MUSIC INTERVIEW: DIRTY VEGAS
The Boys Are Back in the Studio, Back on Stage with 'Electric Love'
Between 2001 and 2005, Paul Harris, Steve Smith, and Ben Harris (AKA Dirty Vegas) were one of the world’s most successful electronic groups. Multiple #1 singles and albums around the globe, a Grammy win, and a near ubiquitous Mitsubishi ad featuring their song "Days Go By" put them on almost everyone’s Best of the Decade lists… Except that in the middle of the decade, they simply disappeared for almost three years. Now, back together and about to release their third album, Electric Love, the boys from South London came to Hollywood for a chat with Buzzine about where they’ve been, what they learned, and why they are back and better than ever…
Stefan Goldby: For the first half of the last decade, you guys surged to the top of the music industry, winning a Grammy and enjoying platinum sales, and then there was a period where you went off and did your own thing... What brought Dirty Vegas back together?
Steve Smith: I think just true love. We all missed each other. The fantastic thing about taking a break from anything, whether it’s a relationship or a business partnership – whatever it is – or being in a band, is that you get to realize the things that you miss. And in that period of us kind of being apart, you become fans of music again, and you’re genuinely speaking to one another to see how everyone is. So much had changed, it seems ridiculous to think of how fast the world is now, but from 2005 to 2008, when we decided to get back into the studio, so much had gone on. You could play someone a track in a second, and the Internet speed and stuff. So I think we just missed being in the studio.
Obviously, when we first got together, there’s a reason why we’d done that, and the reason why it works for us is because there’s some kind of chemistry in the music that we’re making together… And I think we just all missed that. We thought, there’s a lot of bands that had been out there in the last few years, and we thought, “We did stuff like that. We can do that.” And it was just we wanted to get back in the studio.
SG: What do you think you learned in that time apart? Is it different now, in round two?
Paul Harris: We went off and…Steve had done scoring, and me and Ben were writing for other people. I guess when we first started the band together, I hadn’t really become a writer. I was literally a DJ who then started to make records. I went away and sort of honed a little bit of skill about writing a song, so I guess when we came back together that was actually what I could nearly do. I could understand how to structure a song properly with lyrics and stuff like that. So I went on a bit of an education in my art for a few years. It was a good thing to do, and then obviously writing for other people was a great thing, but then I missed performing my own songs on stage. There was definitely something about when we’re all on stage together – it’s just great. The three of us going on tour is like a lads’ holiday for a few months. [Laughs] I missed that.
SS: It’s like being on a moving bus that’s like a nightclub for six weeks across the U.S. It’s good.
PH: Kind of good fun.
SG: What is the most memorable thing about the time spent in the studio recording this new album, Electric Love?
Ben Harris: What stands out most for us when recording this album, is probably just the process that we went through to create it was different from before. During the process, Steve moved to Boston with his family, and Paul and I were both in London. What with touring and being that far apart geographically, writing this album had to be done with the technology that’s available now, so everything was done, to start with, through ideas sent back and forth, from emails, iChat…using the Internet to express, really. So that process, instead of being in a room together, sitting there with a blank page going like, “What are we gonna do?” was being able to come up with something – you start with an idea on your own and then send it over remotely to someone else to sit and play with for a while.
And then when we actually did get together, we had tons of ideas that we could channel into straight away. It kind of made the writing process a lot more fun because it’s so much better to be in a room with guys that you’re in a band with writing an album when you can sit and really sort through maybe 15 ideas you’ve come up with over the last month instead of sitting there with like, “I’ve got an idea for a verse…” And then, “Where do we go from here?” So I reckon probably that’s been the biggest thing for us on this record.
SG: What is the best thing about this new album, in your unbiased opinion?
PH: The best thing about the record is the sound that we got. It’s a nice marriage of electronic, acoustic, and analog…and it took us a while to actually get there because we started the album a while ago, and then scrapped it and started and scrapped it. And toward the end, everything was like joining the dots. Like, “Okay, that sounds right; that sounds wrong.” And the last thing we did on the album was “Electric Love,” and to be honest, that’s what sums up the whole sound of the album and the journey we went through to make it.
