Stereolab

Tue 6th Jan, 2009 in Features

Stereolab lynchpin Tim Gane is an all-around gentleman and, unsurprisingly, an articulate conversationalist with an ear for detail. As FL discovers, he also loves it here and is looking forward to headlining Laneway Festival.

Stereolab have long been champions of – œthinking person’s pop’ – where do you see the band at this point in time?
Hmmm, it’s a difficult question because I’m trying to work that out myself. I’m also curious about our message in music. We’ve pretty much always played pop music, yet we’ve always felt that we had to play something new and different from our own experiences – our own version of pop where people could look at things from a new angle.

Your latest album Chemical Chords marks Stereolab’s 4AD debut – was it a deliberate shift for the band?
Not really – basically, we signed to Duophonic, our old label, and 4AD, the new label, which are essentially the same people who work for both labels. It was 4AD on the back of the trade.

What does playing the Laneway Festival in Australia mean to you?
It means we can come to Australia, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to come [laughs]. Laneway Festival is an excellent way of going around Australia and playing our own gigs. We were going to play another festival there four years ago which was supposed to be intimate and fun, and then one week before we were leaving it was cancelled – so I’m a bit nervous. Hopefully everything will run smooth this time. Australia is my favourite country to live in and it has a great climate and a really good vibe.

Could you tell me a little about Stereolab’s songwriting chemistry?
Okay – you ask difficult questions [laughs]! Basically it’s pretty much the same: I write the music, or the basic progressions, on the guitar with a cassette recorder. When I’ve written the melodies, I pass them on to Laetitia [Sadier], who writes the lyrics to the music and has the first check on everything.

No more difficult questions for you Tim, the next one is easy: which Stereolab album is your favourite?
My favourite is probably Sound-Dust.

I love that album – it’s been growing on me along with Stereolab’s 90s records…
Oh really – that’s good, thank you!

They’re all growers. On a different note, what do you think are the differences between the crowds in UK/Europe and Australia?
It would be difficult to say now, I guess, as we haven’t been back in Australia since 2002. But in terms of venues, there’s not much of a difference. I suppose Australian audiences are quite jolly and vocal, like the American ones, while in Europe they can sometimes get a bit standoff-ish, a bit more serious when it comes to the good-time aspect of the music. We find when we travel a lot, the audiences get more similar to each other in all sorts of different places. The Australian crowd is now actually quite similar to the one we have in England, but you’ll have to ask me that question again when we get back from Australia!

Getting back to Chemical Chords, there’s a palpable 60s R&B feel in a number of songs – have Stereolab been influenced by Motown?
Of course, but not obviously. The idea of the songs was not to sound like Motown; I’ve said these things earlier but they’ve come back to me from all over the internet. The type of music that influenced Motown in the first place is girl groups from all around America, not just Detroit. I was interested in the arrangement of ideas, the architecture of songs, which were like small cities. They had this kind of resonating power while the music itself was quite simple. I wanted to incorporate these architectural arrangements into the music that we did on this record. Chemical Chords is influenced by these ideas, but the reference isn’t absolute.

As a musician, it has been a long journey for you from the beginnings in McCarthy to Stereolab – what are your thoughts on this evolving process?
It was always about making music and doing what I wanted to do, and the main motivation was always wanting to work – it worked then, anyway. Now as I’m standing in the present, when I’m working on a Stereolab record, I think about the past and all the music I’ve done then. But for me, it’s more like a journey of the past and the explosions of the present, which are always new.

Stereolab tours the country very soon with The Laneway Festival. See the Gig Guide listings below for festival dates and Stereolab sideshows.