Interview: Les Savy Fav

It seems fitting that terminal nearly-men and ‘band’s band’, Les Savy Fav should hit Manchester the very same night as their more-successful friends, LCD Soundsystem. LSF singer and likeable eccentric, Tim Harrington jokes, “I feel bad they’re on at the same time as us. We’re gonna send some people over as it’s gonna be hard for them, with us playing across the way.”

Tim is busily working away on a customised poster for tonight’s show throughout the interview. Although being knee-deep in cut-out letters (spelling out the words “Man Chest Hair”), he manages to be erudite and charming, while drummer Harrison Haynes is able to pick up the slack when Harrington’s concentration starts to wander. Much minutiae is covered (TV comedy, the vertiginous effects of the dressing room wall covering) before the talk moves into more serious territory.

“There was a period (a couple of years ago) when I thought we weren’t allowed to be a band”, Tim muses, before Harrison interjects, “I think we’re more broken up now than we were then”. “That’s true”, laughs Tim, “We’re like a ghost band”.

Pushed on how he thinks the landscape has changed over the years, Tim reflects, “Since we started as a band… it’s gelled up to be a kind of functioning industry. It’s now like, ‘My job is I’m in a band’ and that never occurred to us. We always had other jobs outside the band”. Harrison then notes that “Bands we had a camaraderie with now seem to have become… legitimised”.

Tim goes on to talk about the overriding influence of the internet on today’s music; “There’s more connoisseurship. More people have access to more music, which is cool, but there’s not as much of that kind of misunderstanding when you live in a town where there’s no good record shops and there’s no good music”.

Tim seems perturbed at the changes in how people are turned on to music today, having seen it evolve from “checking out the thank-you list in the liner notes and just buying them all, hoping that some of them would be good”, to “downloading a song off MySpace and deciding whether you like them or not”. He qualifies by saying “It’s great… for some kinds of musicians that years ago would have been in a punk, underground type of world, whereas now they can actually think of making a living out of it”.

There’s a refreshingly old-school sentiment at the heart of Les Savy Fav that could be misconceived as reverse-snobbery were it not for Harrington’s super-enthused, thoughtful manner. When ruminating on the instant fame some bands have thrust upon them these days, he comes to the conclusion that bands “need time to suck”, before breaking the whole of the music industry’s band nursery down into three types of band:

“There’s band that comes out of nowhere that people go crazy for, but it turns out that all they have is three songs and they suck. Then there’s band that comes out of nowhere and it turns out that they actually are a really great band, they just didn’t have to fuck around for five years before they got any attention. That’s awesome for them.

“Then there’s the band that suck at first and would’ve gotten awesome, but never get the chance because everyone saw their ugly first baby-steps and will have then forgotten about them and then you’re fucked.

“In the past, every city had, like, 50 shitty bands who’d play for each other and no-one got to hear of them outside of that. But it was like Darwinism, slowly but surely they’d be allowed to evolve into something that was really solid. Now it’s like, if you don’t get a hole-in-one, then you’re screwed”.

Les Savy Fav never had that hole-in-one but they’re making up for it now with arguably the strongest album of their career. The epithet on the band’s website reads “Missing out on cashing in for over a decade”, but if it doesn’t happen for them now, something tells me the band won’t be bothered too much, as Tim notes, “All the bands I loved failed. There’s something about being as good a band as you can be but not having to be professional. That’s why (we called the album) Let’s Stay Friends. The friendly thing is really critical to us. We can’t really picture the band any other way”.

Printed in the December/January issue of High Voltage magazine.

Interview: Black Lips

Just four hours later, Atlanta, Georgia’s Black Lips are tearing up The Roadhouse stage, using all manner of baseless shock tactics to throw the audience curveball after curveball, ranging from catching your own spit to sporting bling-bling gold teeth. Right at this moment though, you wouldn’t dream that these four decidedly normal, well-spoken guys would stoop as low as to urinate in their own mouths or French kiss each other on stage just to keep their audience on their toes.

Yet here we are, with Cole (singer/guitarist/spit-catcher), Jared (singer/bassist/handlebar moustache), Ian (guitar/gold fronts) and Joe (drums/screams/flailing arms) waxing lyrical about alcoholic energy drinks and the state of country music. More importantly though, there’s that new album (Good Bad, Not Evil) to cover.

“Our album’s released on September 11th in the States”, Cole informs us, “but we really wanted to compete with Kanye West for a release date. We got some country guy releasing his album on that day though…” “Kenny Chesney”, Jared informatively chips in.

“It’s not even country though. The new (country music) is kinda hilarious. The lyrical content… it’s all (adopts hackneyed Southern accent) ‘Were you theeere when the toweeers feeeelll!’ They’re retarded.”

As one non-sequitur reaches its end, Ian is willing to bring up another so as to not let the conversation take on too linear a manner; “We’re getting into the spirits business”. Jared elaborates, “Ian’s brother invented an alcoholic energy drink… to rival Lil’ Jon’s Crunk Juice”. The band then enthusiastically embellish on the drink’s merits, telling us that it’s “made from exotic Brazilian herbs”, it’s “chemically infused” and that “there’s science involved”. Quite.