SS: There was no pressure there. There was no manager, there was no label. There was no one, basically, beating down the door for us, except that there were lovely fans messaging us on the Internet, and we just thought we can’t let anyone hear it until we’re absolutely 100% sure of it, and it wasn’t any labor of love whatsoever. The songs came really quickly, some of them, and the styles as well. It took some working out, and we’d already done maybe an album’s worth of material, and there was some middling away that we thought was not right, so we went back to the drawing board, and I think that’s a brave thing for anyone to do, because you worry that everyone is going to walk away from it going, “It’s too hard.” But we didn’t.
Everyone got really stuck into it, and between the three of us… I think it was Christmas 2009 that we got these songs, and the boys sent them across to me, and from that minute onwards, I knew we were gonna have a record. Of the 10 that we picked out of the 30 or 40 songs that we put forward, it all worked together. And I think because we’ve had that luxury to do that, it’s probably the best record we’ve made.
SG: You’ve got some lofty goals to live up to, but I can say that the “Electric Love” music video might be your best one yet…which I understand is almost sacrilegious at this point. But we are talking about Jena Malone here starring in a series of clips…
SS: There’s part one and part two of this story with a character. Where we start off in the first video, “Electric Love,” our character, Chad, is not happy in his life. He’s maybe a little bit of a loner, he’s got some demons he needs to exorcise, and he has this infatuation with a work colleague who happens to be Jena Malone. So he envisions her… He thinks he’s out racing muscle cars and she’s cheering him on and she’s his chick, basically, and various other things. And he’s strange – the way he gets his little thrill on. But into the second video, which is for our new single called “Changes,” you see that transition. He’s sorting his head out. He’s getting rid of those demons. He’s not happy at work, he’s not happy in his personal life, and in a nice, endearing way, he works himself out of that and it’s represented by this sequence of him walking out of this field. But you’ll have to check that out online, kids, because that will be coming out very soon.
PH: We actually saw it this week. The video is now finished; it will probably go live…
SG: You’ve already mentioned that you got to make this record without a label looking over your shoulder; without a formal whip-hand. How much of that do you think actually did impact the music?
SS: Probably a hell of a lot...
BH: When you haven’t got a record label pressuring you, management pressuring you, and all the usual things that come from a band making, for us, album number three, it gives you that freedom to be able to experiment with different combinations of sounds, different styling of songs, maybe push the boundaries a little bit further than we would do normally for an album, without knowing that you’ve got to hit a deadline of delivering a single one by two weeks time or whatever. So for us, the sound is always about the electronic with the live and song base with repetitive beats, for one of the better descriptions, and it’s always a different ratio of those, so having no pressure on you means you can just sit there and mess with all of those formulas, and that’s what we did.
As Steve said earlier, we went down a path with the album, pretty much did the whole album before we decided this is not where we want to go with this. And it’s great not having the pressure of a label on your back to be able to do that, but it’s pretty tough to actually take that and then move forward and actually re-do an entire album. So on the one hand, if we’d had the pressure, we’d probably have that first version of the album out now as a completely different record to what we’ve actually got today…
SS: But you get to be your own critic as well, don’t you? At the end of the day, whatever time we finished in the studio, it was up to the three of us to say, at the end of that point of the day, “Is this good? Is this worth carrying on with?” There’s no one that knows your music better than the people that are making it, and that’s us three. When you’re giving it to an A&R person, they’re adding their own personal thing to it, so we didn’t have that. There wasn’t, “Play it to the guy at the label, see what he thinks.” We did the whole project from beginning to end and then gave that to a label, and I think that was probably the better way to do it because we gave a 100% product. We didn’t give 30% and go, “What do you think we should do now?” And time will tell whether that’s right or not, but it was a nice way of doing it.
SG: If you made it all the way to the end of recording once and went, “…No. Start again,” how do you know, at the end of the second time around, that this is it?
