I’ll be upfront here – this is a plug for my friend’s band. There’s your declaration of interest. But that’s not the only reason – I do have a sense of quality control and there is quality aplenty to be had from My Pilot. They are a band from Dublin centred around AU scribe Neill Dougan, and the Spiders EP is their first release.

The band’s sound is rooted in the kind of bruised American songwriting that Neill is passionate about – Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, Mark Kozelek – but, like Beck, his interest in hip-hop, electronic music and, well, popular music in general, means there is a richness and an adventure to the arrangements.

Check out the EP below, but hear this: if you email contactmypilot@gmail.com to order a CD copy for €5, you will also get Lung Wurm Back Rays, a bonus disc of covers of tracks by Neil Young, Nina Simone, Liars, The Fall and more.

The song choices are great, as are the renditions – especially the version of ‘Just Step S’Ways’ by The Fall (from their Hex Enduction Hour album). In it, Neill and co. do what any good cover should do – take a song, pull it apart and put it back together again with their own stamp indelibly attached. It’s ingenious, beautifully played and sung and emotionally affecting. Yes, really.

Lung Wurm Back Rays track list:

1. My Heart – Neil Young (from Sleeps With Angels)
2. Nobody’s Fault But Mine – Nina Simone (from Nina Simone And Piano)
3. What It Takes – Aerosmith (from Pump)
4. The Other Side Of Mt Heart Attack – Liars (from Drum’s Not Dead)
5. Please Mr Postman – The Marvelettes (from Forever: The Complete Motown Albums Volume One)
6. Just Step S’Ways – The Fall (from Hex Enduction Hour)
7. Sea Of Love – Phil Phillips (from Sea Of Love)

Download: My Pilot – Just Step S’Ways

And here’s the original:

Finally, here is the full EP to do with as you wish:

MySpace | Twitter

Just a quick post to plug the new issue of AU. It’s out around the place now and we have published a list of stockists in Dublin here. Be quick though – it’s flying out. Or you can always subscribe.

On the cover, as you can see, we have Cee Lo Green while there are also big interviews with Ice Cube, Karl Hyde from Underworld and Randy Randall from No Age. We also have Kiran Acharya with his own inimitable look at the creationism debate, following on from Northern Ireland Culture Minister Nelson McCausland‘s provocative pronouncements.

Elsewhere in the mag, you’ll find a feature on fixed gear bikes (we ask, are they for dickheads?), as well as And So I Watch You From Afar, Les Savy Fav, Shit Robot, Yann Tiersen, Solar Bears, Isobel Anderson, Torche, Therapy?, Darkstar, Timber Timbre, Mount Kimbie, The Frames, William Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, HEALTH, and more.

Phew.

You can now read the mag online by clicking here.

I spent a week of so banging on about this band on Twitter earlier in the month. Darkstar are on Hyperdub (run by Kode9, home to Burial and Zomby), one of the key labels behind dubstep and related urban electronic music, but they sound very different. It wasn’t always this way – before they added vocalist James Buttery they released a couple of dub/dubstep-flavoured singles on their own 2010 label (Spotify here and here), and their first two singles on Hyperdub – ‘Need You’/'Squeeze My Lime’ and ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’ – were synth-heavy, skew-whiff garage. But the video below demonstrates their new direction.

A cover of an old Human League B-side (inspired by hearing it at 33rpm rather than 45rpm, apparently), ‘Gold’ leans heavily on that early-Eighties synth-pop sound but brings it up to date – fucked-with vocals and crisp modern production blend with plaintive piano and a gloomy atmosphere. It’s typical of an album that also includes ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’, a new version of ‘Squeeze My Lime’ (now called ‘When It’s Gone’) and seven new originals. North, is out on October 18. Mark my words, it’s one of the albums of the year.

Track List (key tracks in bold)

01 In the Wings
02 Gold
03 Deadness
04 Aidy’s Girl Is a Computer
05 Under One Roof
06 Two Chords
07 North
08 Ostkreuz
09 Dear Heartbeat
10 When It’s Gone

PS: I interviewed James Young from the band for AU – check out the next issue for that, I’ll post the PDF link next week.

I’ve been meaning to post this up for a while – a feature that appeared in AU during the summer to coincide with Something For Everybody, Devo’s first album since 1990. It’s one of my favourite interviews, first of all because the idea of me speaking to someone of the status of Devo’s Jerry Casale still seems pretty bloody unlikely, but also because it was such a fun conversation.

It was a bit of a saga getting the interview organised – as is so often the case with big major label artists – so that was cause for apprehension in itself. Then there are the natural nerves of speaking to someone not far off ‘hero’ status in my book. And what would be be like? He is a man in his 60s after all – would be be a curmudgeon? Go through the motions? Deem my questions below him? Maybe he would be as completely nutso as his band’s persona. Or such an intellectual that I would struggle to converse on a similar level.

You see where I’m going with this. In fact, he was charming, self-deprecating and extremely affable. Most interesting, though, was the extent to which Devo’s off-the-wall schemes are the product of carefully planned marketing campaigns. I had supposed – naively, perhaps – that their ‘Devo Song Study’ was the band’s idea, perhaps a wry parody of audience-inclusive TV like American Idol and X Factor, where everyone who wants a say gets one. Casale was quite happy to set the record straight on that one…

DEVO

Two decades after their last record and 33 years since their first, post-punk legends Devo are back with their ninth studio album, and guess what? It’s really bloody good. AU speaks to founder member and ‘chief strategist’ Gerald Casale about the album’s long gestation, the band’s peculiar marketing techniques, and why they were right about de-evolution all along…

So, what happened in 1990? Argentina lost in the World Cup final, leaving Maradona crying like a baby. Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Mikhail Gorbachev was elected President of the USSR. Your correspondent celebrated his seventh birthday with cocktail sausages and pass-the-parcel. And Devo released their last studio album.

20 years is a long time, of that there is no doubt. But for Devo – bona fide post-punk godheads, counter-culture provocateurs and icons of the MTV era – it’s been a strange kind of hiatus. Not for them the sudden break-up followed by years upon years of silence and a high-profile reunion. In their case, they kind of just… stopped for a while, worn down by diminishing returns, falling album sales and plummeting critical and commercial interest.

“After the 1990 release of Smooth Noodle Maps on Enigma Records, we never broke up but it basically became a sleeper cell,” is how Gerald Casale describes it. The 61-year-old formed the band in 1973 with Mark Mothersbaugh – still the frontman – and original guitarist Bob Lewis. Through all that time, Casale has been the bassist and – in an indicator of the extent to which the band is about more than just the music – ‘chief strategist’, becoming deeply involved in the band’s idiosyncratic visual presentation and often bizarre, pseudo-corporate pronouncements.

