(An edited version of this interview originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.)


(Photo taken at Sheffield Academy, Tuesday April 28, by phoenixlily)

It’s been four years between the last album and the new one [Kingdom Of Rust], so what have you been up to? Was there a chance to take a sabbatical break?

There was, yes. We took about four or five months off. We didn’t have a break for [second album] The Last Broadcast, and we had about a month off for [third album] Some Cities. Then with this one we said: look, let’s try and actually live like normal people – not in this weird travelling bubble, or studio bubble. It was a nice time to find ourselves again. When you’re in a band, it’s like this weird family you’re connected to – so we wanted to spend time with our other families! (Laughs) It was much needed.

Then from there it was like: right, fourth album, blank canvas. OK, we didn’t know quite where to start, or what the fuck to do. But a year later, we had all these songs. And we kind of stepped back from it, and we were saying: yeah, it’s good, but it’s a bit comfort zone for us.

Then we started upon our quest, if you like, to search for what we could do that’s different. We needed to push ourselves and go down different avenues for Doves. To almost justify coming back with a fourth album, it’s got to be different for us. So that became the long road to doing this album: what we could try and what we couldn’t try, what we could get away with and what we couldn’t get away with.

So there was a process of experimentation, where you were trying to push at boundaries and see where they’d take you?

It was almost on a song by song basis. It was like, where haven’t we been before? Right, let’s go down that road. Then when we came out of the recording sessions with all these songs, we wanted to pick almost polar opposites. On the album you get "Jetstream" followed by "Kingdom Of Rust": totally opposing songs. And everyone was like: you can’t do that!

But in a weird way, it works. It’s a strange Doves DNA stamp that we’ve got: we seem to get away with what other bands might not be able to get away with. (Laughs)

There are a few changes that I’ve picked up on. The album has a big, majestic, quite grand sort of sound, which can get very intense.

I’d agree with that. It’s possibly our most intense album, because it takes you through some dark passages. Thinking about it, maybe it was a reflection of some of the struggles we were going through with this album: personally and with the band. You can’t help but for it to come out, so it’s always a good stamp of where you were at the time.

But there’s a lot of optimism on that album as well. And there are also snapshots, which is what I call it when you take a picture with words. Lyrically, we enjoyed going into things that we haven’t really done so much.

The lyrics are quite impressionistic, aren’t they?

We’ve always liked songs that are ambiguous. In fact, we hate pinpointing what they’re about. Some are obvious, like "10:03" and "Jetstream". But there are others where we wanna keep it ambiguous, so the listener can put their own version of the story on them.

Anyone’s point of view is just as valid as ours. We might be coming at it from a different angle than what the listener might interpret it as, but that’s cool. That’s what good songs do.

What about "Kingdom Of Rust" itself? What’s the significance of that title?

It’s got quite a strange resonance, that song. We went away for four years, and literally the whole music industry imploded. We wanted to write a song with a bit of optimism, so the lyrics “It takes an ocean of trust in the kingdom of rust” hit a nice resonance with what’s going on today.

You’ve got a couple of your own lead vocals on the album, and it was interesting to note that they’re two of the more electronic influenced tracks.

In Doves camp, we always pass the mike. Jimi’s the main singer, but we always get tracks where we’ll go: you try it Andy, or you try it Jez. We’ll literally get the mike and try it. And if someone’s personality works best in the song, then that gets the vote. Jimi’s one of the first people to encourage other people to take the mike, so it was very natural. In fact, it wasn’t even an issue. The song’s got the ego, and not the individual.

You pride yourselves on this democratic approach – so egos get checked at the door, do they?

You know what? The democratic approach is fine, but it’s a pain in the arse. Everything takes twice as long. (Laughs) With quite a lot of bands, it all comes from one person: here are the songs, this is how they are, you can just play them. That’s never what Doves have been about. It’s always been about a sort of painful democracy, if you like.

