The Skinny's 3rd Favourite LP of 2010: Caribou - Swim

Top 10 of 2010
No.3 Caribou - Swim
interview for the skinny

Canadian Dan Snaith has been making good records for over a decade now, but in 2010 he made a great one. After years of dipping his toes into dance music, for Swim he dived right in. The Skinny met Caribou backstage at Glasgow’s ABC to talk about his greatest album yet and the year that surrounded its release.

“I've been pretty lucky generally. I’ve had some bad reviews but the majority of them have been nice. I actually like reading negative reviews, I have agreed with people who've criticised certain aspects of my music. With Andorra, everyone was like: ‘here's this guy who really likes 60s psychedelia, he's a retro kinda guy’, and I was like: ‘fuck, that wasn't the point!’”

Andorra won the Polaris Prize in 2008 – Canada’s Mercury Prize-equivalent – but Snaith was determined to move on to new things. He’s open about the inspiration for the direction he took: it’s one of the guys sitting in the next room, preparing to play before him tonight.

“The last track on Andorra was me trying to figure out how James [Holden] makes music” he says. “The last track, Niobe, was me trying to figure out how to get that dynamic of his, of something growing and falling apart simultaneously. And even though there was over a year in-between making the records, that was the starting point for this record. I went back to it and thought: ‘there's just so many different ways this track could go.’

“I was so happy with [Swim] when I finished it, but I also thought it might confuse people. It seemed to me that Andorra was a much more straightforward record, it was more concise pop songs. It really stuns me that Swim seems to have captured people's imaginations in some way that previous albums I've made haven't. I’m so happy because this is my favourite one, but I really didn't think it was going to be everybody else’s favourite one.

“Thinking about the situation in which it was made and then fast-forwarding to now, it's totally mind-boggling. I'd love to say I make music because I want to share it with people, but I make music for entirely selfish reasons, I just love doing it so much, and the thrill of when things go right in the studio or at home, that's the most amazing thing. But then this is just... we've always had good shows, but it's never been the party atmosphere it is now.

“Swim feels like the beginning of something rather than the end, even though the end of Andorra was kinda the beginning of this one, it was also the end of making psychedelic poppy records, I feel like I've done what I wanted to do with that. I don’t want to make the same record again, but it feels like there's lots of points I can shoot off from on Swim.”

The Skinny's 6th Favourite LP of 2010: Beach House - Teen Dream

Top 10 of 2010:
No. 6 Beach House - Teen Dream
interview for the skinny

Beach House were fully aware of the majesty of third album Teen Dream as they were preparing it this time last year. “At one point I was more excited about every single song [on Teen Dream] that I had ever been before,” guitarist Alex Scally tells The Skinny, “even songs where I don’t really do anything, like Real Love. There was a recording of that we made and I was trying to figure out how to make this thing hold and I probably listened to it fifty times, every time enjoying every single second of it.”

Teen Dream has been a breakthrough for Beach House, who are now touring with some of the biggest bands in indie music, but they say nothing’s changed since their self-titled debut and its acclaimed follow-up Devotion. “Every record is a different world,” singer Victoria Legrand says, “but the attention on us now I feel is the result of our steady and persistent working. It doesn’t feel that different from what we were doing before but people are now noticing more.”

It’s not glamorous, they insist, and work it certainly is: “I think we’re at the 150 [shows] mark right now for the year, which is pretty crazy”, Alex says. But now that they’ve got here, he doesn’t see the band getting any bigger.

“We make music that’s all about intimacy, I don’t think that would translate to an arena. We played at a 1,500 person place and that blew our mind, it felt great, but I think that might be the limit. We just did a tour with Vampire Weekend and 14,000 people were at the Hollywood Bowl, I think it really taught us where we think the upper extent of our music is. Even if we could sell a show of 2,000 people, it might not work.” Such music-over-money ideals are admirable, and they’re surely about to be tested.

Introducing: Sparrow & The Workshop

Introducing: Sparrow & The Workshop
(well, not if you've been paying attention here already)

feature for Clash

The Scottish live music scene is about as healthy as it's ever been right now, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of new young bands trying to live out rockstar dreams based on little more than the ability to detune a guitar. Earplugs are always recommended, to protect your ears and to protect your sanity. But sometimes you catch one: a new band several steps above the others, like athletes where sloths went before, and it all becomes worthwhile. I knew Sparrow & The Workshop were special from the moment I first saw them live in late 2008. Now they're releasing their debut album and, whaddaya know, I was right!

Sparrow formed two years ago after Jill O'Sullivan (lead vocals) and Nick Packer (guitar, bass) moved to Glasgow from London. There they met Gregor Donaldson (drums, vocals), and the boys began to put some flesh on the bones of songs Jill was already writing. Since then they've been gigging relentlessly, in support of British Sea Power, Idlewild and others, and they've also released two well-received EPs, Sleight of Hand and Into The Wild, which have now been combined to make the album. Jill's high, agile voice, like Joni Mitchell's but with a Southern twang, has instant appeal, but a great singer would be wasted without great songs, and debut album Crystals Fall has those in abundance.

"People call us 'folk noir'," Gregor says. "They say it's just a wee bit weird, in a good way, or they say it's a new take on a timeless kind of music. We enjoy making it, so I'd like that to come across, that we're having fun." Early reviews have highlighted the dark themes of their lyrics and the folk roots of their songwriting, but guitarist Nick isn't afraid of causing a racket, as in the thrilling crescendos of Crystals and Into The Wild, and the sliding solo of Swam Like Sharks.

Gregor's drumming is crucial too. He's not content to do the basic 4/4 support while the song marches on. Instead, he's always looking for gaps, chances to duck in and out, like a winger using tricks as well as pace to beat his man. It's no coincidence that his drumming takes centre-stage on some of the album's best songs, such as Into The Wild and Devil Song.

"We've had some pretty nice things said about us already," Gregor says, and those positive vibes are only going to continue.



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Meursault: Escape From Auld Reekie

feature for the skinny
(crappy photo taken by me on my phone about a year ago at The Bowery)

In the 16th century, after defeat at the Battle of Flodden, Edinburgh built a wall around its limits to protect itself from an expected invasion by the English. They never came, but the Flodden Wall proved useful to the city's rulers as a means of penning citizens in, making criminals easier to catch and traders easier to tax. The wall is mostly gone, but some mysterious force still seems to pen the capital's musical citizens in.

Every August, Edinburgh becomes the cultural capital of the western world, yet its own contemporary music rarely travels far. For two years, the chatter around these parts has been dominated by Meursault, and if you've been to a small-scale gig here recently, you've probably seen them. Meursault have performed live hundreds of times now and won new fans every time. Our readers poll saw their debut album, Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, qualify as one of the best Scottish albums of the last ten years. But despite their obvious talent, the hype has remained dispiritingly local.

It's time they burst through the wall.

For the uninitiated, Meursault are a six-piece (formerly four-piece) led by singer-songwriter Neil Pennycook, a big bald guy with a breathtaking boom of a voice. Other members combine autoharp-strumming with Ableton-programming, korg-playing and banjo-picking: they play modern forms of indie-rock and electronica, but with strong roots in Scottish folk. Pennycook has a versatile voice, but when he yells, jaws drop.

We caught up with Neil to hear more about Meursault's upcoming second album, All Creatures Will Make Merry.

How did you want your second album to be different from the first?
The main difference would be that I'm a lot more certain of what it is that I'm trying to say with these songs compared with those on the first record. If I've learned anything, it's to trust my own opinion and to work at my own pace. Also, playing with a full live band has helped shape this record considerably.

Do you mean - expanding to a six-piece?
Yeah. The two new members, Pete on cello and Phil on guitar, have opened up a huge range of possibilities with these songs. As well as other less obvious benefits such as Phil also acting as our booking agent which brings a whole new level of organisation to things. With Pete joining it gave me the opportunity to work closely with someone who understands music from a completely different perspective than myself, what with his being classically trained and his ability to understand every facet of a song as he hears it.

What would you say your influences have been for this record?
I've been listening to a lot of The Microphones, Mount Eerie. And I guess that's influenced my production style a fair bit.

