Laurent Garnier — Crispy bacon. Story behind the protest track
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Today about the protest idea of the Crispy bacon track from the second studio album by Laurent Garnier, 30. But first, a well-known back story: “I used to be able to work without lots of knowledge and the skills that basically every techno producer is supposed to have. While recording Shot in the dark, I worked almost by touch and by trial and error, finding sounds and melodies in my head and sometimes accidently coming across something interesting. But this time I wanted to tell a very specific story to my listeners and for that I had to work neatly and professionally, basically as a real producer.
I had a minimalistic dance thing in my head for a while. I played the bass line, looped it, added a kick drum, hi-hat, compressed it and, in order to give my ears some rest, went for a walk. When I came back, I listened to the track again and decided that something was missing. Then I re-recorded it on a DAT, turned on the MS20 and, pressing one of the keys of the keyboard, I started twitching the modulator buttons. This time the result fully satisfied me — it was a super-lifting track, one of those that DJs play when they want to explode the dancefloor. I took a cassette box and wrote two words: crispy bacon.
A week later, Jeff Mills who had a transit in Paris, came to visit me. I asked him to listen to Crispy bacon Jeff listened to it without saying a word with a smile on his face and when the track was over he said he wanted to make a remix.
But Jeff absolutely didn’t like the name: ‘What the hell is Crispy bacon? Where did you find such a stupid name?’ I explained to him that when I listen to the track, I have an image of bacon slice frying in boiling oil. ‘Ah, that’s what you mean!’ said Jeff. ‘Then you should have named your track Sizzling Bacon, because crispy — that’s for bacon that’s already cooked’.
This was from his book Electrochoc, written in 2003 but five years before it, Garnier’s comment was less friendly: “It’s stupid name, a reaction against all of the dance tracks which are called Cyber Blah Blah or whatever. I played the track to Jeff Mills and he said I should change the name. Instead, I thought: Cool, I’ll keep that name.”
