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Musical geniuses. Usually associated with viola wizards or piano masters. Those deadly zzz-inducing music theory lessons taken in dusty school corridors by some failed Andrew Lloyd Webber type teacher. Something mainly saved for the classical genre – never really indie, rock or country. However there are a few guitar yielding ones. Kurt Cobain for starters. And Damon Albarn. The guru of the supergroup. Creator of Chinese musicals. And mastermind behind the illusive Gorillaz project. But even he’s getting a bit past it now – kind of old news. We need a new saviour. One who’ll push boundaries and get involved in all things creative. Someone’s who’s not egotistical with it though. Just bemused and appreciative that people listen and understand. That person’s Lightspeed Champion, aka Dev Hynes.
Most will remember him as the pink v-shaped warrior in new-new-rave noughties band Test Icicles. The group who were the Klaxons before Jamie & co had even discovered neon and begun ripping off Ratpack tapes. Test Icicles were one of the first MySpace success stories, but also one of the first online tragedies. They split y’see. Riding high on an indie-scenester wave with just one album under their belted spray-on jeans they called it a day. Kaput. No More. Game Over.
Cue Take That style mourning and Test Icicles band-copycats clambering over each other to beat down record company doors. But Dev had other ideas. In fact he was off to make an album of sickly-sweet country style ditties. All acoustic and heartfelt it’s worlds apart from the pap-pap thud screamo that slingshot him into the spotlight. But that doesn’t make it any less great.
So why the mega musical change? “Everything I do I really want to do. I’ve got loads of ideas in me and this group of songs just fit together more,” he explains. “There’s other styles I was writing but they didn’t really flesh out properly and these all had a similar kind of vibe so I just kind of did this. At the time I didn’t even think about that [the album sounding country] and then after we’d recorded I was like ‘it’s really country.’” Indeed. The bunch of Gram Parson’s type songs on Lightspeed’s debut are country through and through. Darkly lyricised numbers with acoustic string pluckings, violins and slide guitars they’d nestle nicely on both xfm and Radio 2.
Never one to do things by the rulebook Dev wrote most of the album on a red-eye flight from Detroit to London. Strange you may think – but Dev’s a lifetime insomniac. “I wasn’t even planning it – most of the album was from this huge block of writing and then I swapped a few bits around,” he says. “I’ve always had trouble sleeping my entire life, I get like two hours sleep a night but I sleep well on long van journeys and in weird places. My mum says when I was younger I actually used to crawl upside down and stuff in corners, like really weird things. I take comfort in being uncomfortable. It’s kind of odd I guess. I need to be cold as well so on planes it’s always cold and I slip in and out of sleep – I just kind of lucid dream and that’s why I think the album has that kind of drifting feeling.”
The collection of sleepy-soul-bearing songs making up his debut deal with thoughts and experiences usually left private - losing your virginity, drinking too much and break-ups with partners. “Most of them are about really unpleasant subject matters,” admits Dev. “It’s quite personal. There’s a song on the album called ‘Everyone’s Listening To Crunk’ and that’s the most personal song on there. I’ve got this bad habit of making things funny when they get too serious. I wrote that song an hour after I broke up with my girlfriend, like straight after, and it hasn’t changed a bit. The structure is exactly the same as how I wrote it, but if you listen to the lyrics you probably wouldn’t even think it was a really emotional song because I put loads of semi-funny lyrics in it.” Makes a change from run of the mill indie chart-bashers about smoking, partying and snorting. Dev’s human – and he doesn’t mind the rest of the world knowing so.
The finished product, ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’, gets help from a few famous pals. Long-term friend, acoustic folker Emmy The Great, lends her vocals on many a track, punk-funk drummer Clark Baechle from The Faint is the record’s resident stick bearer, members of Tilly And The Wall and Cursive also cameo, whilst Mike Mogis, Saddle Creek records producer and sometime Bright Eyes band member, put his finishing touches to many a track.
Dev’s celebrity connections don’t end there though. A recent invitation to play on Big Brother’s Big Mouth from a friend who was presenting, she of tabloid fame Peaches Geldof, culminated in a ‘Galaxy Of The Lost’ melodied Big Brother song. Check the clip out on YouTube. It’s class. There’s even talk of Dev playing a part in a new Film Four sponsored movie. “I’m still debating whether to do it,” he admits. “I’ve got a script. It’s offensive. I mean I think I’ve got quite bad language and crude humour but some of the language is shocking – and it’s really sexually explicit.” So we could be, er, seeing a lot more of Dev? “Well not like fully nude,” he laughs. “It’s really dark and there’s like this porn bit in it so I don’t know if I’m going to do it, but I might do it just for the sake of hooking up with someone – that’d be really funny. I won’t tell my mum about it though.”
There’s no doubting that 21-year-old Dev has had a colourful career worthy of many platinum disc-ed counterparts. And it’s easy to see why. There’s an alluring quality about him that interests both kids and adults alike. But even at such a young age he’s far from being an icon in the making, he’s already got that status well and truly nabbed. And it’s one label that won’t be leaving him soon. Lightspeed Champion is the start of something special. The calling card of a true genius.
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