Groove Armada to ring in the new year in Dubai at Zero Gravity

As they prepare to play their DJ set at Zero Gravity, we caught up with Andy Cato of the duo to chat about their gig and the year ahead for the band.

Groove Armada’s Andy Cato, left, and Tom Findlay. Courtesy Zero Gravity

With eight studio albums, 13 compilations and more than 30 trip-hopping singles in the last 18 years, British electronic duo Groove Armada show no signs of calling it a day any time soon.

Tom Findlay and Andy Cato are also popular and influential electronic dance producers, while sold-out performances every time they headline a stage in Dubai are testament to their huge fan base.

Dance tracks Superstylin', If Everybody Looked The Same and I See You Baby are considered some of the biggest of this century.

As they prepared to help Dubai ring in the new year with a concert at Zero Gravity on Wednesday, December 31, we caught up with Andy Cato for a quick chat about the gig and the year ahead for the band.

What is it about Dubai that keeps you guys coming back?

It’s the combination of house music and beaches – it’s a great combination. It works in Ibiza and it works in Dubai. This will be our first New Year’s Eve in Dubai – I’m looking forward to the fireworks.

What’s your favourite thing to do in Dubai when you’re visiting?

As is often the case with the DJ thing, you’re never there long enough to do much really – it’s just DJing and the hotel. We’ll get as far as the beach, if we’re lucky. But I have a friend who’s lived in Dubai for a long time and talks about the downtown area and the sand dunes, so hopefully on this trip we’ll get a chance to do more.

Any new material coming out in 2015?

Since our last gig as a live band, we've had EPs on seven different labels, we've released about 35 house tunes and 10 or so remixes. Since the Last Night in Brixton album [in 2012] we've taken the decision to go back to house music, become the underground-club sound that we were when we started. We've had some of the most productive years in a long time these past few years, and in February next year we'll be bringing all this together in a special two-CD release – there's 77 minutes of new Groove Armada music on there. We're really looking forward to returning to Fabriclive in February, which will be great, we used to do that a long time ago and we'll roll through with that until the Ibiza season starts again in May.

When we chatted in 2013, you told us you were trying to be a farmer, to be self-sufficient. How’s that going?

It’s going really well - it always goes between joy and despair - but I’ve fallen in love with it, it’s a source of incredible peace and satisfaction in my life and I’m never happier than when I’m working on making the farming thing become a reality

Any New Year’s resolutions?

More of the same, really. Life is good at the moment; it’s fine by me if 2015 is just more of 2014.

What’s the perfect environment for you in the studio; what do you need when you’re working?

Where I work, there’s no phone signal, no internet – I’m in the middle of nowhere in France anyway, so no one will walk in. It’s about what I don’t need, really. The great casualty of the digital age is concentration. The moments of quality in the studio for me come from getting lost in something, like how you’d get lost in a book. Things that beep and messages that come in saying things that you don’t need to know - none of that.

We know you play the piano, but do you still play the trombone - ever pick it up and just jam?

I do, but mainly to jam with my kids these days, we’ve been playing a few Christmas carols, with daughter on cello and my boy on drums.

Who do you like to listen to when you want to unwind?

I'm a big Bob Dylan fan so it's a happy sort of Christmas treat that they've recently released The Basement Tapes that are supposedly long-lost records from the late 1960s. I've had them on loop.

What’s your favourite Groove Armada track?

It changes all the time, but the two tunes I come back to often, the ones I'm really proud of, one of them is a tune called Paris [from album Soundboy Rock] that features Candi Staton, and the other is Think Twice, from the Lovebox album.

What can you can tell us about Tom Findlay, the other half of Groove Armada?

He's just released an album - he is really into 1980s stuff of all different kinds - so he has done a nice festive compilation called Automatic Soul, which is black soul music sung by white people – there was a strange era in the 1980s when that was going on. He's in his studio in London, more in the thick of it than I am.

Do you promise to keep coming back to Dubai?

It seems to have worked out that we come over at least twice a year, we’ve fallen into a pattern. Long may it last.

• Groove Armada headline the NYE celebrations at Zero Gravity in Dubai, on Wednesday. from 8pm to 4am. Tickets start at Dh350 from www.platinumlist.net. For more details, call 04 399 0009 or visit www.0-gravity.ae