SS: I think that we wrote these songs, and you bounce them off each other…if you might be listening to another band or another DJ or whatever, and you think, “I want to sound like that. How do they get that much grit in the drums or in the bottom end? How do people write songs like that, and why should we try to think of something…” Especially now because we’ve been around for ten years, and there had been times when you’re thinking, “We’ve got to make it a three-and-a-half-minute song for radio.” Well, no one does that anymore. You determine your own length. The Arctic Monkeys will make a song that’s two minutes long, or Daniel Lanois will make a song that’s eight minutes long and will get played on the radio. It may not be commercial daytime radio, but there are certainly more outlets now for that…it could be a song in a commercial or a song in a movie that gets the music out there. I don’t know – we just mixed them and wrote them and thought, “That really suits us.” Maybe it’s just down to being older and wiser.
SG: Talking about different ways of getting your music out there, back when “Days Go By” happened, doing a commercial was, in some circles, a bit frowned-upon, whereas now it’s pretty much Plan A for a lot of artists…
PH: We’ve had that said quite a few times already this week and when we first did “Days Go By” and it was in the Mitsubishi commercial, we were like, “You’ve done what?” It was taboo. Absolute taboo. The only people that really use them…there were obviously loads of people, but the main one at the top was Moby. Moby was absolutely…like every single one of his songs was an advert, and he was selling millions and millions of records. I don’t think we would have…well we turned down lots of offers after that commercial, but you have to have the right product with the right song, I think. You don’t want, like, Chum with one of your songs…or whatever it is. There’s got to be something more… [Laughs]
SS: Do they have Chum in America? Chum is dog food. Nasty dog food.
PH: To be an artist, you want to have the right team-up so it works. Obviously that did work. The style, they got the idea, they used the idea of our video in their advert, so it gelled together and worked. And now everybody wants their song on advert.
SS: It’s strange to see that.
PH: That is the main way, and obviously radio is now… In America, it used to be more indie stations, rock stations, hip hop stations, Top 40 stations; now dance music seems to rule the waves in America – or it does in the west coast, it seems to be at the moment. And there’s more options of getting your music out: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace… When we first started, none of this happened. You just about had like dial-up emails, and now they’re streaming movies... In the last eight years, technology and the advancements have been ridiculous.
SG: With the album with the can, with all of those things new, as an artist, you have to think about an album in a whole different way, right?
SS: This could be the last album we ever make because everybody keeps talking about there’s no point in making a record anymore - a whole album, which we obviously completely disagree with because we come from that generation of buying a 12” album, whether it’s Stone Roses or anybody that you’re into. We’re just gonna carry on making it. We wanted to make a record because I think we didn’t want to stop at one song, but everyone’s putting out singles now, and it’s a bit defeatist. I still believe in a long player, to be honest.
SG: That’s also kind of Back to the Future – it’s the way it was in the ‘50s, right?
SS: That’s right, yeah.
SG: In some ways, the music industry, especially in America, they just stopped making singles. In the ‘70s they stopped making them, and then the CD came along and it was “$15 for the one song you like. This is a good business model for us.”
SS: God, didn’t they get rich on that?
SG: And now things have splintered into commercial placement and licensing and individual song sales and 360 degree deals… I’m just interested to know, from someone who’s gone through that whole thing, Is it better now because you have all these different avenues? Or is it worse because everything is so splintered?
SS: I think it’s better.
BH: I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse today, I’d say it’s just different. We’ve come back, we’ve recorded an album, and the album as a concept, commercially or whatever, it’s pretty much irrelevant today. People go onto sites like iTunes, they see the one or two songs that they want from the album, and they don’t care if it’s placed first, second, tenth, and the rest of the songs on the album – they just want those two and they get them, and that’s fine. The enthusiasm is to want to make a new record, it’s quite hard to just come back after four or five years and go, “Let’s make a song. [Laughs] There’s a little more to it. I’ve got a little bit more than that idea.” So for us, we had to get all of that music out of us, all that creativity out of us, and as much as the online versus CDs versus singles versus albums thing continues to evolve as technology changes, the one thing that does still remain, from our point of the view as the artist, is we still love to go out and do live shows. And we come back now with a body of 10 songs, if you want to call it that. We want to go out and play that and be on stage for an hour-and-a-half and playing a gig in front of fans who are into it, instead of coming back with one song and playing one song from eight years ago, it’s gonna make that a little bit of a short set…[laughs]
SG: How much are you focused on being as much of a live band as you are a group of studio musicians?
