System Overload

James Murphy made a promise to  himself he’d end LCD Soundsystem when he reached 40. He tells Lisa Wright that, in spite of an ace new album, he’s sticking to his word…

This album and tour are the end of this band being a professional rock ensemble that makes records and plays live. I’m not burnt out, I’m not tired of it, I love it, I’m really happy – this is just how I feel.” Perched in a dressing room at London’s Brixton Academy before the inaugural date of his eighteen month world tour (intended to commence in Dublin two days earlier but delayed by a less than convenient volcano and subsequent two-day bus trip from Madrid) James Murphy, aka the brain behind LCD Soundsystem, founder of DFA records and general one-man musical empire, is surprisingly straight talking about his future – not awkward or curt as stories would have you believe, but merely unguarded and to the point, with a mischievous chuckle that occasionally slips out when deviating from the carefully articulated answers that immediately follow every question. In conversation he makes for an intriguing subject; clad in trademark shirt and suit jacket counterbalanced with pin badges, stubble and mussed-up hair, his dialogue is similarly juxtaposed, at once entirely subsumed in the romance of music but with a pertinent and practical business brain attached. But if his words seem meticulously thought out it’s hardly surprising since, in many ways, the LCD’s trajectory has been in place since the beginning. “The thing is,” he continues, “when this started it was supposed to be just an aspect of the whole thing – running the label, producing, DJing – but to do it well, when it’s becoming more successful than I had planned, to not pursue it would have been silly and to pursue it halfway would have been wrong. To be in a band now, there’s so much more required of you than there was twenty years ago. What’s expected of you in terms of interviews and in terms of all the other stuff is pretty intense. Turning out a record used to be a major thing and now it’s like ‘Where’s everything else?’; the record is kinda the smallest part. To do it all, bands end up outsourcing all this stuff – somebody else does the website, writes the emails, directs the videos and no offence to anybody else who does that but for me it doesn’t make sense. I prefer to do everything so that if somebody likes my band or is curious about them they know that everything is coming from us entirely. But I promised myself I’d be done by the time I was forty and the only reason to break that promise now is firstly to be flexible with what’s happening and the other reason is a little gross, like ‘Oh, well it’s going well’ and that’s just not very interesting. So I think the best thing to do is to do this with as much energy as I can, do the best I can and then go and do the other things we wanna do. I’ll still make music as LCD Soundsystem, we’ll still make 12”s and things, I just think it’ll turn more into the art project that it was originally and less into a band jockeying for being top slot at festivals.”

Think of a selection of bands that have recently sold-out multiple dates at a venue the size of five thousand capacity Brixton Academy. Editors? Florence? Is there a hope in hell that either of these (or indeed the industry, ahem, machines behind them) would so much as contemplate giving it all up in favour of going back to their underground roots and ensuring they never become stale? Of course not, because there’s far too much money to be made in plundering your wares until long past the point where anyone’s still listening – enough, at least, to keep you in ‘kooky’ stage outfits and studio time for your next slab of MOR indie fodder. It makes Murphy’s decision to bow out gracefully with his live outfit, if not desired, then at least commendable – after two decades in the business it’s certainly to be applauded that his original artistic drive has remained intact. But for now, or for the next year and a half of touring at least, LCD Soundsystem are in full force and in possession of a third album, ‘This Is Happening’, that pushes their genre melding genius to ecstatic heights. Even more so than ‘Sound Of Silver’ (recorded in a studio entirely redecorated silver) before it, the album is one borne from bizarre surroundings. “This time we had this weird Los Angeles rambling house with a bunch of people in white. We just thought it would be funny. The studio we normally use was closed and trying to find a new one was hard ‘cos everything you do you compare it to the old one – I’m male, I hate change – so it just wound up being better to forget using a studio full stop and rent a house to use. I thought Los Angeles would be funny, I thought a really ramshackle mansion would be even funnier and if everyone just wore white all the time… We had like ten, twenty people living there, working, all wearing white, driving white mini vans… It was really fun. I always try and make an environment and that environment definitely affects me.” Now, whilst we don’t exactly condone setting up a pseudo-psychiatric hospital and convincing your unwitting neighbours you’ve started some kind of cult as advisable methods of creating a good LP, if the standard of Murphy’s third is anything to go by then we’d be willing to turn a blind eye to almost any eyebrow raising activity.

