MGMT
Singer and guitarist Andrew VanWyngarden is an excitable puppy in human form. Bearded keyboard-player Ben Goldwasser is reserved. Sardonic, even. Together they are MGMT, pronounced ‘management’. The 25-year-olds met in 2002 on the campus of Wesleyan University in Connecticut. United by a love of mysticism, psyche-rock and Technicolor, they plugged in some computers, threw on some fluorescent tunics and started making “strange music to confuse people” at college shows – one of which involved a 45-minute instrumental reworking of the Ghostbusters theme. Now signed to Columbia and headlining tours, MGMT’s anthemic power-pop is beginning to hit the big time. Happily the Brooklyn-based duo are showing no obvious signs of taking themselves seriously.
What do you listen to in the morning?
Andrew VanWyngarden: Bob Dylan is good as anti-groggy music. I don’t like to listen to anything too energetic first thing.
Ben Goldwasser: I listen to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain album. The first song’s not good for getting fired up to, but the rest of it is.
What music was playing in the house when you were kids?
AVW: I listened to the stuff my sister was into. Pearl Jam, The Grateful Dead, Spiritualized, Smashing Pumpkins. I heard a lot of classic rock through my parents – Neil Young and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young… all that big stuff.
BG: Progressive rock like King Crimson and a little bit of Yes. Some jazz, like Charles Mingus.
AVW: You make it sound like you were six years old and listening to Charles Mingus!
BG: When I was really young I was listening to Talking Heads…
AVW: Talking Heads is great for kids.
BG: So is The Incredible String Band.
If you could teach the world to sing, what would you teach them?
AVW: I think about this a lot. I have this weird dictator fetish. I’d like to take a group of a hundred 50 to 75 year olds and trap them in a gymnasium until they learn every lyric to a Jay-Z album. I’d have to be really mean – like starve them. I like Jay-Z but it wouldn’t be pleasant for septuagenarians.
BG: Remember we saw that show on MTV where they were teaching a choir of old people to sing Welcome To The Jungle?
AVW: That was kind of similar… but it wasn’t a torture thing. They were taking it pretty well.
Where would you be without music?
BG: I’d be living in the woods somewhere. Going feral.
AVW: I’d be a Marine Biologist. That’s what I wanted to be when I was a kid. It’s still the coolest job. I’d live by the ocean just researching squid or something. With a decent-looking wife and dog.
BG: You’d be like that guy we saw on TV who was teaching seals how to paint at Colchester Zoo.
AVW: It’d be awesome to teach some seals to play in the band.
BG: Dogs would be cool.
AVW: There was a Swedish prog-rock group from the late 60s who had a dog in the band. I don’t know what instrument he played.
MGMT’s headline tour of the UK starts on November 5.
Friendly Fires
Aged 14, St Albans school friends Ed Macfarlane, Edd Gibson and Jack Savidge formed First Day Break. “It was all guitars, no vocals… far too serious,” says Gibson. University changed all that. Thanks to a student diet of German techno and Prince, in came romantic melodies, propulsive drumming and rib-rattling bass. In 2006, three months before graduating, the trio met in The Beehive – “St. Albans’ most depressing pub” – and reinvented themselves as Friendly Fires. Their self-titled debut album – recorded in the garage of Macfarlane’s parents using “a laptop and a crappy mic gaffer-taped to a stand” – is out now on XL Recordings.
Do you have a post-show routine?
Ed Macfarlane: Champagne and forget all the mobile phones, jackets and things that we’ve left on stage.
Edd Gibson: Maybe a short informal debrief. ‘How was that?’… ‘Yeah, it was alright’… ‘Good, see you later.’
Jack Savidge: I was backstage straight after an Iron Maiden concert and the singer and drummer were hanging around in dressing gowns two minutes after they’d walked off stage. I saw Nicko McBrain putting his robe on as he was walking out of his dressing room and there was the faintest glimmer of a penis. He was decently hung.
