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Photo: Veronika Moore
Yeah Yeah Yeahs have had huge success with their latest electro experiment, White Lies are ominously harking back to the post-punk era, fusing elements of Joy Division and Duran Duran, La Roux is being touted as the new Annie Lennox. All this while actual relics of the bygone era themselves keep surfacing, most notably with The Specials and Spandau Ballet reforming. The Eighties are undeniably en vogue, so where better to be than in a red hoodie dancing away at a Datarock gig?
Formed in Bergen, Norway, Datarock have been taking inspiration from the late seventies and early eighties since their debut in 2005, a home studio project created on virtually no budget which sparked a five hundred gig tour in over thirty countries. Despite being heavily influenced by the synth pop era, the group cannot deny that it’s advancements in technology over the last couple of decades that mean they have any kind of a career at all. “We wouldn’t have had a chance in the eighties” explains Frederick, one half of the dynamic Datarock duo. “We have over two and a half million fans from all over the world on myspace and we have sold virtually no records. On the last tour we played to six thousand people in Buenos Aires despite not even having a record out at the time. Record sales are in decline on average by 20% but that’s not taking into account the fact that people over thirty haven’t died recently. A record buying audience doesn’t exist in the younger demographic so it’s going to be hard in future to produce records on a big budget”
The new album Red, set for release in early June, was the first the group were actually given a budget to record with. “It’s Ironic really because we built a career out of file sharing and then were given a sizeable budget to produce the second album with”. Despite the Eighties revival Datarock are sceptical about whether the collective sense of a music ‘scene’ will ever be the same since the invention of the internet.
“The only real scene we have ever been involved in was the new rave scene. There were a lot of negatives about that new rave tour but putting those to one side you had bands from Brazil, Austria and France all performing together, it was so beneficial to be perceived as in a scene because each audience would check out a band they weren’t expecting to see despite there not necessarily being a strong musical link between the groups. I don’t think a scene with a strong musical connection will ever take place again. It seems as though people are trying to pretend there are connections by moving to the same neighbourhoods”.
The new record is as tongue in cheek as the last, while also retaining the intricate delicacy of its predecessor. “We wanted to make it as accessible as the last one so that you can go to a live show, get drunk and dance, but also we wanted there to be messages and obscure references for people to pick up on if they want to sit down with the headphones and analyse the material”.
Fear of Death, when first played sounds incredibly happy and upbeat while covering a morbid subject using lines alluding to Don Delillo’s profound novel White Noise; “It’s a book which was produced in the early eighties while eternally being perceived as modern because of its subject matter. The message I took from the book was incredibly positive, the fear of death inspires me to live for the moment. We decided to infuse Delillo’s message into the song and keep the positive outlook”.
The Blog opens the upcoming album with canned cheering interspersed with intellectual jargon exploring the development of the internet, “we wanted to seriously discuss the advancements in technology but in an extremely Datarock way, updating the eighties for a modern audience”
With the group embarking on a new tour later this month the modern audience are bound to fall in love with the eighties all over again. “Our live show is very energetic and we use a rotating line-up so most people who claim to have seen Datarock twice probably have not because we must have used about forty people by now. We wear red hoodies onstage and shades so people are never quite sure who is who up there, that’s how we get away with it”. To be sure to catch the entourage you can find them in the UK from the May 18.
