Since breaking through with his 2011 track Entrance Music, Bristol-based DJ and producer Dan Pearce, aka Eat Everything, has built a reputation as one of the most versatile – and hardest working – figures on the UK club scene.
With an innate enthusiasm for dance music and an ability to join the dots between house, garage, breakbeat, DnB and more, Pearce’s sets tend to play like a rapid-fire guide to everything that’s great about dance music.
With his new album, We Lost Ourselves and Found a Family, Pearce has applied that same eclectic approach to his own productions.
“The idea for the album is it’s sort of a whistle stop tour of my journey through dance music,” he tells us. “I make and play a lot of different styles. I've always tried to be quite varied in what I play and what I make.”
To tie in with that genre-hopping concept, Pearce called on an eclectic mix of collaborators to work on the album, from UK garage legend MJ Cole to dubstep MC Sgt Pokes. Perhaps the most prominent guest on the record is British jungle and rave originator Goldie, whose spoken word contribution to We Lost Ourselves and Found a Family gives both the track and album its title.
“When I’d written the drums for the track, I messaged Goldie on WhatsApp, and I said, ‘Look, would you be cool to be on my album?’,” Pearce explains. “He called me. It was about 6.10am on a school day morning. When Goldie calls you, you kind of have to answer, because it’s Goldie, you know? He's a legend and he's a lovely guy.
“He said, ‘I want you to tell me what the premise of the album is, because I don't just want to be on any old shit. It's got to have a story. It's got to have something about it’,” Pearce continues. “So I told him all about the album. About it being a walkthrough, going over all different styles of music – house, techno, garage, drum & bass, breaks, boogie, the whole shebang. And he was like, ‘Yeah, I'm into this’.”
To create a hook for the track, Pearce asked Goldie to record himself talking about his memories of the ‘90s rave scene.
“Within the next hour, he sent me about 15 voice notes saying loads of poignant things about rave culture and what raving meant to him.”
One particular voice note stood out, and became not only the centrepiece of the track, but the phrase that tied the whole album together and provided its title.
“I was like, fuck, that's the album name right there, ‘we lost ourselves and found a family’. It encapsulates what I'm trying to do perfectly,” Pearce says. “But the first recording he did was he was like, on a fucking bus or on a train or something, there was loads of wind and background noise.
“So I was like, for months and months, saying, ‘Can you please rerecord it?’ Obviously, he's a busy guy, and he was like, ‘No, no. I like the rawness of it’," he explains. "I said, ‘Yeah, but you're Goldie, you're on my album. I want to celebrate you and want you to be audible. I want to be able to hear everything you say!”
When Pearce eventually persuaded Goldie to rerecord the original voice note, there was still one fairly significant problem. The new version was missing the phrase that had become the track and album title.
“He didn't say, ‘We lost ourselves and found a family’,” Pearce explains. “So I had to piece it together from the old one.”
In our new studio video, which you can watch above, Pearce demonstrates how he pieced together the final phrase from the different recordings, as well as revealing Goldie’s response when he discovered he’d inadvertently titled the album.
Eats Everything We Lost Ourselves And Found A Family is out now.
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