It has been three decades since Belgian brothers Soulwax added electronica to orthodox indie rock, enhancing their reputation overnight and, as 2manydjs, giving dance music a kick up the backside. To mark the release of their first album in eight years, Stephen and David Dewaele talk to Craig McLean in their hometown, Ghent, about their disregard for the music ‘manual’, their father’s connection to the Small Faces and why they were an awful ‘normal’ band…

“Do you know where your teenager is at five o’clock in the morning… drugs, dirty dancing and pounding techno music…”

On a late summer’s Saturday night in smalltown Belgium, it’s not quite dawn, but it is knocking on for 2am, aka 5am for grown-ups. Because while there aren’t many teenagers in evidence at this Daft O’Clock festival hour, their parents are out in continental lager-fuelled force. Drugs? I couldn’t possibly comment. But the dancing, while not so much “dirty”, is certainly on the exuberant side of hygiene. Especially if you’re wearing, as many are, sensible but pricey technical wear. Keeps the rain out, the sweat in.

The beats emanating from the stage, though. They’re definitely pounding and, at times, thrillingly techno. The propulsive live sound of Soulwax will bring that – especially the bit in their set when the Balearic bliss of new track ‘Gimme a Reason’ leads into 2001’s ‘Theme from Discothèque’ (made under the alias Samantha Fu), with its scaremongering, sampled image of dissolute teens getting their pre-dawn rocks off, and then on into 2004 monster ‘E Talking’.

Three drummers will bring that, too. Soulwax’s trio of tub-thumpers – one of them, Igor Cavalera, a founding member of Brazilian metal heavyweights Sepultura – are going at it hammer and tongs from their perches inside scaffolding towers arrayed in a row upstage.

Downstage, meanwhile, are four banks of vertical, mirrored, big-knobbed synths. One of them is worked by a musician who’s suited and booted like a Kraftwerkian bank-teller. In front of him, crooning into an old-school radio microphone, is a dapper man with hurt in his voice but pep in his step.

This is Soulwax, the band led from the front by brothers Stephen and David Dewaele. In the transatlantic, UK-US-EU, rock-rave triangle, the duo sit alongside old pal James Murphy (with whom they host travelling, heavyweight (30,000kg) sound system Despacio) and even older pal Erol Alkan (for whom they helped turn London club night Trash into a year zero tear-up).

Here at Lokerse Feesten in Lokeren, the middle-aged raverati are out in force for Soulwax’s headline slot. They’re splayed and arrayed across the festival site’s municipal park tarmac, making good, shape-throwing use of a space somewhat thinned out after the midnight end of Pet Shop Boys’ set and the onset of babysitter rush-hour. Still, Soulwax, being local boys made good, mean the crowd appreciate the familiar bangers as much as they do the brand new tracks from the brothers Dewaele’s new album, ‘All Systems Are Lying’.

Well, to these eyes and ears anyway. But as they see it from their spots behind microphone (Stephen) and big-knobbed synth (David), the crowd includes a fair amount of folded arms, metaphorical or otherwise. This, too, is apparently because Soulwax are local boys made good (they’re from, and still based in, Ghent, 18 miles down the road).

“That show wasn’t the best one for us,” David says in our second interview, a few weeks later. “You’re playing in front of a home crowd, but it’s not an [easy] home crowd.”

“I know people think of Belgian audiences differently,” adds Stephen, referring, presumably, to Anglo-Saxon notions that the Belgians and Dutch are, well, more polite and less judgemental than us Brits. “But they’re kind of critical. They’re like, ‘Oh, let’s see what you got here.’ So I don’t think we enjoyed it that much. We like being the underdog way more!”

The result: even though the Dewaeles de-emigrated around the pandemic, returning after 12 years living in east London, the biggest Belgian artists in the world don’t particularly look forward to hometown gigs.

That said, the new tunes did go down like 5am teenager-friendly Jägerbombs. “The majority of those songs hadn’t come out,” says David as we talk at the mid-calendar point between Lokerse Feesten, the final show on a summer run of dates, and the release of their fifth studio album. “So the fact that they work in that setting without people knowing them [is great]. It’s not like the reaction is a lot less than for the ones that people know for 20 years. That’s reassuring.”

