They may have been nominated for the Mercury Music Award (for ‘Fantastic Playroom’), but New Young Pony Club’s musical preferences remain firmly rooted in the past. Andy Spence, N.Y.P.C.’s guitarist, notes with pride that ‘I picked up a 7 inch version of Human League’s ‘Love Action’ yesterday- that was pretty cool.’, while going on to muse that ‘I like the 7-inch thing; it reminds us of the 80s, which is a period that we love musically.’ Indeed, the band’s fascination with tacky, sweaty, sexy pop music is illuminated by the song they choose to sing at Karaoke- ‘The last time we played in Dublin, we headed out for Karaoke afterwards and did a killer version of ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ by Bon Jovi. We got the entire room singing it!’

While New Young Pony Club embrace their Nu-Rave moniker more heartily than other similar bands do, they are by no means musically exclusive. They describe themselves as‘fresh, fun, exciting, flirty, edgy, punky and poppy’, and while ‘shameless’ may not be the right adjective to use, as long as music is involved, their interest can be roused. It’s difficult not to appreciate the wide-ranging musical capabilities of the group, though they shrug off notions of virtuosity, laughing that - ‘seriously, we’ll do anything, we’re slags!’ Andy composed the music to the Tibetan film ‘Dreaming Lhasa’, because of a fortuitous coincidence- the directors were his landlords. ‘They had heard the stuff that I did with N.Y.P.C. and really liked it, so they asked me to compose the soundtrack. They were lovely so I said yes. As landlords they were really nice, they never raised the rent in 7 years.’ From film soundtracks to remixing (a Seven-Inch for Gossip and ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’ for Amy Winehouse, amongst others), N.Y.P.C’s musical enthusiasm is limitless. When possible collaborations are mentioned, Andy gets incredibly excited-‘Well, obviously we’d love to do one with Bowie- though we might be doing a track with Paul Weller soon. There’s a Best of British compilation coming out, and we’ve written a track that he’s producing, but I don’t want to give too much away just yet.’ Despite being signed to the hip Modular label, N.Y.P.C. remain true to the minor venues where they honed their immaculate live set-‘ Well, we’ve never played a stadium… I’d like to be given the chance, though not as a support act, that’d be too difficult. You can’t beat a small, packed, sweaty club.’ Amongst their various side-projects, the band is also in the midst of writing their second album, the follow-up to ‘Fantastic Playroom’. Once more, when writing music is referenced, Andy’s enthusiasm is tangible- ‘with N.Y.P.C. there’s more of an emphasis on having fun, doing what we want… really, we don’t want to write for anyone else.’

Brazilian trio Bonde do Rolê have come a long way since their first Irish show last October. They’ve gone from playing a half-empty Crawdaddy to filling up the Bodytonic Arena at this year’s Electric Picnic, as well as countless other festival performances across the Globe this summer. I spoke to DJ Gorky ahead of their November performance in The Button Factory. Of course, this being my first interview, the recorder stopped working and I lost the first five minutes of the conversation. I can tell you however, that they will be performing Gasolina for the first time on this tour, as Marina has finally learned her cue points. As well as that, the next album will (hopefully) feature a full brass section, provided by none other than the Brazilian Military Brass Band. The rest of the conversation went something like this.

You play a lot of Brazilian music [in your DJ sets], but you’re kind of like Erol Alkan and 2manydjs, that kind of style? But then the Bonde do Rolê sound is much more inspired by 80s rock. Do you ever have a difficulty keeping the two of them separate?

No, not really. The whole influence for Bonde do Rolê was 2manydjs as well, blending stuff, but the difference between us and 2manydjs is that we blend with Brazilian influence. If we were doing with anything else it would sound just like 2manydjs trying to be a bootleg band. Not Soulwax though, they’re completely different.

You know the first Solta o Frango single? The track Bondallica that’s on that CD is different to the one on the album [the original version features the voice of a heavy metal fan shouting “Heavy Metal rules” etc].

Because we couldn’t clear the Heavy Metal Parking Lot sample. That’s from a documentary from the 80s called Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and we couldn’t clear the sample. That release that was out on CD in Brazil only, had the sample. We put all those tracks there, because we didn’t have any other songs to put on, and then it ended up on the album as well.

I got that at the show in Dublin last year.

I remember that show, we were so happy, we sold so many t-shirts and CDs, we were running back to the hotel, it was fun. [Gorky had earlier mentioned that it was after this particular show that Bonde do Rolê were signed to Domino.]

Do you ever find that you have a crowd that doesn’t really want to party the way that sort of crowd did, have you ever had any bad reactions?

Yeah, we played this show in New York, but New York’s like that, especially Manhattan, they’re over there just to be at the place, and talk about it afterwards. We played at the Natural History Museum, that couldn’t be a worse place for us to play. There was like ten, fifteen, of our friends having fun with us, and then I could see fifty-year old couples, drinking wine and not paying attention at all. But we managed to have fun by ourselves. It’s funny because in Manhattan it’s always like that, but if you go to Brooklyn it’s completely different, and it’s the same city.

Crazy. I was going to ask about DJ Chernobyl [aka Freddie Van Halen], he’s a big legend in Brazil, right?

Indie-wise yeah, not like mainstream wise, he was one of the first people who mixed baile funk with rock and stuff like that, like ten years ago. It was really fun working with him, and he’s our friend.

He worked with you guys on the album?

He recorded the album with us, cause he was the one with the good microphones, we only had the cheap ones. We recorded the whole album back in our place with him, it was fun.

Who’s been your favourite person to work with so far?

Freddie is really good to work with. Yeah, probably Freddie, because if we go on to him at 4am in the morning “So he’s like “yeah yeah, sure, just gimme a beer and we’ll do it.” Diplo is like, [makes explosion sound] we have to be babysitters, “Let’s work right now” and we have to sit him down and put his computer [away], and not let him check his emails, and put away his cell phone, and his sidekick. We have to put all that away, “No, let’s work.” But he’s fun.

And what about Radioclit?

The only track we did with them on the album was something we recorded in five minutes, and we kept doing re-edits between us, using the internet, one sending each other the stuff. They’re really professional as well. I lived the whole summer with Johann, one of the guys from Radioclit, and I know he’s really committed, he’s down for you. We needed some help with some stuff and he was the first one to help.

Oh, cool. The artwork on the singles is pretty crazy.

Thank you. It was done by this friend of ours from Curitiba. For the first Domino release, the Solta o Frango one, we were like “oh, we want a girl in a bikini doing barbecue, and you have to put a weird setting.” For the second single [Office Boy], I was like, “I want a naked guy”. But then we couldn’t do the whole naked guy, so we had to cut him in half. For the Gasolina one, we actually didn’t say anything to him, he used the lyrics. It’s a gorilla smoking a pipe. It’s fun. It’s my favourite one so far.

And then the second Solta o Frango one has some chickens coming out of a barn [Solta o Frango translates roughly as release the chickens, or to go crazy].

The second Solta o Frango one had a better version, but Pedro and Marina didn’t like it. I kind of liked the old version, but we’re never going to use it. Maybe on a box set in like 20 years, “Oh this is the cover we never used.” There’s like tons of different versions of the tracks on the album, but I don’t have half of them. I’m asking all my friends that I sent the tracks at the time, “Do you have this version of blah blah blah?” For instance, Office Boy had a different chorus, it was something in Portuguese, but I don’t have that one anymore, and everyone keeps asking me about it. The new version’s better.

What do you think of the remixes that people have done for you?

Usually I get to choose them, since I’m the DJ. I’m really happy about them. My favourite batch is going to be the Gasolina single. The Buraka [Som Sistema] remix was already out, but we’re re-releasing it because it was really good, there’s also going to be the Crookers, and Fake Blood, Peaches as well. That’s my favourite pack. And the Brodinski remix and Shir Khan ones [of Office Boy] as well. I tried to call people that we liked but they’re not really big. For instance, we would love Soulwax remixing us, but they’re too big for us. I tried to call people who I admired but it could be easier to work with, like Brodinski and Shir Khan. I hope they get big, so I can go like “Oh, we had one of their first remixes”.

Is there anyone else you want to work with? I know Marina worked with The Go! Team.

Oh, yeah, and she’s working with TTC right now. I really want to work with a lot of people, on the second album, like Switch, and the Crookers, and Simian Mobile Disco. We want to finally ask Spank Rock and Amanda Blank to be on the album, they’re always at our gigs, and we sing together on some songs as well. It would be nice to actually have them on the record. Who else. I would love to work with Soulwax, but that’s impossible.

I know you like Surkin, have you tried talking to him?

Yeah, maybe for like a remix, for the second album.

Do you wish there was something you could say in an interview, but it never comes up?

We always say everything we want to, even the bad parts. Even when my mom gets a magazine, especially the Brazilian ones, and we say a lot of crap on them. She’s like, “Why did you say this Rodrigo? Your grandpa could read this!” I’m like, oh whatever.

Words & Photos: Aidan Hanratty

The experimental duo who brought us the gloriously filthy single Hustler last year sit down with Analogue before their pounding set at the Electric Picnic to answer a few questions.

So although you are now on your own, Simian is no more, why did you keep the name afterwards? Why not call yourself something different and break the reference to your old band?
Jess: People say Simian Mobile Disco was instrumental in breaking up Simian but it wasn’t at all. It was part of Simian, it was part of the band. The band had split up over differences between each and all of us and we just sort of carried on after the band and did out own thing. It has been a good three year gap between now and then and we have evolved from then. We used to DJ under the name Simian Mobile Disco while we were in Simian and we just thought we would keep the name.

