We’re all revving up for the festival season here in the anablog caverns. The vans been polished. Hats are being tried on, the jauntiness of angle perfected. Old sleeping bags are being unfurled and the empty crisp packets and other matter is being swept out of them. The tie dye arrived last night and the old tee-shirts of the years before are being vetted for credibility. Soon, soon, my friends. The elysian fields are calling, can you hear it?

Umm… Its actually quite away from the season. Months and months. Still tickets are being booked, holidays booked in work and camper vans are already nearly booked up. So some bastards excited.

I’m not, though. There are so many festivals this summer that its difficult to guage which ones to go for. If you haven’t got press passes that is. And lets face it, Bren’s never going to favour me with one of those. And so which ones? There’s the Electric Picnic, which is nearly always brilliant, but the defection of both Body & Soul and the Foggy Notions might leave it feeling flat. Both those teams are putting together there own events this year and with Latitude coming as well it might make for a busy summer. Oxygen can piss off if it thinks its getting a mention. Oh. Balls. Anyway, with big festivals on the continent like Roskilde being cheaper and boasting an unbelievable line up (Radiohead, Battles, Band of Horses, Chemical Brothers, Efterklang, My Bloody Valentine and SLAYER) Ireland might not get a look in at all. If I get a job that is. And they give me time off. And I’m not doing something else, like sleeping.

You know people who collect rubbish in their houses, terrified to let anything go lest they loose some part of themselves as well? Or the scarred limping olds who scuttle round city centers with metal shopping trolleys packed high with old plastic bags, full of “good stuff” they’ve found in bins, before finding a quiet alley to die from the cold in? Yes, you know them. They’re crazies.

Well, what happens if you’re obsession happens to be music. You obsessively store it, scared you’ll loose a single note, some of the liner notes, you make back ups in hard copy and digitally and preserve the original, in its box, away in a special room, which you call your treasure room, living in fear of Conan the Barbarian, or worse, you’re ma destroying it. Yes, we’re crazies too.

But, and here’s where you’re money comes in, what if you had the money, a specially built warehouse and the obsessive hoarding instinct? Well you end up with this. Over 3 million records, a state of the art store age facility and pressing medical costs which necessitates the sale of your beautiful baby boy. Well then, pony up the cash and lets get this lot into the analogue office. Bren‘ll never notice…

I’ve had a long running love affair with music which lyrically I don’t understand. That is not to say that the opaqueness of the lyrics puzzles me happy, as say with the largely meaningless refrains of Radiohead’s Amnesiac, but rather because they’re in French. I studied the French language from the age of 6 ‘til I was 16. I understand very very little of it, despite this, largely because I’m stupid.

However I love French music. Every kind of it. Nearly. I can’t stand soft rock. Bands like Le Rue Kétanou I love, spiraling gypsy brilliance with lyrics about freedom and bohemian lifestyle that thankfully I can’t understand because I’m fairly sure that their hippy insufferablility would ruin it for me. I love the flow and rhythm of Saïan Supa Crew, but their lyrics which their website tells me are about racism and drug use, religious violence and suicide, are also in French. Again bonus.

This might strike you as desperately stupid, and it probably is, as I certainly am. I just really enjoy the sounds and rhythms without being burdened with meaning, which I then have to engage with, and agree with or disagree with, and it takes some of the relaxation away from me.

Happy Valentines Day. Otherwise read this.

A few years ago Ireland had one of the strongest anti-globalisation movements in Europe. The Reclaim the Streets march had thousands of long hairs out in central Dublin partying away. Then they seemingly evaporated, they went away and haven’t been seen again since. It’s difficult to work out why. Some will have got jobs, cut their hair and got on making money. Some left Ireland, to bigger canvas’s. Some turned away from the movement to concentrate on the war in Iraq.