Who is your musical nemesis?
JS: We need to get one of those!
EM: I’m trying to think of a shit Indie band… Someone like Pigeon Detectives. Pretty bollocks.
EG: If we’re going to start a proper Blur/Oasis rivalry with someone then it might as well be Pigeon Detectives.
JS: Who’s No. 1 at the moment?
EM: Actually someone like Late of the Pier because we play gigs a lot with them. They copy our every move. Their synth player Sam Potter said, ‘I don’t like Friendly Fires… I see them as competition.’
What’s the worst show you’ve ever played?
EM: Barcelona. We were playing at the Razzmatazz event and there were only about ten people in the room. After about five minutes they just turned around and looked the opposite way towards the bar. We played our set to their backs and then after we’d finished they put the Spice Girls on the sound system and everyone went crazy!
EG: If we’d have known that was the magic formula beforehand we’d have just got up and played Wannabe and cashed in.
If you had to kill one of the Spice Girls, which one would get it first?
JS: There’s something about Sporty Spice…
EG: No, she’s my favourite. And Baby.
EM: I’d put a cap in Posh.
Funeral song?
EG: Ed Is Dead by The Pixies.
EM: Yeah, has to be.
JS: I can’t have that one.
EG: You’d play Sparklehorse, wouldn’t you?
JS: No. The last two minutes of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. It’s really cheesy but it sounds like you’re going into another world.
EM: Played on an organ would be good.
Which song do you wish you’d written?
EM: Happy Birthday. We could do with the royalty money!
The Teenagers
Boxing Day 2005, Paris. Quentin Delafon, Michael Szpiner and Dorian Dumont are eating frozen pizza and getting drunk on vodka. They decide to set up a MySpace page for an imaginary band. A random girl called Nicole sends them a comment… The Teenager’s first song, Fuck Nicole, is born. Within eight months the French trio have amassed over 10,000 MySpace friends, bagged a record deal and decamped to London. Any worries that the jokers-turned-electro-popsters would play it safe for their debut single were soon dispelled with Homecoming, which features the catchy chorus “I fucked my American cunt.” The Teenagers – all in their mid-twenties – are here to prove that adolescence is only a state of mind.
How would you describe your music?
Quentin Delafon: Sleazy French pop.
Do you write for yourselves or your fans?
QD: We’re pretty narcissistic so we write for ourselves. But it’s cool that people enjoy it.
Michael Szpiner: We share our selfishness.
Dorian Dumont: Share our selfishness… that sounds good.
QD: We’ll have to use that again.
Career highpoint so far?
DD: The first time we played Reading festival. That was our first big show.
MS: And the first time we played in America. Doing shows in places like Seattle, LA, San Francisco, New York, Vancouver.
QD: Vancouver isn’t in America.
Do you have a pre-gig ritual?
QD: We gather round, I grab their arses and we say the name of the place we’re about to play.
MS: We sound like Madonna.
QD: No. She does like a big Kabbalah group chant. It’s different. In the beginning we used to hit ourselves because we were so nervous.
DD: But it didn’t help us to play our instruments.
If you could teach the world to sing, what would you teach them?
QD: I don’t think we’re ones to teach anyone how to sing!
MS: Maybe Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
What do you listen to on the tour bus?
QD: Everyone listens to their own music. For me at the moment it would be Robyn, Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, Crystal Castles.
MS: Metallica.
DD: Kings of Leon, MGMT.
What do you argue about?
MS: The seats in the van.
DD: The seats on the plane. Window or aisle.
QD: Or who wins at Mario Kart on the Nintendo.
Any scary fans yet?
MS: In America we saw the same girl at three of our shows. Then we saw her back here in Nottingham again. But she’s not very dangerous or frightening. She just looks young and fragile.
QD: Vampire Weekend are dangerous fans. They’re like stalkers. Every festival we play they are there, playing after us. It’s like, ‘What the fuck? Get a life!’ Always hanging about backstage. It’s so weird.
