JC: How did the whole Breakin` Bread thing start?

Skeg: We basically started off as a group of people being into funk and hiphop. It was mainly myself, Rob (Life) and Tufkut from Beats In Progress.
[all pictured above]
First we`ve started off doing a club 5 years ago, at a time when hiphop was sort of coming back and we were like "where are all these good clubs playing our sort of music"?, because we`ve always played jazz&funk alongside hiphop.
Rob and Tufkut particularly just got into the production side of hiphop when we started and used the funk&jazz for the breaks, so the three of us just found it natural to play that sort of thing.
Myself and Rob are the main DJ`s, we´re doing stuff with a DJ called Kam from "Mr.Bongo`s" / "Beyond There"... and some nice guests, of course.

JC: And the crowd got hooked on this as well?!

Skeg: It just went on from there, we started this club off in brixton, south london in 98`. It has gone from strength to strength, after about a year the club was quite popular and we could see that people were getting into the fact that we were playing both funk and hiphop, because no one else was really doing this.
But the breakdown was and is particularly the b-boys, they really love our sound because its easier to b-boy to funk music or that sort of tempo of hip-hop music, with the right sort of drumsounds and whatever...
Then we started releasing records with rob producing the very first one...

Rob: Which was "Ok, We`re Rollin", the b-side was "Style Applications", a kind of cut`n`paste thing, some breaks`n`beats`n`cuts. It kicked off the label...
Far and on from that we had Quantic, he released his very first record with us which was "Fresh Rhythm/We got soul", a nice and jazzy instrumental ... affair.
Then there is our "house band" Color Climax, they bring out the funk and they do it live... not to forget Beats In Progress, both have done a lot of good stuff for us.
So we just build up the label with those 7inch singles, cause they were kind of quite cheap & easy to do, plus we love 7inches. we would play all of these old funk&soul records in our dj.sets, so it seemed to fit very well.
we build up `til the album "V.A. - The Deadly 7" Sins", which was released in 2002. That one was like a compilation of the material we had released on our seven inches before because they were quite limited. Plus we put some new tracks and a couple of remixes on it as well. We got good feedback, it kind of did well...

JC: ...and lead to further releases.

Rob: Yeah, from that point on we started to release some more hiphop stuff on 12", still doing the 7" format as well. But hip-hop seems to work better on 12" because a lot of people wipe off the instrumentals as well, so we needed room to put that on.
Our new 7" called "Heavy Heavy" is by Keno1 & The Hermit from Brighton, they are on Tru Thoughts as well, doing stuff for them under the moniker of Natural Self & Nostalgia77.
Hiphop-wise we got Tom Caruana, there`s going to be a new ep by a guy called Ghost, we`ve done stuff with Cappo & DPF and Cashmere...

JC: Plus you`ve started distributing your own records and fresh uk funk & hip-hop talent...

Skeg: Well, we were sort of right distributed but we felt that it could be done better. so we just set up Boombox Distribution Network together with Disorda from Suspect Packages. [an internet mailorder specialised in uk-hip hop. breakinbread stuff can be found there as well...]
A lot of good music is coming out of the u.k. right now, and distributionwise there`s no one who really understands it, no one`s doing justice to the scene...

Because there really is a scene in the uk, mature and well grown, there are quite a few good labels around and we feel they need to be brought to the world via Boombox. We try to do that in germany and lots of other places as well, so if anyone reading this is interested...

BNB#011 by Keno1&The Hermit is out now. Get it.

click here for full Breakin`Bread releasecat.