The Neptunes live in a big house, a very big house, in the country. No wonder: they are the hip hop production guns for hire, as everyone from Jay-Z to Britney will attest – Steve Yates visits them on their Virginia Plain and encounters two reserved, reluctant superstars. ‘‘I watched myself have an ego, and that can’t happen again,” says Pharrell Williams…

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“I’m trying to keep from doing anything that looks like MTV Cribs,” says Pharrell Williams, explaining his reluctance to be snapped with his Neptunes compadre, Chad Hugo, next to the giant statue of the eponymous Roman god of the sea that stands proudly in his back garden. “Things that are expensive have such a negative connotation and I don’t wanna get grouped into that.”

He needn’t have worried. Although Pharrell is rich – very rich – and spends accordingly, his crib is a world away from MTV’s tacky trawl through the palaces of ostentation. There are no crystal chandeliers, rented or otherwise, the expensive cars that litter his garage and driveway are symbols of taste rather than showiness (according to our photographer, who seems to know about these things) and even the porn comes in the form of expensive art books.

Regardless, we’re strictly forbidden from snapping the interior (other than a few action shots of Pharrell on his skate ramp) or the cars. “Where we live, what we drive and what we wear isn’t really relevant,” insists Pharrell, in flagrant violation of hip hop ethics. “It doesn’t define you. It’s a by-product of your taste and somewhat of your mentality. Material items have no meaning. They get made and either become trashed or crashed, or they go on to become antiques, outlive all of us.

“I think reservation is a little more intriguing,” he continues. This doesn’t just denote a restraint rare in hip hop’s culture of conspicuous consumption, it’s also symptomatic of the ‘push me, pull you’ relationship Pharrell has with his own fame. This is a man who confesses he used to beg the artists he produced to appear in their videos but can’t stand looking at pictures of himself; who has severe reservations about his own voice but sings on virtually every record he makes (including taking lead for the first time outside of N.E.R.D. on the new single, ‘Frontin’’); who has been linked with a string of celebrity girlfriends (Beyoncé, Jade ‘Mick’s daughter’ Jagger) but longs for Chad’s wife-and-two-kids domesticity. 

“I am a playboy because I have nothing else to be,” he confesses. “I go around with a lot of different girls but I’d love to have the inspiration to come home – now I just go home because it’s where I live. I wanna family, I wanna wife.” This is a man who has it all but doesn’t want to talk about it. “Everybody brags about what they got, but if you owned the Earth on Monday what is there to talk about on Tuesday?”

Owning the Earth – at least that part of it marked out by hip hop, R’n’B and, sometimes, pop – is something The Neptunes are coming ever closer to. More popular than Timbaland, more productive than Dr. Dre, they are currently the most important producers on the planet bar none.

Established stars like Jay-Z, Snoop, Busta and Beyoncé use them to stay on top, journeymen rappers like Clipse go to number one on their coat­-tails and pop megastars like Britney and Justin Timberlake turn to them when they want to shed their teenybop skin. But, despite worldwide sales falling not far short of every other cover star in this journal’s ten year history combined, they’re still credible enough to appear on the cover of an underground magazine like Jockey Slut.

In part this is due to their genre-bending N.E.R.D. sideline – a cavalcade of hip hop, metal, soul, psychedelic rock and jazz – in part, the changes they (in tandem with Timbaland, an old cohort of Pharrell’s in his high school band, Surrounded By Idiots) have wrought, rescuing R’n’B from its nightmare of jheri-curled bump’n’grind and guiding hip hop out of the sampling cul-de-sac with their gnarly, abrasive keyboards.

“Keyboards are the way for me,” Pharrell enthuses, “you can make them loose and messy.”

And yet they can still make a massive pop LP with boy band escapee Timberlake. “Music is music, and right now pop is playing what’s cool,” explains Pharrell of their decision to write and produce half of ‘Justified’. “Sometimes it plays bullshit, but right now it’s playing what’s cool. We don’t really worry too much about guidelines, we walk on the boundaries of bravery and admiration.”

Having established themselves as the production guns for hire, The Neptunes now step forth as label directors with the inaugural Star Trak compilation, ‘The Neptunes Pres... Clones’. Although it’s effectively their fifth LP – following N.E.R.D., Clipse’s ‘Lord Willin’’ and a brace for R’n’B/rock crackerjack, Kelis – it’s the first to feature The Neptunes name in headlights, completing their transition from behind the boards genii to fully-fledged stars.

“You’ve gotta make your mark on this life, let people know who you are and how you feel and what you think is relevant to this world and that’s all we’re doing with this album,” says Pharrell, by typically oblique way of elaboration.

Chad Hugo, goofy comic-book kid to Williams’ space cadet, is slightly more expansive. Slightly. 

“There’s much more freedom when you put shit out yourselves. In America everything is packaged up – if you want a Big Mac you get a Big Mac, you want a Whopper you get a Whopper. Record labels ask you what kind of car you’re gonna put in the video, what about the sexy chick, because the standard has been drawn. But we don’t give a shit about that stuff, we just wanna make music.”

Although the line-up speaks both of their pulling power and favours returned – Jigga, Usher, Busta and a recently freed Ol’ Dirty Bastard, whose caustic hyper-persona The Neptunes corralled sufficiently to give him his only bona fide pop hit with ‘Got Your Money’ –‘...Clones’ emphasises their own stable: Clipse, FAM-LAY, the splendidly-named Roscoe P Coldchain, N.E.R.D. and their Spymob backing band, Kelis duetting with hubby-to-be, Nas, and their newest signing, dancehall’s re­-appearing star, Super Cat.