So you are now in a band and make your own music and have just released a CD. However James you also produce, most notably you produced the Arctic Monkeys second album. In which area do you feel more comfortable in? Producing other people’s music or making your own music?
James: For me personally I think the studio, whatever it may be. Whether it would be with Jess or whatever, in the studio is the bit for me.
Jess: I think that’s why we do it. We really like gigs and we like to make music. We enjoy playing but we are just essentially playing music we made all the time gigging so it is probably the studio where we feel more comfortable.
James: having said that, the gigs have been more fun than we have given them credit for. We weren’t that super keen on it but we made a system where we were flexible and it would be different every night. It has been really fun but if it came down to it I’d be with Jess and say the studio.

You seem to have been one of the bands at the vanguard of this period in music in that you have been able to seamlessly marry dance, rock and electro. So for example you have made indie kids dance. How does that make you feel?
James: I think in a way we were pretty late into electronic music. We weren’t born or brought up with house music. We are definitely from a rock background and in to all sorts of types of tunes but mainly what you would call rock music. But it has been only recently that we have begun to get excited about electronic music so I suppose it’s a good thing that we can be that stepping stone to that whole new world of um, bleeps.

There’s a cross breeding of genres so to speak recently. Has it been an exciting time for you in music-recording and producing?
Jess: Yes. It’s great. All these set genres that you used to go into the rock section and dance section in like music stores. That doesn’t fit anymore. All these genres seem old fashioned. Well the terms, they seem wrong. It’s great. I love the fact that there’s this cross pollination going on between all this different stuff. It means that people like us now, who are young are now opening up to electronic music and stuff. By mixing these things together it’s not so polarized as before. It’s not like two separate camps of dance and rock as before. Now you can get people who like pure electronic into bands like Lcd Soundsystem and from there get them into something you may call traditional rock and indie. I think it’s good.
James: I think it’s a testament to the way people listen to music these days. For example you have access to all different types of music and you just shuffle them up on your iPod. I think that has changed the way you listen to music. It definitely has for me and I think that in turn more so in the future it will change the way people make music.

So it is almost liberating now where preconceptions about music are gone and blurred?
James: Yeah. Like the way you mix the music up and be more I suppose eclectic is good. Nowadays you hear DJ’s playing a good broad range of stuff and I think that’s great.

So what should one expect from a Simian Mobile Disco gig? How does say a festival compare to a stand alone gig?
Jess: Yeah. That’s the thing with festivals. You never know what it’s going to be like ‘cause people are there for a laugh, not just to see you and you have to focus on that. You have to kind of watch people and rope people in somehow. It’s different. I think it means you can play a slightly weirder set. In a festival you have to be aware that people will walk off if you’re not holding their attention so we will be watching the crowd and if people start leaving we will be aware of that.

Is it hard trying to mix and play a song and watch the crowd, trying to gauge their reaction?
James: That’s the best bit of it really. That’s what we liked about DJing. If a song wasn’t working you could change direction and that’s a really good thing about DJing. Like in a band you generally have to play your own songs.

So you have been together for almost ten years. Have there been many good and bad times?
Jess: Oh there’s been some bad times!
James: I think to be in a partnership and travel around and go through stressful situations you have to get on with each other where in a band with other people you can kind of deflect that tension a bit onto others-not intentionally but you know…But Jess and I, we’re pretty laid back so we have gotten to a point now where we can almost know what we are going to do in a musical sense, when we’re DJing.
Jess: The whole reason we did this was as a side project for a laugh. I don’t think we would have done this otherwise, if we don’t have a laugh doing it.

So what does the future hold for Simian Mobile Disco?
James: Well we’re booked up until something like 2012! Nah, well May next year and then there’s festivals and it’s crazy. The DJing has been good. We don’t know what to expect though. It could all end up wrong either. We have a tour of America and you never know we could break up which is what happened to Simian!

Really? How?
James: We had an argument in a fish restaurant in Texas. That’s how Simian ended!

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.

Ninja and Ian from Brighton’s finest dance mash- up band The Go! Team take some time out at The Electric Picnic to speak to Analogue about their new album, getting old and George Michael.

So Ninja and Ian, what do you think of the Electric Picnic?
Ian: There’s so much detail in it. Like that Body and Soul bit- it’s really cool.

Great. So if we may go way back to the start, to before The Go! Team. Ian, you were making documentaries. What kind of stuff did you do?
Ian: Oh, lots of stuff for American t.v. about mummies and dead bodies and space travel and sleep walking and stuff like that. Nothing great or major.

So did you kind of go to yourself at some point in time “Enough! I want to do something different. I know! I’ll start a band!”?
Ian: Well kinda. Not really. We all had jobs quite well into The Go! Team. Ninja was in university. Everyone else had jobs and we would go off at weekends to do some gigs and come back on Mondays. It got to a certain stage, it got to a point where we were taking the piss too much and had to leave our jobs. So we made our leave.

Were you friends beforehand? Or was it a situation where you started making music and then it developed from there and asked people to come together and make a band?
Ian: Yeah
Ninja: No!
Ian: Oh, I was writing and wrote the music and asked people did they want to be part of it (the band).

So how did you go about putting the band together? Was it like the age-old method of placing a message in a magazine?
Ian: Most of it was that way. Ninja was from a message board off the internet.
Ninja: The message didn’t say or ask if I wanted to be in a band. The message said “Female rapper needed” and it was for this gig in Sweden.
Ian: Oh so that’s how it started, for that gig in Sweden? When we first started it was about getting through our first gig. It was a way to get through this first show. That went ok and we thought “Let’s do another one and another one”. We never even spoke about the future. It was just one week at a time.

I remember an article from the Guardian from over a year ago where you kind of said or at least implied that you were only going to do one album.
Ian: No no. It was more like I didn’t want to be an old man, still making music.
Ninja: You are an old man!
Ian: Ha ha. Yeah.
Ninja: Well it depends on how old old is.
Oh so it’s more like a mental thing?
Ninja: Well what I mean is there’s Iggy old and then there’s Wayne, Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips old. There’s two kinds of old.
Ian: Some people are suited to getting old but I don’t think that being in a band called The Go! Team and in your 40’s or later is suited…
Ninja: But then you can have an album saying “I Told You There’s Proof in Youth!”
Ian: Ha. Yeah. Well we could get plastic surgery.

On that note, your stage presence is very eclectic-it looks like a great workout! Could you see yourself in 30 or 40 years time and then going “Damn! I need a new hip!”?
Ninja: I think I should release an exercise DVD. I’d say there’s good money in that!

So, going back to the music. Your first album Thunder Lightning Strike is full of samples. Did you have problems finding and getting them and getting the rights for them? In fact, where the hell did you find some of them?
Ian: All over the shop really. I’m always on the hunt. My ears prick up when I hear something and when I’m in a club or something…..Like that bit in Battle Rocket, you know “2-4-6-8-10”? I heard that in a club in Brighton one time and I just went up to the Dj and asked him what it was. Some things came from documentaries when I was working on them…a whole bunch of stuff really from all over the place.

Was it hard getting the rights for some of the samples?
Ian: When it was first released it was 100% illegal. It was just out there and when the record companies picked it up and were involved we had to go back and change a few things but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been- but there were some real heartbreakers.

Did you have to leave some stuff and songs on the wayside as you just couldn’t get permission to use them?
Ian: Nah. They all wound up alright. All the original songs wound up but they were slightly different in the end.

Was the process of getting samples easier with the second album?
Ian: Well we had a bit more knowledge on how it works so yeah.

Going back to your stage presence and your future gig here at the Picnic. You all always change positions and instruments. How did that come about? Why the constant changing of roles?
Ninja: There are a lot of instruments and a lot of sound and not enough people so it has to be done really. If we had one person playing what needs to be played we would need like 30 people on stage and it’s bad enough with two drum kits and six people onstage. So it’s kind of necessary really.

Do you ever get sick of it and all the hassle of getting the kits ready and moving around all the time?
Ninja: Nah. But it makes things more exciting on stage as we like the idea that you can watch a song that we do and then you want to watch to see the next one as you don’t know what we are going to do. So it makes you wanna stay.
Ian: There are so many bands around that you go to a gig of theirs and you pretty know what to expect. I even like the idea of swopping instruments in mid song, like, drop your guitar and run to the drum kit.

That must be great for jamming. Do you do a lot of jamming?
Ian: Well…you can’t really jam with samples. I mean, you could jam. Everyone in the band could jam but I’m not a good jammer. We don’t really for that reason but you never know. Good ideas could come out of it in the future.

Two years ago you were nominated for a Mercury Music Award. How did you find out and how did you feel?
Ninja: We were in America at the time and we got a call saying, “You might be nominated for a Mercury”
Ian: It was the day before and we got a text about it.

Were you chuffed? Was it like a milestone in being part of the band?
Ian: I was chuffed, yeah. I mean it was kind of like “if nothing else happens at least I have the award and show it to my grandmother”. In fact, she has it!

And another milestone-you got Kevin Shields of My Bloody valentine to remix one of your songs. How did that come about?
Ian: Em, it just came about. I think he’s a fan really and we have the same booking agent and he came to one of our shows and I met him afterwards and he was bigging us up. I think it was the production that he liked about us. He said he had an idea about making a Jackson 5 kind of band with more of a garage sound but that we had beaten him to it so we kinda went from there to remixing our song.