DD: In Norway they even came on stage with us.
QD: Yeah. ‘Get your own gig!’
Black Lips
Black Lips call their sound “flower punk”. Live on stage, however, there is not much that’s flowery about Cole Alexander, Jared Swilley, Joe Bradley and Ian Saint Pé. Antics include vomiting, inter-band tonguing, pissing in their own mouths, spitting in each other’s mouths, fireworks, nakedness and a dancing chicken called Popcorn. These boys are smart. A series of raucous 2002 performances in their hometown of Atlanta, Georgia saw Black Lips banned from several venues, helped label them the state’s most notorious act and got them their first recording deal. Now signed to VICE Records, the four-man team supported the Raconteurs on their US tour earlier this year – and managed to keep a check on the exchange of bodily fluids.
Where are the other two?
Jared Swilley: I dunno.
Joe Bradley: Somewhere else.
How would you describe your music?
JB: [Burps]
JS: Like psychedelic pop… kinda.
JB: It’s rock but we take influences from lots of different places. I’ve been known to get inspired by classical Japanese composers.
JS: He means video-game composers.
JB: Hip-hop, sink taps and the sound of cars pulling off. You got to take influence where you can get it.
JS: We make it short and simple. I don’t like it to be intellectual. The music shouldn’t be too hard to get your head round.
What other band would you want to be in?
JS: If I had the talent or the voice, I’d be in The Falcons, Wilson Pickett’s first band. Actually I’d be in The Stones. Those guys are still like the happiest people on Earth.
JB: That’s because they’re rich as fuck.
JS: We have some friends who know them and they say those guys think everything is funny no matter what. I would too!
JB: They’re like, ‘Look at that microphone stand! Hahaha!’
JS: My whole life would be one big joke if I had that much money.
JB: Yeah, if presidents were coming to meet you, why wouldn’t you be happy?
Who’s the hardest in the band?
JS: Probably Ian. Ian’s the biggest.
JB: Yeah but Cole’s the scrappiest.
JS: But Ian could kill Cole. And Ian has a really tough older brother that he learned to fight with. I’ve seen Ian beat people up and I wouldn’t want to fight him.
JB: Ian doesn’t fuck around. But, see, we always fight together.
JS: We’re like fire ants. It doesn’t matter if one guy gets in a fight. We all fight. A little bit like the Three Musketeers but we’re not as gay as that.
JB: Or as fashionable.
JS: And there’s four of us.
What’s the last album you bought?
JS: The last one I actually spent money on was a 60s Jamaican compilation called Studio One Rockers.
JB: I bought an album by Brimstone Howl – they’re a band from Lincoln, Nebraska.
JS: You bought that?
JB: Yeah because I wanted to help them out. I was at their show in Omaha. They’re on Alive Records.
If you could teach the world to sing, what would you teach them?
JS: Living In America by James Brown.
JB: That came out so naturally. I concur.
Quiet Village
Joel Martin, aka DJ Zeus, is a former film editor and one of London’s best respected record collectors. Matt Edwards is the man behind the moniker Radio Slave and Berlin-based label Rekid. The pair met at Sir Dunstan’s College in South East London but it took a car journey to drum’n’bass club Metalheadz one Sunday night in 1995 for them to realise a shared love of pillaging car boot sales for oddball vinyl. As Quiet Village, Martin and Edwards proved themselves early on as remix wizards for The Gorillaz and The Osmonds. With their debut album Silent Movie, they take Italian soundtracks, down-tempo disco and exotic rock samples and create a series of Balearic wonders, complete with screeching seagull sound effects.
Who is your music for?
Matt Edwards: We’d love everyone to get into it. It’s the first music I’ve made that I can actually play to my parents and they appreciate it.
Joel Martin: My mum trainspotted one of the samples. I was really pleased by that.
Do you ever argue in the studio?
ME: Not really. We’ve known each other long enough that things run pretty smoothly.
JM: Actually, didn’t we recently have an argument about the tempo of music?