How do you expect people will react?
I hope people get what I was trying to achieve with the production and arrangements as well. It's this idea that just because a song has a grander arrangement, or is more than just guitar, bass and drums, that shouldn't necessarily entail that it needs slick production, which always seems to be the case and has been for as long as people have been making records.

Edinburgh's happy to have Meursault, but logistical problems have undoubtedly played a part in keeping them here. They're signed to a bedroom-sized local label, Song By Toad, better known as a blog run by Matthew Young, and there's only so much he can do. And with six members, co-ordinating time off work to tour has proved extremely difficult. Hence most of their gigs in the last couple years have been in the homely Bowery basement, downstairs at what is now the Roxy. They were able to rehearse there regularly, and played so often they became like an unofficial house band. Just around the corner from the Bowery, on Drummond St, is a still-standing portion of the Flodden Wall. They're very close to getting beyond it.

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Caribou: Selling Live Water

interview feature for the skinny (revised)

"I thought everybody was going to hate this album," Dan Snaith aka Caribou tells The Skinny over the phone. Incorrect, red pen, cross. Show your working! "I've never been one to play it safe or want to not-rock the boat, but this is a big left-turn, there's much more dance influence, there's much less in the way of poppy songs." OK, so you follow up an award-winning breakthrough album with something very different, and you risk alienating fans. But no-one's going to hate Caribou's magnificent new album Swim.

Snaith is a very open and articulate talker. After half an hour's chat, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that his brain responds to music in a mathematical way. Partly that's because his back-story involves a lot of maths and it's hard to resist a good narrative, but partly it's because of the way he talks about music: like a song is a set of problems that can be solved, expressed in sound instead of numbers.

Dan Snaith's back-story (involves a lot of maths)

The Snaith family could hardly be described as multi-talented. "My dad was a maths professor, my mom was a maths teacher, my sister's a maths professor, my grandfather was a maths teacher, my brother-in-law is a maths professor." According to Wikipedia, his sister Nina works in random matrix theory and quantum chaos; just so you know. Dan himself has a Ph.D. in maths from Imperial College, London, where he now lives.

The very talented Snaith family were based in a little Canadian town called Dundas, in Ontario, population 25,000. Without a music scene, Dan's musical education lacked the constraints of received wisdom. "When I was in high school I was listening to Plastikman and Yes. Maybe if I'd grown up in New York or London or somewhere there'd have been a sense of context to the music, like 'oh yeah people are part of a scene here'. For me it was just like: this sounds exciting, I dont care if it was made fifty years ago or yesterday, I dont care where in the world it comes from. I didnt have any context for anything I listened to, because there was nothing musically going on in the little shithole town where I grew up."

About ten years ago Snaith began releasing glitchy, Warp-like electronic music using cut-up and re-worked samples, under the name Manitoba, but he had to change the name after a legal threat from the lead singer of The Dictators, Handsome Dick Manitoba. "Manitoba is a Canadian province, so it was irksome being told by an American asshole that nobody could use the name of a Canadian province apart from him! So Caribou is the North American name for reindeer and as a word it evokes the same kind of things and places as Manitoba does, to me." It has nothing to do with the Pixies song. "No, I was into Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and really horrible, terribly unfashionable progressive rock when I was a teenager!"

Manitoba's second album Up In Flames (2003) was the first to catch a prevailing wind, because it contained more accessible melodies smudged by reverb and echo, exactly as the bright, blurry cover art suggested. Having approximated his aesthetic, The Milk Of Human Kindness (2005, as Caribou) improved on it, and Andorra (2007) was better again, winning the 2008 Polaris Prize, the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury. Continuing the pattern, Swim is even better again, though it's far more based on rhythms than melodies. As he said.



The way Dan Snaith talks about music

Stuff like this: "I'm influenced by hearing someone else's music and thinking 'How the fuck do they do that, technically?', and trying to do my own take on it." If you add these notes, and these sounds, in this order, at this tempo, do you get this emotion, every time? And this: "I'd already settled on what I wanted to do for Andorra, I wanted to figure out how to write pop music, how to compose and arrange it," as if pop music is a quantifiable thing, a science that can be learned, with right and wrong answers at the end. And this, about lyrics: "Rather than on Andorra just sketching some hypothetical scene of two people falling in love, say, just this kind of format for lyrics to mirror what was going on musically in the song, this time it just felt kinda natural that the lyrics had more to do with things going on in my life." If I'd misheard that word 'format' as 'formula', it wouldn't change the meaning, would it? This is what a pop song looks like, now see if you can solve it for x.

And this all begs the question: is that how more of us, or all of us, respond to music, even if we don't realise it? Some people hear a power ballad and recognise the melody as being dramatic and emotional, and then feel the emotion and feel the drama; others hear the same melody and recognise the same formula, but refuse to be led to the same conclusion. What causes these opposite reactions? In an interview last year with Eye Weekly.com, Snaith said "Once I feel like I can do something, it becomes less interesting to do it again." He's found x.

"In high school I was in an indie rock band and all my friends were into that kinda shit but I hated it" Snaith says. "I didn't see the attraction to it until I got to university and then it totally changed, it became this very creative, abstract, more imaginative thing." OK, I cheated there. In the first quote he's talking about music. In the second quote he's talking about maths. Where do you draw the line?



Swim isn't about maths, at all. According to the press sheet, he wanted to make "dance music that sounds like it’s made out of water rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does". "The last track on Andorra [Niobe] is essentially an attempt to rip off James Holden's music," he said on the phone, "to figure out how it works, music where elements seem to breathe and grow and then fall apart. It's a very non-machine-like process and I couldn't figure out how he did it, but I loved the idea".

"On a song like Kaili, all the synthesisers are constantly washing around, nothing sits still, everything's moving, appearing and disappearing. So there's this back and forth idea of musical fluidity." So that's why this record is called Swim? "And also just for the totally naive reason that I became obsessed with swimming over the last year, which probably had an influence on me wanting to make the music sound liquid."

So is the clanging percussion on Bowls really made with... bowls? "They're Tibetan singing bowls," he says. "You know you can run a stick around a glass with water? I picked up these bowls while I was in Asia cos I'd always liked the sound of them. I did this kind of thing a lot with this album: I sampled the sound of these two bowls individually and then played them on a keyboard as if they were the starting point for a synthesiser, changed the filter, changed the envelope. So it's kind of a hybrid between a bowl being hit and it being a synthesiser."

Even when Snaith shows his working, he still gets remarkable results.

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Interview: Dirty Projectors

interview feature for clash magazine

Depressingly often, talking to a musician is far less interesting than listening to their music. When "we just make songs what we like, like" is the most perceptive explanation a band can give about their creative processes, the facepalm is instinctive. That's not the case with Dave Longstreth, mastermind of the Brooklyn-based Dirty Projectors, whose new album Bitte Orca is one of the best records of the year so far. Despite Bitte Orca being an endlessly inventive and fascinating listen - and a fun one too, beard-scratchers - he talks a real good game, if you can actually get hold of him. Sure, he's performing with David Byrne, and yeah, he's in the studio with Bjork; we've heard all these excuses before, press person! When Clash finally does touch base, he's still juggling a million things to do, but while we've got him, he's going to make an impression.

Dirty Projectors have been a going concern since 2002, and used to include two members of Vampire Weekend. In recent years they've been cultivating a reputation as a band easy to admire, but not quite so easy to love. Isn't the idea of a chopped-and-screwed rock opera about a suicidal Don Henley kinda amazing? That's Dirty Projectors 2005 album The Getty Address. And what if a band tried to cover an entire album that they hadn't listened to for 15 years, basing the whole thing on blurry fragments of teenage memories? That's Rise Above, from 2007, in a conceptual nutshell. Both albums had plenty of great moments, but ultimately felt like they were born of better ideas than execution. Bitte Orca isn't so easy to narrow down, but it seems like the absence of an overarching theme has taken the edge off its abstract experimentalism, allowing the band more room for baser aims, like hooks.