The surprise, I suppose, has been that they haven’t been replaced.It could be that Ireland is too damn small, Dublin even, to support more than a few youth movements. And ‘movements’ itself is the wrong word they’re more like groups, loose affiliations and groups of friends, who dress the same a bit and hang out in front of the Central Bank and Starbucks. At the moment there are hipsters, emo kids and nu-ravers. Nothing else has arisen in large enough numbers to make a cultural impact. The hip hop kids are dismissed as scobes, the longhairs are mostly privilege hippies, and everyone else is English. None of the tribes that are currently thriving in the capital have anything political about them.

The hipsters are the most conscious of the political, but are the worst of the three. They wryly observe, self-consciously sit apon the sidelines witnessing the world, aware of the problems and the need to do something, but prefer to cock a snook, or to blog humorlessly about clothes and bad Italian cinema. The music is varied and some, mostly folk, is explicitly policital but the scene itself is about iconoclastic apathy. They wear Make Poverty History wrist bands and Arabic scarves, but when asked about them they spew nonchalant irony and sarcasm.

What’s going on with the emo kids? What are they thinking in there? Is it the same as goth, the introspection and the bad poetry? Are you trying to work out whats going on in your own heads never mind everyone elses, never mind the worlds? Whatever, the trend seems too commercial and self-reguarding for there to be much going on, and even if the lyrics are wild klaxon calls to the red flag, they haven’t had any goddamn effect. The only march I ever saw them on was an unpaid publicity march up Grafton Street for the launch of the Black Parade album.

There is something nihilistic about the total anti-politics and euphoria of the nu-ravers. The music is mindlessly fun, lyrics meaningless refrains, some even advertising slogans, existing solely to be shouted deliriously. Intentionally there is no depth, nothing else there, allowing you to utterly escape. It is quite political in its own negative way, but it hardly promotes anything like the rage and activism that the similarly apolitical Nirvana did.

And so here we are, in a time of strong tribal youth cultures but little politics. Perhaps it’s something to do with the success of the tiger. We don’t have much to complain about and maybe the capitalists are right, so what the hell’s there to protest against? Maybe the movements were defeated. Maybe we’ll all be back on the streets soon when the jobs we presumed were waiting for us by rights aren’t there when we get out of college. At a time where there is more inequality and injustice, when there is so much that ought to merit protest, when our police service and government act like the criminals and cheats they condemn, it is disappointing to look around and see so much energy wasted. You’re young for godsake. Shout about something.

It’s coming up to the time of the year when publications show their colours, pin them to the mast and then strenuously claim the meant them to look like everyone else’s. Or put more simply, its list time. Album of the Year, Female of the Year, Hairstyle… Its usually a race to the blindingly obvious, with only a few side angled odd balls thrown into prove some sort of indie credentials. The problem for these lists is two fold. Firstly they are usually decided upon by committee, so the lower common denominator usually prevails. Secondly, they limit themselves to the past years releases. Both of these seem reasonable, but for me, if the list is to have any relevance or informative prowess, then they’ve to be utterly subjective, and be dominated by the personal experience of the last year, rather than the dates on the inside of the sleeve.

So here are my colours, I guess some of the others will violently disagree:

Band of the Year

The Kleptones. They are not strictly band, and I actually first heard them there in December last year on Nick Johnson’s Plastic Soul Show on Trinity FM so I fail on even my own criteria, at the very first hurdle. Still here’s the reason - they are brilliant and easily my most listened to artists this year, aside from Bonnie Prince Billy and Love, and I’ve been listening to them for way to long to even try and justify their inclusion. So here we go: The Kleptones approach to music is seemingly so antagonistic it is difficult to see how it works, sandwiching upwards of twenty slices of movie dialogue into samples from Eastenders, using widely hated artists like Phil Collins, before his chocolate revival, and Minnie Ripton, mixed through with great big smiles of hiphop and classic rock. Or rather, lets smash everything together and see how it works. It does. These gentleman are master aural engineers, the tracks fit so seamlessly together that you can hardly believe that the mixes were not the originals anyway. And they give there stuff away for free. Brilliance.

