Sole vision: Bonobo has quietly become the biggest act in dance music today

Bonobo fans are wild. It’s only just after midnight, an hour into the six-hour DJ set that Si Green is playing to announce his new album ‘Migration’, and the large London warehouse basement space is already thronged with a vibed-up, diverse crowd – most of whom could still have been at primary school when Green started releasing records in 1999.

They’re milling around, drinking, dancing in groups, just like any other club or party – but in front of the low stage where the decks are is a different story. There, they’re packed in tight, facing forward, three or more deep, nodding away and lapping up every detail of every tune, but when the chimes of Bonobo’s 2013 track ‘Cirrus’ fade into the slo-mo house and disco he’s been playing, they go apeshit. Proper apeshit, too: punching the air, singing along to the instrumental melodies like their lives depend on it, only just stopping short of forming a moshpit.

It’s not what you’d expect for an act generally filed as down-tempo or chillout music, but then Bonobo occupies a unique position in the musical ecosystem. Independent of any hip or hyped musical movements, Si Green has built up a career that has made Bonobo the band a huge live draw – conquering the USA and able to headline the Alexandra Palace in London – and made his own DJ sets as hot a ticket as any house or techno big gun. Online DJ sets clock up views in the millions, with a huge community of fans poring over every detail of the tracklist; one play from him can be enough to break a new artist. His albums are now event releases, and – along with the likes of Amon Tobin and The Cinematic Orchestra – are part of what has made the Ninja Tune such an important player in 21st century music.

So when we meet Green at Ninja Tune’s South London offices the morning of the album announcement, the whole building is abuzz. Mixmag’s phone buzzes too, just as we’re about to arrive, as the label’s normally laidback PR man uncharacteristically calls ahead to make sure we’re running on time, concerned about the BBC and international interviews they also have to fit in. And when we get there the label staff are in a huddle, making sure that social media and other announcements are all set to drop at the same time. It certainly feels like there’s excitement in the air, as well as a little more tension than there usually is in the slick Ninja operation. And at the calm centre of the storm is the man himself, having a cup of tea.

Green, in the best possible sense, doesn’t have a superstar DJ aura. OK, he’s wearing one of those long black T-shirts – which he jokes about as being “techno bloke uniform” – with dark jeans and skate shoes, but other than that his vibe is less Richie Hawtin than your mate who’s not done too badly for himself in the creative industries and still likes a party. He looks his 40 years, a little tousled even, but certainly not ragged round the edges – and he sits comfortably back in his chair without doing that DJ sprawl that signals a sense of self-importance. He certainly doesn’t seem to bear the scars of the musical life, despite having spent three years solid on the road touring his last album: he’s articulate, gives full thought to each question Mixmag puts his way, and despite his insistence that he’s “quite private” never baulks at any line of questioning, seeming very open about any subject outside of his own close relationships.

Raving or chilling?

Mostly chilling out these days. But it’s balance, isn’t it? It really depends, it’s seasonal I guess. I don’t want a life without the rave, I always want to keep a foot in the rave, but maybe not keep it in there as long as I used to.

Biscuits or cake?

Cake. I just don’t get much from a biscuit these days. Seems to be a developing taste thing... I can’t really expand on that.

Jazz or folk?

Oh man... jazz I think. Just because it’s a lot broader. My parents were folk musicians, but jazz was more of a personal discovery thing for me. Retracing from old hip hop records through rare groove, into jazz and spreading out from there.

American or English breakfast?

[long pause for thought] English. But I probably just say that nostalgically as I don’t have access to it these days, living in LA. I like the American diner thing too, for the amount of choice you get.

What’s your favourite dinosaur?

That has to be... [lost in thought] ...well, I’m a great fan of the pterodactyl. It’s got that gracious height advantage, and it’s nice to see a great big flying reptile, you don’t get enough of them. I don’t know enough about them, thinking about it. Are they predatory? Or do they just glide about passively enjoying the view?

Green grew up a country boy: first in Hampshire, then in Sussex. “There’s fuck-all to do,” he says; “we’d drive out to the woods with a soundsystem and lots of drugs, light a campfire and just hang out – it was that or hang around in the town square getting beaten up.” It was a cultured upbringing, though – his dad’s day job was in the pharmaceutical industry but he had some renown in the post-hippie folk scene for his left-hand technique on the accordion, while his mum “came from a very humble background to become a doctor of literature... long after my sisters and I had left home. They both passed away recently, but I learned a lot from both of them.” By his mid-teens he was gravitating to Brighton, where he made friends for life and quickly started DJing on the more eclectic side of the club scene.

By the late 90s Si was a resident at the town’s Phonic:Hoop club night alongside Quantic and Rob Luis. It was a proper party session, where you could hear Brazilian and African tunes alongside hip hop, house, drum ’n’ bass and more. It’s nights like that that Green still considers his natural home: he also cites as key influences Gilles Peterson’s DJ sessions and the Sofrito warehouse parties in London, “where you had people of every age, every walk of life, just the right mix. They’d really come to life after about 2am, 3am, when it thinned out a bit, leaving just the people who really wanted to dance – that’s when you know you’re with your people!” In 1999, Luis would start the Tru Thoughts label and put out Bonobo’s music, notably the blissed-out, sitar-twanging ‘Terrapin’ as its fourth release, then ‘Animal Magic’ as the label’s first album.