So I ask Longstreth to explain what Bitte Orca's about, really, and he says this: "Collapsing dualities, conciliating factional antagonisms, creating Mexican blankets of formal beauty and arresting emotionality". I don't quite know what to say to that, so he continues: "Parsing the future for potsherds of the past, reggae kaleidoscopes, goofing around with noise-gated snare drums". There's a pause. "'Stillness Is The Move' is sort of a love song" he continues, much to my relief. "The beat is based on T-Pain. We commissioned a radio mix of the song by the guy who mixes all of Timbaland's records, but the mix we made sounded way better, so we didn't use it." 'Stillness Is The Move' is the album's first single, a juddering, trilling, soaring kind of alien R&B ballad, featuring bright lead vocals from Amber Coffman. Explaining the new prominence of both female band members -- following song 'Two Doves', a clear tribute to mournful German chanteuse Nico, is sung by Angel Deradoorian -- Longstreth says "I wanted it to feel like a Beatles album, each of the singers with a lead number, playing with foreground and background. So much of our singing is about sharing a melody between two voices, or dividing a harmony into component voices, you know. Giving the girls a lead number felt like a natural application of that idea to the album as a whole."



Like all Dirty Projectors albums, Bitte Orca is packed full of ideas - but this is the one which gets them all to coalesce together most smoothly. It's all pretty odd on first listen: you'll hear flashes of Peter Gabriel, King Sunny Ade, Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, Talking Heads, The Fiery Furnaces, Arthur Russell and Frank Zappa in there at different times, not forgetting the aforementioned T-Pain and Nico. Somehow, even though he's pulling from so many different boxes, Longstreth still manages to put his hundred-piece puzzle together and form a clear picture, a picture that looks in whole like no-one else. It's been enough to convince two of the world's most critically revered musicians, David Byrne and Bjork, to collaborate with Longstreth in the last few months. Firstly, Byrne and Dirty Projectors recorded 'Knotty Pine' together for the Red Hot Organisation's Dark Was The Night charity compilation this winter. Then Bjork got in touch, having been impressed by a Dirty Projectors cover version of her own 'Hyperballad', and Longstreth agreed to write a suite for her to sing, again in support of an AIDS organisation. The six-song Mount Wittenberg Orca, which is planned for release "sometime", is about an imagined moment of eye-contact between Coffman and a whale. "Bjork is a huge inspiration for me," Longstreth says, "It was a big honour to write music for her. She said the only other person's music she's ever sung was Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire." That's not a name that often gets dropped in interviews with indie-rock bands. But Dirty Projectors are not a normal indie-rock band.

Chic: Good Times Guaranteed

feature for the skinny

Nile Rodgers has an abundance of amazing stories to tell. Some of them are about his band Chic, who were the biggest group of the late 70s disco explosion, and his side-project Sister Sledge, who had several more dancefloor filling hits. Some of them involve world superstars like Diana Ross or David Bowie or Madonna, because be produced the biggest-selling albums any of them made. Some of them involve other stars like Debbie Harry, Duran Duran, INXS and Mick Jagger, whom he also produced. And some of them involve the birth of hip-hop, at which he was present, thanks to The Sugarhill Gang’s unauthorised borrowing of Chic’s Good Times to lie under Rapper’s Delight. He enjoys telling these stories, and The Skinny enjoyed letting him.

Like, there was the one about the time Debbie Harry took him around New York to visit some hip-hops – congregations of hip youths, hopping – where at every single one, Good Times was being spun, over and over. Some time later, he went to a nightclub and heard it again, only for the DJ to start rapping on top of it – "I said a hip-hop, a hippy to the hippy to hip hip hop..." – only, it wasn't the DJ. "I looked in the DJ booth and I thought it was him and a couple of friends rapping over a musical bedtrack which they had created." That was a reasonable assumption to make, because for a while fans had been jumping on stage at Chic gigs to grab the mic and rap. "We didn't mind seeing this in a live arena, like what we'd seen at a hip-hop, that was cool 'cos it was just a performance thing, and it was interesting to watch. To know that people had rehearsed rhymes and routines to perform over Good Times – that was cool!" But the DJ wasn't rapping in the booth, the vocals were coming off the vinyl. "The thing that was ironic was that Rapper's Delight generated more revenue than Good Times because it was only available on 12", so you'd pay $3 for a song that we would sell for 79cents, almost four times the amount! When it comes to artists sharing work there's a sort of unwritten rule that some things are cool. I always find it a little bit weird when we all know where an idea came from but the person changes it enough that, y'know, it's cool. I'm pretty sure you can think of dozens and dozens of records you know that come from another record. I mean I do it all the time myself, we all do! But there's a difference between inspiration and plagiarism. So, basically that happened with Sugarhill Gang, they crossed that line."

It’s interesting to think of that in light of Rodgers' unexpected explanation of Chic’s formation. “When you're coming up with a band and coming up with a concept, you work with artistic ideas the same way you would do a sculpture, you mould those ideas or reinterpret them. It's very clear in today's musical world there's more of a collage culture, because of hip-hop, it's a re-interpretive culture.” In the early 70s, Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards had become fans of Roxy Music, and especially liked the glamour portrayed by Bryan Ferry's beautiful model girlfriends on the covers. Meanwhile their friend (and later keyboard player) Rob Sabino was hanging around with a guitarist called Ace Frehley. “This was before Kiss really blew up and got signed to Casablanca. They were still an underground band, but they were already doing the makeup thing. So basically the concept of Chic was a fusion of those two ideas, the Roxy Music covers with the girls and the Kiss logo and Kiss's anonymity because of their makeup. Our version of Kiss's anonymity was putting on suits and pretending to be bankers from France or something!”

The bankers from France didn't stay anonymous for long. "We thought in our hearts artistically we were doing the right things and it would be successful. When Dance Dance Dance forced the black station to play our music because the white station had started playing it first, we realised that, OK, we got something pretty unique here!" In this country, that doesn't really make sense. What's a white station? "David Bowie told me something really fantastic," Nile Rodgers begins another anecdote. "He was explaining to me why people from the UK know so much more about music than your average American. It's because of the way that the radio was formatted, on BBC [Radio] 1 they were just playing whatever was happening, they didn't care whether it was blues or jazz or R&B or dance or whatever." Contrarily, in America, radio stations only play specific niches to specific demographics. This is important, because it's difficult to think of disco without also thinking of the backlash it provoked in America in the late 70s. If disco isn't your cup of tea, that's fine; but in Chicago in 1979, 75,000 people donated disco records to be exploded, with a bomb, in a Baseball stadium. Disco sucks, they said, and then BOOM, and big cheers all round. Isn't that a bit much? Isn't that a bit like a book burning?

That rabid hatred of disco was likely driven by homophobia and racism, but music always finds a way to challenge preconceptions. In these senses, the disco explosion in the States mirrored the UK's punk breakthrough. Both genres were propelled by a new generation rebelling against what rock had become in the mid-70s – no longer the vibrant and exciting challenge to the status quo it represented to the post-war baby boomers, but the status quo itself. Punk's anti-authoritarianism took on confrontational guises, while disco became a vehicle to challenge the homophobic attitudes of the mainstream, as embodied by the macho rock fan. Most disco artists preferred messages of positivity, community, and triumph through dancing – rather than the aggressiveness of punk – as exemplified on Chic hits like Everybody Dance and Good Times. And, of course, Chic became so popular that stations demarcated for white music and white listeners programmed them too. Popular art melts more hardened attitudes than moralising texts or lectures do.

The story of Chic's inspiration coming from Roxy Music and Kiss is telling too. How many of the 75,000 seeking to burn disco down in Chicago donated Chic records and were also fans of Kiss or Roxy Music? It's fair to assume that there were probably quite a lot. With American radio stations so precisely targetted towards narrow demographics of listener, it's no surprise that American listeners heaped a whole pile of identity issues onto everything they heard. Musicians don't care about demographics; musicians are inspired by music, and then they make their own music; it's only marketeers and listeners who make it tribal. Of course, British fans conflate music taste and identity politics too, but we're lucky enough to have a dominant set of non-commercial radio stations which expose us to a wider range. "In America we're very compartmentalised by race and genre and stuff like that," Rodgers continues. "I remember when I was a kid the first time I played in England. There was some song called The Ugly Duckling. We were like R&B guys, and the audience was grooving to us, and then when we finished performing some guy came on-stage and went [singing] 'there once was an ugly duckling', and we were like 'you gotta be fucking kidding me!'".