I was just thinking about side projects some of you guys have been doing. For example, Ninja, you did the song “It’s The Beat” with Simian Mobile Disco. How did you get involved in doing that song?
Ninja: I honestly don’t know. I just kinda ended up in the studio with them and I had never heard of them at that point. I just spent a few hours putting down lyrics and it was just cheeky and cheerful and we had a lot of fun doing that and they didn’t know what they were going to make of it. I didn’t know what they were going to make of it and it was literally a couple of weeks later they sent me an email with two songs for me. One was called “Hot Dog” and the other was “It’s the Beat” and it had really bad dirty basic rap lyrics. “Hot Dog” was made from a song I did in school and it was really fun and they were really fun guys and great fun to work with. They had a room full of gadgets and all!

Could you see yourself doing your own stuff in the future? Recording a solo album possibly?
Ninja: I was writing my own stuff before I was in the band and obviously that’s not going to stop, so maybe sometime in the future, yeah.

Has The Go! Team given you a fresh impetus to do that? A spur perhaps?
Ninja: Not so much a spur but touring has made me listen to stuff that I wouldn’t normally listen to. Just looking for sounds like. Just watching bands I wouldn’t normally watch, and that has been a real influence on me. I think it’s difficult as a normal person watching tv and reading magazines…you’re exposed to only a bit, so being in The Go! Team has exposed me to more.

Have you discovered new bands while touring?
Ninja: Not really. It’s a case of “I like that” and “I definitely don’t like that”. It’s easier for me to pick out the negative points than it is the positive because a lot of people aren’t really doing anything original and the people who are are not really known or are on very early at a festival like this. You have to go out of your way. You have to be told about someone or someone has to give you something specifically. That’s the way it is for me anyway. I won’t go out of my way to find someone. People have to give me pointers otherwise it’s way too hard to look.

There are so many different mediums nowadays that it is almost like a haze out there. You have to search and grope around almost.
Ian: People are drowning in information, aren’t they? Theres waaay too much choice.

So finally, talking about influences and music out there, do you have any musical guilty pleasures?
Ninja: I probably have got loads. Like, I really like George Michael and Ian doesn’t like me saying that in interviews! But it’s out there now and there’s nothing you can do about it Ian!

The Jimmy Cake were born out of the ashes of Das Madman way back in the year 2000. Since then the nine piece outfit have pushed musical boundaries with their particular brand of instrumental rock and consistently raised the bar for all of their peers. They released their first album “Brains” in 2001 and followed up the next year with “Dublin Gone. Everybody Dead.” Then after the release of the extended EP “Superlady” in 2003, The Jimmy Cake disappeared. That is until now. After a few recent live dates to blow away the cobwebs, The Jimmy Cake are now preparing the launch of their latest album. Analogue catches up with them to talk about the hiatus, the new album, collaborations and their dangerous alter-egos, Badger Attack.

Paul Bond: So first of all, where have you been for the past four years?

Vincent Dermody: We were locked in a kind of basement for about two years writing an entire new album, from which we have subsequently dropped about half the tracks because, for want of a better word, they were a little too tame. We had three members leave over the past four years, some on of whom would have been the driving force behind writing a lot of the songs. So basically we’ve kept having to reorganise for so long that it is only now, only in the last year we’ve had any settled line up with any kind of settled coherency to actually get the tracks. We’ve written two and a half albums worth of stuff over the past three or four years, just trying to whittle it down trying to get an album we’re all happy with together. Trying to get the consensus of nine people together, all who have nine different opinions on pretty much everything, takes a long time. A very long time.

Paul G. Smyth: One of the members, Simon [O’Connor], who was pretty much the driving force of a lot of the tracks, he would have been playing guitar, bouzouki, banjo, and we had another member who was a trumpet player who also played bouzouki and banjo. Once they were no longer in the picture a lot of that material changed. At lot of the reasons for playing that material would change. There was a major adjustment period of people trying to find their feet again and once there’s any kind of reorganisation the roles that anyone had shift considerably. It would have been more of a guitar driven band up to that point and then once you start losing the string players then it has to filled by something else, but it takes a long time to figure out what that is.

PB: So what would be the main inspiration behind the new album, musically or otherwise?

VD: That would be an absolutely impossible question, because like I said there’s so much compromise between the members to get to a certain point. That’s not to say that we would never compromise at the expense of quality, but obviously we have to compromise to come to some sort of nine person agreement, that you do have to leave most of your influences at the door to a certain degree and be willing to embrace others. So I guess the record doesn’t really sound like too many other bands as a result because of that. I mean I can’t think of many other groups. Nor does your playing doesn’t represent any of your influences.

PS: No, no. It think people would be into certain bands or certain records at any given time but by the time it’s been put through the grinder that is the aim of the people, it’s become something totally different. It’s certainly become something that I would never have written. And no one member of the band, and no smaller grouping within the band would ever write this stuff if it wasn’t for everyone else. It can only really happen with that combination of people.

PB: So the fact that The Jimmy Cake is so large is a good thing creatively?

VD: It allows a certain uniqueness to emerge but at the same time it can be slightly frustrating when you want to draw something in one direction but you know well that you’re going to face this opposition here, by the time you get over here it will be nothing like the point you hope to get to in the first place. Like I said we’re all extremely, genuinely really, really happy with the record so it’s fantastic. So it has to be a good process to that end.

PB: Well a simple question then, what’s the new record called?

PS: We have no idea. And it is a simple question, and it’s one that we should have been able to answer for the last year.

VD: I think because the artwork has only really come into our possession for the new album very recently, and the artwork is extremely unique, and very iconic so it’s kind of difficult to come up with some words to capture that and to represent the music as well. Yeah so it’s in committee at the moment.

PB: How do you think you fit into Dublin’s music scene; now, and as you were before?

VD: Well our absence from the live scene for so long has meant that, like a lot of our peers from five years ago, who have either broken up or gone into similar hiding, and with a new kind of well, generation is too strong a word, but a confraternity of bands has emerged who we would have absolutely no connection with. So we’re kind of isolated at the moment I guess to some degree.

PS: Yeah it’s very hard for us to tell. We played Crawdaddy last week and the first time around we would have had some idea of numbers and we would have had some idea as to who our fan base were. You know you’d see familiar faces, you wouldn’t know them from anywhere else apart from coming to our gigs, but last week I had no idea.

VD: It was a shot in the dark.

PS: We didn’t know who, if anyone, would show up apart from our significant others and all that.

PB: Do you think it was received well?

VD: Yeah, yeah, it was great, went down well.

PS: We were delighted.

PB: How did you find collaborating with Damo Suzuki Network back in 2005?

VD: That was good craic.

PS: Fantastic yeah. Raucous, and there was no discussion before hand.

VD: The only discussion we had was that there was no discussion beforehand!

PS: He’s a strange guy, but he brings a very particular energy to everything.

VD: It was just great for us to discover that we could actually pull it off. Again it was very, very nice to have an excuse to really push the limits as well and actually make the band this raucous screaming energy, it was just really deadly. I really enjoyed that actually.

PS: Yeah I think because of the approach to this album, and that most of the material was written back then, but we were still you know fine tuning little bits, polishing little bits and things, that every once in a while it’s great to just do an hour and a half of just going completely ape-shit and walk off the stage afterwards and go “what the hell was that?”. And as with Damo Suzuki…

VD: You walk off exhausted, bleeding and sweating and bloody delighted with yourself, its great.

PB: Where did you get the name The Jimmy Cake from?

VD: It came from a nights drinking, we drank for seven or eight hours and just reeled off as many names as we could and then the next day when we went through it we just kind of decided what was the best one, The Jimmy Cake. The fact that it had meaning afterwards was very disappointing, we just thought it was a really nice random two words together that worked really nicely, but then it turned out to have various different connotations in various different countries. But yeah it was just a very nice random collaboration.

PS: The idea originally was that the band name would change every time we did a gig. But unfortunately the first gig went down really well so it just kind of stuck. There were other names on that list, the next gig was supposed to be Joined Up Writing and after that was supposed to be Badger Attack. Although Badger Attack still is a really good name.

VD: We write under the name Badger Attack. We’re actually going to support ourselves someday as Badger Attack, that’s the plan.

PS: There’s a serious risk of clearing the room with Badger Attack though, same people but it’s a very different animal, not necessarily one you would like to be in a room with in the dark!

PB: What’s the story with your website www.thejimmycake.net?

PS: Yeah it went from being ours to a cake website.

VD: Yeah that’s now, but when it was .com it was a gay porn site and now with .net it’s the cakes.

PS: Thank God for MySpace that’s all I can say!

PB: Do you have a predicated date for the album’s release?

VD: The end of October. It’s been gradually pushed forward.

PS: It was early September.

VD: It was 2005 at one point as well. (Laughs)

PS: That’s true.

PB: Once it comes out are you just planning on touring?

VD: We’ll do kind of weekend dates, because there’s some daddies in the band now, and we are full time employed as well, so it kind of changes. We’re going to try and get to the UK, and try to get the album out in the UK as well.

PS: There’s a real energy there to get stuck into the next album already.

VD: Just to get rid of this stuff. Once it’s recorded and done and we do a few shows then we know the stuff and we can just get working on new material. The band needs something to look forward to now. Obviously we have a few gigs and all that with the album coming out, but creatively we need something new.

PS: The first rehearsal after the album release will be us working on the next album.

VD: Basically the three people who have joined in the last couple of years have joined in the middle of working on this stuff, so they’ve had almost, bar one or two tracks, not too much input. They joined at times when things were fixed in stone, so all they could do was add little bits here and there. So they haven’t actually been involved in a song from the ground up. So it’ll be great for them as well.