Did you literally hole yourselves up in your converted farmhouse studio for months on end, cutting yourself off from the outside world?

Looking back on it now, I suppose we were isolated. We were almost in a tunnel, if you like. Halfway through, we were thinking there was no end in sight. We started to lose it a little bit. “When is the end in sight? When is it?” And so it just seemed to be this endless tunnel, with no light coming in.

But three-quarters of the way through, we started to see an album emerging, which was the most amazing feeling. It’s like you’re looking at a jigsaw puzzle and then suddenly in front of you, you can start to see the picture. So it was literally from the darkest point to the highest point, in a couple of weeks! (Laughs)

You’ve got a big tour coming up, where you’ll be spending two months on the road. I guess it’s been quite a long time, so have you had any warm-up dates?

We did six warm-up dates, and it was great. It’s something that’s been missing from being in a band. The live circuit has always been a part of us, and it was weird to be in a studio for so long and not do a gig. So it felt so good to get back there. That’s what being in a band is about: actually getting on stage and playing it, in front of the whites of the eyes in the audience.

It feels good to have fresh material in the set, and just to exercise these songs live is an amazing feeling. If you’re playing for a year, you get to understand the songs a little bit more, and you can have a different twist on them from the actual studio recordings.

It’s the old cliché: it’s the travelling and everything else that’s shit, but that actual hour and a half on stage is what you do it for.

Have you got any festival appearances coming up?

Glastonbury is confirmed now. We had two choices – the second stage or the John Peel tent – and we decided to close the John Peel tent on the Friday night. Just because we wanted word of mouth. Everyone was complaining: it’s not big enough, it’s not big enough! But it’s like: sod it, we want to get some atmosphere going in that old tent. It’s gonna be cool.

I’ve heard a few people comparing your position in 2009 with Elbow’s position this time last year. I hope no one’s putting any pressure on you to “do an Elbow”…

Well, that’s out of my control, isn’t it? We’ve done an album that we’re all very proud of, and that we’ve worked ridiculously hard on – so our work is kind of done in that respect. As for commercial pressures and all that, that’s out of our control now. What will be, will be. I don’t think we’ve done an interview, or an article, without people mentioning Elbow!

But there’s one thing that their success has shown: that if you make a bloody good record that can stand on its own qualities, then that record will actually see you through.

Well, yeah. I’m always a strong believer in that. When we went from [early 1990s dance act] Sub Sub to Doves, we thought people wouldn’t give us a chance, because of our prior history – but it just shows you how wrong I was. You do a good album, and I think people will appreciate it.

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

(An edited version of this interview originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.)

Having previously released reggae covers of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Radiohead’s OK Computer, what made you decide to cover The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for your latest project?

Our thing is that we like to do concept albums. We don’t just want to do a collection of songs, or greatest hits, in reggae. We want to do higher albums that work really well as a cohesive unit, where the songs make sense together. Sgt. Pepper’s is considered to be one of the first concept albums, so that made it a logical choice.

Besides that, our first two albums were – because of the source material – were somewhat dark, minor key affairs. We thought it would be a great challenge to apply our sound to something different: to a more upbeat, major key, pop-orientated album.

As a resident of New York City, is it important that the albums that you choose are all British? Because they’ve all been British so far.

I think it’s somewhat of a coincidence. Or maybe it’s just that the British make the best albums? I don’t know if this informs the decision-making, but I did grow up being something of a musical Anglophile – even with reggae, as a lot of my favourite reggae comes from British bands.

Were there any delicate negotiations involved, when it came to assigning tracks to your various guest artists? [Steel Pulse, Ranking Roger, Max Romeo, U-Roy, Sugar Minott, Frankie Paul, The Mighty Diamonds, Black Uhuru’s Michael Rose, Third World’s Bunny Rugs and others.] Or did they just do what they were told?