Chad and Pharrell take pains to point out that the ‘Clones’ title isn’t a warning shot at their numerous biters. Nor is it an ironic recognition that no one duplicates The Neptunes so much as The Neptunes themselves, although Chad acknowledges that their snare sound – that pin-sharp Ali jab-and-shuffle – has served its purpose. “It did establish an identity, but we are going to move away from that because we don’t want people to think we’re standing still.”

Accusations that all Neptunes beats sound the same are nonsense anyway. Just turn an ear to the bareback thud of ‘Grindin’’, the flamenco strum of Timberlake’s ‘Like I Love You’, the dancehall-meets-Bollywood maelstrom of Kardinall Offishall’s ‘Belly Dancer’ or the techno pile-up of Ludacris’ ‘Southern Hospitality’. For every generic ‘Beautiful’ there’s a bolt-from-the-blue ‘From tha Chuuuch to tha Palace’.

It’s this ability to couple versatility with commerciality that keeps the work coming in despite a rumoured six-figure production fee (some whispered as much as $200,000 for Jay-Z’s recent ‘Excuse Me Miss’) and made the Grammys look hopelessly out of touch when they failed to nominate them for Best Producers gong. In truth it wasn’t the Recording Academy’s fault – BMG and Virgin assumed each other would file the necessary papers – but that didn’t stop Pharrell directing a very public and very bitter outburst against them, later retracted. 

“We were mad, I talked big shit on MTV,” remembers a penitent Williams. “I watched myself have an ego and that can’t happen again. The biggest thing I learned is that I have to practise humility even when I feel something is due to me.”

“I usually don’t say too much,” he continues, ‘‘that’s why I don’t like doing interviews.” This statement is proving painfully true. Having flown a very grateful Jockey Slut out to their Virginia Beach home, The Neptunes are inexplicably awkward subjects. Chad rolls up an hour late, Pharrell disappears for the first 20 minutes and, returning, asks if we’re nearly done yet. With Kelis’ third LP and N.E.R.D.’s second both due this year we wanted the lowdown on the lot, but they won’t be drawn except to say that the former includes a track called ‘Milkshake’ which “will take over the world”, while the latter will be “live from the ground up”, unlike its predecessor, ‘In Search Of...’, which was released with programmed beats, then re-recorded (not to its advantage) with full backing band. (“We felt it could be more organic,” says Pharrell of that decision. “Live implies living.”)

To make matters worse, when together Chad defers to Pharrell who makes frequent recourse to cosmic hyperbole in his answers. For instance, on the subject of the Clones LP: “It’s us pointing the finger at us; us against ourselves, man against spirit, spirit against flesh, life against religion, religion against love, love against man, that’s all it is.” More nothing than everything.

With the conversation interrupted so the photographer can exploit some respite from the rain, such momentum as we have is lost and the interview is terminated with barely half of our questions answered. Lest this appear to be another case of Hip Hoppers With Attitude, it should be noted that both men are courteous; they're just intensely uncomfortable with media demands on their celebrity. 

"We're lucky that someone is even interested," Pharrell says. "We could be musicians with ambitions and aspirations, standing on the corner completely broke, unable to get enough money even to make a call to our family, let alone take care of them. I'm thankful, but at the same time, I hate to read what I say in magazines and I hate the way I look."

Pharrell offers to continue the interview by telephone the next day. Fearing a ruse, but powerless to do otherwise, Jockey Slut agrees and is delighted to be proven wrong when, while awaiting the connection home Pharrell comes on the line. With hundreds of miles between us, and without the inconvenience of strangers invading his home, he is much more forthcoming, beginning with an apology for the previous day. 

"I need people around me to point out the things I have to do," he says, possibly still smarting from his press officer's rap across the knuckles. "Mystique is almost everything to me, it keeps the curiosity up, keeps the imagination going. I don't see myself as Michael Jackson or Elvis where you wanna know everything about me. I'm just not that interesting, I'll never make music of their magnitude so I have to maintain the mystique."

N.E.R.D.'s next LP may be off-limits, but both stress that The Neptunes means more to them, that mass appeal tickles them where cult indulgence can't. You sense it's about more than just the money - it's how they are.

“Neptunes is us as crayons to colour other people's worlds," explains Pharrell. "N.E.R.D. is our own colouring book. N.E.R.D. is a diary, it was written for ourselves, Neptunes is for everybody.”

And when he says 'everybody' he means it. The Neptunes are hopelessly head-over-heels in love with music and want everyone to feel the same way – the polar opposites of the Jay-Z/50 Cent “music is just a hustle” shtick. “I want people to hear our music and have babies, to have a good day at work, to take people through different emotions of universal mentality. Things a madman would think, things Mother Theresa would think, things a normal person would think and bring Technicolor emotions to everybody's lives. I don't care how mad you are, you still wanna have a good day. We wanna celebrate crazy opposites and perpetuate that common thread."

Touching on The Neptunes origins for the first time, Pharrell says he and Chad bonded because they were unafraid to explore; while everyone else in their 'bandcraft' (music class) was concerned with technique, they “wanted to know everything about the songs on the radio. It was sheer curiosity, a love for the craft. Most people in that class have probably never even been to the West Coast, let alone London. Schools in the US don't raise people to aspire to travel – in Europe you're raised to learn about other cultures. That can still be the salvation of this world. Here they think the biggest thing you can do is Hollywood. That's bullshit. The biggest thing you can do is off the planet".

Right now it gets no bigger than Planet Neptune.

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