26/03/11
It’s a testing time for a music journalist when they’re asked to compile a Top Ten Acts to Look Out For list, a Sound of 2009 poll, or anything similar. Stray too far into obscurity and your odds are too rich for most of the music-buying public, play too safe and you’ll lose credibility thanks to a peak-too-soon over saturated media campaign. But for those hacks that carefully selected La Roux for their dream team of 2009, their chips have really come in. With an unabashed love of pop and synth-laden dance, La Roux has eschewed most of the media whoring by letting two fantastic singles do the work for her, as it should be. We caught up with Elly Jackson, one half and the face of La Roux ahead of her headline slot on the NME Radar Tour this month.
You’re in America at the moment; have you had much fried food / Krispy Kreme donuts yet?
Oh god, well I haven’t actually seen a single place yet that sells Krispy Kreme donuts, but in Canada there was this place called Tim Horton’s, which was everywhere, erm and I had a maple syrup donut from there the other day, which actually made me feel quite ill. But yeah, the first few days here was like fried food-a-rama, and then me and my keyboard player decided to just eat salad and sushi for the rest of the duration of the stay. It’s just impossible to stop yourself eating fried stuff, but now we’re on the West Coast it’ll be a lot easier; the East Coast is a lot more burger and ribs orientated, but we had sushi last night, so I feel good!
I’m gonna do that really British thing of asking you what time it is there and what the weather’s like?
It’s about 10:30 in the morning and the weather’s actually alright. Yesterday it was a little bit rainy and cloudy when we got here, but the sun’s come out now and the clouds are clearing, so I think it’s gonna be a nice day and I’m gonna go for a walk in a bit.
So you’ve just done a couple of dates in the US with a couple more to come; has the reaction been any different?
Well, we were just in New York for the Topshop launch and it was odd because we were mostly playing to celebrities, but I saw Chromeo dancing at the back. Erm, well we got a very good response in Toronto, and now we’re in San Fran, so we’ll see what happens here.
Are you pleased to be headlining the NME Radar Tour?
Yeah, yeah, very pleased indeed; I think it’s always fun to tour with some other bands and it should be a great laugh.
What do you think of the other bands on the roster?
This may sound really bad, but I haven’t really heard much of their music, apart from Heartbreak, who I’ve heard one or two tracks from because someone showed me their MySpace and said they were quite fun and I was like, ‘yeah, they are quit fun’. Obviously I’m going to check them all out before the tour – I’m not gonna go into it blind, but I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and listen to them, but a couple of people I know have said that Magistrates are really good.
I hear that on the NME tours, there’s a lot of football going on… will you be partaking?
Ha, no! No way! Oh god, it’s not gonna be like that is it? All boys and football?! I think I’ll definitely give that one a miss – they can all go and do that; Ben, the other half of La Roux is very into football, so he if he comes along, I’m sure he’ll be up for it, but he can go on his own… I’m not going anywhere near it.
We’ve been lucky enough to hear a few of your songs on MySpace, but when’s the album out?
June… I think end of June.
Can we expect more of the same, or a diverse sound throughout the album? It’s definitely diverse; there is some more of the same, like in the next single, but then it gets a bit more diverse. There’s definitely some different vibes on the album; there’s mid-tempo tracks and a couple of ballads, so hopefully there’ll be something for everyone. We didn’t want it to be an album purely of dance-pop. There’s definitely a few different flavours!
The Skream remix of your new single, ‘In for the Kill’ has really caused a stir – who approached who about remixing the track, or did Skream just ‘nick it’?
We approached him; I mean, I was sort of, of the same view – I didn’t understand about remixing and how it worked until I had it done myself, but there’s no such thing as just stealing a track, because you have to be sent the stems to the track, like, all the different parts, so unless there was some serious leakage going on in my team, it’d be quite difficult to remix. But yeah, we approached him; we were kind of a bit stumped with the remix, because it’s already at kinda club speed – it’s already at about 128bpm – so it’s quite difficult to do. We approached Soulwax and people like that, the big remixers, but it just wasn’t gonna work like that because there wasn’t really anything they could do with it; they were like, “well, you’ve already done what we might have done with it”, so we kind of had to think about it in other ways, so we sat back and had a think and we thought it might be good to have one that was a little more sparse and a little more eerie and a bit weirder, so we thought dubstep was a good way to go. Also, it’s always good with a remix to try and reach a crowd that you wouldn’t normally hit with the original, so that’s definitely been achieved with the Skream remix.
Have you seen on Discogs that there’s a copy of the original 12” pressing of the single with the Skream remix up for £50,000?
