Outlaws sent us this great mix what they did for the Casette Kids. The track is awesome, but there story is quite weird about it. Honestly I was thinking a lot which category should I post it, cos it was made for an official remix, but was leaked by the label (!!!?!). Very strage issue, after the jump you can find Peter’s email about the whole thing and a bonus mixtape.

Cassette Kids – Acrobat (Outlaws Party Mix) [mp3]

I did this mix a while back and never finished it. I submitted it and
it went down well, but there was no money for it at the time and so it
was left unfinished, but it got a good reaction at gigs and the other
DJs and label people I played it to as friends were all positive, so I
just though “take that one for the team, it was fun to do, let’s just
let it go, boo hoo”, that kind of thing. Then I kind of forgot about
it.

Then it was kind of brought back to my attention when I got a lovely
email from the blogosphere asking about the mix, saying it was great
and that it gave the band the balls they needed to swing some
dancefloor action. Which was nice.

I thought this was all pretty positive of course, but I had to wonder
how the mix had been released into the wild? After all, I’d never
finished it and I hadn’t been paid for it and no one had it except for
a few DJ mates and music industry types who were good about not
sharing stuff.

A little exchange of emails later and it turned out that Sony
themselves had sent out the mix! Oh the excitement!
It seems like it must have been hanging out in a dusty hard drive of
promo materials and they thought “oh that sounds OK, let’s get it out
there and hopefully get some more folk turned on to the band”. And
then I would imagine it was “seeded” to “bloggers” to use what I
believe is the technical parlance.

Here I chucked the shits a bit because I hadn’t been paid, there’d
been no contact with me and I hadn’t finished what I’d be doing on the
mix. I thought it was slightly off that something I’d half done was
being used as a promotional tool for THE BIG LABELS MAN. So then it
all disappeared from internet land before it even existed.

I had a nice talk with a lady at Sony trying to sort stuff out, and
she was really positive, wanted what was best for the band which was
cool and was trying to do something interesting with them. We even
talked about little me doing some production with them, which I would
have really enjoyed – I wanted to have a go on the first thing they
recorded, but it had to be done quickly and I had to fly back to the
UK so the awesome Jono Ma from The Lost Valentinos (who you’ll be
hearing a lot more about soon) did it instead.

But then nothing happened. They stopped replying to my emails and I
got bored waiting. I liked the mix, Other people liked it too, so here
it is, I thought it would be good to get it out there, get rid of it
and get it out of my head.

I don’t know if I’m kind of making sure I’ll never do any work for
Sony again in future, and this isn’t a case of sour grapes because I
didn’t get any production work with the band or money for the mix
either, honestly, I’m so busy at the moment it’s not even funny! I
just thought it might be interesting and you might like the music (you
might think it’s shit and I’m though, oh well…). I hope you get some
enjoyment from it anyway and go and see Cassette Kids, they’re a
pretty cool band.

I’ve also included the “Work Is A Disgrace” Outlaws mixtape, which is
what I gave to Sony as a kind of vibe thing for the kind of music I
thought it might be cool to try and pull through any recordings

Strange story isn’t it, but on the other hand it is so typical and not in the music biz only. Anyways, here is the mixtape as a kindda bonus if you got this far by reading.

Outlaws – Work Is A Disgrace Mix [mp3 zSHARE]
Magnapop – Slowly Slowly
Ratatat – 17 Years
Dennis Brown – Things In Life
Yeah Yeah Yeah’s – Y Control
Elvis Presley – Suspicious Minds (live)
Can – Vitamin C
Belle And Sebastian -Stay Loose
The Clash – White Man In Hammersmith Palais
Arthur Russell – Keeping Up
Neu – Hallo Gallo
Method Man – Release Yo’ Delf
The Unicorns – I was Born A Unicorn
The Pretenders – The Talk Of The Town
Arab Strap – The First Big Weekend
Talking Heads – Nothing But Flowers
The Pixies – Where Is My Mind?
Joy Zipper – 1
And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Totally Natural