Since then, Ben has enjoyed solo album success and the biggest selling Grandmix ever. And to this day he still produces multi-format analogue and digital releases of ground-breaking productions – all unique and highly collectible. Recently, Ben sat down with Paul Dakeyne to discuss his career. The first half of this interview was published in Pro Mobile issue 126 (July/August 2024).

PAUL: What was the catalyst to launch the ‘Grand 12 Inches’ series and some of the difficulties involved in sourcing, licencing and restoring the master tape recordings? And has Sony always been involved?

BEN: I was working on the second Grandmix Disco edition and instead of sending me the 12" version of Robert Palmer’s ‘You're In My System’ that I requested, the label sent a shorter 2-minute snippet in which you could hear the next being blended in at the end.

I was like, what the hell is going on? How can you, the person responsible for sending me the master, send me a snippet from my own Grandmix instead?! It turned out this person didn't have a clue what a master of a record actually is.

It turns out, a whole bunch of record companies have discarded their tape collections – it’s crazy, just crazy. This kind of sparked my eagerness to preserve all the 12" versions I love. I explained my grievances to Sony and suggested we make a series that tries to preserve these versions, which I consider to be ‘grand’ – therefore ‘Grand 12 Inches’.

It then became a real expedition to find all these masters. For years it was incredibly difficult and also very costly to get hold of them. Imagine you’re a record company and I come along asking you for a particular master, which will end up as one of 40 tracks on a compilation CD. Whatever revenue this thing generates, your record company will earn 1/40th part of that compilation for this label. So, the record companies rightfully noticed that sending someone to the archives will already leave them at a financial disadvantage. It will already cost so much that it's not even worth it to draw up the paperwork anymore.

Luckily, over the last years, I've had help from a huge network of people who love the ‘Grand 12 Inches’ series. They send me whatever masters they have themselves in uncompressed WAV quality. Your first impression is probably, hey that sounds easy. Ben needs a track for ‘Grand 12 Inches’ and he just asks somebody to send it him and then he sticks it on the release? Well, it doesn't quite work that way.

I have my master and I might have a master from the record company, which might be transferred from an old tape that doesn’t have the clarity it should have anymore. Then there might be somebody who has a Japanese pressing of a mastering from the original tapes onto digital. Then I start comparing up to 50 versions of this master, and it turns out it’s the Japanese master that sounds even better than the tape transfer I got from the record company. That transfer might have been made from a tape, back when it was still fresh, and it might even be that a 16-bit transfer was made.
Back then, it sounds better than a 96 kilohertz, 24-bit transfer made today. So, ‘Live and Learn’ – and that is how I select, compare and A/B until I get the best versions on ‘Grand 12 Inches’.

Circa 1993, you switched your primary focus to computer graphics and 3D animation. What led you to this, and what brought you back to music again?

There were a couple of things. Around 1993 there were still lots of fantastic tracks about, but suddenly it became important to make 7” edits for radio. That year I had released a huge global remix of Salt N Pepa’s ‘Let's Talk About Sex’, and my focus was very much on making 12” versions for the dancefloor. Suddenly, all my colleagues got to play around and experiment with making beautiful 12” versions, as long as Ben Liebrand made the radio edits, which were what actually paid the bills.

This soured things for me. I won’t name names, but there was a bunch of records where I thought, I can’t make this. And even if I do make it, I can’t be satisfied because this is just cartoon disco. My creativity was restricted. And they could do whatever they wanted and it didn't matter if I couldn’t.

[Prior to this time, bootlegs of Ben’s Grandmixes had been sold and him wrongly blamed for the distribution – Ed]

I was so busy at that time with computer graphics that my focus shifted and I left music for a couple of years. Although, during that time I came across an online group that gathered everybody who loved the In the Mixes radio show and the Grandmixes too. I’d kind of closed that whole chapter in my book, but I discovered that that chapter was actually very much open. It incentivised me to consider making a Grandmix again, so I contacted Sony and we looked into a new 3-hour/3-CD format and decided to start it as a try out. In 1999 we made the ‘Millennium Mix’, covering the previous 10 years, and that went down so well that in 2000 I restarted with the annual Grandmix as well.

And what's great, not only for the Mastermix audience, but your global fan base too, is that you've now completed the ‘missing’ Grandmix ‘93 and it's going to be available on Mastermix very soon. This is something incredibly exciting…
A lot of people, hearing this interview for the first time, will not expect to hear that. But yes, we took a great effort to make it possible for the Grandmix ‘93 to be released on Mastermix.

I had no idea when I was making it, because at that time we'd actually planned to do a re-run of the Grandmix 1983. I had booked the whole of December off, planning to do nothing but go Christmas shopping. Then I told my Brenda, it would be a fantastic stunt if we announced Grandmix 1983 is going to have a re-run at the traditional time, at the end of the year. And it would be a fantastic stunt if I tell nobody and just make a Grandmix 1993, because there's never been one! So, I just got started on it and it came together smoothly and quickly. With all the techniques and technology you have today, it gives you so many more possibilities to make a certain transition, where on vinyl you would not be able to make such a transition.

I'm so stoked about releasing the Grandmix ‘93 to my audience!

