Hot Press meets Neon Neon

Shooting hoops with Castro, smuggling the only known copy of Dr. Zhivago out of the USSR, plotting the liberation of Sardinia while sipping cups of tea - you’ll find it all on the new Neon Neon LP, which you may have already guessed is not your average synth-strewn indie pop record.

A biographical account of the life and times of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher and activist who counted illegally distributing banned novels and meeting with communist revolutionaries among his many cultural and political exploits, the ambitious 10-tracker follows another concept record, 2008’s Stainless Style, which hailed John Delorean as its inspiration.
Clearly, something about telling a person’s life story through song appeals to the brains behind Neon Neon, that of California producer Book Bip and Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys. But, as they learned with Praxis Makes Perfect, it’s one thing to decide you’re going to create a floor-filling pop biography, and another to actually sit down and make it happen.
“We could never imagine what it was like to be a millionaire communist Italian publisher in the late ‘50s,” Rhys explains, “so we reimagined the story in ‘80s Sardinia, because his plan was to liberate Sardinia and kickstart a revolution from there. We imagined ourselves being a middle of the road band from ‘80s Sardinia, although it didn’t really end up sounding like that.”
The resulting album is remarkably bouncy, a glossy, fun-loving retelling of Feltrinelli’s most bizarre anecdotes, combining all the best elements of hammy ‘80s pop. Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon and RHCP guitarist Josh Klinghoffer turn up on singing and shredding duties respectively, but possibly the most fitting collaboration comes in the form of ‘80s sexpot Sabrina ‘Boys Boys Boys’ Salerno.
“We were inspired by a lot of Italian music and synthetic Italian disco and Italian middle-of-the-road pop and I suppose Sabrina Salerno was a really obvious person to ask,” Rhys says. “The song just wouldn’t have seemed complete without her and incredibly, she was willing to do the vocal!”
As any red-blooded males who were alive and watching MTV in the late ‘80s will tell you, Salerno spent a significant amount of time as the hottest thing on the planet, and Rhys admits to being understandably starstruck when he met her in the flesh.
“We flew on Easyjet to Venice and she picked me up from the airport,” he recalls. “We did a duet in the studio and it was one of the most remarkable moments of my life, truly, and one that I could have never predicted would ever happen!”
The next step was to adapt this highly unique album for the stage, and in typical Neon Neon fashion, no effort was spared. Staged in a secret location in Cardiff with the help of National Theatre Wales, the Praxis Makes Perfect live show enlisted actors to help tell the Feltrinelli tale, with the crowd acting as unknowing extras.
“Someone described it as ‘a music video that you’re in’!” Rhys laughs. “It was extremely different to most live music concerts that any of us had ever been to so in that sense, I think it was really exciting. People didn’t know what was going on, they were being attacked by soviet agents!”
“It’s a shame we can’t take it everywhere,” he laments, “but we have lots of video as well, which is more portable, so we’re bringing the video show over to Dublin.”
Before Rhys makes the trip over for Forbidden Fruit, I feel the need to bother him with a metaphorical quandary; what would Feltrinelli make of the album?
“Awh, it would have been too weird for him, I imagine,” he says. “I’m sure it would have been beyond strange for him to have some Welsh guy and a Californian doing a biographical record about him, using really bad taste synthesizer. He was a very cultured guy so he’d have been going to the opera!”
I’m not convinced. After all, Feltrinelli was nothing if not a supporter of experimentation in the arts, even if it is difficult to imagine him giving it socks under a mirror ball.
“The music is totally contradictory to his personality and his life,” Rhys acknowledges, “but he was a contradictory guy, so I think, in a strange way, it makes complete sense.”

Neon Neon play Forbidden Fruit on the Saturday. Praxis Makes Perfect is out now on Lex Records.