Hon Mentions to Bloc Party and Kings of Leon for keeping the standards high (sic). Hot Chip for giving me the sound track to a February depression. Iron and wine/Calexico for having the self indulgent brilliance of having a Spanish Man solo in the middle of He Lays in the Reins. Fight like Apes for making me give a damn about Irish music again. Kila for consistent live greatness.

Individual of the Year

Final Fantasy, literally one of the best one man sets I’ve ever seen. And a manful attempt to stand up to the bullies in Architecture in Helsinki who tried to drown him out during the jam session at the Picnic. Not so memorably brilliant recorded as live, but still a damn site better than most of the other indie dross piling out of Montreal at the moment.

Hon. Mentions to Sufjan Stevens, for making Christmas music fun again all those (three?) years ago and still doing it today and to M.M.I.I.A.A.M.I.A who continues to flourish despite no obvious talent by cynically taking ownership and exploiting the imagery and language of terrorism to give her heavily borrowed music an edge its got no god damn right to have. You go girl.

Track of the Year

Thou Shalt Always Kill, by Scroobius Pip vs Dan le Sac is right up there. A beautiful self help guide for hipsters in the form of song. Like the Sunscreen Song but good, relevant and funny. Likewise Dan le Sac’s track CUPID on Dylan was brilliant.

Album of the Year

Untrue, by Burial. I only got this there last week and am utterly entranced by it. It reminds me of films such as A Bittersweet Life and Collateral (which basically copied much of Bittersweet’s cinematography anyway), both of which were love letters to cities at night, forgetting their plots. Endless fluorescent images flicker and mirror, muffled snatches of conversation and buttended sentences jog the memory. Untrue is the follow up to Burial’s eponymous first album, and continues in the slight manner of that work. The unnerving half constructed beats of dubstep seek to impose order upon the music, but fail, instead adding to the confusion and beauty, like a depressive who seeks control in self harm. Untrue also provided one of the funniest album reviews I’ve read in a while, when the pitchfork reviewer actually apologised for likening it to DJ Shadow, because he was too well known for it to be a proper reference. Please god, don’t ever let Analogue fall into that prattling level of pretentiousness.

Gig of the Year

Its difficult to look past Fight Like Apes set up in the TFM studio a few weeks ago, but then I’m reliably informed (by reason, no less) that that was not actually a gig, so I guess it’ll have to be the old fall back of the Electric Picnic. I suppose its a lazy choice, but then it marked so much for Analogue and for us all personally. The music was outstanding, from the utter jaw dropping brilliance of Bjork, to the understated frenzy of Final Fantasy, by way of perennially consistent performers Hot Chip, Kila, and on and on. It can’t really be called a gig, but I don’t go to enough festivals to warrant adding another category for them. So yeah, it was the greatest moment of the year, spinning madly, laughing at the top of our voices at the top a Ferris wheel at four in the morning, with the rest of the crew, the sheer mayhem and brilliance of the Picnic in a moment…

Publicity Stunt of the Year

Got to be Radiohead’s cynical ‘pay what you will’ album launch (the market research of the demographic spread etc of what people are willing to pay will surely cover any gaps in their profit projections), laughingly emphasised by the utterly overpriced their tickets were for next summers gig. Boo. Still they are the reason I will be making the pilgrimage to Roskilde next year, so whatever, I’m a hypocrite.

And that’s it.

I’ve been kicking at the filing cabinet for a good few minutes now, mildly collapsing mentally, conspicuously unable to open it, to retrieve the stylish little red recorder nestled within, conscious that the other one, upstairs in the studio, is rendered meaningless by the lack of connecting wires, which are carefully stored in this filing cabinet. Behind me the phone I’m meant to be talking on is in use anyway, and a feeling of monstrous nothingness instils itself heavy upon my shoulders. I lobbied to get this interview, and it is gently slipping away like ribina through clenched teeth.

