May 26, 2008
Ladytron interview
It was a hot spring afternoon Saturday 3rd of May. Upon arriving at Amsterdam’s famous concerthall Paradiso, I was informed the members of Ladytron were out cruising the city’s centre by bicycle. Visibly happy to have been able to momentarily escape their relentless touringschedule, two of the four members later joined me on the private waterside terrace behind the venue. Accompanied by flocks of ducklings and the occasional canalboat, I briefly spoke to Helen Marnie and Reuben Wu about their new album, touring, and doing remixes.
Ladytron’s new album Velocifero (due to be released June 3rd) was recorded in Paris and co-produced by Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails) and Ed Banger’s Vicarious Bliss, though Wu notes much of the album’s production was done within the band. The title Velocifero, stated as signifying ‘bringer of speed’, also is the name of a song that was intended to appear on the album but was later excluded. “It’s still a good track, but..it just..we had so many songs to choose from. We got another twenty or something that we’ll probably make into another album. When you’re trying to narrow things down into an album you can only have so many songs, like..similar sounds. We wanted something that was quite varied, so we had to leave specific songs out.”
As happens with so many highly anticipated albums, Velocifero leaked onto the internet long before its’ schedules release. Wu and Marnie weren’t exactly schocked by this delevopment however: “We knew it was gonna happen. All these promo copies of the album were given out anyway, so it was only a question of time. In fact, we just decided to put the whole album onto MySpace very soon after that, just as a kind of streaming audio.” Wu continues to explain why the leakage failed to concern them: “The main thing for us as a band is to go out and tour, ‘cause that is the only way we can actually make money really. It’s not really from record sales.” “-Although we do expect people to go out and buy the record as well”, Marnie then quickly adds.
Beside their extensive touring as a live act, Ladytron has also built a reputation for doing live DJ-sets and remixing other artists’ work. “We’re into the idea of remixing old stuff, we did Gang of Four, we did Blondie, Soft Cell. It’s nice to be able to go backin time and work on tracks that have been recorded in the 70’s and just work on it in the present.” When asked who he would like to remix in the future, Wu discloses: “We have the audio parts for ‘Ladytron’ by Roxy Music. That would be quite interesting. I thought about what I could do with it, but I just haven’t got round to it. Maybe it’ll be crap.”
Listen to the rest of the interview on Kink FM’s New Music.
