Interview || It's A Showdown With Fully Charged

Chatting Belly Dancers With Fully Charged 

Fully Charged (Lee Watson & Scott Ashworth) begun their musical journey 10 years ago when they first begun DJ’ing. During this time they held a residency at one of the UK’s most iconic clubbing venues The Syndicate, Blackpool and only four (4) years ago they decided to turn their hand to producing, which led them to the formation of aptly named Fully Charged, in 2013.

Since forming in 2013 the duo have already notched up 11 electro/prog-house cross-genre hits, consistently charting inside the Top 100 Beatport Chart along with gaining support from internationally acclaimed DJ’s, Jochen Miller, Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold, Judge Jules, Richard Grey, Futuristic Polar Bears, Fausto, Pink Panda and Sick Individuals.

Since their collaboration with Richard Grey titled ‘Hey’ (#10 Beatport Electro Chart) the duo have gone from strength to strength. No sooner had the dust settled on ‘Hey’ and ‘Prayer’ was hitting the Top 20 in the Progressive House Chart. Since then the boys have become renowned for their high quality energy fuelled dance-floor hits most notably ‘Prayer’, ‘About The Music’ and recently ‘Showdown’.

One thing is certain, the future for these guys is sure to be Fully Charged!

Hello Lee and Scott, it’s such a huge honor to be doing this interview with you, thank you much for taking time out to do it with us. 

How are you doing and how was your guy’s summer?

Hi hope you’re well and thanks for your kind words, we love to talk about anything to do with music :) Our summer was really good, we basically spent it in the studio which has 4 carpeted walls so didn’t see much sun at all! 

To start off tell us who Lee is and who Scott is? If you could be any animal in the world what would you be?  

Lee has been in the spotlight quite a lot over the last 15 years with his appearance on many TV shows and if he was an animal then definitely a Monkey! He’s always pratting around and being cheeky... Scott would be a Tiger because of the Eye of the Tiger track – he’s focused on being the best and doesn't let anything get in his way.

Fully Charged on what….? 

We are Fully Charged on music and the energy of the crowds – we think it’s all that matters in life.

We are from South Africa, and we ask all our “guests” this. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear South Africa?  

For us it has to be the World Cup in 2010, we love football and it was such a fantastic tournament! The South African people were amazing and the atmosphere was just awesome :)

Together you form  Fully Charged for all our readers out there who don’t know Fully Charged  please can you tell us a little more about how you both met and how did you join forces? 

We both met DJing at the Syndicate super club in Blackpool which was the UK’s largest club, from the moment we met both of us connected like brothers and to this day we have still not disagreed on anything. We’re both crazy about music and starting to produce just seemed like the perfect path for us to go down. It’s taken a lot of hard work but our music is now we starting to get some recognition which, we must say, is just fantastic!

The story goes you only began producing recently tell us about the first time you sat behind a pc to make a track? Did you love it or hate it?  

Yes actually, it was a nightmare!  The first time we ever sat behind a computer it was an old, slow PC and the machine kept crashing all the time.  As with all our projects, we weren’t put off and certainly didn’t give up – we decided to invest in a Mac Pro and have never looked back since.

Where does your love for music stem from? Have you always wanted a career in music?  

Yeah definitely, we both fell in love with music from a very early age, starting to play the keyboard in our teens. We loved the track Underworld by Born Slippy from the film Trainspotting, it was probably this track that got us into dance music – it’s such an iconic track.

You’ve just recently released Belly Dancer and the track blew up.  Tell us more about the track, it’s not the typical EDM record? 

We are so happy that Belly Dancer is doing really well – it was a bit of a risk track because like you said, it’s not a typical EDM record.  The track started with us receiving an email from Chaim in Israel who sent us the original idea which we really liked, we decided to work on it as a collab which resulted in the Belly Dancer you can hear on Beatport today!

 

11 Beatport top100 in one year. That’s pretty impressive. Do you think chart ranking are important for success in the music industry? 

Yes, 100%.  You need to be in the Beatport Chart without a doubt, it’s the world’s #1 and most recognised dance chart so in our opinion, this is where the world will hear your sounds.  So many tracks are released every week so to get into the Top100 is hard, it goes without saying that we are so incredibly grateful that people support us because without them we would be nothing. 

Out of all the Fully Charged releases thus far if you had to change one of the tracks which would it be and what would you change? 

Hmm tough one!  Probably “What You Doing” – it was our first release and we’d probably change everything now!  But at least it’s proof of just how far we have come in 12 months...

With so many new styles of music becoming popular in your opinion what style is here to stay and won’t change? 

Our style! No seriously - music will always have trends where certain genres become more popular than others but at the end of the day, music is beautiful and affects many people in so many different ways so no matter what style you like or are into, as long as it makes you smile then happy days! 

You both started out as DJ’s and it been said to get noticed in the industry as a DJ you need to put out productions. Do you agree with this? 

Yes, these days this is a must.  You need to produce your own music so we’d advise all aspiring producers put the hours in refining their craft or take a music course like we did – then you will stand a much better chance in this very tough industry.

How would you describe the Fully Charged sound? Do you see yourself ever changing your sound? 

The Fully Charged sound is very energetic and uplifting, we don’t ever want to change it - we love and it’s what has worked so far for us.  Although we understand that any sound has to evolve to stay current, we strongly believe that if you love doing what you do then stick with it.

Do you think luck has been on your side or do you make your own luck? 

We believe that sitting in our studio 12 hours every day has got us to where we are now, oh - and plenty of cups of coffee!  No, we don’t believe luck has had anything to do with our achievements - if we had then maybe we would be playing big festivals by now!

It’s that time again DJ Mag 100 . We don’t agree with the poll what’s you guys take on it? Who do you think is going to be number 1 DJ? And what makes someone a number 1 DJ? 

We are not big fans of the DJ Mag poll, it’s a popularity contest rather than a skill contest so don’t really take much notice of it really.  Plus, if anything there should be a DJ Top100 and a Producer Top100 as many don’t do both…

Dead or Alive If you had to invite three people to play at a party you were organizing who would you invite and where would your party be? 

Tiesto, Underworld and Richard Grey at Hakasan in Las Vegas :D

We are heading in to summer and you are heading into winter, where is the best place to spend summer? 

Ibiza - it’s the place to be every summer, we hope one day we can get a summer residency there!

Any Last messages for your fans? 

We love all our fans and without them we would be nothing so a huge thankyou for being Fully Charged!

Thank you for doing this interview with us , we hope to see you playing somewhere around the globe soon

Fully Charged
http://www.fullychargedmusic.com
https://www.facebook.com/FullyChargedDJ
https://soundcloud.com/fullychargeddj
https://twitter.com/FULLYCHARGEDDJ
https://www.youtube.com/user/FullyChargedDJ