After Smooth Noodle Maps, nothing was heard from Devo for about five years, until they shuffled into life again, playing gigs here and there and closing the Sundance Film Festival in 1995. Over the next couple of years, activity increased to 20 or 30 shows a year, with occasional Devo songs being written for video games, films and advertising. “It laid there on one level like that until 2007 when [new song] ‘Watch Us Work It’ came out on a Dell commercial,” says Casale. “Everybody in the business started calling us up – label executives, managers… like, ‘You’ve gotta do something!’. And Mark [Mothersbaugh], who’d spent 20 years saying no, said yes.”

Something For Everyone is the result, an album that stands as evidence of a band in extremely rude health, even as the four old-timers – Casale, Mothersbaugh and their brothers, both called Bob – hover around the 60 mark. To these ears, as someone who came to Devo for the first time only a few years ago in my early twenties, it’s as if that 20-year chasm never existed. Urgent, fun, goofy and packed full of neon-coloured, synth-splashed rock songs, it sits proudly next to the likes of Freedom Of Choice and Oh No! It’s Devo as the work of exactly the same, prodigiously talented band.

“Well, of course we can’t be anything except us,” says Casale, who is frank and affable to a fault. “It would be foolish to try. A lot of bands, if they haven’t collaborated or made new music in a long time, try to be current or imitate trends and go, ‘Let’s try to sound like MGMT!’, and we knew that that was silly. We would just be us, and work from the vocabulary and subject matter that we know, and be honest about it. So that’s what we did. And it sounds like Devo, but it sounds… modern.”

So you work within certain parameters when you’re writing and recording? “Yeah, not really by decree – it just turns out that way. There’s just certain things that you do, and frankly it’s probably what people would prefer anyway. We do what we do, as the [new] song says.”

That maxim also extends to the way in which the band conducts itself publicly, except now there’s the wide world of the Internet to have fun with. Devo have always plastered their behaviour with a thick coat of irony, appropriating the language and imagery of politicians and especially the corporate world in order to poke fun at and shine a light on the peculiar way in which corporations and governments make us behave. See ‘Devo Corporate Anthem’ – the first track on 1979’s Duty Now For The Future – for a prime example, one that is used to this day to introduce live gigs.

Therefore it was to widespread amusement but no great surprise that the band launched the ‘Devo Song Study’ at the same time as announcing the new album. In it, Devo Inc. (the fictional corporate wing of the band, headed by the moustachioed ‘Greg Scholl’) ran a website featuring clips of 16 new Devo songs, of which fans could choose their 12 favourites. Fans were told that the 12 most popular would make the album. Simple. Amusing. Well-executed. And very Devo. Where did the idea come from?

“It came out of talks with the ad agency, Mother,” says Casale, not even trying to claim any credit for the band or himself. “Mother is this kind of ‘adbuster’ ad agency. They’re definitely the coolest, funniest, cutting-edge guys, and we just realised that in a world where there’s far too much music coming out in a month, more than anyone could ever know about; in a world where nobody wants to pay for music; in a world where the old business model has imploded and the function of labels has imploded, and a new model has taken its place; in that world, marketing is absolutely everything. Absolutely the beginning and the end.

“Why should people care about your music? How would they even know that you made new music? How do you even get them interested so that they may buy it? Well, it’s marketing. So we thought, let’s take the marketing out of the hands of a label, who only dabble at it, and give it to a real agency. And they said, let’s use the techniques that we use for Dell computers or for Cheerios, and let’s be humorous about it.”

As much as you have to admire Casale’s candour, it’s disheartening to discover that the whole Song Study schtick came from the minds of an ad agency, rather than the band itself. But Casale has been in the business long enough to know how things work, and how things have to work in order to get anywhere. He’s 61 years old – not a naïve youngster.

“The campaign is about doing business in the corporate world – how do you put out creative content in the corporate society?” he ponders. “So that was a post-modern idea of marketing it and having fun with it at the same time. You know, it goes all the way back to The Who Sell Out – it’s nothing new on that level – but we really embraced the techniques and did it, for real.

Leaving aside the genesis of the idea, the execution itself was slick and multi-faceted. The on-screen presentation was cold and eerily detached, as ‘Greg Scholl’ guided the user around a sleek, sterile interface with which to listen to snippets of the tracks. And the method of choosing the track-list was ingenious, too – a comment on the power of the hive mind in these times of instant opinions and mass empowerment of television viewers?

“Well, with the American Idol model and all the social networking models, people like to be involved – people like opinions and my god, they love to give them when they’re asked!” says Casale with a hint of mischief. “And so we invited it to see what would happen, and we really wanted to respond to the results. We probably would have taken it much further had we had more time and money. We would have even put up different versions of the same song – different mixes, different instruments, different vocal performances – and gone really far with it. It would have been funny to go so far as to say, ‘Would you like this song better if Adam Lambert sang it?’ [laughs] And then if they said yes, to try and get Adam Lambert to sing a Devo song.”

In the end, the Song Study was revealed to be less than what was promised – although the fan-chosen tracklist was announced first and will be released, it will only be as a digital download. The predetermined, ‘real’ tracklist (“88% focus group approved!”) will be what features on CD copies of the album, while all 16 tracks will be available in a ‘deluxe’ edition. According to Casale, all this was a result of commercial pressure. “We are putting out more than one version of Devo songs, because we have to,” he admits. “The different retailers demand different things – iTunes wants this and that, and frankly the corporate partners, being Warner Bros. and Mother, they weigh in because of their contributions – they wanted certain things.”

Make no mistake though – Devo are not selling out. Although they are seen as counter-cultural icons, they began on Warners – a major label – and they have routinely licensed music for use in TV shows and commercials. The use of ‘Watch Us Work It’ in a Dell commercial was the primary catalyst for this new album. And although Casale would clearly prefer complete artistic independence, he is candid about the need for compromise when you sign to a major label, as they have done again, despite his words about the current model “imploding”.

“It was the Devil Deal Or No Deal,” he says. “Frankly, all this hot air about, ‘You can create a sensation on Facebook and become famous for no money and everybody will know you’, or ‘You can go to a sponsor and they’ll give you the money to record your record and market it, or ‘You can go to big concert promoters like AEG and Live Nation and they’ll front you money for 100 shows and you can put it out yourself’… It’s a lie! We investigated all that and nobody was giving you anything, especially in this economic climate.

“Nobody’s offering any money for music, and frankly the reason Warner Bros. ponied up the marketing money is that they own our back catalogue – the masters of eight different studio records. They have a practical reason on a business level for taking the risk to give us the money to market the new record, and frankly we couldn’t have done anything without [their] money and Mother. So it was just good common sense.”

Do you feel like there’s a loss of control there, as an artist?

“Of course there is!” he exclaims, sounding – it must be said – a little exasperated. “I mean, let’s be real – nobody gives you anything unless they’re taking something from you. It’s always a compromise.”

