Having enjoyed breakthrough success with his superb 2010 album Swim, Canadian musician Dan Snaith, aka Caribou, has again delivered one of the albums of the year in Our Love, an excellent collection of irresistible dance tunes.

“This album was kind of made as a 'thank you' to the people who got into my stuff and made Swim such a success,” says Snaith, sitting backstage at Vicar St. before his recent performance there. “The reaction to that record was so different to my previous albums – it felt like it had spread more broadly, and people were talking to me more about what it meant to them. It made me want to make music to share with those people, because it made my life so qualitatively different.
“The last four years have been incredible, and I’d never really considered the audience as such when I made music before, so that was the change – I wanted to make music for the people who were going to hear it rather than just for myself.”
Although Snaith now enjoys a large international audience on the back of Swim’s success, he hasn’t broken the habit of keeping his overheads low.
“We still fly on Ryanair and EasyJet,” he notes. “We’re pigheaded in that we’ve never had a tour bus. We’re so used to doing everything ourselves – we’ve had that ethos for many years. We’ve just decided that we’d split the extra money we make now between everybody involved, instead of spending it on being more decadent or whatever.”
One of the big opportunities that came Caribou’s way in the aftermath of Swim was the chance to tour with Radiohead, an experience Snaith recalls very fondly.
“It was amazing in a number of ways,” he enthuses. “First of all, they’re heroes of mine, so the fact that it came from them was great. Thom and the rest of the guys asked us to do it and were super-excited about it, so that was very flattering. What happened was that I got an email from their manager about doing a remix, and then we met them at Glastonbury. They were on before us – they were the secret band on this little stage at the festival. They were very enthusiastic about both the remix I’d done and Swim. Then later on, I met Thom at a party they had for their remix album, and I was like, ‘I see you’re announcing some dates next year – if you ever need a support band, I’m just saying, we’re here.’
“And he was like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t going to ask you, cos I know you just had a little baby and I figured you’d want to take some time off.’ But I said we’d work it out. The next day I got an email with a little list of dates, and in the end we just took our baby along.”
Snaith’s opening shows with Radiohead were two nights at a 60,000 capacity stadium in Mexico, and as the tour went on, he says one of the most notable aspects of the band’s approach was their sheer perfectionism. Indeed, the group told him that in their early days, they would record their gigs on video and rewatch them in order to correct mistakes. Aside from that, he says one of the most enjoyable parts of the experience was simply getting to know the band.
What does one talk to Thom Yorke about?
“Music,” says Dan, simply. “He’s just a crazy music fan. I’d booked a bunch of DJ sets for after various shows, and I’d say, ‘Hey Thom, if you wanna come and play some tunes, it’d be cool.’ And a lot of the times he would, because he was after playing these huge pressurised shows. They take the whole thing so seriously, they want to it be perfect every single night.
“Funnily enough, I’m not DJing so much after shows now. We just played this club called the Warehouse Project in Manchester last week and it reminded me what a good idea it is not to do that. In a room with loud music, you have a steady stream of well-meaning people who want to talk to you, and you just end up shouting. I’ve got a pretty feeble voice in the first place, and I wake up the next day and my voice is gone, and I think, ‘That was a stupid thing to do!’ So at least while we’re on tour, I’ve decided not to do that.”
Our Love is out now on City Slang