INTERVIEW: Laurie Waite spoke to Sigma about ‘Life’, YouTube stardom and Summer 2016
After embarking on their ‘Life’ album tour, Cameron Edwards and Joe Lenzie – better known by their joint pseudonym Sigma – spoke to Laurie Waite before their second leg of the tour in Manchester.
How has the tour been so far for you guys?
Cam: It’s been wicked so far. We’ve only done one date, which was yesterday (March 30) in Norwich but it was a great start. It’s always quite nice to launch a tour because everything’s new; we have new tracks, a new setup, and it went really well. It was a good crowd and we hope for more of that in Manchester.
Your latest album ‘Life’ has been out for nearly four months now. How well do you think it has been received?
Joe: It’s quite hard to tell really. We still get tweets every day from people just finding out about it. For us though, the most important thing is just having a body of work out there that we’re proud of, and I still listen to it now and I love it.
Do you enjoy listening to your own music then?
Joe: Not always, some days you can have a moment where you quite enjoy it. I think there are certain tracks on the album, particularly ‘Life’, which is one you can just put on when you’re chilling and isn’t too intrusive. So if there are any tracks off the album that I’d listen to it would be that purely because it’s a bit more relaxed.
Sigma are now considered big players in the drum and bass industry now. What’s it like for you guys to be at the top of what is an already saturated music scene?
Cam: It’s quite flattering really. We’ve worked for a very long time just to try and get people to listen to our music, so to actually be in a position now where a lot of people are listening isn’t something that’s just happened easily for us or anyone for that matter. We respect every day we get to do this and we appreciate the constant support that everyone gives us because this is what we do. Having people come to a place like this (O2 Ritz) and queuing up hours before the doors open is crazy.
Joe: We actually just saw some people selling fake merchandise outside, so we can tell we’ve made it now. (Laughs all round)
Cam: But yeah we love doing what we do.
You’ve had a lot of collaborations with other artists in your music, including the likes of Rita Ora and Labrinth. How do you go about selecting who you want to feature on your tracks?
Cam: We kind of write the tracks first and then we think about who suits them best. We have written tunes before, for example with Maverick Sabre, and he’s stayed on it. There’s loads of different ways of doing it, we can write with singers who write as well or we can write with other lyricists and then put the singer on it later, it just depends on the song we make.
How do you think your sound has changed over the course of your careers?
Joe: I guess our sound is slightly more vocal-driven now than it was before. That wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision we made in regards to selling more records or anything that’s just kind of what we moved into more of doing and enjoying really.
Your track ‘Nobody to Love’ was a huge hit at number one in the charts and 190million views on YouTube upon last inspection. What is it like as musicians to make an anthem like that?
Cam: Yeah it’s pretty nuts really, we didn’t expect it to [do well] because we didn’t even expect the song to come out in the first place. It was originally just a bootleg of Kanye West’s ‘Bound 2’ and we did it without really asking anyone and gave it away for free on our website because we didn’t think it would ever come out. Then the label realised that it could potentially be released and they did all the stuff to get it done. We can’t really comprehend how big it is, especially the amount of plays on YouTube.
What does Summer 2016 have in store for Sigma, and what are you most excited about?
Cam: Probably quite a lot of hangovers. We’re doing lots of festivals and lots more gigs, but we’re off to Dubai next week (April 7) which we’re very excited about. We’re playing in the Atlantis hotel in Dubai which is a really prestigious hotel, god knows why but yeah that’ll be fun. So lots of gigs and festivals to look forward to and lots more music hopefully.