The funny thing is, that while Sgt. Pepper’s is considered by many people in the rock and pop world to be one of the greatest albums of all time, a lot of Jamaicans – while they might be familiar with The Beatles – don’t know the album. It’s such a well known album, but it doesn’t have a lot of so-called “hits” on it. There are songs that get played on rock radio each year in America, such as “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “A Day In The Life”, but you don’t hear a lot of the deeper album cuts. And therefore they haven’t been covered a lot. So it was great for us to be able to do songs like “Fixing A Hole” and “Getting Better”, that probably haven’t been adapted. I’m sure that there’s covers of every Beatles song, but they’re not so well-known.

Listening through to the Beatles originals, how easy was it for you to imagine them as reggae versions?

There were certainly some tracks that were pretty difficult. My overall first impression was that it would be a very difficult project. Partly it’s because the vibe of the album is very different from our first two albums. Partly it’s the reverence that people have for this album.

It’s always good to attack that sense of reverence.

Oh yeah, and I have no problem with doing it – but it’s something to think about. I spent about six months just writing the arrangements. The beginning period was really just listening to the album, and immersing myself on a deeper level. I was very familiar with the album from the time that I was a child, but I hadn’t really analysed it on an intellectual and musical level.

Certain songs came easier. With something like "Lovely Rita", I knew pretty quickly what I wanted to do with it musically.

I‘d have thought “Within You, Without You” would be a challenge. That was the one that I just couldn’t imagine, before I played the album. But I like what you’ve done. You’ve put that “Sleng Teng” rhythm underneath it…

Hey, you’re the second reviewer who caught that, which is great. That arrangement was really difficult, because originally part of it is in 10:8 time, and then in 3 time. With our previous two albums, I’d done a lot of experimentation with doing reggae in odd time signatures – but on this one, just because of the pop aspect of it, I wanted to keep this album for the most part in 4:4 time. So I knew I had to get some kind of 4:4 beat and rhythm to this song. So, yes, this one was pretty tough.

Our bassist Victor Rice, who also mixed the album, wrote the string arrangement. He did a brilliant job of making it work in basically 5 time over 4. And then the whole “Sleng Teng” thing didn’t come about until we were actually in the mixing studio. I was like: you know what, this just isn’t night. It’s just not good enough. And I was just fooling around, and I thought: what if I replace the original bassline for it? I’d somehow got the idea of interpolating “Sleng Teng”, and that really glued the song together for me. It gave me the drive that it needed.

Another song which I didn’t think would work is “When I’m 64”, but it’s one of the most enjoyable tracks on the album. Especially with that extended dub section, which has a kind of Rico Rodriguez feel to it…

Yeah, with the trombone. “When I’m 64” was also difficult. I think that in England, people understand that it’s somewhat of a tribute to the whole 1920s music hall genre. But in America, people couldn’t quite relate to it on that level. I know quite a few people who actually just don’t like the song. They think that it’s too corny: “This isn’t rock and roll, what is this?”

In the course of my life, I’ve heard a lot of reggae covers of other music that I thought were very corny. It could be corny because of the source material, or corny because of making it reggae. So I had to be really careful to give it something that would make it sound cool to reggae fans and rock fans alike.

I don’t remember exactly how I came up with the arrangement, but I was just somehow thinking: OK, Twenties music hall in London; I’m gonna transport that to early Eighties dancehall in Jamaica. It’s kinda got the vibe of a classic Sugar Minott song called “Herbman Hustling”, and then I was like: well, let’s get Sugar Minott in to sing this one.

Have you had any response, from the Beatles camp? Do you know if they’re even aware of it?

Well, we do all of our albums above board. Before we put anything out, we’re dealing with the management and the publishers. We don’t want to fly under the radar. We want everyone to hear this, and we wouldn’t want to give anyone a reason to sue us.

So a long time ago, we dealt with Apple Corps: the Beatles company that they set up in 1968, which still technically administers their business. We got approval from them, and then we dealt with their publishers, Sony ATV, which was a much more lengthy procedure. That being said, we’ve not yet heard a response from Paul or Ringo or Olivia Harrison or Yoko Ono – but we really, really hope to get some responses from them.

