Devonte Hynes, aka Lightspeed Champion, digs the simple life.
“I just spent six months living in Omaha, Nebraska, which is really the middle of nowhere,” says the sweet-voiced strummer. “It was the most remote place I’ve even been. And I loved it. Give me a Barnes and Noble, a Starbucks and a Whole Foods emporium and I’m happy.”
When last we heard from Hynes he was fronting art-house grungeniks Test Icicles, whose train-wreck sound seemed as calculated to annoy as their pun-from-hell name.
“The thing is, we started that band off as, you know, a joke,” says Hynes, in Dublin for an afternoon of promotional interviews. “Me and a few mates would start a band in a different genre every few weeks, just for a laugh. The problem is that people latched onto Test Icicles and then we got signed. All of a sudden, everyone thought that’s all we could do.”
Lightspeed Champion, then, is Hynes attempting to set the record straight. On his debut album, Falling Off The Lavender Bridge, the 23-year-old investigates pastoral freak-folk and gentle psychedelia to tingle-inducing effect.
“Lightspeed Champion is a cartoon character I created in school,” he explains. “He’s a super hero from a maths based planet – all of his adventures involved him fighting evil with his amazing powers of long division and algebra.”
The move to Nebraska came after Conor ‘Bright Eyes’ Oberst, father figure of the Omaha indie scene, was advised to look Lightspeed Champion up on MySpace. Liking what he heard, he called Hynes and asked him to make a record in America.
“Conor is a great guy, very kind and helpful. He’s got this reputation for being, you know, earnest and crusading, but I found him to be extremely normal. I think that’s how it always is; you have an idea of how a famous person is like, and they’re usually nothing like that.”
The biggest difference between Omaha and the UK? The former’s lack of sex industry workers apparently.
“In Nebraska, you look out your window and see clear blue sky. Where I live in London, in Dalston, it’s really rough. You look out the window and you see prostitutes crying.”
Asked about his influences, Hynes pulls one out of left-field. “REM because the video to my single, ‘Galaxy Of The Lost’, has puppets in it, which was inspired by the time REM were on The Muppet Show doing ‘Shiny Happy People’. Only my muppets are scarier. More like gremlins.”