Leetabix - Interview

  by Dave Goodwin

published: 31 / 8 / 2013

intro

At the Deerstock Festival Dave Goodwin speaks to Nottingham musician and singer-songwriter Leetabix, who combines singing and beatboxing together

Leetabix is a young beatboxer from Nottingham with something of a difference in that he incorporates singing into his batbox act. Pennyblackmusic spoke to him backstage at this year's Deerstock Festival to find out about the many projects that he is involved in. PB: So Lee, you are Nottingham born and bred? L: Yeah, I was brought up in a little area called Whitemoor in Basford. I went to Whitemoor School which is where I learnt how to use my talent and developed my taste for music really. PB: Did you start out by playing instruments? L I used to play keyboards and drums and a bit of guitar - a bit of everything really. All the main aspects of music. PB: And did you sing at any point? L: Yeah, I did some singing. I've always been fond of my own voice so I suppose that helps. PB: So where did all the noises start coming from? L: When I was growing up, my biggest influence was the drums and anything that basically revolved around the percussion side of music. What I do is very percussion-orientated or should I say vocally percussion-orientated. I used to practice playing the drums at school, and then go home and practice doing it with my mouth. PB : You have got a lot of piercings. Does it help having piercings or doesn't it make any difference? L: Not really, no. You'd think it would, but it sounds exactly the same without the piercings. PB: Your are now 25? What sort of stuff were you listening to as a kid? L: I think because of the area that I grew up in it tended to be the grime scene, and also hip hop and drum and bass. But I have always liked rock music, so I actually have a vast taste for different types of music. I'm very open when it comes to music. When you listened to my set earlier on, you might have noticed that I did a bit of dubstep and hip hop but then I'll try and do something like Black Sabbath and keep it as diverse as I can. I don't like being close-minded, so I'll give everything a chance. PB: So what would you class yourself as because it is not strictly beatbox, is it? L: Well, I got an interview with 'NME' and they classed me as Urban Alternative. And to be honest that fits in quite well. Beatbox has always been hip hop-orientated, and I wanted to break away from that. The thing is you've got people that come to listen to the beat box and people that come to listen to hip hop, but you will have heard me just now doing Ben E. King's 'Stand By Me' as well. I try to reach all kinds of people and to attract different kinds of audiences. PB: Do you play any instruments now? L: I can play a few, but I don't bother now too much. I play guitar and drums, but I prefer my beatboxing over any of that. But I'm just starting to do things with a Cajon. It's a wooden box that has strings down one side, and if you bang it in the middle it has one sound and if you bang it on the other side it has another and so on, and you can change the pitch on it as well. PB: And are you going to incorporate that into your set? L: Well, I've got a few different projects with a couple of musicians that I'm working with at the minute, and some of them will be more suited to the Cajon or the drums and some will be more suited to the beatbox. There's a girl im working with at the moment called Chloe McShane, and we're working on a few songs at the moment, and then there's a few other projects I'm involved in. One's called 'Dirtbox Live' which goes to Prague, Barcelona and Latvia in the next few months with a drum and bass group called Sigma. The other project is called the Beat Consortium where me and a good friend of mine called Chris Sheperson, who is probably the best bassist I've ever played with in my life, and has a brilliant bass guitar and a load of pedals to put it through as well, just make live music up on the spot, PB: Is that just off the cuff? L: Yeah, just as it happens. We have songs we do all the time, but then improvise it and sometimes pull a random bloke from out the crowd and get him up with us doing something. We've just released some stuff on YouTube. If you search for the Beat Consortium, you'll find us on there. PB: What have you got out at the moment? L: I'm just working at putting together a collection of stuff. Its not strictly an album as such. There's going to be about eighteen tracks on it, each with a bit of me on them. So track one will be one genre and track two another, and each track will be a different genre. I have got about fifteen or sixteen of them down now. I'm working with lots of the top people of different genres in the Nottingham/Midlands area. There is a guy from Scotland coming down to do some rapping on one of the tracks. He's from Glasgow. PB: So where in Britain can we catch you? L: We are in Manchester on the 20th of October which is a biggie, but if you check my Facebook page I'll be posting regular dates up on there. PB: Thank you.