PS: I went over to London to see Animal Collective last year for the launch gig for their album “Feels”. I was always very impressed that they only played two tracks from it and the rest of the gig was the album that is coming out next month. There’s a band that can actually stay ahead of themselves, I like that idea of getting stuck straight in and moving on. But of course we said that five years ago!

PB: When will you be playing again?

VD: We’ve no specific dates, but we’ll make a big deal out of the album launch. We’ll do that when the album comes out which should be the end of October. We’ll probably find us doing a couple of Christmas dates and we’ll do a Dublin show after that and then’ll be a Galway show.

PS: Galway, Cork. Limerick, wherever..

VD: Jurgen can threaten his students with bad grades if they don’t turn out for the gig.

PB: Do you ever worry about things getting too predictable in your writing? I think that would be a main concern of a more experimental band like yourselves

PS: Oh yeah, absolutely, all the time. I wonder how experimental we are, I don’t think we are experimental at all actually. That’s not a bad thing. I think we know what we are doing, I don’t think it’s an experiment as such. It may be experimental for somebody to go and buy our record. We’re an experimental band for other people rather than for ourselves. But there are certainly traps we know we fall into naturally but there’s always someone trying to pull the rug from underneath us at any given time. There are habits that I fall into at this stage, naturally enough being with the band for years there are certain things that I do in the band now, and thankfully there’s usually somebody else in the band who’s constantly trying to wrong foot me and snap me out of it. I would do the same for somebody else.

VD: And just try not to fall back into it. They are very localised clichés, but we do have our own set of clichés that we have to avoid like the plague. I think we are our own best watchdog as well to be honest. We lost a very good watchdog last year in Simon, but also on the flipside he criticised everything. (laughs)

PB: Is this the first album to hopefully be released outside Ireland?

VD: If it does get out it will be the first to get over there, but we’re going to put a lot into getting it out. I work in music so I’m just going to try and pull in any favours I’ve ever been owed ever to try and at least get it stocked over there anyway, however limited a supply. And then go over and do a few dates and see. We played London a couple of years ago with Caribou, it went down really well. We did a tour of Eastern Europe as well but that was just fucking chaos….

PS: Yeah the alcoholic submarine…. But it’s tricky you know. We were lucky with that London show, it was a mate of ours, Dan Smith of Caribou, who out of the good of his heart forfeited half of his fee to help bring us over, ‘cause it’s obviously expensive bringing over a nine piece support band from Ireland.

VD: It’s hard enough to get a support gig in Dublin.

PS: So it’s not the most savvy business sense in the world, so we were very grateful for that.

PB: One of your best tracks is “Limestone Archie”, and RTE seem to have fallen in love with it as well and seem to use it quite a lot.

VD: RTE?

PS: Oh God…

VD: Limestone Archie as in the choir recording really?

PS: Well over the years RTE have used the Jimmy Cake’s music for absolutely everything. I think we should probably bring the producers of “Would You Believe” to court! But yeah we’ve had our stuff show up in the maddest of places.

VD: Do you have any specific examples of what they are producing with “Limestone Archie” in it?

PS: We’re looking for names here!

PB: I think they just use it in the background in a few shows. I just frequently hear it and recognise it.

PS: I remember seeing some trailer for some documentary and it was Bishop Tutu talking about the IRA and it had a track of ours that had only just come out on the “Other Voices” CD going on in the background. But we never hear about that, we never hear anything. It’s certainly not reflected in our thirteen cent royalty check we get every six months. (laughs)

PB: Have you ever tried to perform “Limestone Archie” live?

VD: There was talk of it, there was definitely talk of it. I was just down at the Archie in question’s sixtieth birthday at the weekend. Archie is the conductor of the choir, Jurgen from the band’s father. Loads of the choir were there and I met a couple of them, they were still up for it.

PS: Well we are probably going to launch the album in Tripod, but we were thinking at the time if we did it in Vicar Street we would just have the choir sitting in whatever seats they were in, dotted around the balcony and then at some point when we do “Limestone Tiger” they’d just stand up and sing out from wherever they happen to be sitting. If suddenly the person beside you just stood up and took out their sheet music, it would scare the shit out of everybody! (laughs)

The as yet untitled new Jimmy Cake album will be out (hopefully) at the end of October.

Analogue caught up with hip hop legend Rich Terfry aka Buck 65, just before his July 5th Gig at the Hub.

A: So how many times have you visited Ireland at this stage?
B: It’s been quite a few times and in fact in the last few years I’ve been coming an average of two or three times a year. I don’t even remember when my first visit here was. I’ve been coming here fairly regularly at least for the last five years or so. Interestingly one key memorable show that I did here, memorable for a lot of reasons, some good, some bad to be perfectly honest with you, was the Trinity Ball a few years ago with ‘The Rapture’, ‘Dizzee Rascal’, ‘Electrelane’, and myself, I played with myself that night. And, that was a strange, strange, strange night.
The good thing that came of it is I met the girls from Electrelane for the first time, and we hit it off and became fast friends. Bringing things full circle from that event years ago to today, we’re now actually working on some music together. So something really great ended up coming of that. It may result in some new songs, conceivably even an album, depending on how well it goes. So for that reason alone I’m really grateful that it happened.
The one thing that I found really bizarre about that event – aside from all the obvious factors about how debauched and drunken it was – was the fact that there was a programme, explaining what was happening and giving a little background on the bands that the school had invited. Maybe there was some kind of humour there that was lost on all of us. The write ups on each of the bands was basically slagging them off. So it’s like, why invite us here just to diss us, and it wasn’t just me, it was every single one of us. So we as the bands had to band together, so we ending up feeling like ‘It’s us against them, and they hate us but we’re here, and if we stick together you know, maybe we can make it’. But we ending up all feeling really alienated, and just kind of terrified by the whole thing. But a lot of us were strangely upset that we had this invitation, and you think logically that you’ve put together this event, you want to bring people out, so you think you’d write something flattering about the bands, but it was all really really horrible, it was actually pretty nasty. Which, obviously we didn’t like, but it just didn’t make a lot of sense to us, if you’re trying to promote an event that you’re putting on yourself, to say bad and strange things about the acts. It was really bizarre, I almost wish I’d kept one of those programmes.

A: Can I just apologise on behalf of Trinity right now?

B: No problem.

A: You use your website’s ‘Love Letters’ section, and MySpace and other digital media to keep in contact with your fans. You also recently have away your ‘Dirty Work’ EP, how do you find all these tools and technology help to foster community and develop a fanbase?

