X-Press 2

Presenting, for your foot-tapping pleasure and mind-expanding enjoyment, the men of X-Press 2. The last time they were here, their humungous fanbase propelled their vinyl-only 12-inches - sold without a barcode, only in HMV - thumping into the charts. But they've been away for a while, sweating in the DJ trenches, frequenting international clubs aplenty, trapped in the studio with Sixties sunshine-pop LPs, wrangling vocal stars from far and wide. But four years after they and David Byrne swaggered to Number Two in the charts with 'Lazy', then waltzed home with an Ivor Novello Award (how proper is that?), the X-Press 2 three are back.

Back with Makeshift Feelgood, the follow-up to the 100,000 selling Muzikizum. Back with an album you'll be rocking all summer, and into the wintry beyond. Presenting Rocky, Diesel and Ashley Beedle.

Gentlemen, if you will: describe your role in X-Press 2.

Diesel: "Indescribable."

Beedle: "That's a really hard one."

Rocky: "We all have an equal role in X-Press 2. All bringing our own ideas and influences to the session. Some days one person may take up the baton and the rest of us will leave them to it. We're basically all sound designers that work with a great engineer (Greg Fleming), who actually makes sense of our madness!"

Once upon a happy hour, Rocky, Diesel and Ashley Beedle's roles could be described as just three of the UK's most respected DJs, backroom boffins and committed partiers. They gigged and produced and remixed together, and separately, and as The Ballistic Brothers. Uniting in the studio in the early Nineties and shifting shape into X-Press 2, they marshalled their unparalleled knowledge of the history of house to make huge, hard-hitting, one-off singles for Junior Boy's Own, beginning with wee hours clubfloor monsters 'Muzik Express' and 'London Xpress'. As the millennium turned they re-emerged as artists, now signed to Skint, with 'AC/DC'. If you went clubbing even once in the last decade-and-a-half, you clubbed to X-Press 2.

In 2002 they took another hairpin curve and dropped 'Lazy', the now-classic sound of Talking Heads' David Byrne oozing laidback funk over sublime beats. The parent album Muzikizum was largely instrumental, but the massive single was a different kettle of big fish, little fish. Nighttime pleasures gave way to daytime radio; darkened clubfloors yielded to bold, colourful pop: X-Press 2 had moved into sunny pastures new.

Then, silence from X-Press 2. Were Rocky, Diesel and Beedle frightened by becoming, long after they'd left short trousers, something like pop stars? Were they paralysed by the question of how to follow a landmark modern dance tune? Where have they been for the last four years?

For licensing and syncing of music by X-Press 2 visit syncinc