I’d like to think that if Paul heard this, he would like it. I’m pretty sure that he likes reggae, and it seems like he’s into experimentation. Even if this album tanks commercially, if Paul McCartney ever said to me “I really appreciate what you did with my music”, I would remember that for the rest of my life.

Will your live show be dominated by Sgt. Pepper, or do you split it between the other projects?

We do a pretty long show, and with this new album we’re certainly going to play the majority of it. But because so many people love Dub Side Of The Moon and Radiodread, we’re still going to give them a healthy serving of those songs as well.

Do you carry a mental shortlist of albums that you might consider for your next project?

Oh, sure. When we did Dub Side Of The Moon, we didn’t realise that we were going to create a series. But once that became somewhat successful, we’ve thought about many dozens of albums. There are some that I’ve even started writing arrangements for. So we have a bunch in mind for the next one. I can’t tell you what it could be, because we try to surprise people when it comes out.

For what it’s worth, my vote would go to REM’s Automatic For The People. I’d like to hear you tackle that one.

I will register your vote!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Sticking out like a raw, throbbing thumb on the NME’s latest package of up-and-coming young bands, The Chapman Family faced the hardest job of the night: warming up the still sparse crowd, at the awkwardly un-rock-and-roll hour of 7pm, with their intense, thrashy, guitar-heavy squall. To add to the challenge, they were forced to compete for our attention with an annoyingly distracting overhead video screen, which was mostly given over to advertising the NME brand and the tour’s mobile phone sponsors. Worse still, they had to suffer the indignity of performing beneath an endlessly repeating multiple choice text competition: “Which town do The Chapman Family come from?”

To their credit, none of this deterred the band from delivering an impressively full-tilt, committed performance. Mercifully, the screen was switched off during the remaining three sets.

Notably less self-assured than their predecessors, Magistrates were likeable, but lacking in charisma. They were name-checked as a band to watch by Dawn from Black Kids, when she spoke to the Post last October – and it was easy to see the musical connection, as both acts deliver a light, tuneful, breezy brand of indie-pop. If you like Franz Ferdinand and MGMT, then Magistrates may well be up your street.

Heartbreak belong to the classic tradition of synth duos, but with an added drummer. Their singer sported a spivvy pencil moustache, teamed with a close-fitting leather blouson which sported the sort of shoulder padding last seen on Gary Numan in the early Eighties. Fully aware of his own preposterousness, he strutted and preened with a winning sense of self-belief, occasionally breaking into interpretive mime, and even a brief moonwalk. The girls down the front loved him, and he lapped up their adoration. The music drew on hi-NRG and Italo-disco influences, and was strongly reminiscent of the much hyped electroclash movement of 2002. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Almost unknown at the start of the year, La Roux have been one of this year’s big breakthrough acts. Astonishingly, they had never even played live until just over two months ago, and so their learning curve has been a steep and public one. Backed by two synth players, Elly Jackson cut a startling presence on stage, her outsized quiff sculpted into a gravity-defying vertical point. Plagued by technical hitches in the middle of the set, she shrugged off the problems with self-deprecating humour. (“Thank you for forgiving me. I wouldn’t have done!”)

Somehow, this lack of slickness reinforced Elly’s compellingly flawed yet strangely winning qualities. Yes, her pitch control is all over the place, and she undoubtedly has a “Marmite” voice. You’ll either cover your ears in horror at the shrill screechiness of it all – or you’ll recognise that La Roux are all about celebrating human frailty and imperfection, and you’ll end up loving them all the more for it.

For in this age of airbrushed, Auto-tuned pop robots, who never quite seem fully real, it’s refreshing that the charts can still make way for a quirky girl with weird hair, an odd voice – and some cracking tunes to match.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

An edited version of this interview originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.