These records made waves straight away, with ‘Terrapin’ quickly becoming a chillout classic, and Green signed to the bigger Ninja Tune, at that point busy reinventing itself and settling in for the long haul after its 90s successes, though he always stayed close to the Tru Thoughts crew. DJ bookings further afield followed, which led to some cultural puzzlement. “When I first played in the US,” he says, “I was lumped in with abstract hip hop stuff, so the crowd would be all serious guys in outdoor wear and backpacks, staring intently at dudes with tables full of samplers. They weren’t really ready to dance to me playing a load of Afrobeat and disco tracks.”

Never mind, he thought; he was doing perfectly well at home and in Europe. Another two albums with Ninja Tune followed, his profile growing slowly but steadily. Then, in late 2006, he called a US promoter he’d worked with before and said “Hi, remember me from back in the day? I’m looking for some gigs again”. They booked half a dozen smallish shows – and were shocked to find they sold out almost immediately. It was at this point that Green realised he’d become a cult figure in the burgeoning world of MySpace, file-sharing networks and internet message boards. “I had this mystique in the US,” he laughs. “I was like a unicorn, there were all these rumours that I was reclusive, never toured or whatever, and I was like ‘No, no, I’d have been here years ago if I’d have known!” A couple of months later they booked another tour, doubling the size of venues, and again sold out immediately. From thereon in, his profile would only snowball further.

Part of this steady growth clearly came from Green’s willingness to work: if there was demand, he would tour, first as DJ then increasingly with the live band that he began building from the mid-2000s. And he enjoyed it, too: by 2010, when the ‘Black Sands’ album and his collaborations with Andreya Triana provided further breakthroughs, the Bonobo live show was filling big halls around the USA and the world. “That was the first time we toured in buses,” he says, “with tour managers and all that, and every date was sold out so there was nothing to worry about. I had one guy in particular who liked to keep me [chemically] ‘topped up’... I can’t do all that any more, now. It gets a bit depressing when you see a load of forty-something guys pretending they’re 15 years younger. Anyway, it was all very functional – bus to show to party, every night for about a year or so, always with someone to look after you and mop up after you, no responsibilities, just very easy really.”

The touring mania would step up even further after 2013’s ‘The North Borders’. The six-piece band, along with six road crew, embarked on a live tour that would see them more or less solidly travelling the world for two years. “Touring comes in like a tornado,” says Green, “and just wrecks everything.” He’d been settled in New York at this point, and in a relationship, but all that went out of the window as the touring took over. Rather than let this mess him up, though, he decided to ride it out – becoming completely rootless, giving up completely on even having a home to return to, and in fact continuing the mission by touring non-stop as a DJ for a further year after the band’s triumphant final gig of the cycle at Alexandra Palace. “It got weird towards the end,” he says wryly, “but it was an interesting way to live.”

Are you a political person?

Not actively, but you can’t ignore politics – especially now. I don’t really want to think what might be around the corner, considering the energy and the trajectory of where we’ve all been going lately, which is a not very tolerant place for humanity. I don’t know if I’d use my platform to speak out from, though... you assume that the people you engage with from your platform will have views that align with yours, but actually that’s not the case, and if you do voice something it almost always ends in confrontation. Maybe it’s just to save myself the stress, but I try not to stir it up.

What do you want people to get from this album?

It’s about the connections between singular points – how they’re held together by common threads. People’s own plotted histories as they’re made up by their own tastes and their own geography, how certain people might connect to one common point from completely different angles, and how that then is then interconnected with other things and other stories. Is that political? Well, I guess it is, just not in a very direct way. Just the very idea that migration is a contentious subject – this is the state we live in now, one where migration is viewed with suspicion. It shouldn’t be like that.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how that nomadic life led to the themes and sounds of ‘Migration’. In a sense, it’s a continuation of what Green has done throughout his career: live instruments and sophisticated electronics woven together into balmy, luxurious textures – but emotionally it’s the deepest, strangest record he’s made yet, with all of the house, jazz, funk, and global influences from his DJ sets hidden just beneath the surface, the connections between them creating a very personal perspective. It has a weightless feel that absolutely chimes with Green’s descriptions of being rootless, yet just when you’re least expecting it hits hard with a gut-level emotional punch. He’s “really contented” with where he is now, though, he says: settled in LA, and plugged into the club world there, and happy with a modern music scene that has a place for him and peers like Four Tet and Jon Hopkins.

At the DJ gig a bunch of Green’s friends from the old days in Brighton are dancing by the side of the stage, laughing affectionately about the different expressions of the cult of Bonobo. French fans consider his music to be ultra sexy, they say, while the Americans need to know every detail about it. Meanwhile, Green himself just keeps on keeping on: never pushing the tempo, just allowing one steady groove after another to feed the energy of the crowd, the likes of Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’ and Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Pusher Man’ blended into the deeper electronic sounds. The hardcore at the front continue to go spare every time a Bonobo tune is dropped, but just as importantly the crowd behind them keep milling and dancing just like at a proper party. Dammit, it is a proper party. Si Green might be riding the wave of one of the biggest and more unlikely successes in modern music, but in a sense nothing has changed in 16-plus years. The dancers who want to get down to funk at 3am in a warehouse are still “his people”. He’s still theirs.

Bonobo’s ‘Migration’ album is out now on Ninja Tune