As the album is released into the world, though, it seems like a compromise worth making. Unlike many other reformed bands we could mention, Devo are not just cruising around the world and playing the hits while cryogenically frozen in time. They have had the stones to get back in the studio, create something entirely new, and tour it the old-fashioned way. And, perhaps best of all, they get to be incredibly smug about the reason the band formed in 1973 – the much discussed, often derided ‘Theory of De-evolution’ that gave the band its name. 37 years after the band formed, what changes has Casale seen, and how do they fit in with the theory that mankind has reached its peak and is actually devolving?

“Well, it seems it all came true!” says Casale, the delight audible in his voice. “It’s even worse than we thought. If someone showed you, back in 1980, the world today with planes running into the World Trade Center and the oil spill and on and on, you wouldn’t have believed it. You would have thought it was some cheap B-movie – a bad sci-fi dystopia designed to scare people. But it all came true.

“So when we said we didn’t think the world was getting better; we didn’t see progress; we didn’t see people getting smarter; we saw massive stupidity, we were definitely having a pose or making a kind of a warning, but we never thought that this would happen. I mean, this is beyond anything we thought! So de-evolution is real now, and it’s not a crackpot theory and it’s not shocking and everyone goes, ‘Oh yeah, de-evolution – that’s true’. And so we’re just part of it. We’re in it, prophecy fulfilled and here we are celebrating it.”

20 years after their last album, it seems Devo are more relevant than ever.

Something For Everybody is out now on Warner Bros. Records.

www.clubdevo.com

At the end of last year I reviewed an amazing gig by New Jersey noise/hip-hop act Dälek, when they played in front of pitifully few people in the Black Box, Belfast. Those that weren’t there missed a treat – “imagine Kevin Shields adding his guitar onslaught to Public Enemy” as I wrote at the time.

It seems the band’s DJ Oktopus has read the review because he just emailed me out of the blue. Bizarre. Reason being, he has a new project on the go called MRC Riddims. It’s a collaboration with a NYC-based producer called Merc – Oktopus is now in Berlin, and the track below features vocals from John Morrison. It’s kind of discordant, but much less so than the sheer mayhem of Dälek – here we have buzzsaw bass, siren beeps and a doozy of a head-nodding groove. I’m into the production more than the rhyming but it’s worth a listen and a download.

I had a few post-work pints with AU writers Francis Jones and John Freeman yesterday. Fra was the editor of the mag before me, and we’ve both been involved with it for about five years. His day job has changed but he still contributes regularly and is a good friend. John is from Manchester and found out about us through a mate of his who is obsessed with Duke Special – when we had Duke on the cover a couple of years ago, this guy got hold of a copy and showed it to John, who got in touch, pitched some work and soon became one of our main feature writers. However, he had never in his 40 years been to Northern Ireland so after interviewing Jeff Tweedy for our Wilco cover feature he took the opportunity to fly over for the band’s debut NI gig, at the Open House Festival. After innumberable phone calls and emails it was good to finally meet him.

Anyway, we were chatting about the mag and music writing in general, and got on to talk about the interviews we do. Being based in Belfast, most of our interviews are done on the phone – we are normally either previewing a gig to be played here, or the artist is promoting a new album. Either way, the interviewee is unlikely to be in Belfast. On certain occasions it does work out (sometimes we interview bands when they are here to play a gig, especially if they are about to release an album soon after) and of course we often interview bands from Northern Ireland.

Any music writer will tell you that a face-to-face interview is always preferable – there is only so much you can do with an interview based solely on words down a phone line. When you meet up with an interviewee, however, there is so much more to play with. Context, geography, even something as simple as facial expressions and body language make a huge difference.

With that in mind, and because I haven’t posted it up here yet, here’s an interview I did with And So I Watch You From Afar in March last year, just before their debut album came out. The photographer Carrie and I went to their own patch – Portrush – for the day and chatted to them in Barry’s Amusements, the Harbour Bar and on the beach. It was a fun day.

AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR

THE MACHINE RUMBLES ON

As ASIWYFA prepare to release their debut album, AU takes them for a day out at the seaside to get the inside story on this most extraordinary of bands. The music, the mayhem, and just why it is that these four lads from the north coast are such a force to be reckoned with.

It’s a bright, crisp day in Portrush, and as the wind whips in off the Atlantic and down the deserted off-season streets, there’s a bleak, sad air about the place. The coffee shops seem to be doing ok – it is freezing, after all – but even in mid-afternoon there’s hardly anyone walking the streets. It’s not quite the buzzing, bucket-and-spade resort that we remember from happy childhood holidays.

In Barry’s Amusements, for decades the centrepiece of this most earthy of seaside towns, some overall-clad employees mill about and we hear the faint clanking of a forklift deep in the bowels of the building, evidence that work is underway to rouse it from its winter hibernation. At the back of the complex, the Big Dipper stands proud – not as tall as we remember it but vividly bright blue and yellow, the product of a refurbishment a few years ago. The slot machines are modern and hi-tech, but to all intents and purposes, this place hasn’t changed for years. Dodgems, the ghost train, the carousel, the Cyclone. Generations of local kids have worked here and thousands more have passed through its doors, ice cream and candy floss in their nostrils. The manageress tells us that they’ll be open again for Easter. “We hope it’ll be busy,” she says. Later, we are told that even now, long after the town’s heyday, Barry’s makes enough money in a few months to sustain it all year. Summer is big business in Portrush.

We’ve made the trip up from Belfast not just for a jolly by the seaside (though that has its attractions, not least nostalgia for those hazy holidays of old) but because of a band that calls the area home. The four-strong unit of And So I Watch You From Afar are now based in Belfast and have, by accident or design, assumed the position of spokesmen for the city’s music scene, but this is their old stamping ground. Guitarist Tony Wright and bassist Johnny Adger grew up in the marginally more genteel resort of Portstewart, a few miles round the coast, while Tony’s fellow axe-wielder Rory Friers hails from the countryside near Whitepark Bay and drummer Chris Wee from the distillery village of Bushmills, a couple of miles inland. Rory reminisces about getting kicked out of Barry’s in his teens because he wasn’t spending any money. “We used to come over to Portrush as teenagers to drink,” says Tony, fondly. Their first video, for ‘WPB, 6am’, was filmed by Rory on a handheld camera right outside Barry’s, and a few days after we meet up, the band will headline the St Paddy’s Day Hooley gig at Kelly’s nightclub on the edge of town. They haven’t forgotten this place. In fact, they’re fiercely proud of it.

“In the Eighties, obviously, there was the Troubles and all the shit that was going on,” says Tony once we are all safely ensconced in the cosy Harbour Bar, where he, Chris and Rory used to work – the latter two as apparently lax supervisors. “But in Portstewart, we kind of felt disconnected from it. There was bits and pieces but never anything severe, so it was a nice place to grow up. But it was a very closed-minded place to grow up as well.”