The transatlantic success of Dance Dance Dance was followed by more seductive grooves on Everybody Dance, Le Freak, I Want Your Love, Good Times and My Forbidden Lover. Then as Chic's successes scattered, Rodgers and Edwards took on the struggling Sister Sledge and gave them We Are Family, He's The Greatest Dancer, Lost In Music and Thinking Of You. Rodgers is especially enthused when I mention He's The Greatest Dancer as a personal favourite. "I really dig what you just said there, because it's funny, a song like He's The Greatest Dancer doesn't get mentioned as much as I believe it should do because it was overshadowed by We Are Family. But it's one of my favourite songs that I've ever written! How often do you hear a diminished chord in a pop song? I make a big deal of that diminished chord, it goes [singing] 'Mweu! He's the Greatest Dancer!' We don't get a chance to do that that much in a pop song and we pulled it off there!" By the turn of the decade, Rodgers was hot property. He was approached to resuscitate Diana Ross's struggling career with Diana (1980), and did just that. Familiar sounding hit singles Upside Down and I'm Coming Out even led to the criticism that Ross was just a new vocalist for Chic. In a previous interview, Rodgers recounted how Ross was suspicious that singing "I'm Coming Out" might lead listeners to think she was gay. Rodgers persuaded her otherwise, that "I'm Coming Out" had an innoccuous meaning, and it worked, though he hoped that the song might become a gay anthem. Ross embraced her new iconic status, encouraged to do so by a career now revived to the tune of ten million album sales.

Later, Rodgers produced Bowie's biggest ever album Let's Dance (1983). "When I worked with him his concept was to do a really really big record, and that's not David's normal life." Only in the 80s could massive commercial success be an 'artistic concept'. This album, of course, spawned the chart-topping title track, and was Bowie's last essential full-length before the inevitable artistic demise. "I spent a very long time working with Duran Duran after Bowie," and 1984 duly gave LeBon's boys their two biggest hits yet - The Reflex and The Wild Boys. Then up-and-coming coquette Madonna chose Rodgers to produce Like a Virgin, and it launched her to superstardom. "The fact that Madonna's the biggest star in the world now doesn't change the fact that when I met Madonna, she couldn't really pay her rent! When I met Madonna I think I had, em, nine gold albums and eight platinum records and she hadn't even sold 300,000 records!" Like a Virgin, including the very era-appropriate Material Girl, sold over 20 million copies and turned Madonna into an icon too. Then there was Jeff Beck, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, The B-52s; sadly, there's only so many anecdotes Rodgers can recite in a half-hour phone call. He's got time for just one more."I think probably one of my favourite records that never really made it to the big time was Al Jarreau's L Is For Lover, and I know why - we sabotaged ourselves! Al Jarreau did a theme for the TV show Moonlighting and we thought our record was so artistically cool that we didn't want to put the theme for Moonlighting on our record, so we put it on another label's product, and that other record went platinum with our single as its lead record!"

At the end of July, Rodgers is coming to Scotland with some new bandmates for a Chic Organisation spectacular. Former core members Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson have both passed away, but Rodgers is sure that "all the musicians I know are the best people I've ever worked with. We do all the Chic stuff, but it's a bigger world than that, it's also Sister Sledge, it's Diana Ross. Now we've increased the set so we do a Bowie song, we do a Madonna song, we do this song called Spacer which we wrote for a French artist called Sheila B Devotion, and this will be the first time we've done that. Playing with Chic is one of my big loves. To think that I never have to stand on a stage and play a song that I didn't have anything to do with, that's incredible to me."

Nile Rodgers has an abundance of amazing songs to play.

Sparrow & The Workshop: They've Got It All

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Sparrow & The Workshop only formed a year ago, have never released a record, and their achievements so far have been modest, but you need to know about them. If only they'd ever toured, I'd have the T-shirt and a month off work to follow them. But that's for the future, because I'm in real danger of becoming a super-fan, and you are too.

If it's tempting to demarcate singer and songwriter Jill O'Sullivan as the 'Sparrow', and the rhythm section as 'The Workshop', that's not far from the truth, though they're very much a team. Jill used to perform solo as Dead Sparrow, but she benefits hugely from the creative input provided by drummer, Gregor, who also sings, and of bassist Nick. They found each other through Gumtree after Chicagoan Jill and Welshman Nick moved to Glasgow from London: serendipity saw them move into Gregor's girlfriend's flat, and the rest is history. But it's not, yet, they haven't actually achieved anything. This is it: they've had sessions with Vic Galloway and Edinburgh blogger Song By Toad, they've supported British Sea Power, and they've had discussions with "one or two" labels. Few others have cottoned on - now is a good time.

Your first stop to Sparrow super-fandom is the track which best shows off all their talents: The Devil Song. Beginning with an ominous duet, warning of doom like a ghost story told by a desert campfire, Gregor's galloping rhythm gives the song a cinematic transition, away from the story-tellers and into the story, harmonised over Nick's spaghetti western bassline. "I have to talk to frustrated people at my work, and some of them can be really mean and bitter," says Jill, "so I wanted to know how to be like that, how to get rid of your conscience and your heart so you can just be cruel without feeling bad about it." So that's what she means when the music grinds to a halt and the spotlight lands on her breath-stopping wail: "Take away my heart so I can be free!" It's a stunning climax, especially live where Gregor's drums sound more like a runaway train than a dashing horse.

But Sparrow & The Workshop's talents don't end there. The Last Chance is another tale with Southern Gothic themes, in which Jill's bittersweet twang flies dramatically over Gregor's rollicking, flaring rhythms. Try The Gun too, which wears a lulling acoustic melody like a mask, hiding a bleak tale of domestic abuse; and then there's Swam Like Sharks' impassioned folk lament, or You Got It All's soulful defiance.

"We’re working on an EP right now," offers Jill. "We’ve recorded about ten songs and we're still choosing," and it's apparently slated for "a spring release". But don't wait that long – go watch them live first. See the ones standing at the front, mindlessly clapping out of time, with glazed-over eyes and fixed dumb grins? That'll be us, the super-fans. Join the club.

So what're you waiting for?

First stop, their MySpace

also, their Song, By Toad session here (videos, 10 minutes)

and their fabulous Vic Galloway radio session here (audio, 20 minutes)

Best of 2008: #7 Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight

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This time last year Frightened Rabbit were playing in city centre bars around Scotland and not selling them out. Tonight, every ticket has gone, and we're in one of the biggest venues in the country. Sure, they're playing Edinburgh's Corn Exchange as support for Seattle indie darlings Death Cab For Cutie, but the suspicion that the Rabbit are a strong draw for much of this crowd is confirmed by the almost capacity attendance during their brief support slot. Frontman Scott Hutchison twice bigs up Death Cab for the crowd, seemingly because he can't quite believe that so many people would be there for his own group. The truth is Frightened Rabbit have taken a huge leap forward in 2008, thanks to a fantastic second album in The Midnight Organ Fight and a relentless touring schedule, and they've become a hot ticket. The Skinny first featured them in September 2007, but we were more focussed on FatCat mates The Twilight Sad last year; 2008 has been, in Swing Out Sister terms, their breakout year. So let's go back to the beginning lads: talk us through a life less ordinary in The Year Of Frightened Rabbit.

"This time last year the album had been done for three or four months," Scott tells us before the gig. "I think I knew it would be quite well received, cos I was very pleased with it, I'm not gonna lie, when I finished it I thought it was pretty good." Hold on a sec - so the second album was finished before the first was even released? Scott's brother Grant, the drummer, chips in "We always saw the first album as a kinda demos album, but when we gave FatCat the remixed mastered version they decided to put a full campaign behind it, so that meant pushing the next album back a bit". "This time last year we were pretty much sick of Sing The Greys" Scott says, "We were saying goodbye to that record and just really itching for people to hear the new one."

