How Benjamin Stanford became Dub FX

Many of you will, like me, have been introduced to Benjamin Standford (a.k.a. Dub FX) back in 2008, when videos of him went viral on a still-relatively-young video sharing site: YouTube.

After it came out, I remember sitting in my parents’ living room, making them listen to Love Someone with headphones on, so that they could get the full experience of watching him create complex soundscapes with just his voice.

I wanted — no, I think I needed — my parents to see just how professional a street performer can sound and look. It was important to me that my family understood what was quickly becoming a bit of an obsession for me: the awesomeness of the universe of street performance.

Since then, two things have happened. Benjamin has built an independent record label and huge international fan base, toured the world and collaborated with huge names. Also, when my job feels a bit too boring, or thankless, or overwhelming, or difficult, or uncertain, I’ll listen to the above song again to replenish my energy.

Anyway, what I loved about our interview most was seeing the way in which he came to be a busker. Benjamin was what I’m calling a “street nepo baby”, destined to follow in the family footsteps of making money from making art on the street.

What follows is the first half of that genesis, from birth to buying a loop station.

My mom and dad were punks, right? They were proper punks in the 80s. When I was in my mum's belly, she used to make her own jewellery and sell it on a wooden board. I remember we'd always be hanging out at markets until I was maybe three or four years old. We lived in a van sometimes, and we'd travel around, and they'd sell their earrings on the street.

Eventually what happened — because my mum was quite talented, very creative — was that this woman from a big department store in Australia, Myers, saw the earrings and said, “Hey, can you sell me 2,000 of these?”

That was their first order, and Myers kept coming back for more. My mum designed the jewellery, and my dad would go on these trips to Taiwan and get them mass produced. All of a sudden we went from living in commission flats [Note: these are what Australians call council flats / projects] to being middle class. I watched my parents lift themselves out of poverty from literally selling shit on the street.

My mum also writes, plays songs and does jam nights, her brother plays keys and sings in a church choir, and my whole family on my Dad’s side are professional actors and musicians. So I’ve just grown up around art my whole life.

No one ever told me you can't do that, you've got to be a lawyer or some shit. Although my dad, funnily enough, is the black sheep of the family, quite strait laced. He’d say to me that all his brothers and sisters were following their dreams, but none of them had any money. You have to make money to have a comfortable life, so you have to be clever when creating a business. That always stuck with me. It's true: you have to figure out a way to make money.

I used to sit and watch buskers all the time. I used to love watching them. There's this street festival where I grew up in Melbourne called the St. Kilda Festival. It's been going on since the 90s. I used to go around by myself on my rollerblades to find all the different buskers.

I said to myself, “One day I'm going to do that.” Since I was a kid, I always wanted to busk. But I thought I was going to do a circle act because that was the stuff that I was really into. I just thought it was so amazing how they could get the crowd to come in. I’d watch them do their act a bunch of times, studying the formula: tell jokes, do close up magic to reel them in, slowly build a crowd, talk about and eventually do the grand finale, and then try and fill the hat with as much money as possible.

I was always telling stories and being funny at dinner, so my parents told me I should be an actor. I started doing drama classes and music in high school, because I thought being good at singing would be helpful for my acting career — for musicals and things like that. Then I realised that all the people in drama class annoyed the shit out of me, while all the people in music class were really cool, so I found myself wanting to hang out with the musicians more than the actors.

I grew up loving the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Anthony Kiedis was my idol. I wanted to be him and jump around on stage and swing my hair around and have my top off and all that shit. I knew I could do that. I could pretend. I could pretend to be a front man and act. I didn't know I could sing yet, but Anthony Kiedis couldn’t sing, so apparently that didn’t matter.

I was in 5 different bands in high school. The musicians all loved me because none of them were singers or front men. They were all just geek musicians, metal heads mostly. I was the one with the balls to get in front of the band, head bang and have a good time.

In the metal band I began experimenting with making my voice sound different, putting it through a guitar pedal, using delay, distortion, compression and reverbs, taking vocal effects processing to another level. I could make my voice sound like a bass guitar, so in this jazz band, I'd be like, “Yo, let me do a bass solo,” and the crowd fucking loved that shit. I felt I’d stumbled onto something really fresh, something no one else was doing at the time.

Then I watched this documentary about Bobby McFerrin. He did this whole show with just his microphone and his voice, and I thought that was incredible. I listened to his album and realised that he’d re-tracked himself, he’d built up these songs just with his voice. And I thought, how would you do that live? So I bought a loop station.