With debut LP Settle racking up critical acclaim and massive sales, the back half of 2013 surely belongs to UK house duo Disclosure — the rest of us are just living in it.
Now wouldn't be an ideal time, then, for a 'fake DJ' controversy to spring up.
So, naturally, that's exactly what's happened. Disclosure appeared at Wembley Stadium's Summertime Ball over the weekend alongside the likes of Taylor Swift, Robbie Williams and will.i.am, where they played single 'You & Me' accompanied by vocalist Eliza Doolittle. After the set, a photo appeared on I Love Bass Music's Facebook page that showed the sibling duo on stage, sans headphones and with CDJs unplugged.
The caption's inference was clear: "Did Disclosure just pull a David Guetta?" (The Frenchman was accused of faking a set at Tomorrowland last year.)
Rather than denying (or ignoring) the accusations, Disclosure have taken an unusual tack, with Guy Lawrence admitting that, yes, of course they were faking it, and the fact that they didn't try to hide it should absolve them from blame.
"We didn't try and make it look like we were mixing," he wrote. "We left the fucking plug on the floor on purpose, didnt even plug phono leads into the master out, turned all the EQs fully down and the master out AND DIDNT EVEN TAKE HEADPHONES for god sake!!"
Apparently, the festival had forced Disclosure to play the show with a backing track — in protest, the duo decided to make it clear they weren't actually mixing.
Guy's full defence reads as follows:
Hello I Love Bass Music and everyone who is talking about this photo… so. here is how and why this happened.
Capital FM made us do this show with a backing track playing but allowed the vocalists to sing. They said that they had to trigger the tracks themselves to sync visuals. We pleaded with them for weeks and weeks to let us play fully live or at least let us mix but they just weren’t having it. You will also notice this was the same for a lot of the dance acts playing that day (i.e. the duke dumont pic you posted)
It was incredibly frustrating and horrible for us to hear our music at Wembley and not actually be able to play it ourselves, as anyone with any knowledge about disclosure knows that we play fully live seen here… AND can mix…
Notice also that we didnt try and make it look like we were mixing. We left the fucking plug on the floor on purpose, didnt even plug phono leads into the master out, turned all the EQs fully down and the master out AND DIDNT EVEN TAKE HEADPHONES for god sake!! LOL if at any point we touched the mixer it was…well, you try standing infront of 80,000 people and not touching the mixer… go on… its really hard hahaha!
I would also like to point out that people like David Guetta ect who have also been accused of pretending to mix, actually try and cover it up and pretend to blend tracks into one another and hide it… but with us, we played three songs with vocalists b2b with gaps in between, so even if we had been mixing, there would have been no beat matching involved anyway + we didnt try and hide it at all!!
But yeah it was a very strange experience and one we will not be going through again. Capital have been amazing to us and they play our songs roughly 400 times a week across their various networks and we wanted to thank them for all the support.
Guy x