With the forerunner of your Ben Liebrand Artist album, ‘Styles’, the later ‘Iconic Grove’ album project began – can you tell us how this came to be?
At the time of ‘Styles’ I was having a whole string of hits for Sony [at that time CBS] and they said they’d like to put together a compilation album of my remixes. I’d just had a UK number-four with ‘The Eve of the War’ and they suggested a ‘Best of Ben Liebrand” compilation. I suggested we could do you one better than that – why not make a Ben Liebrand album with original Ben Liebrand productions, all produced and mixed by Ben Liebrand?

And then I wanted to do an album that thrilled me in the same way as the first time I played the ‘Change’ album, with ‘Lovers Holiday’ and ‘Searching’ and all those tracks on. I could remember how I felt, taking it out of the cover, playing it for the first time, and I thought, I want to make an album that evokes that same feeling, that same state of mind. So that's how ‘Iconic Groove’ got started.

And the title refers to?

Well, what is an iconic groove? The iconic bassline in ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, Chic’s ‘Good Times’, or Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ – those are all iconic grooves. I thought it would be great if I could make a bunch of new iconic grooves.

I had a collaboration with Marcel Schimscheimer and Jochem Fluitsma in the Netherlands, one of the best bass players and one of the best guitar players I know.

We sat down and we talked about the feeling you get with certain iconic tracks, and I would name a couple of iconic tracks to kind of get in the mood. Then we decided on a key and a tempo. We put down a basic click track and laid down whatever felt best at the time. For each and every track we basically recorded say, 32 bars of music, which isn't that much time – about a minute. But in that minute, I would have sections for the verse, a bridge, a chorus and another section for anything extra. We’d lay down the bassline, the guitar and some chords. Then I took those back as if they were a remix and started building them into songs, coming up with lyrics. So that's how ‘Iconic Groove’ came to be.

You’ve just played your annual Disco 250 solo DJ set/show in Utrecht, Belgium. What is the technical and creative preparation involved for such gigs? And what do you strive to deliver as the audience experience for those attending?
I've kind of specialised and profiled myself in disco and that era from the late seventies to the early nineties. I can play the whole shebang from anything back then, up to the modern day, but that era is where my love is. Once you’ve been listening to these records for so long, at a certain point you're like, OK, I want to play that track but I only want to play the first verse, bridge and chorus, and then I want to get into the break. So I make a shorter edit of the original track, but I don't add bass drums or rhythms – it's the original mix as it appeared back then.

I'll often extend the break too, so I have more break to work with. Having played these tracks so many times, I want to keep it interesting for myself, so rather than just making a cross from one track to the other, I get creative. For example, if I'm in the key of E, and I'm going from this track to that track, how about in that 8- or 16-bar transition I find some other acapella that will match the key, energy and groove?

Whilst I'm mixing the acapella, I'll also be starting the next track. Whilst this acapella is running, I will be making a transition from one to the other, so three tracks going. On certain occasions this might be a little bit empty, so I'll have the chords from a fourth track on the last player.

When remixing, do you always have access to the original tape’s multitrack parts or do you sometimes utilise this latest technological production stage of using stem-separation software?

Well, first of all, I am somebody who collected and archived all the stuff I came by during all these decades. When doing mixes back in 1983, for example, they would send me masters and I’d record these onto my Sony F1 system. So even way back then, I was making my own digital copies of all the multitracks.

Funnily enough, last weekend my remix of Roberta Flack's ‘Killing Me Softly’ came out on the original Rhino Records label, and some of these record companies asked me, “where did you get the multitracks from?”
It's an odd situation where there’s been a whole era when the record companies didn't care about the tapes or the multitracks anymore, so they got discarded or offloaded because they weren't relevant anymore. But many technicians over the years have thought, you know, before I’m tossing this thing in the trash, I'll make a transfer and just upload the transfer online. So now there are a whole bunch of multitracks out there.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen this software that uses machine learning to distinguish between the vocal, the instruments, the drums etc. And a whole bunch of clever people have written scripts that let us extract the vocals or instruments from the track with science fiction-like accuracy. It's really astounding what is possible today and though some of it might not even be 100% perfect, if these vocals are used in a production where you know compression and processing is going on, then those sounds and those acapellas will sound absolutely natural.

The technology gives you a lot of new possibilities to use tracks in that way. And yes, the nerd I am is interested in these new technologies, especially new technologies that actually work and get the job done.

Here in summer 2024, what can your established global audience plus your new Mastermix audience look forward to from Ben Liebrand?
My Roberta Flack – ‘Killing Me Softly’ remix will be on Rhino Records. Then on High Fashion Records we will have Divine Sounds – ‘What People Do for Money’, Timmy Thomas in connection with the rhythms of T-Connection – ’Why Can't We Live Together?’, Sharon Brown – ‘I Specialise In Love’, Fun, Fun – ‘Happy Station’, and Advance – ‘Take Me To The Top’.

For Mastermix, on one of the first Ben Liebrand Collections, is my two-track remix of Dua Lipa’s ‘Swansong’ and Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’. I’ll also be making weekly mini-mixes, which will use the original multi-tracks. All of these will be to the standard of the official releases and a whole bunch will be made available on Mastermix in the Ben Liebrand Collections. I can't tell you I how stoked I am about this because it's fantastic to have an outlet for these creations. Don't forget, many of these mixes were made to be heard just once, and now DJs have the chance to access them for their own use.

Ben Liebrand Collections, Grandmix ’93 is available via:

https://mastermixdj.com/ben-liebrand-producer-page/

Instagram: @ben_liebrand