The afternoon before Lokerse Feesten, Stephen, 55, David, 50, and I meet at Soulwax HQ in Ghent. The architect-designed space, completed in 2014, lurks up a cobbled side-street perpendicular to a canal. Also home to their label, DEEWEE, it’s a wonderland of music-making, record-collecting, gear-amassing and artist-developing, hidden-not-hidden behind a tiled, matt-black exterior. On the outside it looks like the wall of a chic AF shower cubicle. On the inside, a disco Tardis.

Pride of place in the middle of the office from which they run their business and their craft is a space-age hi-fi, racked in a ceiling-high cabinet bisecting the floorspace. Throbbing from the speakers as I arrive is the Small Faces’ ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’. When I commend the choice of the 1968 psych-pop-conceptual classic, Stephen’s face lights up. As they often do, Soulwax have a story about that.

The brothers’ dad’s status as Belgium’s pre-eminent music TV host and disc jockey of the 60s and early 70s (imagine a cross between pirate-era John Peel and Serge Gainsbourg) meant that the Dewaele household was full of music. And, occasionally, musicians.

“My dad worked for the TV, a bit like the BBC,” begins Stephen. “I wasn’t born at this point, but they had a house a little bit outside of Ghent. And he had a TV programme, and for some reason they chose to film the Small Faces in their living room. They recorded it – but they lost the tapes,” he adds, still disconsolate despite living with this knowledge of the one-that-got-away for five decades.

Encircling the stereo are stacks and stacks (and stacks) of vinyl, running in floor-to-ceiling rows along the walls of the main office. They’re the evidence of a deep-seated, Abba to ZZ Top eclecticism. The reference points for their remixes. The weapons of mass distraction for the dancefloor botherers who went out as 2manydjs and came back still battling the complicated legacy of the bootleg/mashup micro-genre they invented-didn’t-invent at the turn of the millennium.

We move downstairs to the studio, a crowded cave of synths and amps and wires. David, comme d’habitude, is dressed in business casual: shirt, slacks, no tie, jacket drying on a hook after an afternoon downpour. Stephen is in rock star casual: crisp white T-shirt, directional denim, strong trainers game. On the interview rider: a bowl of plump cherries and mugs of hot water poured over artisan Japanese leaves. Soulwax are tea spotters, too.

‘All Systems Are Lying’ is the Dewaeles’ first studio album in eight years. Its predecessor, ‘From Deewee’, was recorded in one take. Further back still, the “pre-2000” Soulwax, as Stephen puts it, were an indie band purposefully bucking what they saw was their young Belgian peers’ obligation to make R&S-friendly techno. But the seeds of change were sown early, when Chris Goss (Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age), the producer of their 1996 debut album ‘Leave the Story Untold’, said to them in the studio one day: ‘Whoa, you guys need to incorporate some of that electronic thing. Because that’s easy for you guys. That seems to be in your DNA.’

In short, the brothers like a framework to their records. Was there, then, any concept, or focus, or rules for the making of ‘ASAL’? David nods before embarking on a typically thoughtful, eloquent description.

“The two things that we’d set out, they’re interlinked. One is that we wanted to it to be more vocal. Less of this ‘travelling studio that does a crazy audio experiment’. Which is maybe more what ‘From Deewee’ lent itself towards. So, more vocals. Then – this is going to sound like it’s the same thing, but it isn’t really – we wanted the songs to be better.”

That meant pushing things hard, not working them to death. Rigour, not rigor mortis.

“For everything that’s on the album, there’s maybe five or six things that we’ve thrown away,” David continues. “For this album, we wanted it to be a very intuitive and instinctive process.” That, he notes, is at odds with their remixes (for Tame Impala, Marie Davidson, Fontaines D.C. and many more), where the tracks unavoidably must work, if not to a script then at least from one. “Therefore the rule is a non-rule: we had to feel whatever came out of us.”

That meant, ultimately, that the album they recorded here in studio DEEWEE was built from modular synths, live drums, tape machines, processed vocals – and no guitars. “That was never a rule that we set out,” clarifies Stephen. “It was something mentioned to us when we finished it. But songs like ‘Hot Like Sahara’ or ‘Idiots in Love’ could easily have been made with guitars,” he adds of certifiably rockin’ album tracks that definitely sound like riffs (but are actually synth-alikes). “And would have been maybe easily done by Soulwax pre-2000. But I guess, in a way, they have the same sentiment, or the same DNA.”

