Pop Idols

There comes a moment in every musician’s life when you suddenly realise the direction your career should be taking. Decky Headrock (AKA Declan McLaughlin) from Derry’s Japanese Popstars is no different. His epiphany didn’t happen in a small, sweat-drenched club. No, instead it occurred in a muddy field in Thurles.

“When I was growing up I got into hip hop and rock music first. When I went to Feile ‘94 and I saw The Prodigy do their live show it converted me to dance music on the spot,” he recalls. “I remember The Prodigy were headlining the dance tent that night and they blew me away. I instantly became a big fan of dance music. I started making my own tracks pretty much a week later on my computer. That was the beginning of it.”
Having initially started out as part of the hip hop combo Headrock Valley Beats, Decky began amassing equipment for his home studio thanks to the help of a rather generous advance from his then record label. Now he has pretty much every piece of kit he needs at hand.
“I started off making music on a simple computer and over the space of four or five years I started to build up a proper studio. When my previous band Headrock Valley Beats were signed I got a sum of money from the record company to put together my own studio. I went from there,” he remembers. “I got a 48-channel mixer, some synths and samplers and all sorts of gadgets. Everything we do now though is software based. We each have our own studios. A lot of our music is written on a programme called Reason 4, so we’ve taken it away from hardware based stuff and focused more on the software side of it. That way, we can take our music anywhere with us on our laptop. If we’re doing a remix for someone we’ll work on it on the laptop and then bring it back to the studio and finish it off.”
Translating what they create in the studio to the live arena has been a pretty painless affair for the outfit (completed by Gerry Curran and Gareth Donoghue). According to Decky, the Popstars tend to think about their live show first and foremost.
“We don’t write as DJs. We write thinking about how we’re going to fit an idea into our live set. Some of our tracks go off in a DJ direction. Most of them have that live feel to them. For our live show we also use a programme called Ableton, which is essential."
He adds: “In a live setting we’ll run both Ableton and Reason 4 and map everything out beforehand. Then I’ll play large retro synths and samplers, Gareth sequences the whole set through Ableton and Gary uses Reason to tweak and change things as we play live, which works rather well.”
Despite writing music within a genre famous for its fascination with futurism and gadgetry, Decky confesses that new programmes don’t really interest him that much.
“I’m not really a technology junkie, no,” he confesses. “Gareth is probably the member of the band who’s most into gadgets. He’s always keeping up to date with stuff and buying new gear. He’s also reading up on what’s coming out and trying to get his hands on stuff. We’ve been lucky enough to get some Novation Launchpads recently and we’ve added them to our live show. We have an Access Virus which is a retro synth and I’ve gone through four Roland JP-8000’s in the last two years. We do like to add to it and build it up. It keeps it interesting for us.”
At the time of our interview, Decky is relaxing in Miami where the band have played at the Ultra festival. While he’s admittedly enjoying the “gorgeous weather and the fake boobs” he’s also looking forward to putting the finishing touches to the band’s second record.
“We’ve got two weeks to finish off our album,” he says. “We’ve got a few collaborations on there and the first [featuring Jon Spencer from art punk combo the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion] has been announced. He’s done a track called ‘Destroy’ and that will be our next single. We’ve also done a track with Green Velvet. He sang on a tune called ‘Let Go.’ We’ve been playing them recently in the live set and they’ve been going down really well. We can’t wait to get the second record sorted and to see what response we get from it.
“We’re looking at releasing it at the end of July/start of August. We’re going to begin the promo over the next few weeks and start to reveal bits and pieces. Some of the vocalists we’ve worked with weren’t available when we wanted them. We’ve had to wait on them. Now they’re all done and we need to polish it all off.”
Unfortunately for our readers, despite our best efforts, Decky can’t reveal the names of his collaborators. But he can tell us that one of the performers is utterly “iconic”.
“It’s one of these things where we have to keep our mouths shut about it for a few weeks. We couldn’t believe it when this particular singer agreed to work with us,” he teases. “They’re absolutely iconic. We’re absolutely flabbergasted to be working with them because they’re such a legend. It was the same with Jon Spencer too. We wrote the track ‘Destroy’ and we thought, ‘Who could we get to sing on it?’ and the only person it would suit would be Jon from the Blues Explosion. We sent it across and he did this crazy vocal take. We expected him to sing, but he spoke through it. We’re hoping to do a video for it and all being well he’ll star in it too.”
With this very publication dubbing their 2008 debut We Are the dance album of the year, it seems like the only way is up for the trio. However, while the press has universally lauded the band, Decky admits that their success is taking a while to sink in.
“At the end of the day we’re three Irish lads who started out blagging our way into Oxegen and it’s really kicked off for us from there,” he concludes. “We’re happy that people like our music and it’s great to be able to travel the world playing what we write in our bedrooms to thousands of people. Sometimes it feels a bit too surreal though. We’re overwhelmed by the response sometimes. For example, here in Miami we played Ultra on Saturday and there were a hundred people who came to the show before we even played a single note and were waiting for us. It’s pretty bizarre. We did a two-week tour of the States last year and to get followers there for you off the back of that is pretty insane. It’s the same in Japan. The last time we were there, we had landed and there were people at the airport who wanted to meet us to get their CDs signed. Then we got to the hotel and we had fans waiting on us there in the lobby too. It’s pretty mind-blowing.”