B: Well it’s really an invaluable tool, and I see it work really well, and the great thing about tools like MySpace is you can do something, and then get a sense from the response from it in a variety of ways, for example, if I do a show in a given city, the next day I’ll have something like 200 new friend requests, and they’re almost all from that city where I just played. In particular if I make a blog entry or post new music, you get feedback on it right away, and I really value that a lot. But, you know, although part of my thinking leading up to the decision to make a bunch of music available for free, whether it was the ‘Dirty Work’ thing through MySpace, or the ‘Strong Arm’ mixtape project that I did through my website, was I really got to the point where I believed that for better or worse, the value in music – or at least the perceived value in music, had just gone. People just didn’t really see much value in it, and I was not going to continue to fight a losing battle or cry over spilt milk. So I thought well, if people don’t really want to pay for music any more anyway then I might as well really try to adopt a new way of thinking, and try to find new ways to make a living, and as far as music goes, you might as well give it away for free, if people are not ever going to pay for it anyway. Never the less, having done that, the response to that was so overwhelmingly good; I still get the sense that even though no one’s really paying for music, even just the gesture, that they’re not being fought by an artist, seems to mean a lot to people. Like ‘You’ve met us half way on this, we don’t want to pay, and you’ve accepted that, and we really appreciate it’. And so it’s weirdly bittersweet in a way, it’s really a Pandora’s box that’s been opened. You can’t close it: it’s not even worth trying. Mostly I try not to think about it. It’s gonna taken even a little bit of time still. Like, for example on my last tour, I tried to help out my own cause. At a certain point, what becomes the focus for me is trying to make a living, and I don’t really have a fall back plan, so I have to figure out ways within this one thing I know how to do, to try to get my rent paid. So on my last tour, I put together a whole bunch of bootleg titles, and I was selling them, and about half way through the tour, I started to see the sales go way way down, and you know it didn’t take a genius to figure out it only took that number of weeks for it to spread all over the internet. But I was coming face to face with people who were walking up to the merch table, looking at everything that I had available there, and saying, ‘I’ve downloaded all this stuff, there’s nothing here for me’, and then just walking away. It’s kind of like, it’s one thing just to know that it’s happening out there, and it’s invisible. But to be confronted with it, face to face, to have a person walk right up to your face, and to say ‘I’ve stolen all your art, and I don’t give a shit, fuck you, you have nothing for me,’ and then just walking away, it’s weird, it’s really weird. Then later that night, you’re on stage, and you’re looking at all these people, and you’re performing for them, and you’re there to provide a service for them, and at the same time trying to remember all the things that are valuable and good about what you’re doing in the first place, i.e.: ‘I love this, I love music and that’s why I’m here’. But sometimes you have to fight off the feeling that your audience is also your enemy in a weird way. They’re the people preventing you from putting food in your mouth. At the end of the day they don’t give a shit about you. They will rob money right out of your pocket if they have the opportunity to do so. You have to try really hard to not think about that, but the reality of it is, essentially that’s what’s going on, and it’s gotten to the point, where people don’t mind telling you right to your face, ‘I don’t know who you are as a person, you may or may not be nice, but as far as what you can do for me, you know, it’s just a matter of what I can take from you, and if you can make some sort of separation, and separate out the human part of you, and really think about it in terms of, I don’t know what, cause it’s not business, stealing doesn’t really fit into a definition of business in a way that really makes sense. But if you can make the separation, ‘cause on a human level, to be confronted with that face to face, it’s tough, so you kind of have to put yourself aside almost completely, and accept the fact that you’re just this thing for people, and that’s a hard thing to accept, and it is a lot to ask it’s hard to say I’m going to put myself as a person with feeling aside as I try to do this job, but it’s what you have to do. Nevertheless, like I said, giving away music for free, and trying to maintain that open channel of communication through MySpace or whatever else, does seem to have some value in it, and I wouldn’t want to paint an entirely negative picture, because there’s a lot of great things that come of it too. For every time I essentially have a person slap me in the face, I also have another person who tells me ‘Your music has made a big difference in my life, and it helped me get through a tough time’, or whatever, and when you here that, even just to know that someone’s listening, obviously that means a lot, and I do try as much as I can to remove my ego from what I do as much as possible. When you hear something nice like that, it’s really just all you need to keep going.
A: Is it possible – you’ve got a major label distributor in Warner internationally – but as a semi-independent artist just touring and selling merchandise to survive, and to continue doing what you’re doing?
B: I think, and I hope so. That basically seems to be the last real avenue that’s open to us in terms of making a living. I think it’s maybe too soon to tell. To go back to what we were just talking about. There’s a real hump you have to get over as a musician, to get to the point where you’re touring and you’re making money. And if you walk away from the end of a tour with a couple of hundred dollars that’s ok, you can get back and pay part of your rent. That’s not really making real money, and so the one way you can help your own cause is at the merchandise table. Even in that situation, if you try to do something really exclusive, I mean give it a day, it’ll be on the internet, and people can and will get it, and they’ll get it for free. So, I gave that a shot on this last tour, and the first few weeks were pretty good, and then like I said, it went downhill fast. I know, I was touring with a guy named ‘Sage Francis’, who in the US is bigger than I am, and he wasn’t doing a lot of business at the merch table, he had a lot of music for sale, but it was the same thing, it was all material that everyone had and they weren’t buying, so you know, you become like a salesman in a different kind of way, and the one way a musician is going to make money is by selling t-shirts or something like that, you can’t download a t-shirt yet. So if I can put some creative thought in what might be interesting for people. You always hear people arguing for vinyl, there’s still a few enthusiasts out there who really want to get there hands on a tangible thing, like on vinyl, but that’s a really loud minority. They make a lot of noise but it really is a minority, and when you really believe passionately in something, you feel that you’re right and you don’t feel that you’re alone, but the truth is that you are.
It’s a fascinating thing, and it’s a whole other discussion, but the DJ side of the game, and this is even starting to trickle into your casual DJ, is getting taken completely by Serato, this programme with this two digitised pieces of vinyl, that allows you to run your MP3’s off your computer, which again, most music that people have on their computer is stuff they downloaded and got their hands on without paying for it anyway. So now all you need to do is buy this programme which is pretty cheap, get these two cheap encoded pieces of vinyl and you never need to buy vinyl again. Apparently what I’ve heard, in the few years that this had existed already, it’s had a major impact on vinyl sales. For serious DJs and the casual collectors, you just don’t need it, if you want to hear your music on vinyl, all you need is Serato, and anything that you’ve ever dreamt of that you want to play on vinyl you can do, so it’s make an impact particularly with the hardcore people, and anyone that’s in the business DJ’s and MC’s they’re all using Serato, or close to it, so what remains is those few hardcore collectors and fetishists.

A: Your lyrics are a huge part of your music, it’s a cheesy question, but who would you say are your writing and lyrical inspirations inside and outside of music?

B: Inside of music I would say, I mean a lot of the obvious ones, I’m always taking inspiration from the people that completely blow me out of the water, I mean the problem there is that sometimes those very same people humble me to the point of making me want to quit. Looking at people like Leonard Cohen, whose early work is just completely devastating to me, or, there’s a really small handful of people that I’m utterly in awe of, in terms of their ability to write magnificent words. That David Berman guy from the ‘Silver Jews’ has some moments that are really, really impressive. Sometimes you know, it’s little handfuls and people have little flashes of brilliance, and when I look at it that way, there’s a lot of people I could name that have one song, that completely floors me. There’s a few I can look to that are like a rock that are always there that are always going to inspire me. I suppose if there was one it would have to be Leonard Cohen. Anyone else that mystifies me or that gives me a lot to think about or try to figure out. Someone like Captain BeefHeart, or someone like Tom York even. His writing is so strange, and he’s begged people not to interpret what he’s saying, which leads me to believe that maybe he doesn’t even write for the sake of meaning, maybe it’s all just phonetics to him or something. But it’s interesting on some level never the less. The problem there is that I will listen and I’ll analyse and if I come up with answers that demystify people, then it’s like, ok, I’ve finished with them, I’ve figured out what their trick is, where they’re coming from. Outside of music, that’s more where I get my influence, and that can come from a lot of different places, and a lot of different artists that don’t even work with words at all. So like looking at the work of a really great photographer, whether that’s someone like Robert Frank or artists like Egon Schiele, or filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, or Alejandro Jodorowsky, or Jan Švankmajer, or people like that, I’ll watch their work and feel really inspired and feel compelled to sit down and write, but to be perfectly honest with you, and I take this as a really good sign, and hopefully as a sign of some kind of maturity or something, but the one thing that is inspiring me the most to write these days, and consistently so, is just real things that are happening in my life, more than anything else, even some of my old sources that used to work for me every time, sometimes they’re not even working for me any more, but it’s real life, and just real things that are happening. Luckily my life is interesting enough that it is constantly providing me with inspiration and ideas, and I’m not the sort of person that’s afraid of trouble or pain or whatever else, and I like to throw caution to the wind even at the expense of my career, sometimes, maintaining like a real life. I know a lot of musicians, they have to surrender it almost completely. That’s helped a lot, I’ve been going through just some unbelievably weird things lately, and at the end of each day it just has me running for the pen and paper to get it down more than anything else. It’s nice to be reminded about beauty or great ugliness, which a good artist can help you do, but when it comes right down to it’s just my own experiences that I find that I’m writing about the most, and it’s those experiences that are moving me the most you know emotionally and so on, and that’s good, I think that’s good, because I’ve been trying to shed influence as much as I can and I think I’m getting there.

A: Trying to voice?

B: Yeah, my own.

A: Your stuff, at least in the last few years, is quite radically different from a lot of what’s going on in hip hop, have you faced resistance or criticism from the quote unquote Hip Hop community, for that more lyrical, more introspective, intelligent material.

B: When I started to break away, and I guess if I was going to pinpoint when that happened in more of a conscious way, I guess I’d say back around ’99. When I started almost consciously doing things that felt like risks, or that were taking guts. Shortly after I certainly was getting resistance, almost like a hostile resistance to it. And I had to, almost for the sake of my own sanity, hang onto a belief, that one day they’ll get it. Lo and behold, from my observation, and my perspective, I think that’s happening now. I do admittedly get this really juvenile sense of satisfaction sometimes when I sit back and I look at the work of some of the same people, peers, who were criticising me, who are now doing what I was doing back then. I kind of end up saying to myself, ‘Well I told you so, I knew that in time, you would get to the same place that I got to a few years earlier. And it took time, and maybe at first people weren’t quite ready for that yet. But music’s changing fast, and the world is changing, and more and more I kind of feel like people are getting it. Even if they don’t necessarily like what I do, which I don’t expect everyone to at all, more and more people are accepting that there is a place for what I’m doing, and a general just embrace of diversity these days, which again maybe the internet plays into that, but I think people are digging that more. I’m seeing more and more musicians becoming more and more adventurous. Even like mainstream ones. Think about it, it’s hard to do this, we always were in the times we’re in right now, and we enjoy being in the times we’re in right now. And we just go for it, and we look to the people we’ve chosen as mavericks or whatever, and we trust them. And so, if Kanye West decides to hook up with Daft Punk, or sample Daft Punk or whatever, we believe in him, and we say to ourselves, ‘It’s ok’, and we go with it or whatever, and we dance. But if he or anyone else had tried doing that X number of years ago, it would not have been happening, and there would have been that same kind of hostile resistance, like ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and ‘Stop!’. But it’s changing, and not only is that ok for the hot rapper of the moment to be getting into like French dance music or something like that, which you know, people would have got punched right in the face for that years ago you know. Now it’s welcomed with opened arms. It’s amazing to me, and it does make me smile, and I do get this perverse sense of satisfaction from it certainly. Not that I had anything to do with it, you know what I mean, but just thank goodness people’s minds are like opening up, and people are becoming a little more liberal. Cause granted, for a long time, Hip Hop music across the board, from your biggest commercial level, all the way down to your deepest underground stuff, was really conservative, and it’s loosening up now, thank goodness.

Buck 65’s next album ‘Situation’, is expected in October. For more on the gig, and a snip from an acoustic styled version of ‘The Centaur’, check out the excellent Nialler9 blog.

San Francisco 3 piece Deerhoof earned many new Irish fans last year when they supported Radiohead at a sold out Marley Park show. Drumming mentalist Greg Saunier took some time out to talk to Analogue in advance of their return to Ireland to play at Electric Picnic.