As with any small town, anyone looking a bit different can get pilloried by the locals – Tony admits he is no stranger to taunts of ‘fucking hippy, get your hair cut!’. “I still get it now!” he exclaims earlier in the day, his wiry crop steadfast in the breeze. But according to Rory – Chris and Johnny largely let the two guitarists get on with the talking – the fact that these north coast towns can be insular, boring places to grow up in has actually worked to their advantage. “I think we’ve grown to be almost grateful of the negative aspects of it,” he says. “Me and Chris were out-of-towners – country bumpkins – and Portrush and Portstewart were the places we’d come and see friends and stuff. And almost an extension of that is how we all felt when we came up to Belfast. None of us really knew what we were doing, but we all had almost an ingrained, inbuilt sense that nothing is going to happen unless you do it. It wasn’t like you could wait for a really good gig to happen – you had to form a band and then put a gig on for yourself. So it was cool because, naively, when we came to Belfast, that’s all we knew how to do. I think it’s almost been a blessing in disguise for us.”

Since the band made their Belfast debut in February 2006, their impact has been nothing short of seismic. Early gigs in the smallest venues quickly enabled them to prove their worth, but a constant theme of their story is an inability to accept the normal way of doing things. They were never satisfied with the usual treadmill of small pub shows and occasional support slots for touring bands – the limit to many bands’ ambitions. They were going to make things happen for themselves, and the first evidence of that was at the launch of their debut EP.

“One of our rules,” says Rory, “is that we try to have massive ambition but massively small expectations. I remember when we first booked our EP launch in Auntie Annie’s – we were like, ‘If we get 50 people in, that’d be amazing’, and then 100 people turned up. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.”

Since then, it has been a constant procession of bigger and better gigs – proper events organised, hosted and (with one notable exception) headlined by the band, that have shown off their enormous cojones as well as their ability to walk the walk when they get on stage. The real watershed moment came when they booked another EP launch in the xxx capacity Spring & Airbrake. The EP was Tonight The City Burns, featuring guest vocalists from Fighting With Wire, LaFaro, Driving By Night and Cruz. On the night, all of the bands played sets of their own before ASIWYFA came on and utterly destroyed the place, opening with the very first airing of the extraordinary ‘Clench Fists, Grit Teeth… GO!’.

“That felt like a big step for us,” says Rory. Tony admits that there were a few doubts as to whether they’d be able to pull it off, then recalls the response within the band: “Why the fuck can’t we do that? Why take the safe route again? We’ve done Auntie Annie’s now, let’s try something else and push it a bit further and hope it works. Let’s have massive ambitions and expect little. And we did it and it was brilliant.”

Through all of this, the band have frequently returned home to play gigs at, among other venues in the area, the Retro in Portrush, the scene of “anarchic” and “hectic” gigs by earlier bands Pepper Book and Zombie Safari Park. But it’s Belfast where the band made its name, and the next step was the quite mind-bogglingly ambitious A Little Solidarity festival in November last year – as the posters had it, “three days, four shows and a fuckload of amazing music”. 18 bands played in total, ranging from newcomers like Here Comes The Landed Gentry and Yes Cadets to heavyweights Oppenheimer and Fighting With Wire, the whole event proof of the strength of the Northern Irish scene and ASIWYFA’s place right at the head of it. At the closing show in Mandela Hall, the band humbly deferred to Fighting With Wire and let them headline, but at the start of April chalked that one off the list too at their album launch, supported by the Lowly Knights, Adebisi Shank and Pocket Billiards.

But does it stop there? No. The band was unfortunate not to make it onto the bill of the recent Do You Remember The First Time? gig at the newly reopened Ulster Hall (though Tony does spend the day excitedly recalling his guest appearance: “I got to sing a Rage Against The Machine song with Jetplane Landing, in the Ulster Hall! It was a dream come true!”), but that iconic venue is in their sights, too. “I think any Irish band goes, ‘One day we’re gonna play there’,” says Tony. “Of course we’ve all said that in our lifetime. So yes, one day we’re gonna play there. Those are still the same plans I made when I was eight years old and they’re not changing!”

These things don’t happen for nothing. One not-insignificant reason for the band’s meteoric rise – all the more impressive when you consider how utterly uncommercial their music is – is the fact that they’re totally fucking amazing, especially live. An ASIWYFA headline show is almost how you imagine it would have been seeing Public Enemy in their pomp, or Fugazi. Utter life-affirming carnage, and all achieved without words, save the between-song exhortations to the crowd from Tony and Rory. But aside from that, the band themselves recognise that there is something special in the chemistry between the four of them. Spending the day with them, you can feel it. These guys are the closest of mates, first and foremost; everything else flows from that.

“Sometimes we have to take a step back and realise why it’s so good to be in this band,” says Rory. “The most exciting thing about when the four of us first got together wasn’t really the music we were playing, but it was a definite feeling that everybody just wanted to push for something. We didn’t know what, but we wanted to push towards something different and something cool. We always say how lucky we feel that there’s four random people who have all met and all have this very specific drive and ethic and ambition. And it took us a long time to realise how lucky it was because bands come and go so much.”

Tony adds, “Everyone knows what the other person’s going to do. It’s just like one big bastard fucking machine, driving forward.”

“Music is why we’re doing it,” says Rory, “but at the same time that’s the fundamental reason why this band’s worked so far – because everyone’s shooting off the same page and the music’s almost a bonus of the shared attitude and shared drive we’ve got.”

It is a hell of a bonus, though. This month sees the release of their debut album proper on Smalltown America Records, the Derry-based label run by Jetplane Landing. It follows the self-released This Is Our Machine And Nothing Can Stop It mini-album, which received excellent notices from the UK press, putting the band on many more radars than they would otherwise have been, resulting in a Rock Sound magazine-sponsored UK tour, amongst other things. The debut proper, recorded in Belfast with Rocky O’Reilly, is nothing less than a statement of intent – an hour-long encapsulation of everything that makes them such a thrilling band. But although they are often tagged as post-rock and latterly have brought in a more technical, mathy feel, they are curiously reluctant to name any specific influences, instead preferring to talk abstractly about what inspires them to make music.

“I think it evolved, really,” says Tony, “because the first jams that we had were more in the style of what people would call post-rock, and we wanted to move away from that was much as we could. We have a common influence between us all which is a love of dynamic music – it doesn’t have to be pinned down to one genre in particular, but stuff that is dynamic and passionate and has some fucking heart behind it.”