(Photo taken in Toronto, April 5th 2009 - the night before this interview - by chromewaves)

Congratulations on going Top Ten with “In For The Kill”. Did you expect the song to do so well?

It’s kinda weird. I know it’s a pop song, and that with the right exposure and the right push behind it, we always knew it could get to where it’s got. But without things like radio backing, it doesn’t matter how good your song is; if no one hears it, no one can buy it. So it’s just all a bit of a gamble. It’s obviously one of those songs that people have heard once or twice and bought.

There’s also been a lot of buzz about the Skream remix, which is quite unusual for a remix.

Well, this is the thing. That’s helped. I think it’s probably about 50% of the reason why it’s sold so much, because that remix means that the song has reached people that it wouldn’t otherwise have reached.

It takes the song in quite a different direction. Was it a strange experience to hear it for the first time?

Yeah, I think it was. I was in a hotel in Exeter at the time, just after our first gig. I could only hear it on my laptop speakers.

Which is how most people hear their music these days, I guess.

I know, and it was exactly the same – so you might as well listen to it. And you’ve got to be clever with the remix. You’ve got to be sensible. A remix is about taking the song into a new vein. There would be no point in getting a really electro remix, because it’s already like that, if you know what I mean. So you've got to do something with it.

You first came to a lot of people’s attention when you placed fifth in the BBC’s “Sound Of 2009” poll at the start of the year. At that stage, you had one limited edition single and a couple of songs on MySpace, and you hadn’t yet played live. So how did all these tipsters find out about you?

I think it was just an industry buzz. That BBC poll was based on 130 people in the music industry – and that is pretty much most of the music industry, to be honest. People in the music industry had known about me for about a year, so it wasn’t that shocking. We didn’t know if we would definitely be in it – but to be honest, I really don’t care. I know that’s really bad. You know, I’m not dissing the BBC or anything...

But you were glad of it? You didn’t think: oh shit, I’m not ready yet, stop?

Not at all – it came at the perfect moment. And it was the perfect position. I wouldn’t have wanted to be any higher. If you’re at Number One in that poll, you deserve a fuck of a lot of expectation. You’ve got to have your album ready, then you've got to come back with a whole load of press – a whole load of bang, bang, bang – or people forget.

I think being at Number Five is a nice thing, because it’s slow and gradual. But I don’t think it makes any fucking difference whatsoever. Yeah, it’s important, and we wouldn’t have had as much awareness without that poll. But in terms of meaning anything real, it’s not going to affect record sales or anything like that. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the poll not; if you’ve got strong songs and a good label behind you and good management, it’s gonna work.

Do you still keep tabs on what people are saying about you in the press, or is that a bad idea at this stage? Do you Google yourself, for instance?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you know what? I have absolutely no interest. I don’t go on YouTube. I check my front page messages on MySpace, but that is literally it. You only have to read one nasty thing about you on the Internet to make you never want to look for it again. It’s just not worth it. For every five people who like you, there’s gonna be five people who don’t like you.

And anyway, it’s all losers on the Internet. Anyone who’s got enough time to fucking sit there and comment and slag people off… It’s nice to write positive things, and if people feel compelled to write positive things, that’s different. I don’t think that means you’re a loser or anything…

It’s easy to hate...

How much of a sad bastard have you got to be to fucking sit there and slag people off on the Internet all day? Get a life, seriously!

What stage are you at with the album?

Oh, the album’s finished. It’s all done. It’s out in June. We’ve been writing it for four years.

Is that four years as a duo with Ben [Langmaid]?

Yeah. It was essentially a solo act, until we realised that it wasn’t a solo act – in that it’s not just a producer/singer situation. We produce together, and we write the lyrics together, and so it was more of a Goldfrapp thing. The songs are all about my life, and I’m the front woman, and I am “La Roux” – but in the studio, we are a band and it’s like Goldfrapp.

[Ben] doesn’t come out live or anything. He’s just not really interested, and I am the “face”, as it were, of La Roux.