The band are just as enthused about the current scene developing out of Atlanta that themselves, Deerhunter and Mastodon seem to be spearheading. “There’s a band called The Selmanaires”, Jared notes, “that are like a Kinks/Talking Heads mash-up. There are bands popping up all over right now. The Coathangers, The Carbonas…” “It’s a really close-knit scene in Atlanta”, Cole explains, “Even, like, Cee-Lo from Gnarls Barkley and Andre 3000 from OutKast, you’ll see on the street.”

What about the future of Black Lips though? What kind of goals do the band have for this new record? “A billion records”, Cole beams. “We want to outsell Kanye and 50 Cent”, Joe quips, an ironic smirk creeping across his face. I guess it’s a mark of the band that they treat the important things trivially and the trivial things with the utmost importance, but something tells me that the manic stage show and borderline-unhinged recordings are all part of some devious world-domination plot. Be warned when you crack open that bottle of D-Tuned.

http://www.highvoltage.org.uk/displaydemoreview.asp?num=3170&band=1728

Interview: Elektrons

It’s a time of transition for Luke Cowdrey and Justin Crawford (aka Manchester’s very own Elektrons), as we meet them after a rapturously-received homecoming gig at The Mint Lounge. They’ve recently announced that the Mancunian clubland institution they built with their own bare hands (figuratively of course), The Electric Chair, where the two DJ under the moniker The Unabombers, will be coming to an end in January, but as one door closes, another opens and with Elektrons’ album, Red Light Don’t Stop garnering glowing notices left, right and centre, it seems like it would be a good time for Luke and Justin to spend more time on this venture.

To the naked eye at least it seems that way, but the decision to end The Chair and the emergence of Elektrons aren’t really as interlinked as they at first seem.

“Every year, for at least the last ten years, we’d sort of check ourselves”, Justin ponders. “Is it time? Are we still enjoying it? It would be wrong to say that we aren’t getting distracted by Elektrons. We are. We’re putting a lot of time and energy into it. It’s just that before we couldn’t imagine a future without The Electric Chair, but now we can.”

It appears that the need in Justin and Luke not to rest on their laurels and a mutual distaste for rose-tinted nostalgia helped their decision. As Luke elaborates, “We think change is a very fundamental thing in music. We’ve always said bomb the past, don’t be complacent, don’t rest on some kind of horrible reputation that ends up being just a Spinal Tap kind of thing anyway… We’re just gonna change guise and shape and format. We’re still gonna do parties and one-offs like Electric Souls (parties that Luke and Justin have put on in the past in various off-the-beaten-track locales)”.

“We’ll get a Saturday night off once a month now, too”, laughs Justin.

One point where the guys are happy to have the night and the band intersect is in the music. “We did sometimes think when we were in the studio”, says Justin, “Would this work (at The Chair)?” Luke interjects, “We think (the album) is – and this might sound like a pompous thing to say – an honest reflection of where we’ve come from and Me and Justin have always talked about the lineage… of our music. Going back to Northern Soul, through to the Wild Bunch and Massive Attack… Soul II Soul. Great British sound systems that started off as parties, then taken into bands and collectives. It’s not like we’ve copied that but we’ve taken inspiration from that British vibe.”

“As DJs, we try to bring the vibe and the atmosphere of the club into our music, just like people like Soul II Soul and Basement Jaxx do”, Justin is eager to clarify. A view that’s mirrored by Luke, “The idea at the heart of The Chair was that some of our favourite records might, potentially, be records that everyone else liked as well. For us, Elektrons is a very natural continuity of what we’ve been doing… for the last thirteen years.”

Again, Luke is adamant that their music not be a backward-looking venture; “We wanted it to be very bold and dynamic… We didn’t just want to be derivative. We love house music, gospel, disco, soul and we wanted to take that and rekindle it and make something new. Whether that works or not I’m sure we’ll find out”

Elektrons aren’t just a duo, with singers like Pete Simpson (“Britain’s own Marvin Gaye”, according to Luke) and Mpho Skeef adding some much-needed flavour and inspiration both live and in the studio. Whereas others may rely on musical stunt casting to catch the eye, Luke and Justin wanted “quintessentially British” vocalists on Red Light Don’t Stop. “All those artists are coming through and they’ve got a real individuality” notes Luke, “There’s a lot of attitude there and a lot of bollocks, really”.

“We wanted to work with them though because, essentially, they’re really talented” says Justin, pragmatically. “When you work with people as talented as they are, it makes it easy”.

Something else that has come easy to Elektrons at this early stage is getting number one singles in far-off places. “We were number one in South Africa!”, beams Justin, referring to ‘Dirty Basement’’s out-of-leftfield success there. “We knocked off Rihanna!” exclaims Luke, “It’s just one of those mad things that happens”. Justin continues, “Somebody in the right place ‘gets’ the track and it just goes from there”.

“We could probably do with a few more South Africas though”, Luke smirks. “Maybe Chile or Australia, somewhere nice and sunny”. Justin and Luke may be dreaming about Elektrons affording them some beach time, but it seems that a change is as good as a rest for these two, so expect them to go from strength to strength as soon as they bomb that past.

Printed in the October/November issue of High Voltage magazine.