Early reports were good. "People were coming up and saying 'new album's fantastic by the way', and we'd ask where they'd got it, and they'd say 'Jetpacks'!" Apparently allowing friends (and now labelmates at FatCat) We Were Promised Jetpacks hear early copies wasn't the best idea. "By about March, Jetpacks had given it to pretty much everyone in Glasgow!" But apart from praise from pretty much everyone in Glasgow, the album was also attracting attention from international publications like Spin and Paste, as well as online zines like Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound, and of course The Skinny. The acclaim was almost unanimous - I say almost: "We got one from this guy from the Costa Del Sol Tribune, or something like that. He gave it a really scathing review, it was quite funny. He was saying 'I don't understand what they're trying to do, it's all over the place, they need to be specific and consistent'. One of his favourite things of the year was a book signing by Mick Hucknall, but, we're saying nothing."

So the big day arrives, April 14th, and it's a huge relief. "I was in Edinburgh actually" Scott says. "I went to Avalanche and bought a copy, and they were already playing it when I went in. I was like [clenches fist]!". "I went into FOPP and it was the same" says Grant, "they were playing it in there. We played the album from start to finish at Mono for free the day it came out. It had been such a long time, we'd been waiting for ages, so for Mono to fill up so quickly that they had to stop letting people in... that was quite a big moment. It felt real then."

But because the album hadn't dropped until late spring, most summer festivals had already booked their line-ups, and the Greys-era Rabbit weren't chosen for too many. They did T, and Belladrum, and Connect, and Summer Sundae, and went on a massive tour of the States which even led to an interview with ABC News in New York when a reporter became a fan. “The shows were getting busier, and as we got closer to Washington and New York we found out that those shows had both sold out. We'd never sold shows out well before the night, even here [in Scotland]. So Washington DC was technically our first sell out.” As we talk in Edinburgh, they’ve just come off another US tour, during which they had to swap with the original headliners because crowds were leaving after their support; and tonight is the third leg of a packed European schedule with Death Cab.

One new song that’s received a particularly rapturous live reception is Keep Yourself Warm. "It's now the standard closer for the set because people always want to sing along, and they really sing those lines with gusto" Scott says, referring to the jarring opening lyric. "I'll get my hole" is such a strange line to be sungalong-to because it's male-only, distinctly Scottish, and really, horribly crude. But it's true - men, women, and probably children, of every background at every gig they play, roar along jubilantly. Does Scott think everyone actually understands what it means? "They might interpret it as whole, with a w, as in 'I'll become complete'. But actually no - it's about fucking!"

As is the album title, of course - The Midnight Organ Fight ain’t something a band has when musical differences arise. So it’s nearly 2009. Frightened Rabbit will see in the bells down under, with a gig in Sydney, before taking a well-earned break before yet another US tour. I ask Scott whether he’s had any time to think about the future. “Well touring has become such a habitual thing, there's not much brainwork going in to what we do these days, so yeah I'm starting to think about what to write about. I can't do another break-up album, cos I haven't had one this year! Maybe it'll just be a bit less focussed on me”. What does that leave, politics? “OK, that's track one, ‘Yes, You Can‘!

And there, bands still struggling to sell out city centre bars, is your encouragement: in one thousand words, or right there in just three.

Broken Social Scene presents Brendan Canning: Something For All Of Us

review/interview for the skinnybroken social scene presents brendan canning - something for all of us (**)

“It’s a very confusing time for musicians,” Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning told The Skinny late last year in the bowels of Glasgow’s Arches. There to play with his BSS buddy Kevin Drew, then promoting his first solo album, Canning had to do Drew’s press while the main man was away dealing with unforeseen equipment problems. It was a confusing time for fans too, who wondered what the prefix to Drew’s record, ‘Broken Social Scene presents…’, meant for the future of the Canadian indie collective. But in answering the 'In Rainbows Model' question, which was legally obligatory for interviewers to ask at the time, Canning wrestled with an issue he would have to properly deal with himself in the summer of 2008.

After Canning’s first solo album, Something For All Of Us, was leaked a month ahead of its US release in May 2008, he decided to try to wrestle control of his music back by immediately releasing a fully mastered version for digital sale. Back in October, he told us: “You're not going to get mainstream radio support, so having music downloaded is an essential way to get your music heard and spread a fan base. We would not be in the position that we're in without that. But then you look at someone’s record collection and there's so many burned discs you think 'do they ever spend any money on records?’ They said 'home taping is killing the music business', but of course I made mix-tapes as a kid.”

And there’s no immediate danger of Broken Social Scene finishing, despite the increasing focus on solo records. It’s like the Wu-Tang Clan brand system, where everyone in the group helps each other out with their solo endeavours, without losing sight of the appeal of the central project. But the BSS project's membership has never been set in stone: Canning estimates an enrollment "in the 20s". “Kevin made a record where the trio was Kevin, Charles Spearin, and Ohad Benchetrit, but everyone in Broken Social Scene was involved. And when we're going out to tour the show, we're playing songs from that record and also Broken Social Scene songs. When we started this band in 2001, we had many different incarnations of the band who would put on different shows as members were in or out. There are people on my record who weren't involved in Broken Social Scene before, but I like to work with them. This is just the next phase of whatever being in a band is all about.”

But does it sound like BSS? Something For All Of Us is full of overdriven guitar, but not too loud – the overdrive is quiet enough to leave a fuzzy, ambient shadow. “I just want to continue to make music with my bandmates” he told me at the Arches, but it appears at times that this professional sense of duty is the only motivation for the record's existence. Artistic compulsion is a much healthier spur, but so much here is lacking spark that Canning must’ve included everything he’s got. Better songwriters would have discarded or worked harder to give meaning to, for example, the title track hook - "Everyone’s talking ‘bout something for all of us" - which frankly means absolutely nothing. If the title is supposed to indicate an appeal to universality, then it only achieves that in the sense that lots of people like bland music. Unfortunately, Something For All Of Us contains very little for any of us.

T in the Park: Glasvegas have arrived

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Every festival has at least one - a band that blows up just before the weekend arrives so that their stage draw is underestimated - and T in the Park 2008's was Glasvegas. We arrived at the mid-sized Futures Tent for their early evening Saturday show a full 20 minutes before it was due to start, and the stewards were already closing it off; we just managed to sneak in, while desperate others were charging and climbing fences. The atmosphere was just incredible, with thousands of fans heartily singing along to every word of every song - even though this is a band whose discography stretches to just one full single release. They started with Flowers and Football Tops, remaining impressively calm despite the bedlam going on before them - arms flailing, girls on shoulders, hugging, waving, cheering, screaming - so at times it was difficult to even make out the music. Meanwhile, hundreds were standing outside, crushing against barriers and stewards, desperate to hear or catch sight of their new heroes. It doesn't take much to get T revellers to chant "Here we fucking go!" but Go Square Go got thousands belting it out with gusto. Of course, the closer was Daddy's Gone, which already has the feel of a classic festival anthem that will be sung here for years to come; but never will it go down as well as here, tonight. This was a real landmark performance in the career of Scotland's favourite new band.

The Skinny caught up with drummer Caroline and guitarist Rab after the gig. "The best gig and the best crowd that we've ever played to", Rab beamed, still clearly overwhelmed by the experience. "I expected it to be busy but not quite like that. Our tour manager came on-stage halfway through and said to ask the crowd to calm down. People couldn't get in and then they rammed through the barriers, so they were gonna pull the gig". Caroline said "We've gone around the country and had the most amazing response everywhere we've went, and we're so thankful for that. But you cannae beat that. It was absolutely amazing". Rab also confessed that the band had decided not to headline the stage: "We said no because it's quite early still, we've only brought out one single -although we've done the limited editions - and our album's not out until September. As a band we all said it's too soon"

Rab and Caroline also spoke about the Christmas album the band hope to release at the end of this year. "It's definitely happening" Rab said, "It's all written. He [James Allan, singer] wrote it all in New York when we did the album. It's pretty fucking special to be honest. One of the songs is called Cruel Moon and I think it's the best song he's ever wrote. I get hairs on the back of my neck every time I listen to it. We were gonna put it on the album and I was gutted that we didn't, but I understand it's more suited for the Christmas album. So we're gonna go to Romania, Transylvania, and record it in a big church, live, and maybe get some other people to sing on it. The record company is really excited about it, a second album in a year!

