Dangerous Liaisons

When The Raveonettes’ ‘Attack Of The Ghost Riders’ showed up on the radar a few months ago, some of us experienced vibratory sensations in regions that hadn’t twitched in years. Here was a Danish duo, Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo, he a tousled nocturnal creature with a fetish for ’50s Americana, she a six-foot natural blonde quarter-Chinese Nico-icy bassist with a working knowledge of Hindustani and qawwali drones. Better again, their debut mini-album Whip It On groaned with trashy mondo-horror imagery, Cramp-y guitars, Mary Chain feedback and definite Suicide-al tendencies. True, there was the niggling detail that the band had but one song, in duplicate, but it was a pretty cool song.

Now comes ‘That Great Love Sound’ a taster for the forthcoming full-length album Chain Gang Of Love. Again it’s a killer tune somewhere between the Shangri-Las and Sonic Youth: bright melodies, dark sounds, the kind of surf movie where someone inevitably ends up as shark bait.
“I didn’t start listening to music until I was about 16 years old,” says Sune, sipping Guinness, bumming fags and scoping out Gemma Hayes backstage at Witnness. “I saw a movie called The Buddy Holly Story and I immediately was drawn to the whole ’50s thing. I thought all the cars looked great, the clothes were great and of course the music was very cool. (This was in) the ’80s, everybody was wearing fluorescent pink and yellow shirts and stonewashed jeans. We grew up in a small town, and it was just nice to dream about a different place I guess.”
Wagner found himself gravitating to old school rock ’n’ roll: Ritchie Valens, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Fats Domino, getting off on the uncouth spirit that later infested acts like The Sonics and The Contours, and later again, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane.
“I actually didn’t know a lot about contemporary music until I heard bands like Dinosaur Jr. or Sonic Youth or Nirvana,” Sune admits. “I was searching for where people got their inspiration from, and I stumbled across bands like The Ramones and Television and Suicide.”
Hence veteran Richard Gottehrer signing on to produce Chain Gang Of Love after hearing them at CBGBs – Gottehrer not only understood the punk and new wave references, having overseen key records for Blondie, Richard Hell and The Go-Gos, but also the stiletto and lipstick-killer girl groups.
“Oh yeah, he worked in the Brill Building in New York City,” Sune observes. “He wrote such classics as ‘My Girlfriend’s Back’ with The Angels and ‘I Want Candy’ for The Strangeloves, so he’s a great popsmith. He hadn’t been producing for many years and he never really wanted to until he heard The Raveonettes, and he thought that it just reminded him of so much of the stuff that he liked, so he really forced himself on us so to speak.”
Then there’s the cinematic factor: Greil Marcus recently highlighted The Raveonettes’ film noir streak in his Real Life Top Ten column, and when pressed, Wagner also namechecks Harmony Korine and Hitchcock. The latter’s influence is evident in Sophie Muller’s promo clip for the new single.
“She called me up one day and she said, ‘Is there anything that you absolutely don’t want in this video?’” Wagner recalls. “And I said, ‘Yes, I don’t want Sharin and I to be perceived as a couple, ’cos we’re absolutely not.’ And she says, ‘Oh, we’ll just make a video where you try to kill each other. You like Hitchcock, right?’ And then we did it. I like working like that, very spontaneous.”
Spontaneity is also an integral part of Wagner’s songwriting process, albeit within a strict set of guidelines proscribing three chords, one key and
a Beats-inspired one-take rule.
Does he foresee that such dogmatic methods will become restrictive in
the future?
“It’s a good question, because I really like the idea, and it was very easy for me to write songs like that. I did Whip It On like that and I did the new record like that too, and I could easily do that again. It would actually be kind of cool if we could build our career on three chords and one key and actually maintain a solid fanbase, sell a hell of a lot of albums, maybe even have a number one single. But I don’t really like to think too much ahead; I just do what I do. Chain Gang Of Love wasn’t planned to be recorded in B-flat major, it was something that happened. And before I knew it had written 20 songs in the same key… but they were all good songs!”

‘That Great Love Sound’ is out now on Columbia. Chain Gang Of Love will be released on August 25.