Rory picks up the baton: “The general rule, and we say it all the time, is that as long as you’re writing music that you want to listen to and as long as you’re writing music that is progressing yourself, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. Whenever we first started we didn’t decide we weren’t gonna have a singer. We were doing these jammed-out tunes, big crescendo-based stuff, and it was great, but very quickly that gets kind of boring. It’s not that all of us dislike post-rock and wanted to try and consciously write something different, it’s just natural for us to do something different; do something more.

“Once a band starts laying out a formula,” Tony adds, “it almost sucks the life out of it. Our sound has changed, but the one thing that’s remained constant is that we’re just pushing further. We’re by no means the finished product yet. We’re getting there, but I think the day we’re the finished product is the day we’re finished.”

Aside from any quibbles about what is and isn’t post-rock, one noticeable shift is that it feels like a much brighter record than This Is Our Machine… There’s a sense of community, celebration and, yes, solidarity. Maybe the artwork is something to do with that – that mini-album featured the titular machine rumbling across a post-apocalyptic landscape, painted by Rory’s artist dad Julian. This time, Mr Friers has come up with something more surreal than outright menacing. But, more obviously, it’s in the song titles and the music.

“With ‘These Riots are Just The Beginning’,” says Tony, “people think that that’s quite threatening or something, but I actually think the idea behind that is that it’s a catalyst – something’s going to come of this; something’s going to grow and be created out of it. It’s aggressive, but I think it sounds really celebratory as well. And with other songs on the album, I think there’s almost a slight pop element to them, but there’s also an underlying current of darkness. With everything, there’s both sides – there’s yin and there’s yang; there’s dark and there’s light.”

Another key track could yet become the band’s manifesto, even more so than ‘A Little Solidarity Goes A Long Way’. That track is called ‘Don’t Waste Time Doing Things You Hate’ (it should be noted here that all four members place great importance in their song titles). It’s long, complex and heavy in places, but it’s also beautiful, indeed almost carefree and optimistic. Halfway through, it enters a samba breakdown, cowbell and all, before a joyous choir of ragged voices comes in and cheers it to the heavens. Efterklang gone prog-metal, you might say.

“That was almost a reassurance to ourselves, calling the song that,” says Rory. “I think we came up with it when me and Tony were mixing the album in London. Being in a band is unbelievable and this is all we’re gonna do, but you’re taking these formative years of your life – your 20s – when most people are working their way up in their career, and all your friends have got these great jobs and are buying their houses and stuff, and we’re scrimping together pennies to try and go on tour.”

As Tony butts in, the strength of feeling is etched on his face. “Whenever you were a kid, whenever you were 10 years old, did you really want to be a chartered accountant? Is that what you really wanted to do? This is all we’ve ever wanted to do, and we’re going to do everything in our fucking power to make sure that this is what happens.”

“Especially now,” Rory nods, “we feel things are really jumping up a notch and it’s proper decisions we’re making. This is it now. It’s something to get people thinking. It’d be great if someone was like, ‘I heard that song and read that title and now I’m doing this’.”

Even now, you will come across young, new bands in Northern Ireland who cite ASIWYFA – and comrades like Panama Kings, Fighting With Wire and LaFaro – as influences. The ambition they have shown is already rubbing off. Shortly before we met in Portrush, the band returned from their latest UK tour, this time with LaFaro in tow. They are now properly tour-hardened, having done this several times, and they know what it is going to take in future, especially now that the album is almost out. They are a fiercely ambitious band, but not in such a way that they are hell-bent on selling millions of records and becoming household names – one listen to their music tells you that much. Their ambition is just to do this for the rest of their lives, and that last tour, which they admit was tough at times (“one of the ones people tell you about,” says Tony) has only confirmed that view.

“We don’t want to set anything in stone,” Tony says, “but we’d all say that if we can continue to make music and [for] people to enjoy it, and we can make enough money to travel and continue to produce that music and get it out there, then that’s all we want. Write, record, tour; write, record, tour; write, record, tour.”

“Our ambitions are stretching to getting to Europe, getting to Japan,” confirms Rory. “The record’s just out in Japan, so let’s go tour there. We don’t want to be one of those bands who sit where we’re from and are happy with that. The fundamental thing that we’ve always pushed is that if you’re in a band, you’ve got to push yourself as far as possible, but you’ve got to make sure you don’t forget where you’re from. That’s something we’re never going to do. We’re not gonna move to London and forget about Belfast. And, in a weird sense, the more we can do for ourselves, the more, hopefully, we’ll be able to contribute to what started it all, which is people back home.”

And as we sit supping pints around this battered old table in what is best described as an old-man pub in Portrush, talk turns to the sacrifices that the band have made to get this far.

“We put our heart and soul into the band and the music,” says Rory, “so we’re not doing it for our four egos. We’re doing it for the band and something that we’re proud of. I’m sure it’s like when you raise a kid – you want your kid to fucking do the best they can.”

“You’ve got to give it the best platform possible,” Tony agrees. “We’ve all quit jobs [especially Chris, who came home from Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the then nascent band], been taken down with doses of salmonella [Johnny , who played a gig instead of going to hospital], snuck out of hospital after being hit by cars to go and play a gig [Tony himself]. We’ve all made massive, massive sacrifices and been broke for the last two years and it’s all for those songs. To get as many people as possible to hear them.”

MEET THE BAND!

OUR CUT-OUT-AND-KEEP* GUIDE TO ASIWYFA

RORY FRIERS, 25, GUITAR

Favourite album ever
DJ Shadow – Endtroducing, but I gotta give a shout to At The Drive-In – Relationship of Command. I wouldn’t be in a band without that record.

Best gig attended
Jethro Tull at the Ulster Hall with my Mum and Dad.

Best gig played
It’s gotta be A Little Solidarity, the atmosphere was incredible.

Guitar hero
Joe Strummer

Worst injury suffered
Snapped ankles, though I’ve had my nose broken 13 times.

Best heckle heard
You’re a big fat mess.

Tell us a joke…
Q: Why did the little girl fall off the bicycle?
A: Because someone threw a canoe at her.

TONY WRIGHT, 28, GUITAR

Favourite album ever
Fugazi – Repeater

Best gig attended
LaFaro at A Little Solidarity.

Best gig played
Glasgowbury ‘07 was a pretty special moment.

Guitar hero
It changes quite a bit, but the constants would be Graham Coxon, Kurt Cobain, Steve Albini and Ian MacKaye.

Worst injury suffered
I got hit by a car the night before Fighting With Wire’s album launch. My head felt like I had the world’s worst hangover before and after the gig!

Best heckle heard
One time in England whilst engaging in inane chat with the crowd between tunes, one guy shouted, “Shut up and play!” Probably the best advice I’ve ever got.

Tell us a joke…
Q: Two cowboys are hanging out in the kitchen. One is an imposter – how do you tell which one is the real cowboy?
A: The one on the range.