The National popped up a few years ago, releasing a few EP’s, including the excellent Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers,on their own label: Brasslands, the result of a few years of messing around. Their success has been a slow burner, much like their music. It grows on you. It seems, initially, clichéd and heavily referential, but seems to creep up on you. Their last two albums (since they moved to Beggars Banquet) have been noticeably more successful. Unlike with a lot of music that takes time to assert itself positively it is not actually the music itself you have to re-evaluate, its your own thoughts on the issue. You see, or hear, rather, the problem is The National have a singer with a deep voice, play guitars, have insistent, driving rhythms and slyly humorous poses, filled broken relationships and obscure, nearly poetic references, within their lyrics. One almost cannot help but hear Joy Division and Interpol and immediately bracket them. But it’s us, not them. They actually bear mere resemblance, (see above list, if you’ve already forgotten), other than their general brilliance. Now, don’t shout, they’re nothing next to the great seething dark brilliance of Joy Division, but they do stand up to Interpol. Alligator is actually quite the little gem and it’s a little bad natured of me to suggest that its just Beggars Banquets PR dept. that made the difference. Boxer, their second album on Beggars, is actually a further step up, surprisingly.

Hopelessly, I finally, dejectedly give the handle of the filling cabinet one last hopeful little tug, a pathetic nonsense attempt after the spoon jamming and full arm wrenches I was giving it a few minutes later. Naturally, like a cliché, it slides open. A sex kitten of a filing cabinet, playing hard to get. I find Aaron Dessner (multi-instrumentalist, brother of the rhythm guitarist) in a coffee shop, buying, well, coffee. The interview starts after a few minutes of me, panicked, talking down the line whilst he completes his purchase and ignores me.

The National have matured in public, taking a relatively unpromising start, almost feeling their way, from the generic to something with more than a passing resemblance of brilliance. “We all grew up in Cincinnati Ohio, in suburban quiet city, without much access to culture, and me and my brother started a band in our basement with our friends. It continued through high school. Eventually we all went to college in New York city, and years later, we were all living in Brooklyn, we had the idea, to get together. We’d play at the weekends and drink some beers…” They gradually found a voice, the lyrics of Matt Berninger progressing from nearly mindlessly repeated cliches, to minor poetry, full of small images and moments that mesh to create a picture of loneliness and break ups far more effectively than his more literal first attempts. “It was a very gradual process…”

They formed Brasslands along with Alec Hanley Bemis in 2001. Unlike, say, The Mystery Jets decision to form a record label, it wasn’t because they had been rejected by a label. “It was definitely our choice. When we first started making songs and getting together, we were just a bunch of friends, and it (the band) was never something we never intended to do professionally, we did it for fun. Eventually we made our first record, and really liked it, and a fiend of ours said he used to have a label in school, so we re-started it and put out the record. Then there was another record by my brothers other band, but we never actually sent our music into any labels. Even then we were really into independent music and we never really though about major labels or anything.”

Following the reception of the Sad Songs for Dirty lover’s EP they signed to Beggars Banquet, one of the larger “indie” labels knocking about encompassing Rough Trade records amongst others (Gary Numan!). “Well, yeah they’re a bigger label, but still an indie label, so there’s still the feeling like they’re a family. And they’ve supported us really well, helped bring the National international…” It marked a jump in critical aclaim for The National’s next album Alligator. Was it thanks to Beggars? “Well…. I don’t know if it was that. I think Alligator was definitely the first album that, kind of, became something more… well not mainstream but… it seemed very popular. I’m not sure if that was something to do with Beggars as much as where we were, in terms of our sound. It was a very good time, a lot of blogs caught on to what we were doing. Obviously Beggars helped with what we were doing, making it available to everybody.”

Live The National play their tracks expertly, filling the space between performer and audience with an aural presence so complete as to almost be physical. Their songs become big stomping beasts, saturating the gig almost as completely as the sweat-smell. After their recent Dublin gig a friend of mine was so hoarse from shouting, she could hardly speak the next day. An achievement. “We are intense, we try to bring the songs to life. We’re a live band, first and foremost, although that was the last bit we did… Certainly Matt is a captivating front man, you never know what he’ll do. We try to get a lot out of it.”