Analogue: Are you looking forward to playing in Ireland again?

Greg Saunier: Very much so. It was, I mean, we were, I suppose…we maybe had some extra lucky way of experiencing Ireland for the first time. Where as, most bands would you know, maybe make a stop there on a bigger UK tour and it would be your first time and expect nobody to know you. Our first show was basically in front of 15,000 people, opening at the Beck and Radiohead show. There should have been no reason for anyone to know our songs or any idea who were but still we started playing. First of all it was a place we never had played before and second of all it was as support for a bigger band. We expected nothing but it was the most enthusiastic response. It was really memorable and everyone was in a really good mood and it is a testament to the nature of Radiohead fans but it showed us what it is really like to play in Ireland. Later when I went out into the audience to watch the rest of the concert, I just found everybody was so easy to talk to. I could instantly make friends with people around me. It was really great and we enjoyed that experience very much so we are looking forward to going back.

A: You played the TBMC very shortly afterwards. It must have been very weird to have Thom Yorke as honored supporter in the crowd?

G: How did you know he was there?

A: I read something you said that he was dancing crazily..

G: I actually couldn’t see him. That was something the people in the audience told me later, like “Who’s that weirdo?!” Of course it turned out to be him and I didn’t know he was there until I came off stage and I was basically walking to the merchandise table from the stage and this guy was like “Oh great show”. One thing I specifically remember was when he was saying to me that it was a great show he was patting me on the back and then immediately retracted it back as I was soaked. It was really funny. We had bumped into him and Johnny (Greenwood). Basically we were walking around the Music Centre looking for dinner and we went to a Japanese restaurant and we were told the wait was going to be 40 minutes and we said nah and we went to see what else there is and basically we went onto the sidewalk and there the next thing we saw was vegetarian food and said cool as I am a vegetarian and that was perfect for us and we walk in and guess who’s sitting down having dinner there but Jonny and Thom. Immediately they invited us over. We also found out Johnny was roped into doing some Irish music concert that same night but Thom was deciding what he would do on his night off from touring. When I have a day off from tour I basically sleep, not see anybody and I am going to give my ears a rest and be fatigued from the world and meeting people and stuff. What does Thom Yorke want to do on his night off after playing with Deerhoof day in and out? Come to our concert. We were surprised and we basically didn’t think it would happen but there he was. It was really fun and memorable. We liked the venue but we did get clamped when we were inside the show!

A: One thing I got from other interviews you have done is the change of your outlook and approach of making music after playing with Radiohead. How did that come about?

G: I think we had changed it before we had met Radiohead as basically it was a thrill to be with Radiohead as they are a very popular band. Clearly such an influence and being such a force to be reckoned with in music as they are to so many different kind of musicians and they float above any sub-genre and they have some sort of affect. We were already crazy fans before this. Whenever we were working on some new stuff we would A-B our music with their music and see if it could measure up to something they have done.

A: What about changes beforehand like Chris leaving and being a three piece set up. Did it force you to learn over again as a three piece and try new things?

G: We were a three piece before he joined so it was extremely natural to go back to a three piece. It’s funny to say that we had to go back and learn again. I could say that we already knew how to play as a three piece but that would be a lie as with and without Chris we still don’t know how to play. We’re still trying to figure it out as we play. We’re still thinking like “What in the world are we doing on stage and what is this ridiculous material we are trying to present to people?” None of it makes sense to us at all and that’s kind of funny to us. I think that the audience can feel like we are still trying to figure it out and that it is a work in progress.

A: Your latest album Friend Opportunity is like a fresh Deerhoof sound but you go back to sampling like on Apple O. How did you approach this album?

G: Well partly to do with the tour and other things happening at the time we basically didn’t have enough time to record it. Everybody had been working on ideas for songs on their own. But once we got together to make an album, most of the time we had set aside for this kept getting re-allotted other things that we could in no way say no to. We were working really fast so if we had an approach at all it was we had no rules as the deadline was enough of a discipline and it was strict enough that that felt like the challenge we had. Also anytime anyone had a thought or an idea we would just try it and so that’s how it ended up. So a lot of times you can’t necessarily know who’s doing what other than when we are singing. Sometimes Satomi plays guitar and other times the drums. Basically we had no limitations on the band as we already had the limitations with the deadline.

A: Although you didn’t have the time you really are perfectionists. For example on the Runner Four album you found it difficult to find a definite ending…

G: Well we recorded it on the computer but we always did it and always mixed ourselves. That’s the upside and the downside. On the one side you have enough time to get it perfect but then albums can take up ending years. I remember working on Reveille for two years straight trying to figure out how to get it straight and other albums have taken longer. So it’s a kind of weird pattern we go to. We start all innocent and fun and we get the sort of thrill of getting ideas from listening to stuff on stereo speakers after doodling on a guitar or hearing things in your mind and then you get to the stage where you say “It’s still not right” and then you put on your Radiohead CD and you go “Woah!”. It turns into a kind of obsession and every time you hear it all you hear is nothing but flaws. So we try and get tired of it.

A: You’re always pushing boundaries and trying new things. Do you get frustrated with critics trying to get your sound and label it experimental?

G: Well I actually like it when they do label it. I get a kick out of it. I think that some compliment and privilege and honour when they do. I find it a weird sense of accomplishment. Like it’s not our goal but I do feel happy when it happens. Sometimes a music journalist can be like a kind of know it all and their job requires them to listen to a lot of things on short notice and try to get the gist of something right of way. They can appear to be jaded in some sort of way and not be overwhelmed with the ecstacy with every single CD that comes their way. So this sort of person’s job is to try and see where everything fits in and find the perfect description and comparison for everything so they can find that perfect and simplified idea to the consumer confronted by another hundred CD’s. So when that person is at a loss for words I find that an accomplishment.

A: On one of your songs “Plus 81” it’s a real example where the lyrics perfectly compliment the sound and mood of the song. Could you tell us a little about the dynamics between you John and Satomi in the band? Are you almost at a point where you’re guessing what the other person is thinking?

G: I don’t know if it’s guessing. It feels like a kind of magic that I can’t describe. That song is one of many I wrote. I didn’t have any sense what the song was about. I just had this melody and drum beats. I am so concerned with pitches and rhythms that I just don’t have the slightest idea what the song is about. Satomi will hear the song for the first time and whenever she decides to focus her mind on that task, it’s like it suddenly comes clear to her what the song is about. As soon as she comes up to me and tells me or shows me what she’s doing I instantly realize that that is what it is all about. I feel like it is one of the greatest gifts one person can give to another person is to collaborate with someone and make something bigger out of what the first person did and to find the real meaning of what the first person said. Like we are from two different countries. Communication is complicated like it is with two people anyway but it’s amazing. Sometimes I feel like I have deeper communication with a person in this process of making music. She wants to discover what I didn’t even know in making the music. It still surprises me..

A: Is it true you get ideas for songs when you dream and in your sleep?

G: Yeah. It’s not like a rule. If I get an idea another way I will not say no.

A: Do you go “I need to get another idea, I’m going to bed!”?

G: -Ha. I really need to perfect the power nap. What I need to do this polyphasic sleeping where people sleep about 5 times a day for 20 minutes each time and Da Vinci was one of the original proponents of this. Obviously that guy had no problem with productivity and a lack of ideas. It seems like that was the source of his ideas. I have like these sketches and then I have to try and find a way to work them out and make it turn into something. I don’t know how to describe it. Sometimes I take accidental naps like in the back seat of a car but I never understood how to control whether it will be a good nap or a bad nap. If you sleep the wrong number of minutes you will wake up more horrible and tired than when you were before you slept. But then a bit of the time you get lucky and feel so much better and feel like I have had this incredible minute where I feel like suddenly the entire universe after this sleep feels fresh and new. But then it floats away.

A: Being woken up from a deep sleep suddenly is probably akin to being on drugs?

G: I have never taken any drugs. Maybe chocolate. Ha. Maybe this is my way of trying to get the lightning to strike in the right place. For as long as I can remember sleep cultivates how to put these things around me together. Ideas seem hard to notice. They sometimes hide or are wiped out by consciousness being busy doing something else. Under the surface thinking about this is trying to appreciate the ideas.

A: You seem to have no problems performing. You have a sparse drum kit but use it very well. How did you come to making your drum sound?

G: If you saw me playing a really big drum set you would see I have no idea how to use it. I get completely confused it there’s too many thing to hit and my arms get crossed and I end up poking myself in the eye and nothing right comes out of it. I have always been into self restrictions….

A: But what comes out of it is real edgy ideas and styles. So from almost restricting yourself you have in fact pushed yourself?

G: Exactly you have nothing to fall back on. Something that has fascinated musicians for several centuries is the idea of the solo. You know those Bach cello solos that are just always returned to by musicians of all types for every field of music. So for one cello you have one sound. You cant play two melodies at one time but we are going to try and evoke something bigger from these very limited means and although one instrument like that cannot play more than one chord it can give the mental impression that it can do more when played in unison and the listeners brain tries to fill in the gaps. The listener has to work with the performer in trying to finish what is a very skeletal suggestion. The suggestion of counterpoint or there being more than one instrument. Even with one instrument Bach creates the idea of there being more than one. Both performer and listener work together to finish the work. Even a cheap keyboard can have hundreds of sounds and choices. You can be overwhelmed. I can be overwhelmed by all the choices. I like pairing it down as it forces me to come up with something more. I like working on a small drum kit so we don’t need any roadies and it’s easier to transport. When you’re playing with a large kit with various sounds, if as you’re playing you start feeling the sound is getting bland you can go to something else there. However if you feel like you’re playing with nothing then what are you going to do when the music gets stale? You have to think of an idea to try and bring the music back to life. So I feel constantly challenged by the lack of choices with my small drum kit.

