Car La Land - Neon Neon

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."

'I Told Her On Alderaan'

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 ****'. 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.