LCD’s centrepiece has always been an almost unrivalled knack of managing to fuse elements of electronica, dance, punk and all manner of other influences into a truly innovative hybrid; ‘This Is Happening’ takes this glorious sonic schizophrenia of old and fleshes it out, whether by means of possibly their most straight-up ‘poppy’ track to date in single, ‘Drunk Girls’, the soaring guitar riffs of ‘All I Want’ or the glossy, synthetic 80s bounce of ‘Change’. It is, inarguably, their lushest album to date; of course, as with everything, this was always the intention. “I think it is less sparse. Typically, I try to be really reserved and really minimal in terms of what I let go on the record, and one of the things I tried with this was to make things a little denser. I used more melody; generally I’m not very generous with melody so I tried to sing a bit more and allow myself to put a few more layers or a few more sounds in there. From the beginning, I definitely knew that’s what I wanted – nothing crazy, but for me it is pretty crazy. I wanted it to be different than the previous record; I think ‘Sound Of Silver’ is fuller sounding than the first record, and I wanted to continue on that trajectory.”

Lyrically, Murphy’s wryly understated wit is in full force (note: practically every line of ‘Drunk Girls’, particularly our personal favourite- ‘Drunk boys keeping pace with the paedophiles’) yet, despite the oft under-appreciated brilliance of his New York cynicism, he remains remarkably nonchalant with regards to his lyrical gems. “Being a good lyricist is like being a good swimming corpse. I mean, corpses can’t swim, so most lyrics I find really abominable. I don’t think too much about ‘Oh lyrics!’, I just try to write things that feel good coming out of my face, that don’t feel like somebody else, or like I’m just writing lyrics for the sake of it. I don’t know if they’re particularly good, I just think they’re as much me as is possible. With everything about the band, I’m not concerned with ‘good’ in the empirical scale – I’m learning that it’s something that other people define not me, so I don’t worry too much about it. As long as I think it’s good according to my aesthetic and it makes sense according to me then I feel OK about it.” The question of people finding the record ‘good’ is, we can assure you, something that Murphy need not lose any sleep over. What is bothering the front-man however is less people’s opinions than their impatience. Despite the impassioned pleas made at their recent show in New York’s Webster Hall, ‘This Is Happening’ still found it’s way onto the internet a month before it’s release; Murphy is, understandably, less than happy. “I find it really offensive. I mean, I made this music, this music is mine, I should at least be able to decide when people download it for free,” he deadpans. ‘I’m not even worried about the dough, it’s just the timing. It’s like if you buy someone a present and someone else tells them what it is – you’re like ‘Really? Come on! Can I at least just give the thing when I want to?’’. As the endless arguments over illegal downloading, Spotify and the general imminent collapse of the whole music industry as we know it (Tongue, check. Cheek, check) rage ceaselessly on, it’s a simple analogy that puts into place, in entirely non-monetary terms, the disappointing reality of the current situation and it’s incessant call for immediate gratification. “It kinda screws up the tour for me a little bit as well,” he adds. “We haven’t played in two years, so the plan was to come back and do this first one with only a little bit of new music. I don’t like it when you see a band and they only play the new songs. You’re like, well… I’d like to hear things that I’m used to.” Ironically, tonight’s crowd end up hearing things they’re used to a little more frequently than they’d bargained for when a technical mishaps leads to the band playing opener, ‘Us Vs Them’, twice in order to ensure the track gets an airing in it’s complete form (insert Murphy’s law joke here). It’s the kind of audacious move that only a band of LCD Soundsystem’s calibre could pull off; the fact that the song receives an even bigger cheer second time round only confirms the audience’s adoration. And as they plough through a set of veritable classics it’s a timely reminder of just how impressive, influential and downright exciting their output over the last decade has been – this may be a gracious bowing out but it’s one that’ll most certainly leave a gaping hole to be filled. “Ten years on, I don’t see the reason to keep making records just because it’s a good opportunity in front of me or because people like it. I still feel like I wanna find a new thing to fight for,” enthuses Murphy. Whatever he finds and wherever it takes him, we’re sure to be right behind.

‘This Is Happening’ is released on DFA on May 17th