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Neon Neon are Super Furry Animals singer Gruff Rhys and L.A. producer Boom Bip. Their songs are about the colourful life of car manufacturer, John DeLorean. At a particular low-point, DeLorean was secretly recorded by the FBI, while one of their informants tried to pin a drugs charge on him. Unlike DeLorean, Boom Bip knew that his conversation with Gigwise was being recorded. I first said hello to him on his birthday, after Neon Neon's show at Barcelona's Sonar festival. A month later, on Gruff's birthday weekend, Neon Neon were at Barcelona's Summercase festival. That's where things got ugly in the incident between Kele Okereke from Bloc Party and punk John Lydon's crew. Boom Bip explained...
"Yeah, we were there right from the beginning, we pretty much saw the whole thing go down. It was pretty intense, kinda surreal. We kinda got involved, but it was pretty violent. It was just a matter of by the time we could get in to really help Kele out, security kinda took over at that point and grabbed everyone and kinda shoved 'em off to the side, you know. It was a pretty intense five minutes."
How did it go so wrong? "We were all kinda hangin' out when it went down, we were in our trailer and The Kaiser Chiefs were in there and Foals, the Bloc Party guys, Raveonettes, the Mogwai guys, everybody at that time was actually hanging out in our trailer. So we were having such a nice time getting to know people and The Sex Pistols were two trailers down from us and so we kept just going down in small groups to say hi to Johnny and get some photos and hang out. It's amazing that he's now quoted as saying the young bands that were involved were jealous and you're just seeing some ridiculous stuff now. It's anything but jealousy, we were in admiration of him initially, but now he's shown his true colours, so it's really disappointing to sorta have one of your heroes become a complete bigot arsehole."
Back to the music, Neon Neon's fantastic album 'Stainless Style' earned them a coveted Mercury Prize nomination, a couple of days after the Lydon/ Okereke incident. Does Boom Bip like any of the other nominated albums? "A lot of 'em, I'm not familiar with. I'm definitely familiar with the Radiohead record, which I think is a great record. I've always really liked Radiohead's work and I've listened to that record quite a bit. I've heard a few of The Last Shadow Puppets songs and I think those are really strong as well. There are a lot of really strong records this year and some interesting choices, so it's nuts. The whole process involved, how the winner's actually selected is a process that seems to be very legitimate. It has nothing to do with the public or anything else. It's a very pure process and I think that's why it's held in such high regard really and it's such a prestigious award to be nominated for, because it's a small panel of music lovers. When it comes down to it, it's just about what album they think is strongest and best and they don't make the decision until that evening at the awards. There have been a lot of surprises in the past, so god knows what'll happen."
The latest video in support of 'Stainless Style', 'I Told Her On Alderaan', segues into 'Trick for Treat', part of the way through... "With that, we wanted a sort of epic, three and a half minute, four minute moment where it's just video and we felt that once the treatment for the video was put into 'Alderaan', it just seemed perfect to tack on the end of 'Trick for Treat', you know how rap videos will do that?" Alderaan is the name for two pairs of stars in astrology and the song is one of two songs described by Gruff at Sonar as 'dream sequences'. On the other one, 'Michael Douglas', Gruff imagines John DeLorean asking if he can get a "second soul". What's the importance of all this duality? There's even the double Neon name...
"I don't know if it's a conscious decision to include duality, I think it's definitely more about balance than duality. With Neon Neon, the name itself, we had about fifty band names that we were playing with and I was sort of writing the word 'neon'. We were talking about really shiny, glossy things because the music was very shiny, glossy. The lyrics seemed to be taking on a very shiny... everything just seemed to be very polished. So we were thinking of bright, shiny objects and we had all these different band names and 'Neon' was one of those, I was just writing it over and over. We basically just liked how it looked back to back and if you write the word 'one' over and over, it spells Neon Neon as well."
Away from the concept of duality, then?
"Two becoming one, I guess."
Two becomes one, when Har Mar Superstar performs both the chorus on 'Trick for Treat' and Naeem 'Spank Rock' Juwon's verse. The song 'Stainless Style' is another live highlight, the best of how to end a set. There's the multiple drummers, like Franz Ferdinand's 'Outsiders', then Boom Bip's techno outro, like Super Furry Animals 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck'. Did Neon Neon think about the live show when making the album?
"We knew when we had a lot of guests involved that it could be difficult to perform some of the songs live and the basic idea we had was that we really wanted it to be quite a spectacle where if we did do live shows, we were gonna have to have several of the guests involved. One good thing that we've had is that a lot of the bands that are featured on the record are bands that have been touring and are out and about and doing festivals and whatnot. So we were pretty fortunate to meet up with other acts.