JOHNNY ADGER, 29, BASS

Favourite album ever
Tool – Lateralus

Best gig attended
Again, I’d have to say Tool. SFX, Dublin, about 11 years ago. They completely blew my mind!

Best gig played
The Solidarity show. Not necessarily for our performance, but it’s the best atmosphere I’ve ever played in.

Bass hero
Jack Bruce from Cream. Until him, bass players were not usually such a prominent part of the band, live or on record, so thanks Jack!

Worst injury suffered
Ruining my ankle skating at the old St. Anne’s in Belfast (RIP). I’ve never felt pain like it and hopefully never will again.

Best heckle heard
I [used to have] a habit of playing shows with my back to the crowd for the whole set due to nerves. One guy kept shouting, “Fucking turn round!” Eventually I did and started going nuts like Tony, only my headstock met the back of Tony’s head, leaving him with a nice scar!

Tell us a joke…
Q: Why did Nivea cream?
A: Because Max Factor!

CHRIS WEE, 24, DRUMS

Favourite album ever
Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream

Best gig attended
Smashing Pumpkins, Wembley Arena, November 2000

Best gig played
A Little Solidarity

Drumming hero
Danny Carey (Tool) and Thomas Haake (Meshuggah)

Worst injury suffered
I got stung on the hand by a wasp just as we started a set once, karma for killing loads of wasps earlier that day!

Best heckle heard
“Get your tits out!” Ironically, mine already were!

Tell us a joke…
Q: Who would win in a fight between Superman, Batman and Iron Man?
A: Chuck Norris

*NOT REALLY

The video below appeals to me for more than one reason. For a start, the audio: it’s been too long since I heard Girl Talk’s mashup masterpiece Night Ripper, which took 2manydjs’ template for anything-goes track selection and genius splicing and went even further. The whole 41-minute record is a bit of a mission to get through, because it just does not let up, but here video artist Evan Roth has taken a choice 10-minute segment (including two absolute highlights – Nirvana’s ‘Scentless Apprentice’ versus Lil’ Wayne and Young Jeezy; and Notorious B.I.G. rhyming over Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’) and set it to the most appropriate visual medium imaginable: the humble gif, those seconds-long visual loops so beloved of 4chan geeks, immortalising pratfalls, cats, dance moves and Patrick Stewart’s impressive range of facial expressions. Put the mix and the visuals together and the result is quite something.

Entitled ‘Cache Rules Everything Around Me’, it’s a funny, trashy but – in its own way – sumptuous assault on the senses.

Here’s an Incoming article I wrote about Night Ripper for AU on the album’s UK/Irish release in 2008:

GIRL TALK

CUT-AND-PASTE KING INTRODUCES HIS BASTARD POP

The sleeve notes for mashup don Gregg Gillis’s third album bear only the names of 166 artists and the words “Thank You, Girl Talk.” By any measure, that’s a lot of samples to squeeze into 41 minutes of music. It’s not just the quantity that’s notable though – it’s the names. Typed alphabetically, the list runs from 2 Live Crew to Young Jeezy. So far, so hip hop. Scan further though and you’ll catch sight of everything from Abba to Aerosmith, Neutral Milk Hotel to Naughty By Nature, Sonic Youth to Salt N Pepa. The experience of listening to ‘Night Ripper’ in one sitting is akin to being bombarded with a lifetime of popular music as experienced by one American geek, aged 26.

Such is the deal with Girl Talk. Gillis has been making music under the name since 2002, but ‘Night Ripper’ is the first to make an impression outside the small mashup scene in the States. The album found huge word-of-blog buzz following its US release last year, and it finally arrives over here at the end of February. While purely sample-based albums have been done before, they either used samples obscure enough to be buried in the songs (The Avalanches), or they were more of a DJ set anyway (2 Many DJs). Girl Talk sits somewhere in the middle – Night Ripper is an album of recognisable yet uncredited samples, cobbled together to create 16 (admittedly fairly seamless) songs. “New pop from old pop,” as Gregg puts it. It’s mashup in its purest form, and it’s taken something approaching genius to pull it off.

The Pittsburgh native’s delirious love of pop music, as well as his total lack of pretension, leads to a head-spinning game of spot the sample. Gregg doesn’t care that you’ll recognise half of the samples here. In fact you sense he rather enjoys it, such as in ‘Hold Up’, where the immortal riff from the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’ stutters teasingly into view, or in ‘Summer Smoke’ where he veers straight from
Amerie’s ‘1 Thing’ to M.I.A.’s ‘Galang’. Our favourite moment? Hearing Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy’s knuckleheaded gangsta rap over the top of the bludgeoning drums and guitars of Nirvana’s Scentless Apprentice. Mighty.

And as for the legendary (and, alas, rare this side of the pond) live shows? Well, conscious of the need for some kind of visual spectacle, Gregg has garnered a reputation as something of an exhibitionist, regularly displaying his tighty-whities for all to see. “I have a party every night, and it’s just up to the audience as to how far we’re going to take it,” he sniggers.

Y-fronts at the ready then.

As you see above, the new issue is out throughout Belfast. The list is:

Katy Daly’s, Lavery’s, QUBSU, Maggie May’s, Clement’s (city centre), Auntie Annie’s, Filthy McNasty’s, White’s Tavern, Clockwork Orange, Best Vintage, Forbidden Planet, Urban Outfitters, HMV (city centre), Viva Retro, Duke of York, Dark Horse, Black Box, John Hewitt, Music Matters and the Empire.

Subscribers’ copies are out and everyone else will be stocked next week. So there. The cover is up there *points* and includes lots of good stuff, as you would (hopefully) imagine. I didn’t actually write much of it this month (delegation ftw) but I did review albums by !!! and Adebisi Shank, as well as write the unsigned section (feat. The Alice Kona Band, Isobel Anderson and We Are Losers. And the odd other bit and piece.

I’m going to take this opportunity to plug the fantastic Ms Anderson here, actually. Review below, and Bandcamp link before that. Listen and order the CD. Go on.

ISOBEL ANDERSON
COLD WATER SONGS

- WWW.MYSPACE.COM/ISOBELANDERSON

Ah, I knew that would happen. A couple of months of relatively busy activity on my shiny new blog and then… silence. Pathetic. Anyway, I’ve been thinking I should blog again and I have good reason for it.

First of all, to tell you that the new issue of AU will be out at the weekend. It’s our first since the Wilco issue and our summer break and it’s full of all the usual good stuff plus a few new ideas and some new writers as well. I’ll blog again when it’s out (promise). In the meantime, you can read the last five issues on whatever you are using to read this by clicking here.