A: Aside from that you have tried some other things such as contributing to music for films such as Dedication?

G: It had its premiere just a while ago in New York.

A: How did it come about that you started working on a film?

G: Justin Theroux who is known more as an actor and this is his first as a director, he’s more well known for being in some David Lynch movies and other stuff. He had made this movie and sent us the rough edit of it and we couldn’t believe it. It was full of all these Deerhoof songs from other albums. It was like as previously mentioned when Satomi would write music from the music I make and she would be able to see the purpose or meaning of the song that was hidden from me to that point. It was weird to suddenly see your music set to images and a piece of a story with plot and characters. Suddenly the piece and music felt so much more.

A: Did it like give it a lot more feeling?

G: We just related to him in a special way and we had this similar kind of way that we’re drawn to the obsessive and naughty and arrhythmic… It is hard to explain. It is not that we are all experimenting. It’s about this specific feeling of someone struggling with themselves and has obsessions and compulsions and a need to always repeat the most difficult aspect, moment of a situation. To express thoughts that shouldn’t be expressed in certain situations. There was a certain dark humor.

A: You were working with composers?

G: After he sent us the rough he asked us were there other parts of the movies where music would go well and we could not believe that this person was trusting us so much to answer a question like that and we immediately started recording stuff for it and sending him tunes. A lot of it ended up getting used and eventually his producers ended up calling a composer in L.A called Ed Schumer.
Theres a funny story to this in fact….
We were on tour with Radiohead before coming to Ireland and before Radiohead asked us on tour. Ed was a big Radiohead fan and he goes to see Radiohead in concert and was intrigued by this band opening for them and asking who it was and wishing he cold work with a band like that and then he gets back to his office the next morning and there is this dedication DVD sitting on his desk saying that this is a movie with a lot of music by a band called Deerhoof and we are thinking of adding some more stuff and was wondering if you would like to work with this band and it was such a complete coincidence. Turns out he loved the movie and had loads of ideas about using music.
Working on the final mix and having everything all in place it was hard to work out who did what as it just seemed all so seamless our work together. I think Justin’s whole approach to using music and sound in this movie is so original. If nothing else the process he used was as it allowed us to be involved. We never climbed on some career ladder to get into the sound affects business. We were just some random band that he got in touch with. He trusted us in a way that it was just ludicrous on paper.

A: Its not the first time Deerhoof music has inspired someone to go ahead and create something in a different art form. You album Milk Man was adapted for an elementary school ballet!?

G: Yeah. They just repeated that performance a few weeks ago and we have become great friends with the people involved in that. It’s totally incredible. There are journalists who feel our music is experimental and only meant for other musicians and certain kinds of knowledgeable crowd and the initiated and elitist. Our dream is always the opposite and I cannot believe our good fortune at how our dreams have come true where it has reached the confines of indie rock.

A: Friend Opportunity is a shorter work. It has the Deerhoof essence but appeals to more. Was that intentional?

G: It was kinda intentional. It has been intentional every time. We don’t have a type of audience we try to appeal to like one genre of musical listeners. We never really fit well into any musical scenes. We have during our time together seen many musical genres come and go like in San Francisco. We never really felt like we were accepted into any of them but we have been able to have friends in many different local scenes. So it was like you didn’t have to be part of any scene to like our band. So if you were part of a certain scene you were most likely to love it or hate us. You are most likely to never have heard of us. I like the feeling that you cannot predict the music a Deerhoof fan listens to or what they look like, age they are or what income level they’re from. You can’t really tell anyone about them. When your fans start to include six year old kids on an island in Maine that want to sing and dance to it you really feel like it is our ultimate goal.

A: What’s next for Deerhoof?

G: Electric Picnic!

A: You have a brief break from touring now. Have you been working on new material? Or is that something else further down the line?

G: Each of the three of us are working on ideas on our own and we are always doing that and seeking out new ideas for future possible songs. However we haven’t gotten together to work on new stuff. Mostly we have been working on is Dedication. The craziness on working on that we have managed to somehow be trusted in being involved in the publicity and it is completely bizarre.

A: It keeps things interesting?

G: Interesting is one word. It has actually been like a crash course to the corporate world. Working with the movie and the studios releasing and promoting it, all their marketing teams and producing teams and the way they work is so utterly different to what we’re used to. On this tiny indie rock band it is really different. We have had to really hound people to get different ideas across on how you believe in this movie and how it is presented to people a certain way through emails. You are only talking to some liaison understudy. These people are just nine to fivers. For us this is one of the biggest things we have ever been involved and been a part of but for them it may just seem as something insignificant as it’s just some minor indie movie to them. It’s probably nothing compared to the other movies on their release schedule. It is hard to convince them to, well I am afraid that it may be sold to the wrong audience. Although it is a romantic comedy in name and context, the actual reality of the movie, is that it is for people who wouldn’t normally go to romantic comedies.

A: You’re doing a lot of work to put it across the right way but the fact that you are involved in it will immediately attract a certain crowd that wouldn’t be into romantic comedies the film is going to speak for itself. I can’t wait to see it myself.

G: I’m totally amazed by it and being involved and trusted so much in the process of the movie, even up to the sound. I mean we were like “what do Deerhoof know about sound mix in a movie?” but there we were mixing it. Even to be trusted to participate in the publicity we thought why in the world would the Weinstein company, a multi million dollar corporation, a major player in the popular culture industry turn to some little scrappy unknown DIY punk rock band or whatever on ideas on how to…

A: They’re trying to keep the sound and things fresh?

G: Yeah. I mean it is probably more to do with us badgering and pestering them like a fly constantly asking them what they are doing and making suggestions to them. I mean it is not like they came to us with open arms. It has been a really long process to manage to insert our selves into the process.

A: On that note, I read somewhere that Deerhoof is all about love. Is that what keeps you going?

G: Yeah, I mean, it’s you know I probably said that as a joke to one particular journalist who wanted to pin us as some snobbish, intellectual, experimental band. So I mean, today as I am talking to you on the phone, it is in the middle of me trying to deal with what is going on with this Dedication movie. I mean if I had to summarize in one syllable what idea I have for this movie that it’s marketers don’t know exactly know. I had a love for the movie and for Justin who did it so while he’s busy shooting another movie with Ben Stiller in Hawaii he is too busy to consider what is going on. So I am trying to protect, care and nurture it so that it comes across and doesn’t get spoiled and misrepresented so therefore you know thrown in the waste basket. I really believe in the ideas that Justin is trying to come across with in the movie and the aesthetic and characters. I recognize these characters and some of them in myself, their mindset, concerns and difficulties. I completely identify with them. Well the source of everything we do is love and if not why would we be doing it. There’s not other reasons for doing it. That’s the thing about music, it is that other than those short lived and rare cases where people are making a real big income from music…It is so uncommon and laughable to be even considering…the other 99% of us is that what’s cool about it is that there is no other reason to do it but that. It doesn’t build houses for people or put clothes on peoples’ backs or cure diseases or ends wars or anything like that. It is just able to express something else which has no justification other than…I don’t know how to describe it.

Analogue: Things have been pretty mental for you lately, is it good to be back in Ireland?

Fionn: It’s cool, it’s what I am, and I suppose it’s where everything starts from. The place that you grow up in, that’s the root of everything that happens. The information in your bones and in your skin, it’s great to come and play for everybody.

A:The title of your album, The End of History is very striking, what’s the story behind it?

F: As you travel along through life it’s like you reach these stations, certain things happen, and it felt like I’d reached a capital city station, and when I hit the platform it felt like it was alright to talk about the journey. Now it’s ok to document the evidence of what has happened, whether it’s been your childhood or anything after that.

A: Do you think it’s going to be hard to find an album title as grand for your next album?

F: Ah these things usually present themselves! Everyone crams at the last minute.

A: There’s a lot of imagery in your lyrics about journeying, is that for you what this album documents?

F: Yeah, jumping over a fence, waking up in a barn, y’know, the things that happen. I don’t want to build houses for all the lyrics in the songs. I don’t want to over-explain- if you build houses, you build walls for them, and then you can’t really knock them down. Of course in every song there’s people involved and there’s feeling in the words, but I don’t feel the need to write them on billboards.

A: The video for Be Good or Be Gone is interesting with all the different locations and the live sound in it. Where did the idea come from?

F: These two guys came up with the idea and we all sort of knocked our heads together and got something down on paper, and then presented that piece of paper to the grown-ups who were holding the purse-strings, who in turn thought we were losing our minds, asking ” How are you going to pull this off?” We did it for two-pence ha-penny. I think we managed to do something different in an area that’s been so overworked…it’s very hard to come up with anything that adds to the wheel, but I think we hit on something.

A: You recorded The End of History live, is this the sort of recording you plan to continue with for future albums, with vocals and guitar recorded together?

F: Absolutely. You figure out early on what jacket you wear, y’know? What jacket works. When it comes to recording for me it has to happen in the moment, it has to be there, it’s got to be happening and it’s gotta be real. I can’t record in any other way. It’s gotta be one big open plan room. Rather than separate small rooms with different things happening in different rooms that nobody has any idea about. A lot of times on records, people are punching in and out, they’re never really getting a feel for what everyone else is going through.

