Bonn voyage

Speaking from her apartment in downtown Bonn, Cascada’s Natalie Horler does not sound like a Teutonic pop diva.

In fact, she talks like a science teacher from the English home counties. Her estuary burr is, it transpires, easily explained: “My parents are both from England and I was brought up in a very British household,” says Horler. “I’ve always felt very English. Growing up, I was surrounded by British culture.”
As Cascada's front-woman, Horler puts her English reservedness on a leash. Unabashed purveyors of cheesy euro-bop, Cascada vault exuberantly from your stereo in the so-dumb-maybe-it’s-genius tradition of 2 Unlimited, Whigfield and Aqua. “I’ve been singing seriously since I was about 15,” says 26-year-old Horler, who hooked up with the Cascada songwriting tag-team of Yann Pfeiffe and Manuel Reuter in 2004. “We’d been working on some demos and did a song called Cascada, which means Waterfall in Italian. It was such a success that we decided to stay together and make more music.”
This year, Cascada threatened a global takeover with ‘Everytime We Touch’, a deliciously nagging floor filler wherein Pfeiffe and Reuter supply slippery trance beats and Horler warbles like a Valkyrie trapped inside the body of a Terminator robot. “Usually, you never know which of your songs is going to be a hit but that one felt really special to us,” says the singer “There was a massive response from audiences when we put it on our MySpace page. Early on, we weren’t getting any airplay so the fact that people were talking about it so enthusiastically on the internet definitely helped us make the breakthrough.”
The success of ‘Everytime We Touch’ probably owes a little to its vaguely raunchy video, which sees Horler, a statuesque hayseed, seek to coax her boyfriend out of his shell by wiggling her curves in his face (for reasons never fully explained, all of this transpires in a library). “It was the director’s idea to film in a library,” laughs Horler, “It’s always fun when someone thinks outside the box.”
In Germany Horler’s father, David, is a jazz player of note; he’s shared a stage with Elvis Costello and members of Talking Heads. “Dad was obviously an influence on me, but I never had much involvement with his music to be honest,” says Horler. “I was always more interested in dance than jazz. I never met any of the musicians he played with.”
Since the success of ‘Everytime We Touch’, Cascada have become habitual globe-trotters (succeeding where many euro dance acts have failed, they lit a fuse under the US techno scene). However, they’re especially relishing their return to Ireland. “We always get a great reaction in Cork. Audiences in the city are always really up for it. Maybe, there’s something in the water down there.”
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