“At SXSW we had Yo Majesty do two shows with us; we had Spank Rock do a show with us one night. We had Har Mar there for a few of the shows. When we got to London we had The Magic Numbers perform with us. So when we brought it onto the road we knew that we really had to limit it, otherwise there's no way that you could fund having all those people come with you. So we sort of put Har Mar on doing multi-tasking with us: Yo Majesty's part, Naeem's verses and his own verses on 'Trick for Treat' and just becoming a big part of the show. Really a member of the band, he's playing bass on a song, he's doing drum work, he's a really talented guy. He's a really good musician and I think a lot of people just look at him as a guy who sings pop music and takes his clothes off. He's a really talented songwriter and one of the best entertainers I know, that I've ever worked with, so it's amazing to have him on board with the project."
DeLorean took his show on the road, too. He was from Detroit, but also a global citizen, trying to set up a factory in Puerto Rico, eventually doing it in Northern Ireland. Was it deliberate to not make anything like music from DeLorean's hometown for the album? It has no Motown style soul, Detroit techno or MC5/ The Stooges rock...
"We didn't wanna stretch ourselves too thin with too many genres, so we tried to keep some consistencies, some sort of common denominator on the record. 'Dream Cars' is our song about Detroit and for us, we felt that was like a modernised version of the Detroit sound. It's a pretty bastardized take on it, it sounds pretty Motown-y. Big reverbs and and big backing vocals and it just kinda has a bit of a bounce, so that's about as Motown-y as I think we wanted to go on the record. Plus, you know there's a massive soul revival lately with everything, with Winehouse and with Mark Ronson. We didn't want it to look like we were trying to ride the coat-tails of someone else if we went in soulful way."
Neon Neon went in a mostly electro-pop way, with hip-hop diversions that were criticized as incongruous in some quarters. But surely bling-obsessed commercial hip-hop is the natural follow-on from '80's style glamour-pop? "I completely agree, going back to the common denominator, I think it's pretty much a dance party from beginning to end. It's like dance music for the kitchen or something, that you can do your house chores to and we had these really big, dancey sing-along songs. Electro-pop, or synth-pop tracks and we wanted something to be a bit more edgy, almost a palate-cleanser for that sugary pop that's on the first part of the record and so we really felt the hip-hop balanced that and made it interesting and not only that, you know we're telling the story of a man's life, so it's basically an audio film from birth until death and if you kept it linear and you kept one constant emotion throughout the record, if you translated that to a film, it'd probably be the most boring film you could imagine. It'd just be one emotion throughout the entire film."
Films are clearly a big part of the Neon Neon project, especially the songs described as "dream sequences", 'Alderaan' is Princess Leia's home planet in 'Star Wars'. In 'Michael Douglas', Gruff 'as' DeLorean see's a reflection in the "mirrored sunglasses" of the actor who plays greedy Gordon Gekko in 'Wall Street' (Incidently, Gekko is based on inside trader Ivan Boesky, who's from Detroit like DeLorean). Another artist inspired by cinema is Jay-Z, his 'American Gangster' album is based on the movie of the same name. The Jay-Z and Neon Neon albums came out at about the same time and have many similarites. Both are based on men with a meteoric rise in their chosen fields. Each album also features a love song dedicated to a place, Jay-Z made 'Hello Brooklyn 2.0'. Gruff provides a succinct sumnation of DeLorean's ambiguous motives with his double-meaning on 'Belfast'...
"Thought I could take you for a ride"
Is this an altruistic, 'let me take you for a ride in my car, darling'? DeLorean claimed in his autobiography (the Neon Neon bible) that equal numbers of Unionist's and Republican's were employed at every level in the factory hierarchy. Or was he motivated more by money and fame? 'I'm gonna take you for a ride, you're gonna make me loads of money'. Jay-Z has a more blatent entrepreneurial pride, rapping "CEO of the ROC" on 'Public Service Announcement (Interlude)' from 2003. It's similar to Gruff singing "I'm CEO" at the end of Neon Neon's 'Steel your girl'. With his hip-hop background, had Boom Bip given Gruff some Jay-Z, or any other rappers to listen to?
"Gruff is a massive hip-hop fan. We were constantly exchanging music and I did turn him onto some early rap and some stuff that he wasn't familiar with. During that time we were recording, Egyptian Lover was one, I don't know if you'd call him a rapper or not. He was kinda like the Los Angeles answer to Kraftwerk in the early eighties. He did really basic sex raps onto these basic Kraftwerk beats. Egyptian Lover was one that he (Gruff) just loved when I played it for him. More interestingly, he turned me onto some Welsh rap, which I didn't know existed."
There's a lot of good Welsh music that hasn't been widely heard, another example is Acid Casuals, whose Cian Ciaran also makes music with Gruff in Super Furry Animals. The opening track on Acid Casuals' album 'Omni' is called 'If I'm A Selt, You're A Sunt'. The first song on Boom Bip's 'Blue eyed in the red room' is called 'Cimple'. What's the story? The two must know each other from sharing a tour-bus in the past...
"We've bartered 's's' and 'c's', I've allowed him the use of the 's' and he has basically allowed me the use of the 'c'".
Seriously? Sorry, cerioucly? Corry, cerioucly?
"I didn't even know this."
So it was a case of great minds thinking alike. Hopefully the same men can keep juggling Gruff between Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon.
