases, I’d say around 65 are me or tracks that I’ve remixed. Things like Must Be the Music, Can’t Get High Without You, Saturday.
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