PHOTO
BIOGRAPHY
Ils was born Ilian Walker, his mum making up the name while she was pregnant with him and reading Homer's epic book The Iliad. "I've always been called Ils from school days," the DJ/producer recalls. "It was handy only having three letters when the first Atari came out, cos for the highest score for Space Invaders you could only have three initials."
He grew up in a hippy commune, and the first music he was exposed to was Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon' - an album left to him as a present by a departing squatter. The other record that was a big influence on the young Ils was 'Never Mind The Bollocks' by the Sex Pistols. "I remember that was being blasted from the house all day long," Ils smirks. "Then the first thing I ever bought, when I was 11 or 12, was Grandmaster Flash + the Furious Five 'The Message'. Everyone in my street was into electro and breakdancing and I saved up for that for about three months." Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones inspired the young Ils to pick up a guitar, after Ils heard that the punk rocker learned to play the instrument in two weeks with just one finger. The fact that Jones also lived in the neighbourhood, on Shepherd's Bush Road, brought it home to him that he too could be involved in music.
Ils got into bands in his teens - big time. He joined school bands, swapped instruments around a bit, got put onto funk bass duties. "When I was 18 we used to club together and book into a West End studio," he recalls. "That's where I first saw the Atari and sampler at work. I was always pissed off at how shoddy our school demos were. When I saw beats coming out of a sampler I had a vision of finished records, as opposed to messy demos. I was getting annoyed with people not turning up, and started coming to the conclusion that I could probably rely on myself more than the super-flaky people I was hanging around with at the time."
Disenchanted with unreliable band-mates, Ils got his own sampler and did some business training courses, going through the Prince's Trust start-up system. He did a business plan, got a grant, set a studio up and began advertising in Loot as a full studio. By this time Ils had got involved with drum + bass pirate stations ("it was like having those old funk breaks sped up, your own youth culture as it were"), and knew that to make drum + bass all you needed was a sampler and an Atari. "I knew there was loads of young DJs who wanted to do dubplates for their pirate stations,' says Ils. "Most were booking into these big expensive studios with engineers who were good at live mics and guitars and stuff, but not good at Cubase or samples. I spent a year learning how to use my equipment, and soon would get people's dub plates finished in four hours. That whole DiY concept of music I liked, and I slipped straight into that subculture."
The first Ils release was on Rugged Vinyl, though he soon gravitated up to LTJ Bukem's Good Looking imprint. "He was a DJ who knew what his sound was, he was out on a limb at the time," believes Ils. "Working for him for as many years as I did possibly alienated me from the rest of drum + bass. When I came out of Good Looking it was like 'Where do I go from here?" After mid-90s success and critical acclaim, Bukem told the artists on his label one day about his financial difficulties. "He pulled us in for a meeting, said he had a forty thousand pound tax bill and that none of the artists would get paid for two years," Ils remembers. "It was annoying going into clubs and having your track played, or it's tune of the month or something, and you weren't getting paid for it. I had to bunk tube fares to get to a club to hear my own stuff getting played. I had six singles out on Good Looking and I was having difficulty retrieving any payment." Luckily his studio engineering work kept paying the bills - just.
DISCOGRAPHY
Studio Albums:
Idiots Behind The Wheel (1999)
Soul Trader (2002)
Bohemia (2005)
Paranoid Prophets (2007)
33 R.P.M. (2013)
Singles & EPs:
About That Time 1998
Ils / Deekline / Donna Dee - Untitled (12") 1999
Music 2002
The Next Level / Music 2002
No Soul Remixes 2002
Unknown Artist, Clint Mansell, Ils - Requiem / Overturned (12", S/Sided, W/Lbl) 2002
Ils Featuring Valkyrie - Cherish 2005
Angels 2005
Ils vs. The Who - Baba O' Riley 2006
Loving You (Part Two) 2006
Next Level Part 2 (12") 2006
Everyone's A Crook vs. Ils - Love Will Tear Us Apart 2007
Everybody Needs A Shrink / Burn Again 2007
Sabotage / About That Time (Remixes) (12") 2007
Hate Is An Illness 2008
Dark Skies (Single) 2013
DJ Mixes:
Y4K (2003)
MORE INFO https://www.discogs.com/artist/4506-Ils