So we chatted a wee bit on, talked politics (”we’re left wing liberals”) and the road noise became to loud to hear anything for a few minutes. He patiently waited it out, some firetrucks passing, and said goodbye. I’d managed to save a wee bit of the ribena, despite my clenched teeth.

“We are the mods! We are the mods! We are the mods! We are, we are, we are the mods!” Or rather you were. But it doesn’t seem to matter to the middle aged men, many dressed like cabbies, out for their first gig since the early eighties, watching a group of men up on stage, all of whom look like cabbies, and indeed Rick Buckler was one until recently.

Then From the Jam kick off, in a perfect an tight set, and the gentlemen around me surge towards the stage in Tripod, then seem to remember themselves, and share slight smiles and half laughs with others around them. Foxton is brilliant, charismatic and utterly unchanged from when Weller walked out of the best looking band ever, and up his own arse. But then Foxton never stopped gigging, he moonlights with the Stiff Little Fingers, and genuinely seems to enjoy being on stage. When he does one of trademark little jumps, one leg forward, the other back, everyone holds their breathe, its one of rocks great moments, and another crossed off the list of must see before I die list.

Weller refused to come back, what with him being unable to answer the Frog Princes questions, so they got someone who sounds just like him, and off they went, to the sounds of unironic “We are the mods!”

The Jams reformation has been a quiet and low key affair, compared to some. Cheap too. And for so many thatís what the lure is. Mounds of cash. They look at the big beasts of rock, the Rolling Stones, at their never ending tours, with their sacks of cash littering up the place and think to themselves thats something I could deal with. Their own original cash is gone, largely spunked up the wall or down the taxmanís greedy throat. And so we get to our current situation, up to the balls in big band heroes getting together again to pass round the begging bowl.

Although some may think the wide spread fleecing of the fans to go to big stadium concerts for the same amount of money I have to live on for a week is the worst of it. It isn’t though, its the little corporate parties the heroes of my youth play. The Specials reformed to play Simon “Don’t look at me” Jordans birthday party and Christina Aguilera singing at a Russian business man’s wedding.

There’s another side though. I never caught the Jam in their pomp first time round, what with me not being born yet, or the Smashing Pumpkins, what with me being utterly uninterested in their terrible music, or the Police, for both reasons. I have am delighted that I get the chance to see them before they fall off the face of the earth all together (although with Sting this cannot happen soon enough), but I’m not sure how happy I am about doing it at cripplingly high prices, to fund the cocaine lifestyle of a wrinkling legend, holding out his hand for one last pay day, singing songs decades old, wringing out a finished talent.

Scroobius Pip vs. Dan le Sac popped up on our radar here in early 2007 with the excellent ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’, a sort of manifesto for good living and right thinking, raging against herd mentality and pop culture laziness. They followed it up with the stormingly danceable ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ and a string of concert dates across Europe. Not bad for an unsigned duo who make their records in their bedrooms (bit of a cliché by now, I suppose). It remains to be seen if they have the longevity to avoid the old one-hit status. Andrew from Trinity FM caught up with them at the Electric Picnic.

Analogue: We better go back to the start, because not a lot of people over here will have heard of you. Obviously you’ve had a lot of exposure with ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’, and now with the new single ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’, and people are getting to know you. But what’s the back-story for those who haven’t?

Scroobius Pip: There’s not a lot. I mean, this is our first year of our being a band and we did our first gigs in October of 2006, so we’ve just been really lucky in how quick it’s all kind of happened…

Dan le Sac: How many gigs did we do in 2006? Three?

SP: Three in 2006 and it’s all gone from there …

DlS: About four million now!

A: I think I caught you some time in late 2006 on [XFM DJ] John Kennedy’s show …

DlS: That was early 2007.