That idea of ensuring room to roam, of following the vibe, is encapsulated in ‘Run Free’’s lyrics: “I want to run free with the music,” sings Stephen in melancholy huskiness, “the beautiful mistake, try not to lose it… I wanna run free when I choose it, play the wrong chord, say something stupid”. That feels like a guiding ethos: the brothers are free to mess things up. There is no wrong chord, no wrong answer. There’s no such thing as a nightmare on Soulwax.

Stephen: “It’s a really, really good point. It’s a stream of consciousness on one hand. I’m definitely struggling with how formulaic a lot of stuff – a lot of music, a lot of life – has become. And I think as Soulwax, or as 2manydjs, or when we do Despacio, we try to colour outside of the lines. Try and see what that new territory there is. Because there is no manual.”

These funky freres have been ignoring the manual since the earliest days. That “pre-2000” incarnation was indeed an indie band who propped up the bill on NME tours and played with other up-and-coming guitar slingers. But as David once said: “We were really bad at being a normal band.” So, to cite just two of the other bands that they played with early on: what could Muse and Coldplay do that Soulwax couldn’t?

Stephen: “Make money!”

David: “Which could be seen as our detriment, because we couldn’t really do that. It’s just too boring for us to be just that. We’ve tried to use it as a positive thing, as a superpower, if you will. But I’m sure Muse and Coldplay are frustrated, having days where they’re like, ‘Oh, this is hard...’”

Stephen: “No, they’re having a great life!”

David: “Maybe. But what I’m saying is: it’s never black or white. We’re constantly doing different things. So that keeps it interesting. But that’s also to our detriment. Because it means sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the things that we’re doing. And I’m sure from an audience point of view, it can be confusing, like: ‘What? Why are they doing this?’”

Stephen: “Maybe we’re also a little bit more dysfunctional. I remember Muse really well, because we toured a lot with them. They were so driven. So ambitious. That was never something we felt was rock’n’roll. Or had the punk ethos. Or whatever it was that we were gravitating to. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing – because Muse were a force. But I honestly think our feeding ground was Van Halen, and the stuff that my mum and dad listened to, but also then quickly we go to The Virgin Prunes, or ‘O Superman’ by Laurie Anderson… So our sense of success, or what we were hoping to achieve, is a very different thing than trying to be Queen.”

Like the man said, you can’t say that’s not ambitious. But the Dewaeles’ ambition was less linear, more unrealistic, wholly… wonky. They were trying to find a way to mash the Small Faces and Jimi Hendrix and Daft Punk and Aphex Twin. As Stephen says: “We were consuming the whole time. We were trying to figure out, how does that become a place in culture? That’s still today what we feed on.”

“People sometimes say about Bono and Damon Albarn: ‘Oh, they’re so driven.’ [Like] it’s in their DNA,” he continues. “We’re very clear about this: we don’t have that. We have a different drive. Which is: ‘Ooh, how can we make that sound?’ Or: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do that?’ Or whatever other stupid idea we had. I guess that’s the difference.”

“Steph and Dave don’t live a stagnant creative life,” says songwriter, composer and former Klaxons man James Righton. He signed with DEEWEE for his 2020 solo album ‘The Performer’ and 2022’s ‘Jim, I’m Still Here’, with the brothers co-producing and Righton spending a lot of time in Ghent. “They have an ability to say yes to things, but never make that decision based on financial or commercial reasons. They didn’t make my records to make money. They did it because they liked what I do and wanted to explore that. Even live,” he adds of Soulwax’s constant retooling of how they play concerts, “they could do a much more conservative version of that. But it’s not about money. It’s about executing their vision without compromise. They’re like big brothers to me, and they set a really good example.”

Soulwax met their other brother-from-another-mother after their 1999 show at Dingwalls in Camden, north London. Somewhat bored with the life of a touring indie-rock band, and with a burgeoning DJ side hustle as The Flying Dewaele Brothers (their pre-2manydjs handle), they jumped at Erol Alkan’s invitation to play his Monday club night Trash.

“We took our record bag, and looked at Erol’s record bag – and he had 80 per cent of the same records that we had,” remembers Stephen. “It was [Daft Punk’s] ‘Rollin’ and Scratchin’’, but it was also Wall of Sound stuff, ‘Silver Machine’ by Hawkwind. And then David and me play ‘Ace of Spades’, and Lemmy’s in front of us doing this” – Stephen flashes devil horns – “and doing this” – Stephen gives me this middle finger. “And we go: this is our world. This guy Erol and us, we absorb pop culture the same way.” Are friends eclectic? One million per cent.