I mean, I am La Roux – but we are La Roux at the same time. It’s kind of confusing.

The Goldfrapp thing helps to settle it in my mind, actually.

Yeah, I don’t know what I’d do without Goldfrapp, in order to explain things. I don’t know how they explain things; you’ll have to read some old interviews of theirs.

But you’ve gone in an opposite direction from Goldfrapp. They’ve moved from electronica into a more acoustic singer-songwriter vein, whereas you’ve done the reverse. Was there a moment of revelation, when you discovered the joys of the synthesiser?

Yeah, there was. I started fucking about on the synths one afternoon at a mate’s house. He used to make tunes in his bedroom. He dabbles in various areas of the industry – a bit of tour managing here and there – and we used to hang out. I used to go up to Dalston and not leave for days on end. He got me to play guitar on someone’s track and he said: do you wanna start making a tune, just for fun? And I was like: yeah, OK. Then he gave me a synth and he was like, do you wanna put some chords down on this? And then I was like, fucking hell, this is amazing!

Then I wrote “Colourless Colour”, which is on the album. It kinda spurred off my synth love. Then I went back to Ben and said: I wanna do this instead.

Did you junk all songs that you’d written beforehand?

No, no, no. “Fascination” was the first song me and Ben ever wrote together on guitar.

Did it change the way you put songs together?

We don’t write on guitar anymore, but we still go through the same process. You get four or five chords that you really like, and then you start humming over them. And you find some lyrics, and find a melody, and go from there really. So it’s the same process, but on a different instrument.

I was reading some old interviews, and in one of them you were asked to pick five words to describe your music. One of the first words you picked was “cheap”. People don’t normally describe music as “cheap” in a positive way, so what are its virtues?

We have one of these synthesizers called a Matrix. It’s by Oberheim and it’s fucking brilliant. It’s not like a keyboard synth. It’s just a rack with a plus and minus button to go through the presets. And it comes out with these noises that… there is no other way to describe them, apart from cheap and nasty. They’re just really tinny and thin and tacky and scratchy and plonky, and I love sounds like that. Really angular.

Obviously it doesn’t sound cheap now, because it’s been mixed and mastered and stuff. But some of our early demos were like old tracks from “Speak and Spell”. Really, really, really dry and beepy and angular. Then as the album grows, it starts to become more and more expensive… (Laughs)

Do you see yourself retaining that certain cheapness in your sound? Or could you ever imagine yourself hiring an orchestra and going for that whole epic, widescreen production?

No, I’m probably gonna go really epic, I reckon! (Laughs) But hopefully still with those cheap sounds in it. Songs like “Tigerlily” have that. They’ve got that slightly epic thing, but they’ve also got a cheap kind of Caribbean feel.

Do your songs come directly from personal experience, or do you like to invent characters and situations?

No, I can’t do that. I’m really good at lying (laughs), but I’m really bad at making stuff up. So it’s all totally from personal experience.

So how much of La Roux is a mask, and how much are we getting the real you, baring her soul on stage?

When you see me on stage, that is totally me: baring my most personal, most upset, most tragic moments, as it were. That really is what you’re getting. I really mean that, as well.

The character of “La Roux” came after the songs, so the songs are totally and utterly me and they always will be. La Roux is the hair, La Roux is the clothes, La Roux is the stage persona as it were – but it’s just a slight exaggeration of what I actually am. It’s not a massive acting job, or anything.

Your first live show was only in early February: at the Notting Hill Arts Club, where you had a short residency. Then just over a month later, you were supporting Lily Allen on tour, and so playing in much larger venues. You must have had to scale up pretty quickly, so how did that go?

It was kind of weird. I remember the first night of the Lily Allen tour: being backstage in the dressing room and just kind of… not being nervous. And then being nervous about not being nervous. But there were about 2000 people out there, and I could hear them. And I was like: I’ve got to go from 200 to 2000 in the space of two weeks, with no extra rehearsal either.

