Simian Mobile Disco

Mon 19th Jan, 2009 in Features

“Because we are your friends, you’ll never be alone again…” These are the words that put the name – œSimian’ on the map and couldn’t be ringing any truer for Simian Mobile Disco frontman James Ford. He now counts members of Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons as some of his close friends, also is one of the most in demand producers in the indie world and is putting the last touches on their follow-up to acclaimed debut Attack and Release.

FL catches Ford in some rare downtime quite humorously cooking – œbangers n mash’ in his London apartment, though he’s no typical Englishman. After his electro pop-rock four-piece Simian broke up in 2005, he and keyboardist James – œJas’ Shaw re-incarnated the project under the Simian Mobile Disco moniker, with ex-front man Simon William Lord moving in a separate direction to join DJ Touche (the man now known as Fake Blood) in new dance-rock duo The Black Ghosts.

Though he has a dance background, Ford is now firmly entrenched in the indie scene through his in-demand talents as a producer. Producing and playing drums on Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s recent project The Last Shadow Puppets, he is currently in the last phase of production for the Klaxons follow-up to their Mercury Prize winning debut Myths of the Near Future. When asked how the new Klaxons album is coming along, Ford is a little coy about how the record is looking. “Should be good I think,” he muses.

Having never properly played an Australian tour yet, Simian Mobile Disco are not going to be lonely, with Hot Chip and Arctic Monkeys there as drinking buddies. Ford likes where SMD sit in the dance/rock middle ground. “We get a bit of crossover which is nice, I’ve just finished a tour with The Last Shadow Puppets where I played drums. We had a string section and Alex and Miles are both great to play with.” He says the SMD live show actually being a live show was something very important to the duo. “We really didn’t want to do just a laptop show. We actually have a got going on live, a lot of our studio, a lot of the synths, drums machines and other stuff is set on a big round table. We basically tweak and manipulate the machines and it’s different every time, all the structures of the songs change, mixed live, we’re pretty much creating it all live. We really didn’t want it to just be a playback thing.”

He also said that it was important to him to focus on giving the audience something different every time. “There are shows where there is a strong visual element but there is generally a lot of playback, so once you’ve seen it once you don’t really need to see it again. We like more of an element of danger, knowing something can go wrong, so it’s a bit more tied to a moment in time, rather than churned out at different spots around the world.” When pressed further about things going wrong, Ford elaborates that as a lot of the equipment is vintage, it’s not always 100% reliable. “Something goes wrong every time in varying degrees. Sometimes it’s just a sound or something smaller, sometimes it’s a whole section of kick drum or something that you have to work around and use something else to try and build it from other tings. It can be like problem solving sometimes, just keeping everything pointing in the same direction.”

Ford says the sets down under will compromise old and new material as they’re at the end of the cycle for debut Attack and Release. “We’re working on the new album at the minute so we’re hoping to road test a lot of the new material through the Australian gigs. We’re really keen to do that and it’s great to be able to road test stuff before we put it out.” Moving on to the new album, he hopes to be able to give fans something in May 2009. “We’re about half way through it and hoping to have everything laid down before Big Day Out, then go home and mix it afterwards, but we are definitely making progress.”

When questioned about finer details, he elaborates on some of the vocalists they have asked to contribute to the new album, after confirming stories about their iron-fisted vocal methods. “Yeah it’s kinda true that we lock a vocalist in a room with the instrumental we’ve created and don’t let them out until they’ve given us something we like; it’s worked out well so far. Saying that though we’re not very prescriptive and really just play around with stuff until it starts to come together and we’re lucky to have some new vocalists including [The Gossip’s] Beth Ditto, Gruff Rhys [From Neon Neon and Super Furry Animals] and Jamie Lidell.” Some tasty prospects indeed.

For a group who gained their first bits of attention through their remixing talents, SMD have been rather quiet on the remix front for about a year and a half now. “We love remixing and when it’s done well it’s great. The concept of sort of taking the strongest element from a track and building your own creation around is good but we haven’t really had much of a chance to do any. Remix culture I think is really over-saturated at the moment and at this point in time we are just busy working on our own tunes.”

You can catch the boys making mistakes at Big Day Outs around the country and be some of the first crowds around to hear their new tracks.