But after that quick burst of creativity, that might be it as far as the Glasvegas story goes. "I don't know if we're going to do a second [studio] album," Rab said. "And the record company knows that. They're genuine and they're really into the music. They won't force us to do anything. So if we say we don't want to do a second, they'd be fine with that".

Vampire Weekend: Hot, then not... now what?

feature for the skinnyI'm not sure why Vampire Weekend's keyboard player is looking at me with a ruffled brow as we're introduced. Could it be because we crossed paths in Edinburgh's Bongo Club 6 months before, and he's struggling to place me 5000 miles away? Maybe he is squinting at the sun? Or perhaps it's because I'm wearing a kilt in 100 degree weather? "I'm not used to this kind of heat!" I tell him enthusiastically, and he looks at my woolly skirt and nods. Obviously. But I think what's actually causing the frown is the matter of the wide open spaces of Coachella this Friday afternoon, and his band's imminent performance on the second stage. "I heard that it gets more crowded at night, and we’re going to be playing a little bit before sundown", Rostam Batmanglij reassures himself. Music festivals just aren't ingrained in the American culture like they are here; this sun-drenched Garden of Eden only really fills for the appearance of Prince the following day, but otherwise it's quieter than T in the Carpark.

Rostam needn't have worried: we see the biggest crowd of the day when Vampire Weekend take the stage. Much of this audience is here out of intrigue, to form their own opinions on the most talked about band of the last six months. Late last year an early demo, creatively dubbed The Blue CD-R, began circulating internet blogs and gathering praise. But for every effusive word of acclaim, there was a disappointed putdown waiting to dampen the hype. By the time that debut LP dropped in January, Vampire Weekend had become hot, then not, then hot again... and now what? What enthused some people - and seriously riled others - was Vampire Weekend's daring to use Afro-pop rhythms, like Paul Simon did so well with Graceland. But Vampire Weekend were accused of being 'cultural tourists', appropriating those foreign styles without properly understanding them, and therefore being inauthentic. The underlying tone of the criticism was "How could they understand African music when they were so well-off, and so white?"

Vampire Weekend never analysed it so. "As an artist it's hard to be aware of that" Rostam says. "First and foremost we wanted to make something catchy and exciting, and something that could inspire people to move in some way. But we also wanted to try and bring different kinds of musical worlds together". But there came a point where they had to resist the primal urge to self-Google. "I think when people started to write things about us, of course we paid attention, but we’ve had to grow out of that stage. I think every artist wants to gauge how people are reacting to you, on some level, but then you want to be able to focus on the art that you do for your own sake. At some point you have to tell people that you don’t want to hear about it, whether it’s good or bad".

The comparisons to Graceland were a little clumsy, but a world famous and Grammy-winning African-based pop record is an easier place to start the mental map than a more obscure and precise equivalent. If you can hear the guitar line and rhythm of 'Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes' in your head now, you're in the ballpark. But I ask Rostam if he likes Graceland, and what he makes of the frequent references. "Oh yeah, I love it. I like the one after it even more [The Rhythm of the Saints]. We met Paul Simon at Saturday Night Live. When we were having dinner we talked to him for a while, and one of the things I asked him was whether he thought our album sounded like Graceland. And he said no. I don’t have any problem with people saying it sounds like Graceland, but in light of the fact that Paul Simon himself said it didn’t sound like it, what more do you want?" One of the most obvious differences is the absence of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose unique backing vocals aren't duplicated by Vampire Weekend. That would just be silly. "We’ve got two new songs that we’re playing today, they probably sound more African than anything on our first album. I’ve been thinking a lot about the production of the next album, what kinds of sounds and what kinds of vibes would take it to the next level". Let's hope he's not thinking of giving Ladysmith a call.

Fast-forward ten weeks, and fly 5000 miles eastward, and Vampire Weekend will be seeing men in kilts at another festival. If you want to catch a glimpse of the most talked about band of last season before the new one starts, get to T in the Park's King Tuts tent in plenty of time. Let's hope they're still frowning: it won't be worry about the size of the crowd, so it'll have to be the flare of the sun.

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I'm away at T in the Park at the moment: updates, reviews and interviews to come.

T in the Park: and a chat with Los Campesinos!

It's Friday evening and The Skinny is at T in the Park, along with 70,000 or so Scottish music fans. The bars are just opening, but there's a mile-long queue outside of late arrivals still hoping to set up camp. They'll have to hurry because the bands are about to start. On tonight's half-length line-up we're looking forward to reformed headliners The Verve, and veteran headliners The Chemical Brothers; but that's a direct clash, so it'll be a tough choice. Elsewhere there's the Stereophonics and the Wombats, the second coming of The Music, local hero KT Tunstall, and festival favourites Feeder. The Kaiser Chiefs' Ricky Wilson has been hanging around, and we just spotted a steamin' Eddie Jordan stoating about in hospitality.

The site's been mostly dry all day so far, but the rain has just come on and The Skinny blames Rain Wizard Gareth, Los Campesinos! lead singer, who we've just been talking to. "The rain is a good thing to us because we're playing in a tent. I think we probably share a similar fan base to The Wombats," he cackled, "but if it rains, we have shelter on our side": and with that, Gareth clapped his hands and unleashed hell. Well, a small downpour. Luckily, the Welsh indie-popsters are only here for tonight, so we should be able to avoid a mudbath. They have three other festivals to attend this weekend, but that means gutted Gareth won't be around to see Will Young here on Saturday. "I would genuinely like to see Will Young," he said. "I think he's a brilliant pop artist, and he seems such a charming, genuine guy. I think it's brave of him to play here, a lot of people won't like him. It's nice when people put pop bands on rather than the same guitar bands. Festivals are so much fun, we play 30 minute sets of our fastest, most upbeat songs, we can exhaust ourselves, we don't have long tedious soundchecks, we just do it and then get off and watch other bands, and there's lots of free beer!" But for Gareth, the main clash tonight isn't between Richard Ashcroft's return and the Ed & Tom Big Beat spectacular, but between The Futureheads and Blood Red Shoes. "We're going to see Blood Red Shoes, they're our mates, but Futureheads are on at the same time. I've not listened to their new record but their first was a big favourite of ours at Uni. Neil's got a really funny photograph on his computer of when we met the Futureheads when we were about 18, and we've both got ludicrous hair and we just look so much younger. We want to show them that and say - look how we've grown!" We've no doubt the Futureheads would be delighted to get a copy of that photograph themselves. "Look, that was us meeting Los Campesinos!" they'd say, "well before they were big!"

We also managed to get a Los Campesinos! update, of sorts. "There is a lot of news coming soon, but I'm not at liberty to mention it now," Gareth said. Any clues? "It's a tour and a release before the end of the year" he added. So you mean a UK tour and an EP release? "I can't possibly say!" But you're winking aren't you? "I was squinting!" That's enough for us.

The Skinny will be reporting from T in the Park all weekend, so keep your eyes on the blog for more updates!

The Wedding Present - Gedge Hits Hollywood

The Wedding Present - Gedge Hits Hollywood

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Twenty-three years after forming in Leeds, seminal indie rockers The Wedding Present are still evolving and learning as they launch their eighth studio album El Rey. Even though two Fifers have joined the band since 2005’s Take Fountain, it’s still hopeless romantic David Gedge who runs the show – he’s the founder, only constant member, singer, songwriter, and tour manager.

Hello there Mr Gedge, where are you and what are you doing?

We're rehearsing this week in Brighton on the south coast, so got a day off tomorrow and one more rehearsal then we're off on our mini tour. Just England, Exeter then Shrewsbury…

All the glamorous places then?

Yeah! Then it’s Norwich and Brighton. Our new album [El Rey] comes out on Monday.

Are you excited about the launch of the album?

It's still nice, yeah, to get a box of the CDs and vinyl from the manufacturers and rip it open and see everything. It's a culmination of a two year cycle of recording and overseeing artwork and everything. It's a lot of work, so to get the final thing in your hands is definitely exciting.