Secondly, I was sent this music video today and I feel compelled to share it. The act is Tropics (pictured above), a new signing to Planet Mu Records, who seem to be on a bit of a roll at the minute. The last new act I heard from them was Solar Bears, a Dublin duo whose debut album She Was Coloured In is fantastic in a Boards of Canada-go-Krautrock kind of way. Tropics operates in a similar kind of headspace – all dreamy and woozy, but rather than Kraut it’s got more of a heady disco feel to it, along the lines of Blondes and Teengirl Fantasy.

The video below is of ‘Soft Vision’, from an upcoming EP of the same name. It also works as 90s nostalgia, because it reminds me of a Timotei ad. Either way, it’s a winner.

However, we’ve pretty much got there and it’ll feel great to get the mag out (hopefully at the weekend) and get cracking on the next one – the first I’ll be working on full-time. Yowza.

As a wee preview of the next issue, then (nudge nudge, wink wink), here’s an old interview with James Murphy that I did in the autumn of 2007. I’ve been a massive LCD fan since I heard Losing My Edge and Beat Connection back in about 2002, so it was pretty exciting to get the chance to speak to him, and he didn’t disappoint. Affable and chatty to a fault. Total man-crush material.

How have you spent the last couple of weeks since the Arcade Fire tour ended? Have you had any time off?
Well I had a bit of time at home, not so much time off. There was studio stuff that had to be done – I had to sit in the studio with Juan Maclean and go over stuff for his next album, and another band on DFA called The Hockey Night [who have since split and spawned Free Energy]. And I was working on an M.I.A. remix, for Paper Planes.

Is it good to be back in Ireland after only 6 weeks?
Yeah it’s funny, we played in Dublin once a long, long time ago and then we hadn’t come back. In a weird way it’s a tough place to get to because once you get there it’s a bus, not a flight. It’s always fallen through so I’m really glad it’s 2 out of the 5 gigs we’re playing here.

I was wondering because of your surname – are you Irish-American, is that your heritage?
Yeah, but for a long, long time – great grandparents and all that sort of shit. It was something I was very aware of growing up. My family’s from Boston so they’re all lunatics! Once I started travelling around it became less of a thing. Because it takes fuckin’ 15 minutes of being here to realise I’m American! You know, I’m from a farm town in New Jersey and my parents, my grandparents and all but one of my great-grandparents were born in America. Plus I’m not always super psyched on Americans who are super excited about being Irish – it always kind of weirded me out a bit.

It does us as well, to be honest with you.
Yeah it’s like ‘what are you talking about?!’ Y’know, some guy with a huge Celtic cross tattooed on his back or something, it just fucking weirds me out! [laughter] I’m like, I’m actually from New Jersey, you know?!

You get Americans that don’t say they’re Irish-American, they just say they’re Irish…
It’s like no…no…no man, you’re not – really! You don’t even need to modify the American part – you don’t even need to be Irish-American, you’re actually American. When I look at my family, my parents were very much Irish-American. My grandmother, who was born in America, had a fucking brogue! Because they ghettoed so hard – every one of my family, all the way back, is from fucking Cork. They’re not even mixing it up from counties – they lived in a Cork neighbourhood! I think for them it was a different thing – it actually was a thing. Half the people who lived in your neighbourhood were born in Ireland, you couldn’t get jobs because you were Irish and shit like that. But for me, to all intents and purposes I’m just white – [laughing] I’m a miscellaneous American dude!

The two recent signings – Shocking Pinks and Prinzhorn Dance School. They are essentially indie rock bands, and neither is American, never mind from New York. How did you come across them?
I’m on tour, so there’s so little I can do with the label, which really frustrates me. Jonathan Galkin found both of them through the mail. Prinzhorn just sent him a package, really old fashioned. So much for us is about meeting people, and we met them and loved them, and just felt interested enough to get involved in whatever they wanted to do. And just be a home for them, really.

What about Shocking Pinks?
Yeah, same thing. Jon just found their music and really liked it. It didn’t exist in the States. This is before we had Death From Abroad. They were on Flying Nun and we took them from there – not in an aggressive way! But we liked them, it started off that we wanted to take these old records that hadn’t been released in the States and release them. And then it just turned into more when we started talking to them. He wanted to come over and do a tour and stuff. In a weird way, especially the Shocking Pinks one, it was in the middle of Death From Abroad. Death From Abroad was really only supposed to be for 12”s – like when you hear a 12” in Belgium that doesn’t exist in the US, being able to licence it for our home market.

How do you see that they fit into the label. Is that even an important consideration? Is there any overall aesthetic?
I don’t think so, I hope not. In the beginning it was The Rapture, The Juan Maclean and Black Dice, and that was a really strange triumvirate. From the outside it always seemed like DFA had more of an aesthetic because Tim and I’s remixes were always considered to be part of it and there was a certain sound there, and because ‘Losing My Edge’ and House Of Jealous Lovers were two big 12”s in the beginning and they both seemed to be related. But we never wanted to be a ‘dance-punk’ label or anything like that. We just wanted to be a good label – as good as we could be. So much of it was, ‘do we want to be involved in these people’s careers? do we want to try and be a good conduit for them?’ And there was music we liked that we just didn’t feel like we’d be good for – music that’s more like our genre that we didn’t want to be involved with. It’s more about whether we want to be involved with these people and watch them grow, and be a part of their music.

Is Nick Harte working on new Shocking Pinks stuff?
Yes he is, I was in the office two days ago and totally heard some!

Are you working on it yourself?
No, no, I’m on tour. Hopefully I’m going to turn more so into a human really soon, once I’m done with this. I’m not a super huge fan of touring a lot. The last year has been gone. I don’t like it. I mean, I like touring, but I’m married and I like being with my wife – obviously, because I married her! – and I like being able to make decisions like ‘I’d like to produce this record.’ I’d like to be able to decide that and just do it – to work with my friends and have fun and throw DJ parties, but I don’t really get to do that so much.

Do you feel exhausted?
Yeah, I feel pretty tired. But if I was home, I’d be working just as much. I’d be just as tired – I’d be doing Brazilian ju-jitsu three or four times a week, working in the studio six days a week and DJing once a week. I miss my dog, I miss my wife, I miss my house. I miss being at a bar with a friend who’s like ‘Yeah we want to make a record’ and I’ll be like ‘Well I’ll do it! Let’s do it in a month’. And I can’t – not like ‘I’ll do it! Let’s do it in 2009,’ which is where it is now. It’s a little frustrating. It’s no problem touring, I actually enjoy it, but it’s so designed in the modern world to be all-encompassing. I don’t get to do what I like doing, which is to be pretty diverse and mix it up – do a little tour, a little production, a little this…

How did the FabricLive CD come about? Were you approached yourself or was it always a package of the two of you?
I’m not entirely sure. I think I was approached a long time ago and couldn’t do it. And then we went on this live tour and Pat and I had been DJing all the time, whenever we had nights off. I think we may have reached back out to them, to say, ‘When we’re done with this tour, do you still want to do the mix? Like a document of what we’ve been DJing on this tour.’ I could be dead wrong, but I think that’s how it went.