SP: Again, for ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’, I recorded the vocals in my bedroom, and Dan recorded the stuff at his place. I sent a CDR to John Kennedy the day after we recorded it and he played it like three hours after hearing it and receiving it. It was just amazing that he got on board so quick and really he’s been just a legend for us since with airplay and sorting us out gigs and everything … really, he’s been just amazing. It’s good that there’s still a radio station where the DJs can just get behind something, regardless if it’s playlisted or being pushed by a major label. He just heard it and liked it and went from there.

DlS: But to be honest, XFM is pretty much the last one of them in the UK. With Radio 1, it’s very much the producers. The presenters do have a say, but there’s still very much a committee element about it.

SP: Even on Radio 1, it’s good to see that the DJs can still choose a few tracks outside the playlist. We’ve had Zane Lowe and Rob da Bank very much get behind us and really support us. It means a lot more because it’s not them just choosing it from a list of songs that they’re allowed to play, it’s them kind of saying, “It’s not on our list, but we’re going to play it anyway, ’cause we
like it”.

DlS: It means that unsigned bands can do this. We’ve played Lowlands, Benicassim, Glastonbury, Electric Picnic, Reading and all these festivals. How many unsigned bands can say they’ve played all of those in year?

A: Of course, it didn’t hurt that you had an excellent video…

DlS: It was banging!

SP: Again, it was done, completely for free, by a guy called Nick Frew who’s done our new one as well, on a budget marginally greater than zero. He does an amazing job. For both of the videos, me and him met up a few times and kind of brained ideas. Then he went away and turned them into something far better than I could have imagined each time. He’s just a great director, a great guy.

DlS: I don’t get involved in all that. I’ve got beats to write, things to do…

SP: You see, I’m the poncy arty one.

A: That’s what I was wondering, what’s the group dynamic like? You were saying that you do each your individual bit and then you sort of put them together. Who does what first?

DlS: Either….

SP: It’s always varied …

DlS: I’d write a lot, and I’ll just send him random things, and if he’s got an idea, then he’s got an idea. Like the newest one we’ve been playing live is called ‘Back from Hell’, and the whole track was just my rough idea of what the track would be, and he was like “No, that’s perfect, perfect, that’s exactly what I want, don’t change it…” and I was like “But I want to make it bigger…”

SP: Lyrically, that one is one I wrote a year or two ago and never got round to using, and I never found the right beat for. There are no rules in how we write really … that sounds like we’re trying to be appallingly rock and roll: “There are no rules, we just write”…

A: It’s all just freeform.

SP: It does seem to gel together quite nicely. It works.

A: You both seem to do quite a lot of side projects, or rather just collaborate with other people…

SP: Yeah, a bit here and there.

A: So, are there any particular dream collaborations that you’d like to do?

SP: Prince, I’d love to collaborate with Prince! There’s tons of people. Both of us have worked in music shops, so when you’re into so much music, there’s just so many people you’d love to work with. The ones I’ve got to work with so far have all been quite small acts, but ones that I’m really into and really excited about, so it’s cool. There’s no, “this person is huge, so I want to work with them above this person”. It’s whatever the vibe is at the time.

DlS: Whereas there’s no one I’d want to collaborate with, because there’s no one I’d want to inflict myself on. I’m difficult and I’m not very good at expressing myself, or at expressing what’s wrong with something, so I will just stand there going “It’s not round enough, it’s not round…”

A: Suddenly yelling, “It’s wrong, do it again…”

DlS: … “It’s wrong, make it slightly chubbier” … you know, it’s not very helpful!

A: So, is there a central message, or mission that you’re on?

SP: Lyrically, it’s just a case of putting as much content and just… no, there wouldn’t be one specific theme throughout all of it. I try to get storytelling and some views and opinions in, and just try to make sure there’s some meat in the lyrics, and it will just take people on a journey and grab them more than just a catchy hook which everyone will remember, kind of thing…

DlS: For me, it’s just move your body…

SP: Really?

