Here Comes The Strum

Zach Condon, Beirut’s ukulele-strumming wunderkind frontman, has the strangest laugh. Somewhere between a high-pitched giggle and a kitten hacking a fur-ball, the first time you hear it you wonder if he’s been chuggling helium on the sly.

Sitting in his hotel room in Manchester, Condon has plenty to chuckle about. He’s fresh from a triumphant turn at the biggest, most prestigious venue at Electric Picnic (and if you missed him at the Hot Press Chatroom you may have caught his equally impressive Main Stage performance a little earlier). Meanwhile, Beirut’s new album, The Rip Tide, is basking in unanimously lavish reviews (as it should – it is easily one of the year’s outstanding releases). Arcade Fire are such fans they invited him to hang out at the ultimate inner sanctum – their backstage ping-pong table – after he supported them in London’s Hyde Park recently and The National reckon he will shortly be playing arenas. Last year Sean Penn took time out from schleeping around Dublin dressed as a middle aged goth – for a film role, he assures us – to check out Beirut’s show at Tripod (a sell-out, as if you need to ask).
The funny thing is, Condon doesn’t break out The Laugh when contemplating all the good things that have befallen him. More tic than articulation of happiness, it manifests when conversation strays to the darker side of life as a 20-something indie over-achiever. Which, alas, is something he can claim to know a few things about. Before he was Zach Condon, curly-haired alterno-god in waiting, he was Zach Condon, the naive kid who drank too much and slowly fell apart on stage. One incident from a 2007 Dublin concert is especially infamous. Worse for wear after half a bottle of whiskey, he inflicted slow, grievous bodily harm on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, a song that should never be broached four sheets to the wind. Those who were there still can’t quite get it out of their minds.
“The rock lifestyle isn’t something I can do indefinitely,” he reflects. “It was very exciting and I had a great time. I had my limitations. I certainly couldn’t keep on at it.”
Seeking respite from the footloose existence of an alt. pop prodigy – his debut Gulag Orkestar came out when he was just 19 – the New Mexico native traded scenester mother-lode Brooklyn for a log cabin in upstate New York with the intentions of writing a new album there. If that scenario exudes an off-putting whiff of Bon Iver ‘woe-is-me-ism’, understand that Condon was thinking precisely the same thing. Above all, he was alive to the danger of delivering a simpering man-sob of a record.
“That was one of the things I promised myself – that I would not write a folksy, wintry album. I vowed not to do that, although I understand I might be pushed mentally in that direction. Otherwise, I lived a totally bumpkin existence. It was the first time I ever did something like that and to be honest it nearly drove me crazy. At the same time, I loved it. It was good to switch off.”
What he found hard to push from his mind was the weight of expectation. With interest in the band on a slow but steadily upwards trajectory, Condon knew The Rip Tide would likely be the biggest of his career – his make-or-break moment, no less. Try as he might, he couldn’t quite banish this thought.
“I was trying to run away from that,” he says. “I was doing everything in my power to forget it. To be honest, it was a struggle. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it crossed my mind all the time.”
Worn out and fed up, two years ago Condon went on a temporary hiatus from music. He married his girlfriend, bought a house in Brooklyn and did his best to live a normal life. For someone who had dropped out of high school at 17 and moved from New Mexico to Paris two years later – and whose music swells with strains of Balkan folk and Parisian chamber pop – his retreat into domesticity was a surprise. Whither the footloose spirit of Beirut’s early records?
“When people described me as a wandering soul I always saw it as an exaggeration,” he says. “I always found it kind of ridiculous. To my own mind, I was more of a home-boy than anything else. I just didn’t know where home was at the time. New York has always been the quest, to my mind. I wasn’t worried about slowing down. That perception of me was never true.”
The Rip Tide is a departure in another sense for Condon. It marks a break from 4AD, the label he’s been with all his career. Rather than signing to a major, however, he’s putting the LP out on his own Pompeii imprint. This means taking calls about iTunes exclusives, record sleeves and CD manufacturing – i.e. the supremely boring shit record labels exist to look after. With a heavy year’s touring ahead, why would Condon put such pain on himself?
“I have a ridiculous history of running away from any authority,” he explains. ‘It’s actually to my own detriment. It has not been a good thing. The last label I was with, 4AD, they were great, they treated us like royalty. But I thought I might be about to run away from something that was very good for me – my music career. So I decided to do it myself.”
He considers The National and Arcade Fire friends, and listens when they tell him he has the potential to headline arenas on his own. For all that, he isn’t comfortable with being constantly compared to other big league indie bands. The media is too eager to paint him as this year’s crossover artist, without really pausing to consider how different his music is from his chug-worthy contemporaries.
“I wish people would take a deeper look. I’m glad to be classified with my friends. A lot of those bands are people I know very well. You do wonder if you are being tied with the right crew. We just happen to be around them quite a lot. I do get frustrated when everyone compares me to all these acts who released albums in 2006. It makes me scratch my head.”
One cause of his early troubles, he says, is that he was just too eager to please. He signed up for months and months of touring, even though he knew it was too much. Whenever someone asked him to go on TV or perform at a festival, he’d blithely agrees to it, no matter that the logistics needed to fulfill the obligation would push him and his band to snapping point. Aged 21 and with the music world allegedly at his feet, he felt in no position to turn anyone down.
“From talking to other musicians I know, it seems obvious to me that there is a phase you go through where you are incredibly enthusiastic and feel it is impossible to say no. Then you get older and you realise that them asking you isn’t so much a compliment as a business interaction.”
He pauses and a sad smile plays across his lips. Then, inevitably, Condon bursts into giggles.

Rip Tide is out now. Beirut's interview in the Hot Press Chatroom at Electric Picnic is online at hotpress.com.