Were you trying to do anything different from previous albums?

Well I try to do something different every time. I've always admired the groups who move on and try different ideas. I hate those bands where you hear a record and you think 'I've already got this!'. I was hearing - do you remember The Lighthouse Family? – they were on the radio chatting about working on a new album, but halfway through working on it they said 'wait a minute, it doesn't sound like The Lighthouse Family', so they scrapped it and started again! I'd see that as a positive thing, if I'm working on stuff and it doesn't sound like The Wedding Present I'm actually quite pleased. We always try to move on and we've had a substantial line-up change since last time.

How does that change the dynamics of the band?

I think it works very well, it's always sad when people have to leave or you have to ask people to leave. You're working with these people quite intimately, so it's quite heartbreaking to see people go, but then a replacement comes in and you've got a whole new set of inspirations and influences and enthusiasms. They always want to ensure that they're as good or better than the people before, they want to be as good as the 1992 line-up or whatever. That competition is good for the group, makes it stronger. After Take Fountain Simon Cleave left the band, he'd been in for 10 years or so, with Cinerama, so that was quite scary in a way. But then again this album is as good if not better than Take Fountain so all these changes work quite well.

Why is it called El Rey, is that a Californian reference?

Nah, it just means ‘The King’ in Spanish.

Is that you?

Nah, it's Elvis! I've always been a big Elvis fan, but also having lived in Hollywood for the last 16 months or so, I quite wanted to have a southern Californian feel, so the artwork and photographs are all from about there. Also thought a Mexican-sounding name would be appropriate.

I was in L.A. recently, is it actually the area of Hollywood you live in?

Yeah, West Hollywood. I kind of enjoy it… when I first moved there I didn't like it, I suppose I'm a big fan of pop culture and that's the home of pop culture really, film music and TV and stuff. It's a big cartoon city really. It is like walking into a film or something.

The city does seem like it’s completely built around the film industry…

Everybody who lives there, or most people, have gone there for a reason, which is fame, working in films or being rock stars. So it's a very self-centered place, it's a very Me Me Me society, and I found that a bit alienating at first. But I suppose I got used to it, and the weather's obviously fantastic. It's just odd that you're sat in a cafe or something... I was in cafe table on the street and as we were leaving I saw a very attractive woman in a very short skirt, and the person sat next to her was Mike Tyson! I thought - of all the people you don't want to be eyeing their girlfriend up, it's probably Mike Tyson! In L.A. you see celebrities everywhere, I saw Dr Who in Urban Outfitters. Not David Tennant, the previous one, what's he called? [Christopher Eccleston - Ed who knows his Who] Lives in Manchester...

Ah but Mike Tyson and Doctor Who were probably going "oh there's David Gedge over there, look!"

Haha, right. I was watching a DVD film one night and then the next morning the actress from the film was walking down the road! It’s funny really.

I noticed on the track-listing for the new album, 'The Thing I Like Best About Him Is His Girlfriend' is listed as the 'Santa Monica and La Brea' version. Well, a guidebook I had in L.A. said that Santa Monica and La Brea was the gay prostitution district. So what's that song all about then?

That's a complete coincidence that! The only reason we did that is the pedestrian crossing there talks to you rather than beeps, it goes 'wait, wait, wait, wait', and that's the intro to the song.

I think it might be interpreted a different way…

Haha! Well you can take something else from that if you want.

'Model, Actress, Whatever' - is that about anyone in particular, or just Californian girls generally?

It's a general thing really, I'm quite interested in obsession, it's about being obsessed about somebody who's probably obsessed with themselves too. I'm interested in relationships and lust and regret and jealousy and stuff like that in my lyrics, and there's loads of that in that town. It attracts those kinds of people who’re driven to try to achieve certain things. There’s all sorts of lyrical references to L.A. in there, and in the song titles.

All your songs throughout your career been about relationships and such, you must either have loads of girlfriends or a really good imagination...

I think George Best was very personal, it was almost like reading out my diary, but after that you have to move on and make stuff up. I think it's always me in every song in some way, if it's not directly happened to me it's always something I imagine myself in a situation. But I just think it's the most successful way to write pop lyrics. I've tried other ways, to write about politics or science fiction or whatever, but I'm just more happy when I'm writing love or relationships songs, and the best are the personal ones.

So have you got a great cheat sheet of chat up lines or is it just 'hey, I'm a big rock star'?

Haha! well a lot of my songs are about failure, aren’t they?

How does Terry's [De Castro, bassist] co-writing influence your songs?

Not at all when it comes to lyrics because they're always mine. Terry's just been helping with musical ideas.

And you’ve been recording with Steve Albini again...

Seamonsters was the last album we recorded with him. Most bands who record with Albini sound like [makes harsh throaty growl], Big Black or Shellac or whatever. I wouldn't say he's bored with that but he does like the challenge of working on music which is different, so when I said it'd be easier to do strings in Britain he was like "oh, we can do strings here."

If you’re able to take a step back, what do you think of El Rey?

I'm far too close to it really! The last album was produced by Steve Fisk [Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees] who's an engineer in Seattle, it sounds great, so there was a feeling that we should perhaps go back and use him again. But I had this worry at the back of my mind I didn't want to make Seamonsters Part 2 with Albini, so my main feeling is that it's nothing like Seamonsters, it's got an Albini edge to it but it's such a different type of LP, so I'm quite pleased with that. I think the thing about Albini is he just kinda records the band, whatever songs you've got at that time. Some of the songs on this record are quite poppy actually, he just records it in the best way that's appropriate, so it's got great sound as well.

Apparently you're contributing to a tribute album for The Cure...

I like the first album, think it's really good, and I saw them a couple times about 1979, but then I kinda went off them to be honest, and I'm not a big fan of Robert Smith's voice, I find it a bit whiny. When the list came through, it was my fault, we sat on it too late, and when we went back all the songs we wanted had gone. I think it was Graeme [Ramsay, drummer] that suggested High, so we're doing that. I don't think it's a fantastic song.

Why did you agree to be on the tribute album if you're not a huge fan?

Because I like doing covers, we've got a history of doing covers. It's very helpful over the years to work out how other people write songs and arrange songs, because sometimes you get ideas from that that you can reapply to your own work. And yes it is weird that we don't like The Cure that much, cos normally it is bands that we like that we cover, but it’s probably good for us in some ways that we don't much like them, because it makes us less precious about it. I think we've made it a better song, we didn't feel like we had to honour the initial version.

Looking forward to finding out. Thanks very much for chatting to us Mister Gedge, bye then!

YIFI's Weird Weekends

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Writer’s block is a malaise that all lyricists, authors and journalists suffer periodically, with no known cause, no reliable prognosis, and no certain cure. “Write about what you know”, the clear-of-thought advise, but often that just results in musicians whining about the hazards of musicianing; if it’s not “boo hoo, too much drugs and too much sex”, it’s “whinge, cry - nobody listens to my profound decrees - waaaaahh!”

But after Y’All Is Fantasy Island’s Adam Stafford succumbed to the mind-numb last year, he didn’t recover by writing about what he knew: he made a breakthrough writing stories about murder victims being cooked for dinner, stalkers threatening suicide, and dyslexic skiers with Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Well, we assume they’re just stories, aren’t they Adam?

“Yes!” he laughs, to our mighty relief. “The main difference between Rescue Weekend and the first album [In Faceless Towns Forever] is that the first was lyrically quite personal, it was all stuff that I had experienced, but with this I wanted to write in a more narrative style, so the songs are not necessarily about my life at all.” Rescue Weekend is not entirely flights of fancy - “I can identify with the dyslexic skier because I used to be one myself!” says Adam – and there is, inevitably, one song in which he complains about the struggle for recognition. With these two excellent albums under his belt, he's well entitled to vent such frustrations, because YIFI are undoubtedly fully deserving of your attention. "Some promoters - music fans as well - are really set in their ways. There's a lot of people who only listen to certain bands." But the conversation doesn't dwell on this, because there are plenty of positives to talk about instead: like how gorgeous Rescue Weekend is; how Adam's new found storytelling abilities mean he'll never have to go over old ground again; and how a third YIFI album is but months away. Firstly, where on earth did this Body Integrity Dyslexia tune come from?