DlS: That’s my central message, no matter what. Even with the slow ones, they make you move. All music should physically make your arse do something at least.

A: I wanted to ask you about your lyrics for ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ … the title and the last line?

SP: Um … a lot of people have come up to me and said like “Is it a Nietzsche type reference, where we have to destroy everything to begin again?”

DlS: Especially with the art work having that little Hitler ballerina figure, because Hitler cynically espoused Nietzsche’s ideas…

SP: … so I generally agree to go with that. Other people have asked if it’s that we, as humans, will always kill and if it’s kind of a statement on that. But literally, it’s a poem I used to end my sets with. It’s kind of from the hip-hop vernacular that if you’ve played a good set, you’ve killed a good set. So, literally at the end of a poem, it would be ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’, and I’d leave the stage. That’s where it’s from, and people just seem to take their own ideas and opinions on it, and that’s perfect and brilliant.

DlS: MTV America don’t put up the “Kill”. It’s called ‘Thou Shalt Always…’

SP: … on the title …

DlS: … they refuse to put up the word “Kill” …

A: Do they leave it in at the end though?

DlS: In the lyrics, it’s fine. But they won’t actually put those words on screen.

SP: It’s pretty dark.

DlS: It was weird around the time of the [Virginia Tech] shootings, ‘cause we’ve got this big banner on our webpage that says “Thou Shalt Always Kill”. We had a few people saying, “You can’t say that” and it was really strange trying to explain it to people. They’re in such an emotional state about something else, and we’re saying “It’s just hip-hop, man” … you just have to be just a little apologetic.

A: So, you’re getting exposure over in America as well?

DlS: Yeah, weirdly, without any actual deliberate intention to.

SP: It’s the power of the Internet for us. YouTube and MySpace have just been great for us. When ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ got on the front page of YouTube internationally, our profile went through the roof ’cause it meant it was being watched by people in America, by people in Holland and just all over the world.

DlS: But there’s a lot of little radio DJs that picked it up and got behind it …

SP: Good people …

DlS: But then there’s some bigger ones like [Breakbeat DJ] Adam Freeland. He was playing it literally within days of John Kennedy, but in LA. If you look at where it gets played in LA, everyone will come back to hearing it on Adam Freeland. It’s amazing how, if you’ve got a good record, one person can actually make a difference, and make it happen for you.

A: Will you be back in Dublin any time soon, or is that dependent on how tomorrow goes?

SP: Yes, we definitely are coming back on October 10th. We’ve been asked to support Rakim, who’s one of the most legendary hip-hop figures ever. That’s in Dublin, and that’s just going to be amazing.

DlS: That’s another Foggy Notions thing … I can remember the words ‘Heineken’ and ‘Green’…

SP: They just asked… and we said, “Yes, definitely, we’ll do it”.

DlS: Is it a day thing?

A: It’s spread over four days

DlS: Right, we’re coming out for the lot!

A: We’re coming to the end of this, and I haven’t got a lot of brain power left … so I’ve got to be really rude and ask, the beard?

SP: Yeah, a lot of people have asked, thinking its religious or something. It’s not. It’s just I fancied having a beard…

DlS: No, see he says that, but he used to cut himself on the face…

A: He has an ugly chin?

DlS: Yeah, he has a really ugly chin and tried to cut it off…

SP: I don’t have a chin…

A: Is it like a Marx thing, that as soon as he could, he grew a philosopher’s beard?

DlS: It’s more of a mathematicians thing … he looks like Pythagoras!

SP: It is known as the Pythagoras look.

A: … you wear the robes round the house …

DlS: Not just round the house. In London generally, he’s in robes, carrying a stone tablet of some kind.

SP: Around the my small town in Stanford I now, having had a small level of success, feel it is appropriate to walk round in a robe.

DlS: … trying to solve problems with triangles…

Scroobius Pip vs. Dan le Sac are supporting Rakim at The Village on October 10th as part of the Heineken Green Synergy Festival. ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ is out now.

