Fuck Buttons Interview- Swear It All Over Again

Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin Power doesn’t regret his band’s name – but he understands it has made life trickier than might otherwise be the case.

“It would be a lie to say it hasn’t caused difficulties,” he admits. “There are ways around it. Our music was featured in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony – so obviously it wasn’t a drawback in that regard. If someone wants to censor us: use ‘f-buttons’ or whatever…well, that’s fine. If that’s what they feel they need to do in order to share our music, we have no problem with that.”
As he’s already brought it up, it seems only reasonable to pose our inevitable Olympics question: did he assume someone was having a laugh when Underworld’s Rick Smith (or at least that’s who he claimed he was) rang up explaining he wanted the curtain raiser to involve  Fuck Buttons – a woozy electronic twosome (Andrew Hung is Power’s other half musically speaking) unlikely to be mistaken for the Spice Girls or Coldplay.
“It was an amazing thing to be asked to do,” Power beams. “At the time we were mostly focused on our most recent album. We were really deep into the writing of it – the Olympics was, above all, a fantastic excuse to take a breather.”
Surprisingly Power and  Hung opted not be attend the ceremony itself. They’d been at the dress rehearsal but unable to scrounge extra tickets for the event proper opted to watch from their living-room.
“If we’d gone it would have been just us and our manager, “ says Power (let Hot Press be first to congratulate him on his sterling surname by the way). “We wanted to be with friends and family. Of course not everyone could get tickets. Even though we weren’t physically there, we did have a sense of being involved in this very important thing.”
It’s been a busy few years for Fuck Buttons. Still buzzing from their Olympics coup, last year they were invited to headline one of the larger tents at the UK’s Glastonbury festival. There was a small sting in the tail: they were due on at the same time as a well-known beat combo with a decent following.
“We were up against the Rolling Stones, which is just ridiculous when  you think about it,” Power notes. “I mean they're probably the biggest band of all time that's still a touring entity. Obviously we assumed nobody would show up. As it happened we attracted 3,000 people which was fantastic. For me, it was extra weird as I’d never been to Glastonbury. My first experience of the festival was headlining a stage – that’s an odd one, isn’t it?”
While popular with clubbing fans, Power and Hung never set out to to conquer the dancefloor. They saw themselves as avant-garde instrumentalists – not so terribly far removed from the Mogwai school of quiet-loud-LOUD! ‘post-rock’. On tour, however, they discovered it was electro fans who were drawn to the nimble grooves and ethereal sensibilities. Now, after two promising albums, with this year’s wonderful Slow Focus there’s a sense the band have truly arrived - glossily produced, with achingly sweet melodies and moments of unexpurgated catchiness, the
pair have at last delivered their calling card.
“Starting work on a record we don’t have preconceptions,” Power concludes. “A lot of the time we're at the mercy of our equipment. We go where it leads. We like to get stuck in - you won’t see us picking up a manual to figure out how everything works before hand. I don’t want to start going on about ‘automatic writing’ or any of that – however, the fact is that once we stumble upon something promising, the tracks tend to compose themselves in many ways.”

Fuck Buttons play Forbidden Fruit on the Saturday. Slow Focus is out now.