A: So recording both vocals and guitar together, do you capture the moment?

F: You’re forced to up your game. It’s very easy now to spend a long time doing one thing. You have to be ready, the sails have to have taken a bit of a battering, and you have to work out how to get out of a storm in the ocean on a two-by-four plank. Whether you’re playing outdoors, or in a telephone box or a mop-cupboard or in an attic, or in the cab of a lorry, you learn something from that and it informs the way you play, so by the time you get to document the songs, you’re ready, and if not then it’s not time to do it.

A: Your tour schedule’s been pretty mad lately, have you been writing much while you’re on tour?

F: We’ve pretty much been playing straight without any days off for a year and a half. It’s like being on a submarine. You come up for air and you might scribble something down. Sometimes you’ll write things in the back of a car somewhere…

A: I read somewhere that you said that the best songs are written on crumpled pieces of paper.

F: It’s true! Though I don’t know how long I could do that for before it started to affect what I wrote. I’ve been trying to find a home for my first record for such a long time, and I’ve been writing songs over quite a long period of time, which is sort of strange when you move to another point and then you’re getting pulled in two directions. People start shining light on the record and things start happening, and you’ve moved on and people are explaining your whole life with 12 songs that took you two years to find a home for and then spent a year on the road with…that’s a long time. I’m really excited about getting the next record done because I think everything will start to make more sense - it won’t have to be branded or pigeon-holed because they won’t be able to anymore.

A: Does it piss you off that you do get pigeon-holed?

F: They like to invent a neighbourhood for you to live in. But nobody really knows what happens behind closed doors. Just because you’re from one area doesn’t mean you have an expensive car, and just because you’re from another area doesn’t necessarily mean you rob cars. And nobody dreams about the same things, or fights about the same things or thinks about the same things on the way to the bus-stop in the morning. In a way it’s kinda frustrating, but at the end of the day what you do is write songs and play shows, and they’re the most important platforms.

A: One thing that sets you apart from past Irish singer-songwriters is your ability to sculpt a witty anecdote into a song with a great melody. Where do you draw your experience from?

F: I don’t know, I suppose everybody likes a laugh. I don’t see how I can’t talk about how if I walk past someone lying on the side of the street being pissed on, I can’t deny that as someone who writes songs, that works its way in- or if someone has lost their mind at the hands of an institution. And you can’t deny girls or whatever else it is that takes your fancy. But everyone likes to have a laugh. Humour is a thread, most people can understand it, it’s something that makes everybody elated and illuminated.

A: Your lyrics also show an appreciation for the little things in life that people don’t notice, perhaps reminiscent of Patrick Kavanagh’s writings. Do you think Irish writers have had an influence on your writing?

F: I think so. When I was growing up I heard a lot of poems being read, people telling stories and spinning yarns so I think it’s part of your make-up, it’s in your DNA. In ‘Be Good or Be Gone’ I say “I have become an aerial view of a coastal town that you once knew” and it’s like wherever you go in the world and whatever you do you have this collage of images and this information. It’s there in your bones and your teeth and your hair and it never leaves you. I think the more I learn about Irish literature and storytelling I can see little similar references, things like the mail boat, because Joyce talks about that. There’s definitely a shared meter and imagery.

A: The Irish have a knack for that. Is the “wink-and elbow” talk something that you try to incorporate?

F: It’s a way of seeing things. The whole thing is a mystery to me. I just write about what I see and what I feel.

A: How does it feel to be up for a Mercury Music Prize?

F: I kinda feel like a lighthouse keeper at a wedding. You arrive down from the lighthouse and there’s flashing lights and bulbs and it takes you a little while to get used to it and adjust, and at the end of the night you might be up in front of the wedding band.

A: Is it something you could get used to then?

F: Well it’s quite hard for me to talk about. For the last couple of weeks I’ve had to answer lots of questions about the mercury prize. And it’s kinda hard enough to talk about what you do anyway, and when it comes to prizes…it’s like asking a tobacconist if he’s interested in moving into the area of roof-racks for Land-rovers. He’s gonna look at you quite crookedly.

A: So does the attention that goes with it bother you?

F: Well its just part of it. You have to accept this in every job that you work. I’ve on worked loads of jobs and you have to accept it if someone comes onto a building site and tells you what you have to do that day. And there’s other parts of doing music that you know are not that easy, but you have to override that and rise to the challenge.

A: It’s definitely been a whirlwind for you this year.

F: Everything blurs into one. Leaving one room and it becomes the next room,one car joins with another car. It’s just a collection of the same kind of thing but the weather changes. We got a present of a camera and I looked at the pictures on it, running through the last couple of months, and it’s very difficult to tell the difference between the days or anything. It just goes ‘venue, sound check, car, venue, sound check, car, room, car, motorway, car.’ But what else would you be doing?

A: Do you have the next album planned?

F: Yeah I have the songs finished; I just have to put them down. I’ve got two weeks in January and it’ll probably be out a couple of months after that.

A: To finish, of all the themes that run through your songs, what is the most personal to you?

F: You just have to tell the truth. If there’s dirt under your nails sing about it. Don’t run off into the corner with a matchstick to try and clean it out.

Next to Seasick Steve, it’s impossible not to feel a little fake. This is a man who plays the ‘one string Diddley Bow’, a two by four with a steel guitar string crudely nailed at either end; a man who learnt to play at the feet of someone named ‘Gentleman George outta St. Louis’; a man who rode the rails as a hobo, lived rough playing “three string, two string, one string, sometime no string guitar”, because “a lotta times, you didn’t have all the strings. If you stop when you break a string you don’t eat”.

Seasick Steve (christened Steve Wold) is the real deal, and next to him we’re all a little less authentic. Kicked out of home at thirteen by a violent stepfather, Seasick became a factotum - tirelessly crossing the United States, working dozens of jobs. “Forty five years ago, riding the train, I used to play music on the streets. People started listening and I started to get club requests. I didn’t choose that life, that’s just how I ended up. Once I got the chance there was no reason not to do it. I could live in a little room somewhere. That was a long time ago.”
Steve became a session musician and producer during the 90’s, cutting perhaps eighty Seattle punk and grunge records at his own ‘Moon Studios’. He continued playing clubs to a small but loyal following, earning a little but never making it big, never getting the chance to release his own material. Steve was too young when he left home and too old when he found steady work to ever get the habit for it. He continued to travel, finally ending up in Norway, the home of his current wife Elisabeth, where he earned his unforgettable nickname on a rough Blues Cruise to Denmark. Then a couple of years ago something changed.
“I started playing with [deceased blues legend] R.L. Burnside and Jon Spencer [of New York revivalists Blues Explosion], and kids started coming. The people who used to like blues, they listen to Eric Clapton, they don’t like it, what I do, and I didn’t think kids would like it either”. As it turns out, hipsters and music aficionados, raised on the musical abundance of the internet, Robert Johnston and Led Belly by way of Kurt Cobain (below whom Steve once lived in Seattle), find something to love in Seasick’s uptempo boogie blues. It’s easy to see why Seasick’s particular brand of ’song and dance’ has separated him from blues revivalists like the White Stripes or Kings of Leon. Seasick’s act is more about the great western story telling tradition (think Utah Phillips) than Mississippi or Chicago blues. “I don’t know if I belong to anything, but that’s more important than playing the guitar - guitar was a second thing, something so they won’t walk away so quick.’ He attributes his success not so much to originality as to the re-discovery of something lost, something from the roots of rock and roll. ‘People nowadays are hungry for something a little bit different, a little bit raw. People been playing guitar behind their head a long time, Zepplin and Hendrix didn’t invent that, it’s not a new thing. The old Delta guys back in the 20’s did that as a trick at parties.”
Steve hangs out after gigs, walks through the crowd, wireless electric guitar hanging from his Denim dungarees, “I’d do that if there were 10,000 people. People haven’t seen that before.”
These days though, it gotten harder to mingle with his audience, as he plays to crowds in the tens of thousands at festivals across Europe. There are places in the UK Seasick Steve can’t go without getting mobbed in the street. All of this started because Joe Cushley, a DJ on Resonance 104.4 FM, heard his music somewhere and wanted to get a CD; but the big break was an appearance on Jools Holland’s 2006/2007 ‘Hogmanay’ New Years Eve show. “Playing for five million people is a lot different to playing for a few thousand.”
I tell Steve I’m surprised to learn he’s stuck by his woman, despite success, and it’s attendant benefits. “That’s the way to get unmarried. I been married before, and that’s how I got out of it, whoring and such. Let me tell you the best pick up line I ever heard”, he says, effortlessly breaking into the story-telling mode that’s hooked him a new generation of fans. “I was playin’ in Belfast last year and this young girl, maybe twenty comes up and she says ‘I love you’, and I thank her, cause everybody says that, and she says it again, ‘I love you’, and I thank her once more, but she looks at me and says ‘No, you don’t understand, I love you. You see that guy over there? That’s my boyfriend, and I’ve just told him I love you too.’ I tell her, I say, ‘Girl, I am old enough to be your grandfather,’ and she looks me right in the eye, tells me ‘If you were my grandfather I’d be into incest.’ ”
Steve is philosophical about such celebrity obsession. “It’s weird looking the way I do. Walking along the street women cross the road to avoid me, I look like an old bum or some such. But you play music… I got so many girls after me, and they really are. You see somebody performing, somebody with talent, and that’s so attractive.”

Seasick Steve played the Spiegeltent at the Dublin Fringe Festival on the 18th of September.His album ‘Dog House Music’, is available now.