Hailing from Birmingham, a duo known as Eddy Don’t Sail are making waves (don’t judge the puns!) in the UK drum and bass scene. We caught up with Jack and Cristian, the creative minds behind this exciting project, to delve into their musical journey and future aspirations.
Their commitment to creating their music is clear, with an impressive catalogue of unreleased tracks waiting in the wings. Their eclectic influences, ranging from rock to house and the whole spectrum of drum and bass have shaped their distinct sound, promising a dynamic musical experience for their audience.
Eddy Don’t Sail is poised to take the scene by storm, and with a treasure trove of unreleased tracks, versatile productions, and a desire to incorporate live instruments into their performances, their journey is one to watch.
How was your summer?
Jack: We’ve been busy writing music and enjoying all the new drum and bass that’s been released. There’s been some great tracks released this summer. It’s given us a lot of inspiration for our own productions.
Did you get to many festivals this year?
Jack: No, I haven’t been to many festivals this year. Me and Cris have been pretty busy doing our own thing.
Cris: We want to be playing the festivals. It’s changing the mindset, the next festival I go to I want to be playing
Are you looking forward to club season starting again?
Cris: Absolutely, we’re basically just waiting to be able to play a lot of stuff. We’ve been working really hard this year. There’s a lot of music we need to road test.
Have you got embargoes on tracks or are you waiting to play them out when you’re out?
Cris: We’ve pretty much got our next six to eight months of releases lined up now. I don’t think we’ve pitched to any DJs, really for the songs that I like sitting there, we’ve got a lot in the park on kind of thing. Ready to come.
Yeah, because we haven’t started releasing with Vivifire yet, we’ve only just recently signed them. So, we’re just waiting to get that rolling, so we can start promoing and our stuff. And then once we’ve got a little bit of a backlog of songs that are out, we can start hopefully going and playing places and that’s what we do.
I want to take you right back to your childhood and talk to you about your earliest musical influences…
Jack: With me? Oh God, that’s very interesting. I was into rock music when I was younger. I still am, to be honest. I listened to all types of music but I mainly listened to things like My Chemical Romance, and Green Day. I listened to all types of music, but rock was the main thing. I was in a band when I was young and we played that kind of stuff as well.
Cris: When I was very young, I loved rock, l was very much into it. I started playing drums when I was 12.
Jack: We’re just a pair of rockers really.
Cris: Then I got into house music quite heavily when I was about 15, or 16. I started DJing when I was 17 at a club in Birmingham. I started with contemporary house then fell in love with d&b. Now we’re doing what we’re doing, it’s pretty cool.
Jack: We’ve been trying to put the rock element into our drum and bass, but we haven’t really found a place yet.
So you were into house and rock, how did you find drum and bass from there?
Jack: I first started going out when I was about 16, the first rave I went to was a Shadow Demon Coalition in Brum. And have been going to d&b raves ever since, I started with jump up and SDC, but then I found more stuff like Calibre and Spectrasoul, Lenzman, and stuff like that. Then I started listening to more filthy drum and bass, and it all just became my favourite genre to listen to, to be honest. That and hip-hop.
Cris: For me, it was when I was 18 and I performed at Bestival, and I ended up watching one of my favourite sets, one that I remember even now- Wilkinson. I absolutely love Wilkinson, it was probably the best of the whole festival for me. I came back home and I had to make a d&b track I’d been doing the house up until that point. It’s one we still have in the demos ‘Drag Me Down’, but we haven’t finished it off yet. But I think yeah I fell in love with it from there really. Wilkinson is one of our biggest inspirations.
Jack: Yeah, Wilkinson, Hybrid Minds, Pola & Bryson. We’ve got a long list of inspirations. You can take a bit from lots of different artists, they’re all doing it a bit differently.
You both mentioned going out in Brum, I used to love partying there. How’s the club scene looking in Birmingham now?
Jack: There’s not a lot of drum and bass really. There are the odd events here and there. I think they’re starting to pop up more now, with the way the industry is at the moment and how there’s a push across bigger platforms and events. Underground drum and bass is always the best anyway, to be honest.
What’s the best club to hear drum & bass in Brum?
Cris: LAB11 is probably one of the biggest ones.
Jack: I used to go to the rainbow, to be honest, quite a lot. In Digbeth, they have loads of warehouses just pop up. The Mill is really good in Birmingham, that was where the old rainbow was, but they just pop up everywhere.
Your tracks that I’ve heard are liquid, can we expect to hear other styles from you?
Jack: I love jump up. I listen to all of that stuff as well. We have made dubplates, but we’re gonna keep them for the club at the minute. We’ve got some tunes that are absolute filth.
