Stereo blab

Stereolab have always been masters of the benign contradiction. Interbreeding exotica, ultra-repetitive guitar grinding and quasi-socialist lyrics with a Brian Wilson pop sensibility and dulcet francophone vocals mightn’t be everyone’s idea of fun, but Tim Gane, Laetitia Sadier and Co. have made it their life’s devout work. Also, depending on who you believe, they’ve either picked their way through a million different influences and experiments with an enviable and varied back catalogue, or they’ve “made that same bloody record” over and over again. Tim Gane, luckily for his sanity, sides with the former.

The last time Stereolab visited these shores included a 4am stint at the Trinity Ball, with the booze-soaked crowd “throwing up everything they’d eaten the previous evening” – which is one way of showing your appreciation – but Tim still has warm memories of Dublin shows past…

“Yeah, this is going to sound stupid but, every time we play Dublin, people are always super, super nice, they seem happy to be there and – all the ones I can remember anyway – they’ve been among some of the most intense gigs we’ve played. I remember one crazy one we played here with Tortoise, with this giant alien and an Elvis impersonator wandering around. You play England, it’s not like that, it’s just a bit… lax.”

Every Stereolab fan website (and there are more than you’d think) seems to be full of people crying out for an offical live album – not surprising, given the stormer of a show they will put on in the Ambassador later this evening - so I ask Tim if such a project has ever crossed his mind. “Laetitia was talking about that recently. But so many of these people also have tons and tons of bootlegs, especially in America. We allow people to tape anything they want, video or cassette or whatever, so these people turn up with huge microphones, you can see them dotted around, like little forests of microphones. But if we were going to do it, it’d have to be set up well – I’m not a big archivist, I’m not so much interested in capturing those moments…”

Is he intimidated by the ferocity of some of the more… dedicated fans? Any serious stalker moments?

“Nothing too much in that direction, really. But as for the collectors, they’re people I kind of understand - you probably know I buy a whole lot of records,” he says, understating wildly, “but there was this one single of ours that went on eBay for seven hundred pounds, and I think that’s just silly. The most I’ve spent was maybe half, a third of that, some really rare Sun Ra record, and there’s a composer called Cristopher Komeda, I bought a seven inch of his. They’re just things that are very special… um, I do sound obsessive now… I remember there was one fan who was like that guy Victor Kiam, he had a bit of money and he liked us so much he wanted to buy shares in the record label (Duphonic). He was so into it, but I don’t think he really understood that we were such a tiny little label…”

It’s all well and good when people actually like your schtick, but Tim Gane is well aware that the music he makes has a tendency to polarise opinion. I tell him of an incident when I was – somewhat bafflingly - threatened with forcible ejection from a club for daring to include one of his songs in a DJ set, and he nods as if not especially surprised: “I remember one guy though, at a gig, he came up to me and asked ‘Are you Tim from Stereolab?’ and I say yeah, and he goes: “I think you’re really shit,’ and walked away. Which I thought was quite amusing…”

Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier have another, non-musical, legacy to cherish these days – their 3-year-old son Alex is staying with Tim’s parents for the Dublin date, but he’s rapidly become an old hand at backstage etiquette: “He can get a bit bored hanging around sometimes, but once we arrive somewhere new, he’s straight into the dressing room, he knows where all the chocolates are – we hide them up on top of the cupboards, but he gets a chair out, he knows they’re around somewhere…”

Stereolab have done so much touring at this stage of their career, surely they’ve come across places where the bona-fide chart music is a little closer to their idea of what pop music should sound like? Tim arches an eyebrow and drawls: “Hmmm… yes, I think if I went to the West Coast, about 1968…” and then laughs like a drain.

I ask if he was given the chance to live anywhere in the world, could he escape England (his lifelong home) easily?

“I don’t know, I grew up in London, I like London a lot, but I think it’s a bit of a boring country. But elsewhere… Paris is great, but it’s really difficult to work in, it’s quite cynical and restrictive – people just lock you down – which is one of the reasons why Laetitia got out of there. I suppose the UK is one of the few places left where a song can change your life, you can say that truthfully - because for some people it does and can, like for me, so I like places that are like that.”

As well as finding space for a gigantic record collection, Tim’s file of demo tapes that he gets handed by earnest fans is outgrowing its storage space:

“I just don’t have time to listen to them all. I do play them occasionally, but people hand us stuff, say ‘oh, write and tell me what you think, even if you think it’s crap’. But I’m not going to write to someone and say, ‘Thanks for your record, I think it’s crap’. I don’t have the time or the inclination to do so.”

Doesn’t he feel he might be missing out on the odd genius every once in a while? “About 2 or 3 years ago, we were doing a gig and Damien Gough, that Badly Drawn Boy guy, was DJ’ing and he leans over and says to me, ‘You missed your big chance – I sent you my first demo tape, and you could have signed me.’ Now I didn’t remember ever getting it, or if I did it didn’t make much of an impression, so I said, ‘Well, maybe we didn’t like it, maybe we didn’t want to sign you’.” In summary then, Stereolab: missed out on the Gough goldmine, but still happy as a dog with two mickeys.