Like the vinyl? Oh my god. Really? Are people that into the remix? I think the shaped picture disks are really cool too… have you seen them? We’ve got shaped picture disks for ‘In for the Kill’, which are the shape of the car, which is really cool.
But for £50,000 I think you should sell a couple yourself…!
You know what, I actually don’t have a copy of his pressing, I just have the original picture disks, so I don’t have a copy of his remix at all!
So, Ellie, your music progressed from your own acoustic noodlings to the synth-heavy electro pop we’re used to today… did this shift in direction open a whole new world of music for you?
It was definitely a transition musically and listening to music-wise. I think it was definitely a musical phase that I’d had from a very young age, and musical phases only ever last so long, so like, ‘In for the Kill’ was written on an acoustic guitar, but we just sort of took some of the songs we had, that I had written, or had started to write in that guise, and then as time went on, we’d done 57 versions of ‘In for the Kill’, or something! It started of acoustic, then we started to put some kind of beats behind it, then the guitar just started to get more and more annoying and the general sound of it became more annoying; at one stage I think it even had a mandolin on it. It wasn’t bad in any way, it was still cool in its own way, but it just didn’t have the strong riffs and the more and more we tried, the more we began to hate it and Ben and I came to each other and said, ‘I don’t like it, it’s rubbish’. It wasn’t rubbish but it wasn’t doing what we wanted it to do and we just started to do several more versions of it and then the synthesiser started to come into the equation and all the acoustic instruments started to disappear, even on the other tunes as well. I started going clubbing when I was about 17 and that started to change the music as well really.
You signed to the fantastically fresh Kitsune label to release Quicksand, didn’t you, but have since signed to Polydor for the album…
Well, it’s actually quite strange, because we were signed to Polydor all along, because we were never actually signed to Kitsune, we just released a single with them, so it was just a one-release thing but we were always signed to Polydor.
Is there any weighting being signed to Polydor? How much effect does the label have on what you do?Erm, well I think every label has the rigmarole of the process before something is released, but I think some labels are better at it than the others. I think at the moment, there are only one or two that are actually cutting it, whereas there are a lot of other labels making a lot of mistakes at the moment. But I think people from other labels hate me already anyway, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference what I say! I think that Polydor are really on it; they’re just really good at knowing when to release things and how to keep a buzz on a gradual build and not let it grow too quickly, just let it build. You can control these things to a certain extent and they’re just very good at it and they like good music and they like y’know, proper songwriters and proper artists and they’re not pushy; they’ll hear your ideas and just want to help you carry them out.
For you Ellie, are you happy being the face of La Roux, or would you sometimes like to stick Ben in a dress?
Ha, that would be really funny. Erm, how do you know he doesn’t wear dresses anyway?
Well, maybe he does, but perhaps not in front of San Franciscan audiences…
Sometimes… I mean, I am La Roux and we always knew that; it’s not a shock and I’m not like, hang on, how come I’m doing all this stuff, but sometimes when you’re being driven to Hackney from West London back to Hackney, back to Brixton, back to Hackney, all day, when you’re doing photo shoots or a video all day and Ben’s at home chilling out, you do sometimes go, ‘Oh, fuckin’ hell, I wish there was someone else to take some of the strain with me’, ‘cause sometimes it does get a bit too much I guess, but it’s only to be expected.
So, festival season is fast approaching, have you got many planned.
Yeah, I think Glastonbury’s still up in the air; we don’t know what we’re doing with that… we haven’t decided, so I’ll see what happens there. We’re definitely doing Bestival, we’re doing T in the Park, we’re doing Melt in Germany and Sonar… as far as I know, that’s it at the moment.
Do you have any festival essentials?
Erm…. Yeah, but I don’t think I could really say what they are.
Haha, I was thinking more like wellies...!
I think wellies sort of become a bit of a ‘well, who cares’, after about one evening. I left my wellies on the boat on the way back from Bestival last year as well actually, so I need to get some more. Obviously wet wipes are of paramount importance, as is toilet paper. But yeah, wet wipes are majorly essential as well as instant noodles, erm, a tent…
You recently came to Norwich to support Lily Allen… do you have any memories of our fair city?
Norwich… they all blur in to one but I do remember the changing room which was changing room / toilet, which was nice! Really glam! But that was a good gig actually, really cool and I wore a red jump suit!
Emma Roberts
La Roux will be headlining the NME Radar Tour, which will be coming to Norwich on Monday 18th May along with Magistrates, Heartbreak and The Chapman family. For tickets go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk or call 01603 50 80 50.