Alphabeat (DJ Set)
February 18th, 2009 by sparky
Alphabeat will perform a DJ set at The Big Chill 2009.
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Alphabeat - Biography
What’s got twelve legs, jumps up and down and comes from Copenhagen? No, it’s not a joke – it’s your new favourite pop band, presently settling into a six-bedroomed house at a secret location in east London and preparing to bursting into vision with the passion and energy of CSS at their happiest and The B-52’s at their un-‘Love Shack’iest best with the rest of your record collection thrown in for good measure.
This band have one simple mission in life – for the entire planet to spend one hour each day dancing to Alphabeat. It’s not such a tall order. Released this autumn ‘Fantastic Six’ is the band’s signature song and it’s destined to prompt some furious shape-pulling down your local indie disco. The UK’s first taste of Alphabeat’s infectious brand of high-octane, organically produced modern pop, ‘Fantastic Six’ yelps, chants and bounces its way into your head and refuses to leave.
Hailing from Denmark’s answer to Motown – the small town of Silkeborg is best known for its proliferation of car dealerships – the band have already released three hit singles and a platinum album on home soil, scooping up awards and pleasing crowds with an incendiary live show, in turn establishing the band as a must-see act on the European festival circuit. Following a one-off London show at the beginning of 2007 and a good, old-fashioned bidding war Alphabeat signed a deal with EMI imprint Charisma in the summer and now stand, instruments poised, on the brink of UK chart success.
Two important facts about Alphabeat:
1. Three of them are called Anders. Anders SG is the male singer, Anders B is the guitarist, Anders Reinholdt bangs the drums. This can prove confusing but it means that the band’s male members are rarely misquoted in interviews.
2. Three of them are not called Anders. Stine Bramsen takes on female vocals, Rasmus Nagel plays keyboard, and Troels Hansen plays bass.
For a band whose collective early influences include Yazoo, AC/DC, Chic, The Beatles and Men Without Hats (‘Safety Dance’, from what Troels claims is “an underrated 80s album”, is referenced in one of Alphabeat’s songs), you might not expect the sound Alphabeat make – but this is a band who thrive on the element of surprise. And at a time when we’re all used to reading drawn-out descriptions of music sounding ‘like a kettle being thrown across a room and hitting a cow on the arse’, Alphabeat’s proposition is simple – it’s 100% sunshine-fuelled, feelgood music whose chief aim is to prompt the moving of feet. “It’s all pop,” says Anders B, the band’s chief songwriter. “We’re into melody. We’re influenced by things, of course, but you’d never guess what just by listening to our music.” Alphabeat’s talents, then, lie in each member throwing their favourite records into a huge pop hamster wheel before clambering in and running around so fast that the whole vision blends into a blurry but perfectly focused celebration of being very, very alive.
The band formed five years ago back in Silkeborg when most of the members had just finished school (although Anders SG had already been expelled for mooning at a bus full of teachers). “We were at the same school and we were bored,” Anders B recalls, “but we’d had a great music class together and we decided to start a band.” It started off as a funk and soul combo – as these things often tend to – influenced by a shared love of Chic, but as the band developed Alphabeat gradually took shape. And as Alphabeat came into being, the band outgrew Silkeborg. “There’s only one venue, where we played quite a lot,” Anders says. “That was great - you could buy beer, hang out with your friends and maybe meet some girls. And ride your moped. But after a while, we knew we had to move to the city.” Silkeborg is, Anders realised, precisely the sort of town you move out of as soon as you get the chance. After relocating to Copenhagen Anders wrote a song called ‘Fascination’, in his bedroom, and realised he’d struck gold. The band signed to Copenhagen Records (hence the name etc etc) before they’d recorded more songs; by the time they finished their debut album in February 2006 they’d hit their stride.
Listening to the band’s eponymously titled debut album, you’d be inclined to agree. It’s hard to listen to ‘Fascination’, a Footloose-esque and fancy free soundtrack to the best Bratpack flick you’ve never seen, and imagine that its infectious tones won’t form the soundtrack of Spring 2008, while ‘Boyfriend’ (“don’t you touch my boyfriend – he’s not your boyfriend, he’s mine”) is an anthem for slightly obsessive mentalists around the world. ’10,000 Nights Of Thunder’, meanwhile, with its splendidly lust-struck cry of “it feels like ten thousand nights of thunder when I spend just one with you. Combined with ‘Fascination’’s Men Without Hats reference, ’10,000 Nights Of Thunder’’s dedication to “the wuthering heights and the stormy nights” continues Alphabeat’s obsession with pop history, which makes for instantly recognisable songs on an album curiously unlike anything you’ve heard before.
It’s coming to something when a band playing their instruments, singing songs they wrote themselves and daring to chuck in a melody or two along the way is seen as unusual, but evidence of Alphabeat’s successful quest reclaim European pop music from the Woganized jaws of naff obscurity lies in Troels’ former job in a record shop. Independent to the core and unbothered by the comings and goings of mainstream chart nonsense, that record shop now proudly displays Alphabeat’s album in its window.
In keeping with Alphabeat’s unique brand of day-glo maximalism, the band have roped in hot-as-hell east-London artist Eine as their in house designer. Check his site - www.einesigns.co.uk - to see why many in the art world are calling him “the next Banksy”.
And the band’s name? It’s a compound of ‘alphabet’ and ‘street’, which should make perfect sense to anyone who remembers videos of Prince bouncing around with multicoloured backdrops and the word ‘YEAH’ flying across the screen: arms flailing and with tambourines aloft, Alphabeat are pretty much one big ‘YEAH’ flying through the pop cosmos. There’s a beat pun thrown into the name too, of course, but if it was good enough for Lennon and McCartney its good enough for this lot.
“We enjoy standing out,” Anders B concludes, which is really just as well. Look at Alphabeat however you like – as towerblocks exploding with colour in Sony Bravia ads, the magical transition from the black-leather-jacketed Kansas City to a Technicolor Alpabeaticised Land Of Oz, the sunshine after the rain – Alphabeat are throwing the fun back into music. One hour’s dancing every day is really a bare minimum.
www.myspace.com/thisisalphabeat
Alphabeat will perform a DJ set at The Big Chill 2009.
A-Z line-up | Buy tickets
