Oceania

It was good discipline of me [to try to not use beatboxers], because it made me do a lot of other things for rhythms, like including me and Mike Patton and people that aren’t beatboxers at all, trying to do rhythms, patterns and beats - trying to come around it the other way. Even the beatboxers told me that they had never worked like that before, so I had them too go out of their normal way to do things. That was good. I kept Oceania til last, because I wanted to do it especially for the Olympics. It wasn’t til the last day of mixing that I though - oh ! I need the sirenes, if the Greek mythology ! So we called up an English choir, and we got 16 women. I had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that was insane, impossible for a piano to play, and I got them to sing that, a bit like sirenes. Then I called up Shlomo, who was recommended to me as the new bright hope of the hiphop scene. He came the next day and I asked him to do a techno tango beat - which he did. That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it’s good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because you can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing.

XFM interview, August 25 2004