ME: It was a discussion. I make a lot of dance records so with the Quiet Village project I’m always saying, ‘Let’s leave out the drums.’
JM: And I want to hear some drums.
Are you competitive about your record collections?
ME: Joel digs a lot harder than I do.
JM: Not harder. I just have more time than you. I love sharing music. That’s what friends are supposed to do.
ME: We were both going to the same car boot sales back in the day but didn’t know each other. After we met through mutual friends, I’d pick Joel up every Sunday at about six in the morning and we’d go hit the booters together.
Where do you find your records now?
ME: Touring is good for finding stuff. But I always think, ‘Do I really don’t need any more records in my life?’ And suddenly I’ve got one hundred records in my hotel room.
JM: We’ve been to The Record Show in NYC for four years in a row. At one, Matt walked up and whispered, ‘I need to go and buy a flight case. There’s a guy over there who just sold me fifty Japanese super-amazing, high-end audio sound effects records for $30!’ These are now items that we’ve come back to time and time again for Quiet Village. If you want the sound of a humming bird, it’s on there.
Worst gig?
JM: San Francisco. It was peak time on a Friday night with an up-for-it club crowd. We were slightly confused as to why we were asked to play as our show was this weird audio-visual extravaganza. We got asked by the promoter to end the set early. He said, ‘I wouldn’t want to come and see this!’
If you could teach the world to sing, what would you teach them?
JM: The theme to Sesame Street. We’d like to do a mix of children’s records at some point.
Black Mountain
Stephen McBean, Amber Webber, Matt Camirand, Jeremy Schmidt and Josh Wells are five longhaired Canadian stoners on a crusade. When they’re not unleashing epic psychedelic rock on bleary-eyed revellers as Black Mountain, they’re busy helping out at Insite – a Vancouver-based charity for the chronically poor, drug addicted and mentally ill. Not many bands can mix a punishing schedule of tour hedonism with a keen social conscience. But Black Mountain have a knack for straddling extremes: they’ve managed mainstream success – their song Stay Free was featured on the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack and they supported Coldplay on their 2005 US tour – whilst still retaining their hard-rocking credibility.
Describe your sound in one word?
Josh Wells: Wide.
Stephen McBean: Ecclesiastical.
Jeremy Schmidt: Minus the really heavy religious connotations.
Matt Camirand: But with the gold leaf.
Any rituals before a show?
Amber Webber: I pee like five times.
SM: We don’t do soul circles – no group hugging and apologising for all the bad things we’ve said to each other.
AW: I would actually like a soul circle.
MC: OK. We can try it sometime for you.
JW: I try to get my blood moving around my body so there isn’t such a harsh contrast between sitting around all day and then suddenly playing the drums.
Are you going to do any short songs?
SM: We’ve got one on our new record, which is only a minute and a half. But we never play it live because somehow we always fuck it up.
JW: It’s too short with too many chord changes.
MC: We’re used to taking a long time to make a statement.
AW: Plus it’s on acoustic guitar so Steve would have to switch guitars. It would take like 30 seconds just to swap guitars and then the song is only a minute and a half anyway, so there doesn’t seem much point.
What’s playing on the tour bus stereo at the moment?
AW: We haven’t played a single tune yet. We’ve only been on the bus for two days.
MC: Our driver isn’t part of the usual touring crew and he doesn’t seem too predisposed to listening to music on the bus.
JW: We don’t have any idea what kind of music he’s into yet.
SM: I think we’ll have figured it out by the end of the tour.
MC: It’s going to be like Rammstein or something.
JS: Yeah, it’s definitely some Euro industrial metal shit.
MC: We’ve got to get in there before he gets in there.
If you had to have one extra member… who would you pick?
AW: We could definitely use someone to dance round the stage and add some theatrics.
SM: What about Stacia, the topless dancer from Hawkwind?
JW: Or Bez from The Happy Mondays?
MC: A laptop might be useful.