Pretenders to the Throne

SUDDENLY ON THE SIDES OF BUSES
Andrew Vanwyngarden wants to die. Spread-eagled on a couch amidst the vintage splendour of Dublin’s Library Bar, the MGMT frontman is suffering the mother of all hangovers. When his chicken soup arrives, you fear he might actually plonk head first into the broth and start dozing.

“We were up pretty late last night,” explains his MGMT partner Ben Goldwasser. “You know, the life we lead gets surreal. I call my girlfriend and she asks me how my day was and it’s like: ‘Well, we did a photoshoot and then played a festival and then we were driven to an interview and then we did some TV – so what did you get up to, honey?’”
You’ll forgive the Brooklyn twosome if they feel their feet have barely touched the floor this past year. Since the release last March of their wickedly catchy debut single ‘Time To Pretend’, MGMT (pronounced ‘M G M T’ by the way: Goldwasser and Vanwyngarden ceased trading as ‘The Management’ when a group of the same name threatened to sue) have hopscotched to the top of Planet Indie. The months since have been a blur: they’ve partied with Kelly Osbourne, shot the breeze backstage with Kirsten Dunst, opened for Radiohead, toured America with Beck and sold an astonishing 30,000 albums in Ireland alone, where ‘Time To Pretend’ and super-freaky follow-up ‘Electric Feel’ have taken up permanent residency on the airwaves. If you visited New York last summer, you might even have caught sight of their mugs, looming down from passing buses. MGMT may be big everywhere but in Manhattan they’re literally 20 feet tall.
“Oh man – the Converse ads,” giggles Goldwasser. “That was frickin’ weird. Our manager asked if we wanted to do a photoshoot for Converse and we were like ‘yeah, that’s cool, whatever’. Then on tour, we kept receiving emails from our friends: ‘I was walking through the Village today and I saw your picture on the back of the bus’. Like, what the fuck? When we got back to New York, I remember clearly, getting off the subway at Union Square – and there we were, on this poster next to Pharrell Williams and Julian Casablancas. I guess people were going, ‘Well there’s Pharrell, there’s the dude from The Strokes – hey, who the fuck are those two guys?’ I looked like a hobo Michael Jackson.”
It was while sharing a tour bus with Beck that MGMT began coming to grips with their sky-rocketing celebrity – and the party, party, party lifestyle that’s followed. One evening the ageing Gen X b-boy took them aside and came clean about his own years of wild living. “He told us that when he was starting out he did all sorts of crazy stuff too,” says Goldwasser. “It was comforting to know that we aren’t the only ones to have ever been in this situation. We’re not alone in being freaked out by all these things.”
Did Mr Hanson, a well known devotee of L.Ron Hubbard, suggest they get back to the straight and narrow by signing up for a Scientology course? Goldwasser grins.
“Oh no, that’s not something he really gets into. Like, he’s been more public about it lately. But he doesn’t bring it with him on tour.”

TRYING NOT TO GO TOO CRAZY
Hangovers aside, MGMT barely look like themselves as they shake out the cobwebs and limber up for their Hot Press Christmas photoshoot. For one thing, they’re understatedly attired: Goldwasser is dressed like a moderately boho undergrad; the absurdly fresh-faced Vanwyngarden – 25 going on 12 – sports standard-issue hipster lumberjack shirt. Whither his penchant for dressing like a refugee from some 60s psychedelic ‘happening’? Why today, he doesn’t even sport a bandana.
“We’ve said adios to bandanas,” drawls Vanwyngarden, who's finally finished glaring at his meal. “Actually, the last time I wore a headband was at Oxegen. I offered it up as a sacrifice.” What, by setting in on fire? “No, I threw them into the crowd. Oxegen was where it ended.”
I mention that, when I attended MGMT’s show at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn last summer, half the (admittedly too hip for its own good) crowd appeared to sport bandanas. Were MGMT appalled at having inspired so mainstream a fashion trend?
“Well, that concert was totally nerve-wracking for us,” Goldwasser winces. “You had, like, every scenester in New York there, with their arms folded, waiting for us to fall on our asses so that they could go home and write about it on their frickin’ blogs. That was a tense affair. It was all about not disgracing ourself in front of a hometown audience.”
Are we to infer they have a complicated relationship with the saddo bloggers in general?
“Well, Pitchfork mostly ignores us, which I think is the best we could hope for,” Vanwyngarden reflects. “After the album came out, they gave us an okay review and haven’t mentioned us since. We’re down with that. We don’t want to be flavour of the month. You read about some band that’s being hyped in some blog or other and then, a few weeks later, they’re cast aside. I like that we didn’t rely on that network of underground hype. We did it the old fashioned way. We signed to a major, got radio play. We were never the hot new underground thing.”
Still, that’s not to say they’ve been immune to controversy. In the US, the drug-referencing ‘Time To Pretend’ provoked a firestorm when it was made iTunes Single of the Week.
“We were being ironic,” says Goldwasser, of the song, which includes such singalong couplets as ‘I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars. You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars’.
“The song’s about dreaming of a rock and roll lifestyle when you’re broke and unsigned and nobody wants to know about you. For reasons that elude us, iTunes used the line about cocaine in the 15 second sample you can listen to online. You had parents freaking out about these two debauched kids who wanted their children to take drugs. It’s hard to appreciate the sarcastic side of something when all you have to go on is a few seconds of music.”
So, now that they’ve actually achieved dizzying stardom, how does the drugs ‘n’ hookers lifestyle look close up? Both break into wry chuckles.
“We try not to go too crazy,” Goldwasser smiles. “We like to cut loose after a good show, but you have to get up the next morning and get into a tour bus and travel the whole day. It’s better not to do that if you’re crippled with a hangover. You learn those lessons pretty quickly. Nobody’s losing the plot here.”
In addition to pastiching rock star excess, adds Goldwasser, ‘Time To Pretend’ is a paean to the heroin cool of bands such as the Velvet Underground. And no, neither of the duo are budding smackheads. But they do find the drug’s influence on the evolution of popular music fascinating.
“Heroin shaped so many important bands yet it’s a really taboo subject,” Goldwasser continues. “The Rolling Stones are this huge mainstream band. And heroin has been a big part of their career. They’ve written songs about it. But nobody picks up on it.”