It was a relationship that gave Soulwax escape velocity from indie rock and fully into electronic music culture. And it’s a relationship that continues to this day. As Stephen says, “it’s quite extraordinary that, still today with the three of us, it’s all about music. ‘Have you heard this? Have you seen that?’ Erol actually sent us a text yesterday, he was playing Pike’s...”

They found more brotherhood in New York, with “what James was doing with DFA”, remembers Stephen, “then Arthur [Baker] doing his nights Return to New York. It all just came together. And it was very exciting.”

That sense of joyful anarchy takes us directly into 2manydjs and the Dewaeles’ groundbreaking bootleg album ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2’ (2002). The idea that you can smash things together that on paper should not be together – it’s the old Björk maths: two plus two equals five. An ineffable extra emerges.

Still, that magic arose from the most prosaic circumstances: given a one-hour radio show on national Belgian radio, the brothers had to come up, weekly, with a mixtape of records. “So just to cram in as many records that we liked,” says David, “we thought, ‘Oh, let’s just take the a cappella from this track...’ That gradually became: ‘Actually, we can make something new out of this.’”

“And juxtapose weirder things,” adds Stephen, “like Salt-N-Pepa with The Stooges, because we felt they had the same energy.”

Alkan, again, was a kindred spirit as mashups invaded the airwaves and the culture. Stephen remembers the three of them browsing in Rough Trade’s Ladbroke Grove shop “when all these A&R guys came in. They were like, ‘Oh my God, I heard this thing on XFM, it’s Kraftwerk meets The Beatles.’ And it was something that we’d made that week, and the three of us were just standing there like, ‘Hee hee hee…’ The guy behind the counter’s like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.’”

That sense of making music on the fly – of bootlegging your own record collection – and just getting it out there was right up their cobbled side street. Stephen: “The world that we [had] lived in was: you make a record, you tour it for a year, release three singles, make a video.... It was all so slow. And it was dependent on getting airplay on Radio 1 and blah, blah, blah. This whole machine – that still is there! But what we were doing was just: we make the track… somebody tapes it… it comes out. It’s a bit punk because it was like: ‘Ah, cool – we can beat the system.’”

Quickly, though, things got mashed up. Kylie Minogue’s ‘people’ asked the brothers, via Alkan, about doing something clever with ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ for the singer’s appearance at the 2002 Brit Awards. All three quickly realised that the best fit was ‘Blue Monday’. But before they could action it, in the brothers’ telling, Kylie’s “people” said they’d had the same idea and cracked on and did their own version. ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head’ then appeared as a Kylie B-side four months later.

The following year, Soulwax appeared on a French TV show honouring David Bowie. You can watch the clip on YouTube, the brothers sitting there, dumbstruck, as Bowie waxes lyrical, intellectualising the dumb-not-dumb 2manydjs bootleg concept.

“It was my least favourite moment in my life!” says Stephen. “This is the difference between me and Dave – this Dave here – because for him it was like a walk in the park. But I just freak out a little bit! Because Bowie’s my hero. He’s the reason why a lot of this is happening for us. And he goes like, ‘You guys can do whatever you want with my music.’ And I go: ‘No, it’s perfect, we can’t!’ What? Just shut up, Steph! Just shut up!”

In the end, eventually, Soulwax took him at his word: in 2015, shortly before Bowie’s death, they released Radio Soulwax’s ‘Dave’, a 60-minute audio/visual mashup megamix of Bowie tracks.

As Stephen characterises it now: “There’s this dance that we keep doing with Bowie. We’re allowed to use ‘Heroes’ and ‘Sound and Vision’ and make these new versions. But it’s like Dave – this Dave – says: the Kylie moment is a moment in the timeline where it also defines a little bit what we end up doing.”

Because you define in opposition to that?

“Yeah, maybe. The fact [was]: we’ve always been DJs. We’ve always been a band. We’ve always been remixing other people. But if the culture goes ‘great’, then what do I fight against? Who am I going to piss off? What lines am I going to redraw? So it’s always great to have those other entities to go looking for other stuff.”

