BYOB’s Bio

For anyone trying to argue 2010’s musical merits against any kind of yawning nostalgia, what are you going to come up with? How about the fact that any tom, dick or harry staggering their way through today’s breaking music battlefield can, more than anytime right now, do what the fuck they very well want. Get wasted, put on whatever tunes they wish, and just lose their mind in whichever way they choose. With that then, no one right now quite says losing your mind in new music like 22-year-old Ash Hamilton from Croydon, or as the cover of his debut CD reads in his signature giant full-spread neon yellow, pink and blue letters: BYOB.

“I think it’s pretty fair to say that people just want good tunes now” Ash nods. “No one really gives a shit what scene its from, what you look like or what club it’s played in. They just want to have a good time.”

If there’s one thing young Ash seems to have down to a tee, it’s having a good time. Just check the emphatic slew of statement-making cuts that have branded his four letters onto the crest of Now as the next party-time producer-cum-Cul-du-sac-poet du jour. Take ‘Best Shoes’, the ode to that special spring that a new pair of box-fresh kicks put in your step when stepping out on the pull. It was duly snapped up by daytime Radio 1 within moments of its release, asserting him as a fluero crossbreed between Mike Skinner’s indie-raver little brother and Tinie Tempah gone D&B. Whilst ‘Chillin’ might just be the most nonchalant shrug of a drop-out anthem you’ll hear all year. ‘Save My Life’ sees Ash – on the remix backed by Number One fans J Majik and Wickaman – at his most gurningly euphoric. And ‘Young Living’ just has it all, Sabbath-pilfered tombstone snarls, agitated hotchpotch-breaks, and a call to the d-i-s-c-o for any fool found sitting still.

“There’s really not much to do round my way” Ash explains, of the concrete apocalypse that he grew up immersed in.  A far cry from the romanticized image conjured by the introverted cold-soul soldiers of dubstep that has established the area with a new sense of cool of late. For thrill-seeking Ash, his hometown was little more than a bombardment of chain pubs and dodgy bars. “Me and my mates would always end up having to get the train up to London to go to gigs and raves or whatever. But I always thought that having to look that bit further afield adds to the whole mission, right?” Adventure and experimentation form the backbone of BYOB’s good-times manifesto. One foot in the rave, the other in, well, pretty much everything else. “I went to see Annie Mac play at Koko and it took my head off. The whole scene that people like her and Zane Lowe front has been a huge influence on me.” It’s this post-iTunes party culture – where serotonin synth stabs meld with jungle breaks and dubstep quagmires before lacerating guitar growls descend from deathly heights – that Ash calls home sweet home. With a full live show in the works, and a full-length debut ‘Everything In Moderation’ imminent, this new frontier is soon set to become simply the here-and-now.

Jamie Hodgson (NME)