WHEN IT WAS COOL TO SING ABOUT DRUGS
Though neither musician is in the least ‘wacky’ this morning, MGMT started as an undergrad prank. Goldwasser and Vanwyngarden hooked up at Wesleyan College, Connecticut, a liberal arts institution infamous for its wild-living undergraduate population.
“One of the first gigs we played, we were stark naked,” Goldwasser recalls. “Was it awkward? Yeah, kinda. We turned up at the house and everyone there was, like, undressed. What do you do? We felt we had to show solidarity, so we took all our clothes off too. It felt terrible, until we actually started playing. Then we got into the spirit.”
Weren’t their, ahem, technical difficulties attendant with performing in the nude?
“No, although I did have my bass slung low, so that nobody could actually see anything. I figure that might have counted as cheating but, man, it was kinda cold up on stage.”
The pranks didn’t finish there. At an early show, they performed the Ghostbusters theme in its entirety for the whole night. Then there was the time they walked from the wings dressed as ice-hockey players.
“I guess we were trying to compensate ‘cos we felt unsure about our abilities as musicians,” says Goldwasser. “Those things were distractions. We weren’t trying to be, you know, ‘crazy’ on purpose. It was to draw the attention away from what we were playing.”
Even when they signed to Columbia Records, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to get serious. Asked who they’d like to produce their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, Goldwasser and Vanwyngarden submitted a list that included Prince, Barack Obama and ‘not Sheryl Crow’. Were they trying to sabotage their shot at the big time? Vanwyngarden shrugs.
“We felt a little detached from the process. We couldn’t quite believe we were getting signed. It felt like some sort of elaborate set-up – that, at the last moment, some guy would come out from behind a screen and say, ‘Hey guys, you’ve been punked'. The whole thing was very unreal. The email we got from the A&R guy went unanswered for like a month, because we thought it was somebody’s idea of a joke.”
Clearly, they had no qualms about getting into bed with a major.
“We never had any indie cred,” Goldwasser avers. “What did we have to lose? We’re actually anti-indie. Our take on it was, if they want to come and sign us well, we’re not gonna say no to that, ‘cos of what some blogger in Brooklyn might think.”
Before Oracular was released, they were lighting up the airwaves on David Letterman’s Late Show. The King of Chat was so taken with MGMT he even waived his strict ‘no drug references’ rule.
“Which was a shame, in a way, ‘cos we’d come up with these fantastic alternative lyrics for ‘Time To Pretend’," Goldwasser chuckles. “Instead of saying, ‘I’ll shoot some heroin,’ I was going to sing ‘I’ll shoot Some Aerosmith’. At the last minute they said it was okay to sing about drugs. But we still couldn’t say ‘fuck’.”
Though they’re synonymous today with New York’s art-rock scene, neither Goldwasser nor Vanwyngarden are native Gothamites. The latter was raised in Memphis; the former hails from a rural hamlet in the Catskills. Both sets of parents had hippyish inclinations – Goldwasser recently discovered his mother and father attended Woodstock – but the communities in which they grew up were rustic and deeply conservative, the sort of gun totin’ good ‘ol repositories of white-bread culture Sarah Palin was talking about when she extolled the ‘real America’.
“One thing that unites us is that, growing up, we were both the ‘weird kids’ in our towns,” Goldwasser recalls. “They were deeply conservative areas. People there are very decent but they have an idea of the way the world should be and they don’t want to change it. So if you’re the creative type, it can be kind of repressive. I suppose that’s why we went a little crazy when we went to college. There was all that pent-up desire to go and cut loose.”

FINAL RUMINATIONS: FREAKING OUT ON STAGE
MGMT have described Oracular Spectacular as “‘70s future-shock’ – as apt a description as any of their retro sci-fi vibrations .
“When we wrote the album we pretended we were living in an alternative ‘70s,” says Vanwyngarden. “Are we obsessed with the decade? Maybe a little. Not to the extent everybody seems to think. That was a mindset we adopted for, like, that one album. We’re so busy at the moment that we haven’t had time to work on new material. But when we do, I think it’s gonna be quite different. We’ll leave the ‘70s behind.”
In conversation, Goldwasser tends to dominate, while the (admittedly worse for year) Vanwyngarden chips in with smarty-pants quips and frat-boy giggles. On stage, though, the dynamic is the opposite: Vanwyngarden is de-facto frontman while his bandmate crouches, uber-nerdishly, behind a bank of equipment. It seems fair to assume a yin-yang dynamic is at play?
“You know, I think you’re right,” Vanwyngarden agrees. He turns to Goldwasser. “Actually, I’ve been thinking for a while that you should get more involved on stage. Come out of your shell a little bit.”
Goldwasser pauses mid-chew. “Oh, you think?”
“Yeah,” chirrups his colleague. “It’s fun freaking out on stage. Give it a try. You’ll enjoy it, dude.”