A couple days ago, dance-music blog I Love Bass posted the above photo on their Facebook. It’s a picture of breakthrough dance act Disclosure — aka brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, who just released one of the year’s best albums — taken during a performance with Eliza Doolittle, at UK radio station Capital FM’s Summertime Ball. It’s kind of a blurry shot, but you can clearly make out one detail: The power cord from the duo’s mixer is just … dangling, not plugged into anything at all.

Naturally, the image caused some controversy, with many commenters accusing the band of “miming” their performance — or “pulling a David Guetta.” Now, though, Guy has responded to the cries of inauthenticity. Yes, he says, Disclosure was miming their performance. But they weren’t trying to hide that fact. As he writes:

Capital FM made us do this show with a backing track playing but allowed the vocalists to sing. They said that they had to trigger the tracks themselves to sync visuals. We pleaded with them for weeks and weeks to let us play fully live or at least let us mix but they just weren’t having it.

[snip]

Notice also that we didnt try and make it look like we were mixing. We left the fucking plug on the floor on purpose, didnt even plug phono leads into the master out, turned all the EQs fully down and the master out AND DIDNT EVEN TAKE HEADPHONES for god sake!!

Check out Guy’s full response below or here:

Hello I Love Bass Music and everyone who is talking about this photo… so. here is how and why this happened. Capital FM made us do this show with a backing track playing but allowed the vocalists to sing. They said that they had to trigger the tracks themselves to sync visuals. We pleaded with them for weeks and weeks to let us play fully live or at least let us mix but they just weren’t having it. You will also notice this was the same for a lot of the dance acts playing that day (i.e. the duke dumont pic you posted)

It was incredibly frustrating and horrible for us to hear our music at Wembley and not actually be able to play it ourselves, as anyone with any knowledge about disclosure knows that we play fully live seen here… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THeSe3XqObQ AND can mix…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAhk7FXb-I

Notice also that we didnt try and make it look like we were mixing. We left the fucking plug on the floor on purpose, didnt even plug phono leads into the master out, turned all the EQs fully down and the master out AND DIDNT EVEN TAKE HEADPHONES for god sake!! LOL if at any point we touched the mixer it was…well, you try standing infront of 80,000 people and not touching the mixer… go on… its really hard hahaha!

I would also like to point out that people like David Guetta ect who have also been accused of pretending to mix, actually try and cover it up and pretend to blend tracks into one another and hide it… but with us, we played three songs with vocalists b2b with gaps in between, so even if we had been mixing, there would have been no beat matching involved anyway + we didnt try and hide it at all!!

But yeah it was a very strange experience and one we will not be going through again. Capital have been amazing to us and they play our songs roughly 400 times a week across their various networks and we wanted to thank them for all the support.

Guy x