I feel like all the best producers produce a bit of everything. If you go to see Hybrid Minds, it’s not like all hands in the air, sing-a-long. They’ll drop some dirty tracks in the middle of the set.
Jack: You need to though don’t you really. It’s the kind of thing the crowd want. I’ve been to sets where liquid goes all the way through and everyone’s almost waiting for that tune to come. So we have got them there in the locker to bring out, we’re just probably not going to release them.
Cris: Well we could do in the future, especially when we’ve got our own songs out and we’re doing VIPs of them. That’s probably the best time to start releasing VIPs officially.
Jack: We have already sound now really, it’s liquid but we like a little bit of foghorn in there.
How did you meet?
Jack: We actually met through a friend who was a producer with Cris, they were in a duo, and he was my best mate at school. I went to make a drum and bass track at theirs, Cris and Mike produced it for me and I sang on it. This was about 11 years ago, we weren’t really close friends then and we didn’t know each other very well. Now, we’re producing together. So we met making a drum and bass tune.
There you go, written in the stars.
And when did you decide that music was going to be your thing? Did you have plans to do something else before or have you always wanted to work in music?
Cris: My dad was in music, he was a singer and he taught me music from a young age. I was surrounded by him songwriting and creating music all the time. He taught me logic when I was 10 or 11. I started writing singer-songwriter stuff when I was 11-12. I’ve always wanted to do music, it’s my passion, it’s my hobby.
Jack: It was different for me. When I was in a band for three or four years, we did that and it fizzled out, but my family own a construction business. I worked there and I’m still working there now, full-time. But it was in lockdown- that’s when I bought my Mac and I started producing. I’ve always been playing the guitar and stuff, I never really just put my mind to actually making music with the DAW. I started doing that and then some of the songs on my probably awful that’s the whole process of starting I suppose. Then we just started making jazz rap.
But I’ve worked in construction all my life and yeah, I’m trying to transition out of doing that. Now, I’m still working full-time. But we do this in the evenings, I take a day off in the week and over the weekends. We’ve been doing that since January when we started together. Last year we were doing a lot of jazz rap and playing live with rappers.
So you both play multiple instruments, do you use those in your productions as well?
Cris: Yeah, we do. I always play keys whenever we start a song, and you’ll always crack out the guitar.
Jack: It depends on the track that we’re making. I do try and get out when I can but sometimes if I get the guitar out, it just doesn’t sound right.
Cris: It depends on the vibe, usually liquid always has a bit of room for different elements. That’s why I love it so much, you can be really creative with it. I think it’s definitely one of our plans in the future to implement that into what we’re doing with our live performance as well.
Jack: Like a Rudimental kind of thing. We really want to go in that direction eventually. It’s just getting things done properly. Just working around with this will work and how that’ll work. It’s connecting everything together to make a full show really. We’re working on that so eventually that will be a thing that we’re gonna be doing. I’d love to play live instruments. It’s what I want to do.
Are you looking to get your DJ sets out there first?
Jack: We want to do DJ sets and the live stuff will only really be every now and then I’d imagine. Festivals and odd occasions. Carrying a guitar and a machine around all the time is quite difficult. It’s something that we are going to do, but not all the time, logistically it doesn’t really work.
Cris: Well not yet.
Sounds quite exciting.
So you’ve got a lot of tracks ready?
Cris: We’ve got about 8 months of music ready, you want to do a release a month, don’t you really? And we’ve got eight songs ready to go. So we’re almost covered for the whole of next year. Which is exciting though. At the minute we’re kind of unknown, so it’s exciting to see where we’re gonna be by the time that last release comes out.
Jack: They’re all being released as singles, then at the end, they’ll be put into an album. We’re gonna try and get a little album launch party or whatever at the end. We really want to get a chance to promo every song so they’ll get heard properly.
I wanted to ask you where your name came from because I thought it was so random, but then I saw your surnames, Edwards and Saylor.
Jack: I grew up and my name is Jack Edwards and my pals call me Eddie. I started an alias on my own when I started doing the jazz rap stuff and I was called Eddie. Cristian’s name is Cristian Saylor, and we were sat with a friend and we were like “Eddie Don’t Sail” -it just kind of stuck really
It’s nice and Google-able, some people have got names that are just you type into a search engine and you’re just getting absolutely nowhere, trying to find this act.
Cris: Coming up with a name is one of the hardest things you can do. You come up with some and you just cringe. But this has a bit of humour to it too. So we thought we’d stick with it.
What’s the worst one you thought up?
Cris: I don’t want to get the list back out.
Jack: I don’t even know. I wish I did because it would be hilarious.
At the last question, what should we be talking about in the drum and bass scene that we’re not currently talking about?
Cris: Interesting question.
Jack: Eddy Don’t Sail- that’s what.
Cris: We’ll lock that in.
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