It would be hard to construct a DJ set in the studio – was it a set you’d been DJing out, so you knew what the reactions were?
We never have a set or anything planned, but there were core records that got played a lot. When we talked about doing it, we made a list of those records and sent it to them, and they cleared most of it, and then we had that list of what had been cleared and started coming over to my house and playing. It’s hard to play away from a crowd because you wonder what’s the point – it’s a bit masturbatory. Why play any record after any other record if you’re not reading the crowd? But we did a bunch of two hour sets at my house, just for fun, listened back and made decisions on what would make a good 74 minute mix. I think we did it in four chunks, like do five songs and let the fifth one play out and go back, so you don’t have the pressure of fucking it up on the last record! It’s no big deal doing the whole thing again, but if you keep doing it, whatever was fun and spontaneous about it would just be destroyed. So we wanted to keep it like live mixing – fun and not too stressed out.

How does DJing compare to playing live with the band?
[yawn] It’s apples and oranges. It’s so different. It’s hard to directly compare them. Live, you’re playing your own music and people are staring at you. It’s a lot more set-up, lugging gear and bullshit. But you’re playing your own music and when it’s great, it’s great. DJing is a delight. Theoretically, unless you’re in one of those weird celebrity DJ scenarios, which I’ve found myself in a couple of times, which I loathe, then people aren’t just staring at you. It feels a bit more like being a chef. You’re doing this rudimentary thing that’s theoretically designed to make people happy.

Do you prefer DJing?
I prefer DJing in the sense that I get to see cities more. It’s a lot less work. You don’t have to be there until midnight, so you have the whole day to go record shopping and you don’t need to carry anything other than your records. But live is obviously a bit more of a something, in a way.

So many different roles – how do you see yourself, first and foremost?
I make things. And whatever needs to be done to make things, I can usually figure out what to do. I’m better at some things than others – I’m a better drummer or bass player than I am a piano player, but I can play piano if it’s what I need to do to make something. It all seems to be about the same thing to me – just different aspects of the job. Again, it’s like cooking – sometimes you make a sauce, sometimes you’re timing the chicken

Whatever needs done to get the finished result?
Yeah, I’ve been an engineer – I’ve designed sound systems. I’ve done live sound, monitors, I’ve been a bouncer. I don’t see them as separate things at all.

And if you had to pick one, the only thing you could do?
If I had to pick one, I’d probably pick producing, just because it leaves me at home. But that’s just arbitrary. I’d get bored – if I just produced a bunch, I’d be like, ‘Fuck this, I need to make my own record!’ And if I just toured I’d be like, ‘Fuck this, I need to DJ!’ And if I just DJed I’d really want to play live again, you know? I like a balance.

It must make it more interesting for you as well, because there’s always something else you can do.
Yeah, I love that. It’s given me a lot of freedom. I don’t have to be as mercenary with any one single thing in my life. I don’t have to find that big record that will pay the bills, or take that really embarrassing DJ gig, or do that advertisement I don’t like. I feel lucky, like I’m in a good spot. I got sued a couple of years ago by a total crazy lunatic-

Was that the Death From Above thing?
No, no, not that at all. No, that was the funniest thing of all time! Jesse from Death From Above is a friend of mine! All of that was made to be a lot more than it was. This was their first experience of being on a major label, and they were learning how that works. We knew who they were, we knew about them long before but we never cared – it was always fine. But I know what it’s like when a major label sees something that could potentially be a lawsuit – they have to clear it before they put the record out. So they’re sending letters to DFA saying ‘We need you to back off the name,’ and I’m on tour so they’re not getting responses, so basically they’re being told, ‘this guy’s not even writing us back’. But I was on tour, I didn’t even know this was going on! So then I got home and I was like, ‘Well they can be DFA if they want, but we’re not going to NOT be Death From Above. We’re not going to NOT do it. These guys were telling us we can’t be DFA! Afterwards we had a good laugh about it cos it was just not the way it was supposed to be. But I wasn’t ever mad about it, even when they were really mad. They signed to Vice thinking it was an indie label, but it’s actually owned by Atlantic. They got the rude awakening to a certain degree and I can’t ever get mad at them. It was just a punk band, they were just a couple of punk dudes that were trying to do their thing and got hung up on shit that they didn’t think they’d get hung up on.

Sorry, you were saying…?
Sorry, yeah. I got sued by my old manager, who was just a piece of shit. And I got to go DJ to pay the bills! It was the best thing in the world – a lawyer would send me a bill and I’d go and do a bunch of DJ gigs to pay the bill off. And it was such a delight because I never had to worry about it. I was like, ‘I don’t mind DJing – if I’m DJing for no money, I’ve done that a million times!’ And to know that it’s fucking up somebody who’s trying to fuck with me, that’s great! Or just being able to say ‘I don’t want to produce that big, expensive record. Yeah maybe I’d make money, but it’d be really embarrassing, but I don’t have to because I’ll…..go on tour.’ There’s always some other way to do something that keeps you from having to compromise. If you only have one thing and you start getting panicky and thinking ‘this is our chance.’

That could be a lesson to a lot of people
I don’t blame them. People do embarrassing things, because it depends on who you’re surrounded by. It depends on who’s whispering in your ear all the time. I try to be careful to have good people whispering in my ear.

Can I ask you one last question?
Yes!

You were in bands for years – through your teens and your twenties. The success with LCD came when you were 32 – do you feel better equipped now to deal with everything that’s happened than if it had happened ten years ago?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Totally and absolutely, yes. If it has happened any other way, I’d be a really unhappy person.

You got married before all this, didn’t you?
No, I got married in the middle of it. But no, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Because like any 23 year old I was a self-involved idiot, and entitled and wondering when the world was going to send me my fucking cheque. And if the world had sent me a cheque I would’ve been like, ‘well there, everything’s right in the world!’ [laughing] And, you know, I’d just have been a baby. Failure is such a good and healthy thing. Prolonged failure is really good and healthy, and I’ve kind of mastered failure, dude! So having some success now, it’s far more surreal, absurdist and funny. And enjoyable, and it gives me better perspective in that when it’s not enjoyable, I can just say ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I don’t need to, I’ve lived for years without it.

And also in terms of music – if all this had happened 10 years before, your music would’ve sounded very different, and did.
Well I did make music ten years before and it sucked! To have been successful for that bad music would’ve been poisonous for life. [laughter]

OK that’s brilliant, I’ll let you go now. Good luck for tonight, and I’m going down to Dublin to see the show tomorrow, really looking forward to it.
Alright, sweet, see you then!

Thanks James, bye bye
Alright, see you.