Craig Walker & Booka Shade’s Galvany Street Out Now

It’s a bitterly cold afternoon in Kreuzberg, Berlin, but deep in the bowels of the innocuous looking building that houses Riverside Studios, a collection of songwriters and musicians calling themselves Them There are getting really warmed up. There’s a lot of serious musical talent gathered in the studio today. In the vocal booth, bearded and bespectacled Dubliner Craig Walker (formerly of 1990s indie darlings Power Of Dreams) and Australian singer Phoebe Killdeer (a one-time member of French act Nouvelle Vague) are working out the chorus of a mournful-sounding pop song called ‘Love Is An Elevator’.

In the main room, the rest of the collective – including American bassist Tyler Pope, whose night-job is touring with LCD Soundsystem – are patiently waiting for direction. Craig has made a good number of studio albums in his time, some with Power Of Dreams and others with his next band, Archive, but he tells me that this one feels very different.

“The vibe in here is just lovely,” he says, speaking in a Dublin accent undiluted by years of living away. “It’s a great buzz. Everybody knows what they’re at and we’re all having a laugh. It’s not always like that with bands in the studio. We’re under a fair amount of pressure time-wise because Tyler has to go on tour with LCD Soundsystem next month and he’s off to New York for rehearsals in a few days. But we’re doing okay.”

Craig is actually going to be hitting the road himself in the near future. He’s just made an album called Galvany Street with acclaimed German house duo Booka Shade, and they’ll be touring it around Europe from the end of March. Meaning that the Them There record definitely has to be completed by then.

No time to waste. After dinner, it’s straight back to work. They decide to park ‘Love Is An Elevator’ for a bit and work on another, more upbeat, song called ‘Invisible’ instead. Several hours later it’s almost done, but Craig decides it needs added vocals at the very end.

“We’ll all do the last bit together,” he announces. “That means you as well, Olaf. Get in here and fucking make yourself useful!”

“But I can’t sing,” I protest, truthfully.

“Everyone can fucking sing, man,” he insists, handing me the headphones. We all stand in a circle in the main room and do the vocals… several times. Someone is definitely out of tune (ahem!) when we hear the playback.

“Try that one more time, folks,” the producer’s disembodied voice commands through the headphones.

“Well, that’s your song fucked now,” I say, when we’ve finally finished.

“Bollocks!” Craig laughs. “You were fine.

You’re on the album now.”

The following afternoon finds Hot Press sipping lattes beside a battered old piano in a Kreuzberg café with Craig and Phoebe. We’re all feeling a little delicate. After leaving the studio late last night, we went to a nearby bar and stayed into the wee small hours.

“That was actually the very first night that everybody went out together,” Phoebe says. “Usually after a long day in the studio we all just go straight home.”

Craig and Phoebe both live in Berlin. They first met about ten years ago when their music publisher, Stephane Kaczorowski, put them together for a songwriting session in a Paris hotel. The very first song they wrote was called ‘The Fade Out Line’. Remixed by French producer The Avener, and renamed ‘Fade Out Lines’, it became a massive hit all over Europe in 2014.

“It went straight to Number 1 in Germany,” Phoebe recalls, “and stayed there for a full year. It was just crazy.”

Figuring that they obviously had a good songwriting chemistry, Craig and Phoebe decided to keep working together. Craig had been living between London and Dublin, but he moved to Berlin in 2015. They’d originally planned to write songs for other artists to sing, but the label execs in the States reckoned that their potential might lie in other directions.

“BMG flew us to LA and we played the bosses over there some of the tracks we were working on,” says Craig. “They said, ‘It’s too good, you should do it yourself. We wouldn’t recommend sending it to fucking Justin Bieber or whoever’, so yeah we had a bit of an awakening.”

Hot Press has only heard two songs from the latest batch of material, but what’s the planned vibe of the full album?

“The album talks a lot about what’s going on in the world at the moment,” offers Craig. “There’s social commentary about where the world’s headed. It’s dark at the moment, but it’s not all dark in the lyrics. There’s some love there, too.”

On that note, it’s time for this talented pair of Berlin blow-ins to return to Riverside Studios for another lengthy recording session. Them There intend to release their as-yet-untitled album starting in September. It could well be a hit… provided they drop my vocal contribution.