That willingness to disrupt, that embracing of the wayward, naturally chimed with James Murphy’s vision of what his band could be and do. The Dewaeles have DJed and played with LCD Soundsystem multiple times – they estimate they’ve seen the American outfit more than 100 times – and were, naturally, part of the line-up during LCD’s final-not-final show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. They were, too, Murphy’s DJs of choice at the aftershow “wake” at the Tribeca Grand hotel.

Now they have Despacio with Murphy. What function or fulfilment does their pop-up global sound system bring them?

“There’s a lot of boxes it ticks,” begins David. “Again, it has to be seen in its context. Because when we started with it in 2011, we were feeling that there had been what seemed already like a peak of DJs becoming this thing. People are just on a stage with pyro, and the DJs come in to play on a not-so-great sound system, and there’s seven DJs in a night. Everyone gets to play 45 minutes. People don’t dance anymore. They just stand there looking at a DJ and with their phones and hands in the air.

“All these clichés that now you’ve heard a million people talk about. But this was what we were [thinking then]. So instead of us being the guys in the business class lounge complaining about it, why don’t we do something about it?”

The Dewaeles were fans of McIntosh, using the company’s hi-spec amps and speakers at home in and their studio. Then Murphy suggested they get together to build a sound system as good as their respective studio set-ups. Soulwax’s management duly approached McIntosh.

“They were crazy enough to say yes,” says David of the New York state-based company. “They’d only been involved in Woodstock and the Grateful Dead Wall of Sound [PA]. But they lent us this crazy amount of amplifiers. Then we sat down at dinner and defined what Despacio should be. And it was all these things that have now become also pretty much the norm: back-to-back, super-long sets, vinyl only.

It is, the younger Dewaele acknowledges cheerfully, “like we’re ticking all these hipster boxes. But it wasn’t that. It was just us saying: ‘All these things are important. The DJ should be hidden, people should be dancing, people should be in the dark for the first four hours.’ All this stuff that seemed obvious to us. And the world has kind of caught up with it.”

Stephen draws parallels with what they did with 2manydjs: they had to create a bespoke ecosystem to play the records they wanted to play. “We had to build a place where we can play Steve Reich, 20 minutes long, and make people feel emotional about it. It was a necessity for us to do things like that.” And now, “when we remix Tame Impala, we make it completely for Despacio: It’s a 10-minute Despacio version. It’s all about facilitating all your ideas.”

Like they said: What? Why are they doing this? Where “this” is a wilfully non-linear, brand-blurring identity. Where Soulwax is only the jumping-off point for a world of differently named musical adventures.

Because, pure and simple, they love it, still. And it takes them round the world, still. But it is, always, a lot. Certainly the fiftysomethings I meet on both occasions are indefatigable and buoyant, even as a “phoney war” summer touring schedule prefigures a full-bore album release and international touring campaign of many months’ duration. But being middle-aged, time-served musos and DJs, with families to boot, how have they looked after each other – and their mental health – through all this period? How have they made sure that they didn’t go insane?

“Have we?” wonders Stephen with a smile.

“It’s a good question,” ponders David. “There’s one thing that’s typical Belgian: to never believe. Maybe it’s the same thing with the Bowie thing – if someone’s sitting there telling you you’re the future of music, you don’t believe it. The typical Belgian thing is to maintain...”

“...that feeling of an underdog,” repeats Stephen. “It’s something that I recognise a lot with people from the north in the UK. Because there’s always London being the place to call things. I feel like you keep your feet on the ground there. That’s a typical Belgian thing.”

And in very simple terms, being brothers and being there for each other – that goes a long way?

David: “Yeah, yeah, of course. We have quite a lot of friends who did travel alone. They did...”

Stephen: “…go insane.”

David: “Yeah, quite quickly you start to spiral into negative territory. And luckily, you have this person with you – who might also be the most annoying person, like most siblings can be. I’m not saying he is...”

Stephen: “And he’s always going to be your brother. He’s never not going to be your brother.”

Forever buoyed by brotherly love, Stephen and David Dewaele have duly booked more shows, well into 2026. That said…

“Just before we started talking today,” says Stephen during our second interview, “we were discussing how we want to skip the whole show part and do something else. We have all these other ideas. Another way of bringing the records [to audiences].”

Really? Soulwax… #4? #5?

“Yeah, we’ll see,” says David with a what-can-you-do? shrug. “We’re idiots.”

“See the difference between Coldplay and Muse and us?” says Stephen. “It’s this!” 

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This article first appeared in issue eight of Disco Pogo.

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