🐙Discopussy w/ TOTALLY ENORMOUS EXTINCT DINOSAURS
FRI | 12.12.25 | 10PM
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs makes music at the central point between pop, electro, house and melodic, tuff rave – and his debut album ‘Trouble’ is just more proof that TEED’s Orlando Higginbottom is one of the most fascinating, brilliant and musically kaleidoscopic artists in the world right now. And he’s about to stomp all over everywhere.
When Orlando Higginbottom was four or five he worked out how to work his Dad’s CD player and soon had three favourites on repeat: Rossini’s ‘Overtures’, Holst’s ‘The Planets’ and Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody In Blue’. “Classical music was 99% of my listening until I was about ten. I thought Mozart was really cool. I had a book, an A-Z of composers, that I read every night. They were like rock ‘n’ roll stars to me.”
This remained the case until the boy chorister (his father is the conductor of the choir at New College, Oxford) hit 13, at which point he absorbed another culturally deep and musically exciting musical genre: jungle.
Our intrepid pre-TEED also discovered Avid, one of those local record shops that doesn’t exist any more with Nicky Blackmarket posters on the wall and a pile of psy-trance flyers on the counter, and where fresh promos would land from London every Thursday and Friday. He careered through the whole junglist spectrum, starting with Zinc and Hype’s Tru Playaz crew and getting heavily into Nico’s No U-Turn Records. It was only when Bad Company and Pendulum started reducing the creativity beyond nil that he stopped buying the music – although that hasn’t stopped him running up a current bill of £360 with Discogs to fill the gaps in his collection.
So how do we get from this evangelical member of the junglist youth wing to the kaleidoscopically vibrant world of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs? It’s a swerving, careering route that turns hard right through an unsuccessful term reading music at Bristol University (“I got messy every night and then dropped out. I knew the course wasn’t right for me”) and then sharp left to a year in Leeds on a music production course. His time there coincided with the early days of dubstep and DMZ’s regular excursions to the West Indian Centre in Chapeltown. “I was seeing all these students taking their first K in this big Jamaican community centre. I found it weird. Why is this suddenly cool? It could have been cool ten years ago. Some of it, I liked, but I was lost, and drum ‘n’ bass had got so shit, I was like ‘fuck it: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs’. I’m going to dress up as a dinosaur, make weird electro shit and just enjoy it.”
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