SS: We’ve always gotten a tremendous amount of excitement about the thought of going on stage as a band or in the DJ booth. For us, when we’re in the studio, we’re thinking, because we’ve come from different backgrounds, we all play instruments, it’s always been, “We’re gonna take this onto the stage,” and when we released our first album, it was just a natural thing for us to go, “Yeah, because this track came from the clubs, of course we can play it in the clubs, but we can also perform this on the stage”. And we’ve always tried to put traditional song arrangements, verse, chorus, etc. into the songs that we do. It’s just what we do.
PH: The other thing is the way technology has advanced in eight years, when we first toured with Moby in 2002, we were trying to perform dance records live. We’d like to sequence in stuff, and sequencing with live stuff, playing along, and it was hard. It was so hard because the computers weren’t powerful enough and the software wasn’t there, and it wasn’t advanced. Now, with things like Ableton Live and…obviously Logic we use in the studio, but Ableton we use live – you can loop parts, you can have different sections playing, you can change it right on the fly…
SS: Change arrangements on the road for the next night…
PH: And that’s made dance music so much easier to perform live at shows, so to do a live show is just great. Sonically we can change it and develop it as we go along, and when we first started, it was...
SS: It was impossible, yeah. What you printed to take out on the road was what you were gonna do for the next year, basically. But now it’s literally like we could go home tonight and change something for a show.
PH: We tried to write stuff live our first few shows, literally, running Logic live, and it was crashing a few times.
SS: It was like seat of your pants every night on stage.
PH: Christ. We were like, “What are we doing?” We were trying to have these synths hooked up to computers and just running it all live. And…it was stupid. It really was stupid. [Laughs] And now a laptop is more powerful than a desktop computer was then. You can literally run a show and (touch wood) it will be fine. Just to be safe. [Laughs]
SS: We can be on stage and turn around and go like, “Do another chorus,” if the crowd is into the song, it’s completely possible.
SG: You’ve done some pretty interesting things in the last decade. Being in a presidential inauguration certainly stands out. What’s the best single shining rock star moment so far in decade #1 for Dirty Vegas? What was the moment where you look around and go, “This is why I got into this”?
PH: Playing Twister.
SS: I don’t think we can say it.
PH: Of course, winning the Grammy was amazing… I would say, because we used to watch it, performing on David Letterman. All those years back, we were going, “We’re really doing David Letterman tonight.” And obviously, back home, people watch it. So it’s an amazing thing to do that, to perform on that. And maybe our first-ever live show. Moby tour. We’re three guys from South London, had just put a record out in America, it’s become enormous, and we’re playing to like 10,000 people in our first-ever live gig...
BH: Without one rehearsal. [Laughs]
SS: Thrown to the lions, yeah. And I think actually another one would be we played at a little place down the road, not far from here, we did a couple of nights at The Viper Room. It was our first-ever tour in the U.S. We’d sold that many albums in a few weeks that the label turned up with gold discs. You grow up in the UK and you think of America, especially Los Angeles and the notoriety of The Viper Room, and you’ve just come off stage, and you’ve been handed a gold disc. It’s like, “Mom, I’m doing all right…”
PH: And then jump on a plane and go to Vegas…
SS: Oh yeah. [Laughs]
SG: …And that’s where that story ends, I suspect.
SS: We’ve been really really good, because our friends and family will watch this, and…
SG: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…
SS: Yup.
SG: We try to let everybody finish however they’d like to finish, so what would you like your final words to be in this interview?
SS: I think, if Dirty Vegas has got any message out there, it’s please carry on buying music. Don’t do it illegally. It’s not just for us, it’s for everyone that’s coming through as artists.
Dirty Vegas’ new album, ‘Electric Love,’ is out this month on Om Records.
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