"There was a programme on about a surgeon here in Falkirk who was the only person in the world that would operate on people suffering from Body Integrity Disorder", he says, explaining that this is a problem where people desperately wanted their perfectly healthy limbs amputated.

"There was a lot of controversy surrounding that because people thought it was unethical to treat them, but patients came from all over the world to be operated on. Then our guitarist Tommy told us a story about a dyslexic skier who got into an accident because he couldn't read a sign that indicated he was approaching a cliff," and Adam combined both stories to invent one helluva unlucky girl, who sadly won't be making a reappearance on the next YIFI album, No Ceremony, due out in October.

"We don't want to repeat ourselves, we want every album to be different, and this is night and day compared to Rescue Weekend. We're mixing it now, but it's taking a long time because there's a lot of production on it - there's 12 guitar parts on one song. It's a lot heavier, it borders on punk rock." Rescue Weekend, he explains, is essentially a solo album (with key contributions from multi-instrumentalist Steven Tosh), while No Ceremony is a full band effort, hence the quiet doleful record being succeeded by a louder, probably still doleful one.

In whichever formation Adam and Y'All Is Fantasy Island decide to arrange themselves, their first two albums are evidence enough that there's plenty more to come from Adam's active imagination - providing, of course, it can resist the dreaded curse of The Block.

Jens Lekman: Life Thru A Jens

Feature for The Skinny



Swedish crooner Jens Lekman briefly hung up his guitar when scurrilous stories about him became too much to take. Luckily for us he didn't retire for long, but as he tells Ally Brown, if you're trying to find out the truth about him, you may as well just make something up

Swedish troubadour Jens Lekman was born on the dancefloor of New York’s decadent disco haven Studio 54, sang in a children’s choir run by Jonathan Richman as a kid, and only moved to Gothenburg as a teen because he was in love with her out of Ace of Base. “If you want to make something up about me in your magazine, I would encourage you to do that,” Jens tells The Skinny from his Washington-bound tour van.

Obviously we would never do such a thing, but it’s still a strange request, part of an explanation as to why he gave up music altogether a few years ago. “Rumours and stories were circulating about me, I was very paranoid and thought that everyone was out to hurt me,” he says, “I wasn’t sick of music, just the stories about my family and friends, I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. If there’s all these weird stories that are circulating then I think these say more than me sitting here. It’s like what they say to boxers if they are seeing triple - hit the one in the middle.”

Luckily for us, Lekman is back in business and on his way to Scotland as part of a world tour supporting second proper album Night Falls Over Kortedala, one of 2007’s wittiest and prettiest records. Lekman is a charming and self-deprecating pop singer-songwriter in the Stephin Merritt mould, but for one key distinction that sets him apart from 99% of who we might broadly categorise as rock musicians: he regularly backs up his doleful croon and acoustic strums with samples, be they drum beats borrowed from Arab Strap, yelps from a hyperactive children’s choir, or outrageously camp disco basslines. Why so few artists outside of hip-hop and electronica embrace sampling is a mystery Jens has few answers to: “I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. The Avalanches perfected that art seven years ago. I guess it’s a question of copyright and sample laws, not many people want to get their hands in that. For me it’s when the sounds meet up and form something new, that’s what I like, I really like putting together sounds that aren’t supposed to meet.”

Undoubtedly one of the highlights of Night Falls is “A Postcard to Nina”, where Jens describes an uneasy meeting with a lesbian friend’s parents as he keeps up her pretence by acting as her boyfriend. Of course, releasing a song of the events kinda lets the cat out of the bag, doesn’t it Jens? “The story, although it was dramatic and awkward when it happened, is not as dramatic as it seemed to be back then, it’s all known. We still e-mail, me and her dad, he’s a really nice guy, and Nina lives in Paris right now. It’s just a song about a beautiful and strong friendship, me and Nina have known each other for 15 years now.”

So what happens when night falls over Kortedala, the Gothenburg district where Jens lived until a recent relocation to Melbourne, Australia? “People disappear, there’s a few gangsters out, I got mugged about eight times there, there’s a few mentally ill people, depressed people, unemployed people”. Despite this familiar scene, Jens assures us he’s being genuine with utmost praise for Glasgow [careful! – ed]. “I don’t really like the UK that much because of the way you’re treated as an artist there, but I’ve always been treated well in Glasgow. I’ve been there several times, it’s always been great - it’s the only good thing about the UK!”

Jamie Lidell - The Jamie Effect

Feature for The Skinny

You may have noticed a new buzzword creeping into the music press recently, though it describes a style that's been around for half a century. At the moment it seems like anyone with a wobbly croon or a horn section is being tagged a "soul" star as PR-pushers swarm to cash in on 'the Amy effect'. Back to Black has sold almost 2.5million copies in the UK, a figure usually reserved for tepid water-treaders like Dido and the Blunt. First to fly in Ms Winehouse's slipstream have been Adele and Duffy, who've both received massive industry pushes with full confidence of success - and indeed, both have obliged with huge sales. But what we're really seeing here, perhaps, is the aftershock of one of 2005's best records, released on famed electronica label Warp: Jamie Lidell's Multiply. "I kinda predicted all this back in 2005 didn't I? I want some of those Grammys Amy!" Jamie quips from his home in Berlin after giving his thoughts on Britsoul's most visible star: "I like Amy, she's got something about her. Unfortunately the celebrity thing has taken over, it just seems like too much too soon. She's got a crazy personality that comes through in her music, but you have to worry for her life now."

OK, so its unlikely that any Warp-released record could have such an effect on the Grammy-giving, multi-platinum buying mainstream market, but the critical love and small-scale commercial success of Multiply has now led to Jim, Jamie Lidell's third solo album and one that could easily spawn some summertime radio hits. Lidell agrees there's a wee chance: "It is radio-friendly, but I've got realistic expectations about how it might do. Warp are always going to be underdogs there [the charts]. A lot of this current soul thing is that they're all ladies so perhaps there's a window there for me." He continues, "It's just 10 songs that I wrote and that I like. I've kept it more bracketed as a bunch of songs, kept it all together, it's more about old-fashioned songwriting. I think it's very focussed, it's short and fat-free but vitamin-enriched! I think I've followed through with what was started on Multiply."

To rewind a bit, its worth noting that Lidell wasn't always a soul man - or at least, not to the outside world. Initially he was one-half of IDM duo Super_Collider, before similar early demos of his own caught illustrious attention. "Muddlin' Gear came about because Squarepusher heard it and thought I should put it out on Warp", he says of his solo debut. "I've always been into soul, but you have to choose what you release. Electronic music can easily be released on a white label. Even while I was making Muddlin' Gear I was still in bands and always singing, but I didn't particularly have an outlet for it. Handing in Multiply was a bit of a shocker for Warp, they weren't sure about it, but once the money started rolling in they were much happier!". As he describes it, he's always had love for rhythm-based music whether it's descended from James Brown's funky drummers or Kraftwerk's electronic beats: "I was a soul man with Super_Collider but it was Sex Machine meets Man Machine, and now it's just Sex Machine! If there's time to go back to that previous stuff then yeah, I'd like to."

In addition to Jim's late-April release, Lidell will also be arriving in Scotland for two live dates as part of the final ever Triptych Festival. His live reputation is quite something, but for this round of touring he's decided to try something new. "For the last 6 years I've been playing solo, building up my songs on my own, being spontaneous, improvising it all. I actually programmed my own software to allow me to do it, to construct and undo and rework the music live, it's really electronic and fresh, beatboxing, and mixing together the Sex Machine and Man Machine elements. But I can't face all that now! It became a comfort zone for me and that's not a good place to be. So now I've got a 4-piece band, including a guy who plays two saxophones at once. So it's gonna be fun, more of what I did before but integrated into the live band set-up."

Finally, why such a modest album title as Jim? "I'm shy of adding big statements to things, and it's also partly a piss-take on how everything gets over-analysed these days. I am just a normal person, and I just think album titles can be pretentious. Jim - it's a part of me isn't it? I'm the real Jim Shady!".