UKF is five years old! We’re celebrating in a major way later this year with a massive London party. We’d love for you to join us… Sign up now and find out how!
To highlight this milestone moment, we’ve been running a series of anniversary-flavoured analyses of the most popular UKF uploads as watched by YOU. And nothing comes close to Zeds Dead’s remix of Blue Foundation’s Eyes On Fire. It’s the highest viewed track on UKF Dubstep by almost 10 million views!
We caught up with DC from Zeds Dead to find out what their take is on this unique classic. But first, a cool fact for those hoping for more ZD proliferation in the future… When picking tracks for their current EP – the massive eight track strong Somewhere Else out now on Mad Decent – they had almost 60 tracks to pick from!
“We’re constantly making music, constantly gathering tunes,” explains DC. “We didn’t sit down straight away after Hot Sauce and go ‘right let’s make a new EP!’. It was probably about the end of last year we sat down and looked at everything we’ve put together and all the ideas we have and realised we had about 60 tracks almost done so we worked out what works together.”
With that amount of ammo in their weapons cabinet, you can be sure the next new material won’t take so long to surface. While DC wouldn’t be pinned down on an album (besides saying they already have particular tracks in mind for it and when it does happen they’ll be taking serious time off to make it) he promised us a range of collaborations and remixes before the year is out.
From the future we now slide back into the past. October 22, 2009 to be precise… The day Zeds Dead and UKF made history with this:
Here’s DC’s take on the 58 million-viewed beast:
Back then we were just doing a lot of bootleg remixes and seeing what stuck… This one really stuck.
“Oh man! We were just starting out with this. We had no idea what we were doing at the time! I thought it was cool getting in with UKF early on; I felt we were both in a similar place, starting out and starting to build up fans. I think we both helped each other in that way. Back then we were just doing a lot of bootleg remixes and seeing what stuck… This one really stuck. So much so we were able to get permission retroactively.
We still play it now. It’s one of the tunes that people kind of expect us to play. We’ve done some re-edits, remixes and VIPs of it over the years… We’ve got to keep it interesting after playing at almost every show for four years! No matter how we change it, as as long as it’s got a similar drop and the vocal is in there then people still go crazy.
Did the reaction to this scare us when we considered the follow up releases? Not really. Not at all, actually. It’s in its own world; it had its own reasons for being such a successful internet hit. It’s got unique circumstances, such as being on Twilight – so I never expected anything that followed to be as big as this. It gave us such a strong base, too… A fanbase and base of work to launch more material from. From this it’s been a steady and amazing flow. Thanks to everyone who has supported it!”
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