Simian Mobile Disco PROUD TO KNOW W HAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING PHOTOGRAPHER -
ELINOR JONES
There’s the sharp tang of cloudy, super-strength cider as the tantalising scent of grilled meat wafts through the air and happy families enjoy the surprising, balmy, summer delights of early August. On blankets and picnic hampers, exhausted by the day’s sunny excerptions, kids are slumped and sleeping, but the ones still fighting bedtime, they stare wide-eyed and open mouthed into the smoke and shadows as two hunched figures manically grapple with a machine that has a thousand red, angry eyes. Back in 2008, Simian Mobile Disco played the everpleasant Summer Sundae festival armed with the dark, danceable live show that’s been their hallmark for the last four years. At that point James Ford and Jas Shaw were busy inducing robotic nightmares within the innocent festival youth and doing a noisy electronic line convincing indie kids that dance didn’t have to mean Creamfields or Ministry of Sound. But where the allconsuming ‘We Are You Friends’ grabbed mainstream imagination, it was the success of debut album ‘Attack Decay Sustain Release’ that marked the crystallisation of Simian Mobile Disco’s crossover acceptance. “We were playing electronic stuff in indie clubs simply because we couldn’t get a gig in techno clubs,” explains Jas. “We were just being belligerent and then it all kicked off and it happened to fit with what we liked and were playing. It wasn’t us being smart, it was total luck.” Music history is littered with the “right time, right place” anecdote, but where so many are happy to accept and exploit that as their only qualifying contribution, Simian Mobile Disco have never been prepared to stand still and wait for the circus to come their way. After splintering from their former band, Simian, Jas and James quickly built a formidable reputation as producers with SMD, another spoke in a seemingly endless cycle of touring, writing, recording, DJing and producing. Thrown in with the electro class of 2007, they quickly hit the forefront of the crossover wave that the likes of Erol Alkan and 2ManyDJs et al. had been fostering since early 2000. Buoyed by the collective momentum of LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, Digitalism, Justice and MSTRKRFT, it was a period that changed the wider music landscape and one James looks back on with mixed emotions. “I enjoyed that period of time but I don’t have any nostalgia for it at all. We did get lumped in with a lot of bands and some of it went on to be ok, but some, especially when it crossed over to America and they took those rock aspects and ran with it, the end result of
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REEF YOUNIS
that is Skrillex. In a way, we’ve spent these last few years trying to get as far away from that as possible. We don’t really play electro and haven’t done for years and it’s been a struggle for us to try and redefine ourselves against that. It was our kick-start but it’s not something we ever want to rehash.” Determined not to take a backwards step, follow up album ‘Temporary Pleasures’ seemed to do just that with its vocal-heavy tracklisting neither appeasing the old fans or appealing to the new breed. Jas and James reaction was ‘Delicacies’ – their label and club night project providing a firm commitment to a year of no vocals and heavy, minimal techno. After the tribulations of the second album, ‘Delicacies’ took SMD back to the context of the club and allowed them to re-focus for new album ‘Unpatterns’ with a brutal honesty. “We’ve changed pretty steadily and been led by what’s interested us,” says Jas. “It’s probably been bad for our popularity and steadily pissed off everybody who liked us at the start, but then all the people who didn’t like us at the start had written us off anyway. We made ‘Hustler’ and then we’d made all this mean, minimal techno music and people would still be like, ‘Na, they make pop music’.” “I think we’ve dug our own hole in that respect,” says James. “We’re quite keen to not repeat ourselves, but on the flipside of that is that people often don’t know what they’re going to get. ‘Delicacies’ was a label for us to put out more techno stuff, but I suppose it was a reaction, in our heads, against the amount of vocals we used on ‘Temporary Pleasure’.” “Before ‘Temporary Pleasure’ we met loads of people on the road and got loads of emails from people in bands we really liked,” Jas continues, “then we sent them instrumentals thinking no-one would get back to us but they all did. So we had all these good vocals in these song structures, because they were in bands, so we thought we’d put the vocals in the centre and rearrange the music we created around it, which was quite naive. It would have been smarter, and probably the decision we would have made if we’d sat back on it for a few months, to mix up the instrumental balance on the album a bit more and put some vocal tracks on an EP.” It’s a lesson learned and one that fundamentally changed the way they approached the writing and recording process for ‘Unpatterns’. Cutting down on production commitments and scaling down the frequency of their DJ sets enabled them to make the time to record instead of trying to find it in a hectic
schedule.According to James, the decision was ultimately one of the best they’ve made. “I feel the most confident and happy with it of all the albums we’ve done,” he enthuses. “I definitely feel it’s the most representative of what we are. We decided to just block out a good few months here and there, in chunks, so that we could properly concentrate on it.The way we work is to create a lot then pick the best bits. Often that’s coloured by the excitement of just making something, but if you leave it and come back and still like it, then hopefully it’s a sign it’s probably alright,” he laughs. “We probably could have made an entirely different record from the tracks we didn’t choose, but we try to choose tracks that work as a whole. I think we felt that on ‘Temporary Pleasure’ we made some mistakes in the tracks we chose for that. We were very careful this time to try and get that balance right.” “We’re never really looking for perfection,” Jas picks up, “but for this record we spent longer on it largely because we felt we could have chosen different tracks on ‘Temporary Pleasure’ and we rushed it. We were doing production for loads of other bands and we’d spread ourselves quite thin and we had this idea we could fit SMD sessions in between everything else and we’d be fine. I think we both felt the record suffered for it.There’s definitely a danger you can spend too long on something and over-think it, but having a period to choose the