There’s a house party on, and you find yourself there, chatting away to someone
of the opposite sex. There’s music on in the background, your six for seven
beer is going warm and you can’t see your mates anywhere. Still, like I said,
you’re chatting to someone of the opposite sex, so, it’s not all bad. Then the
question comes. It’s fairly standard, ‘Are you a total fucking goon or are you
human?’ but it’s phrased as “So, what music do you like?”

You take a second, and a wee sip of the now mostly saliva beer, and answer,
“Sufjan Stevens”, swallowing down hard your actual taste in Israeli trance, or
Abba, or Christy Moore. Stevens is such an easy answer, for many reasons. He’s
not impossibly obscure, but is hardly mainstream. He’s better than most of his
contemporaries and his music is full of hope, and love and innocence. He shows
that you are caring and socially minded. He is also nearly impossibly good.
Americana, or whatever the buzz word for this type of music: The folk revival in
indie music, has had a big ‘aul impact recently, with several mainstream acts
dipping their oars into the pool. Bruce “the boss” Springsteen released the
Seeger Sessions a while back there (by the by, Seeger himself is not dead, as
yet). Black Rebel Motorcycle Club did the excellent Howl. And let’s not forget
the brilliant if impossibly stretched out American Recordings from Johnny Cash, as
a true American hero dipped into the mainstream to gather gems (although there
should only have been one, or two at the most, released - much too much filler).
The acts quickest identified with this roots and folk style of music are
Devendra Banhart, Mr Stevens and several borderline country singers like
Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams. Older acts, which make this current spike a
revival, rather than an original thing, include Cosby, Still, Nash and Young,
Dylan and perhaps even Simon and Garfunkel. Woody Guthrie and the old
bluesmen and story tellers are the true granddaddies of the genre.

There are some clear hallmarks to it; acoustic guitars are usually there,
stripped back recording methods which give the records a timelessness; and
perhaps mostly importantly a story. The songs have a purpose, they
capture a moment and a feeling of alienation and brutality, of naivety and hope,
and a tremendous hope for the future, but under it all, an appreciation of a
coming tidal wave, of the transience of life and property.

As with the short story, as a formal prose form, so the singer songwriter seems
most at home in the vast open spaces of America. That isn’t to say that only
the Americans do this well. Nick Cave has a mean line in it, with thick and
often lyrically vile songs stomping brutally across the red dust of the
outback. Also in contention is the twirling carnival of noise that Duke Special throws out, although he is getting dangerously close to pop.

But back to Mr Stevens, Sufjan if you will. His best known song ‘Chicago’, is
used in an ad or something, and so people recognise it when you play it, and
comes from the excellent ‘(Come on and feel the) Illinois’ LP. This, along
with ‘Greetings From Michigan, The Great Lake State’, are the start of his planned
fifty concept albums, each one based upon an American state, although he has
waived between joking and sincerity when questioned about it. His sound is a
layering of lo-fi instruments, the banjo to the fore and innovative percussion.
Multiple voices and a willingness to use brass also feature. Lyrical portraits
of people and places and much spirituality fill in the picture.

But perhaps the element that marks Sufjan out so clearly above others
ploughing the same furrow, is his sheer listenablitiy; the feeling of
moreishness, at the end of an album. You’ve gone a journey and seen and met
people, you’ve felt the weather splashing down around you, and you’ve a little
sunburn on your forehead, but you want to go back outside again anyway. You’ve
travelled a little way in a believers boots, seen the vast, endless lakes and
flowers, met the murders and the murdered and unemployed and factories, but
recognise there is more, and want to set out now.

Like the photography of Shelby Lee Adams, William Christenberry and Joel
Sternfeld, Stevens, Banhart and the rest show us glimpses not of America, but
of a particular idea of America. They are no more than snap shots: one mans
view, but in that they have the seeds of some outstanding music.

Exclusive interview with Scroobius n’ Dan, live from the Electric Picnic.