It could have gone so wrong. But it didn’t! I fucking loved it! It was brilliant! I think I was just really ready for it, and now I’ll probably be slightly disappointed to be back on small stages.

In a strange sort of way, it might be easier in a larger venue – because you haven’t quite got that intimacy with your audience. If you’re playing the Notting Hill Arts Club, you can see the whites of their eyes – but if you’re playing the Glasgow Apollo or wherever, there’s just a dark mass in front of you.

Oh, exactly. It is much easier. You can be that character a lot more, and you can over-perform. You can’t over-perform in a venue with 150 people in it, because it doesn’t have quite the same impact. It just looks like you’re over-performing for the size of the venue. So you have to bring it back down again. I was really enjoying performing, and really getting into that persona of La Roux – and La Roux doesn’t really like small stages much. (Laughs)

You can retain a mystique in larger venues – whereas in a tiny venue, you’ve got to hop off the stage at the end, and go to the bar with everyone else. So there’s a bit of a disconnect there.

I like that distance, and it can be hard to maintain that distance. Last night [at a small showcase gig in Toronto] I literally had to walk off the side of the stage, pretty much into the crowd, and this girl just showed me her tits.

She was like: I’m just going to show you my tits. And I was like: can you please not? I really don’t want to see them. At all. And that’s really… woah, it’s in your face.

And you can hear everyone talking and stuff! They’re right there in front of you, so you can practically hear what they’re saying. You can go to the front of the stage and drop down to do a kind of emotional bit – and literally, their face is where your crotch is. It’s just a bit weird!

What’s the biggest lesson that you’ve learned from these past four months?

(Long pause) I think it’s the stuff you learn from doing live shows every night. It’s stuff that you can’t really pinpoint, or that you’ve specifically learnt – but you find yourself being more and more comfortable on stage every night. And the people that have seen you from the beginning really notice the changes.

Every night you go: hmm, tomorrow night, I think I’m gonna walk right over to the left of the stage. Or I’m gonna use up a bit more of the stage. It’s little things about a performance, that really make a difference. You start to learn through experience and practice. There’s no other way of learning, apart from just doing it.

It must be a period of very rapid personal growth.

Yeah, and also just learning about interview technique: what’s going to be taken in the wrong context, and what’s going to be taken in the right context.

And learning not to get bored with the same old questions?

Yeah, totally: to give the same passionate answers, just as you would the first time you were asked the question. Because it’s not going to be the same people reading it. It’s going to be different people.

Well, we appreciate that. Finally, a friend of mine is concerned about the grammatical inaccuracy of “La Roux”. He says that it should be “Le Roux” for a man, or “La Rousse” for a woman.

I dunno, it was in this baby name book! It was their fault! Obviously, “La Roux” looks much better written down. Also, I didn’t know it was wrong until about a month after I chose it. And I just didn’t give a shit, really. I just didn’t care. It’s so irrelevant.

To me, it means “red-haired one” – and it does, vaguely. It’s just a male version of “red-haired one”, which I think is even cooler, because I’m well androgynous anyway. So it kind of makes sense.

And Depeche Mode doesn’t make any sense! And loads of English bands, or any bands all over the world, they call themselves… you know, a name like… I dunno, I’m trying to think of something. (Pause) Well, the Eurythmics isn’t a real word, is it?

No, I suppose not.

Exactly! But no one goes on about that!

My friend thought it might be a conspiracy. Because “la” and “roux” aren’t meant to go together, and because they haven’t been used together before, he said you’d show up quicker on Google.

[Stunned] Really? Oh, that’s amazing.

But then the French for wheel is “la roue”, and the French for street is “la rue”, so you can defend it on those grounds. And the famous female impersonator is also called Danny La Rue.

I thought he was a transvestite? No, I was wrong?

I don’t think he likes that, no. He’s a female impersonator.

Oh, never mind! (Laughter)

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic