THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

You know you’ve made an impact on the popular consciousness when political opportunists start singing your tune. Last year, Nicholas Sarkozy’s UMP party co-opted MGMT’s quirky anthem ‘Kids’ for use at a party conference and in two online videos. The issue became a bit of a reddener for Sarkozy (an advocate of stricter intellectual property laws), when it transpired that the party had used the song without permission. The UMP offered MGMT symbolic compensation in the form of a euro, which the Brooklyn duo rejected as an insult. The matter was finally settled in May, by which time Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden were deep into work on their forthcoming second album Congratulations.

“I don’t wanna really point any fingers or anything, says Ben, “I’m sure it was just a mistake. But yeah, the symbolic compensation of a euro was a little bit weird.”
It was, one must admit, very French.
“The main thing that pissed us off about it was that they were trying to pass anti-piracy legislation and then illegally using our music as propaganda, which was kind of hypocritical. We don’t want our music to be used to support causes we don’t agree with, that was the main issue.”
From the benefit of a couple of months’ hindsight, Ben can better appreciate the rather surreal nature of the whole controversy.
“Especially that song,” he reflects, “because the music was written... I think I was drunk at three in the morning, messing around, and I came up with the music, and Andrew wrote the lyrics and the melody the day that we were performing it for the first time, just totally on the spot. So to have that be a song that people are going crazy about is kinda weird. It’s hard to imagine ever reproducing that process.”
But reproduce it they must. To that end, MGMT repaired to Malibu to craft their second album in an environment that offered a degree of immunity from industry pressures or outside interference.
“I think that’s something that comes to us naturally,” Ben says with a laugh. “We’re trying not to really think of the pressure of following up our first album or anything like that, we’re just making music that makes us happy. We have our happy place that we go to and can forget that any of this is happening!”
He makes the band’s admittedly meteoric rise to prominence sound positively traumatic.
“Yeah, I think we were pretty traumatised by it! We never set out to be popular or influential or anything, and it’s not something we ever learned how to deal with. I don’t think we have to deal with it.”
So it seems crucial that MGMT preserve the sense of child-like innocence and experimentation that made their Dave Fridmann-produced debut Oracular Spectacular such a fascinatingly all-over-the-place record. Many folk regarded it as a sort of modern-day acid rock artifact a la Sgt Pepper’s or Satanic Majesties, with a bit of Lipsian weirdness and downtown white-boy disco thrown in for flavour. This listener thought it was all about childhood.
“I feel that way about it too,” Ben agrees. “A lot of people, the first question they ask is, ‘What drugs were you on when you were recording this album?’ I don’t even know if I could record an album on drugs. I don’t know if I could focus that well.”
My point is, childhood is exactly like being on drugs.
“Yeah, every time I hang out with a really young kid it’s like they’re tripping all the time. Their senses are totally heightened and they’re noticing little things. I saw this kid the other day and he kept just pointing out little spots on a wall, totally fascinated with this dirt or something, and his mother’s kind of dragging him along, and he just wants to stop and play with these spots of dirt. Pretty interesting.”
So what’s the progress report on the new material?
“We’ve maybe 90% of the music written and mostly recorded, we’re still working on lyrics and vocal ideas for everything, but we’re starting to get more of an idea of how it’s all gonna fit together. I think we’re feeling pretty confident – we’re just excited to be going in a new direction musically and to have some new songs to play live.
“It’s been a real fun recording environment. We’ve been living in a house with the band and recording whenever we feel like it, no set schedule or anything. We did some recording in upstate New York and then we were out in Malibu for a couple of months and now we’re building a studio in Brooklyn where we’re going to be a doing a lot of editing and recording.”
Be careful with that building-your-own-studio business. It sank My Bloody Valentine.
“Yeah, I would not be surprised if something like that happened to us and this album just never comes out!”
Speaking of ecstasy-inducing guitar drones, this time out MGMT are working with Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, ex- of Spacemen 3.
“We met him at a show in London and got to play on stage with him, and we just started sending emails back and forth and sending him songs that we were working on,” Ben explains. “And slowly we realised that we really wanted him to work on the album with us, and he started getting excited about it. We weren’t really sure what kind of collaboration it was gonna be, or what we would do. But he came out while we were recording and we’ve become really good friends. He has amazing ideas and he’s been really good at helping us figure out what’s really important.”
And what is really important?
“Really just getting the songs themselves as good as they can be. It’s easy to lose track. He’s played us a lot of really simple music. There’s enough going on to keep your attention, but when you really listen to it, there aren’t that many things happening. It’s really elegant. And we’re hopefully going for something like that this time around, not having two hundred things all happening at once.”
Indeed, one thing that surprises the uninitiated on first hearing Spacemen 3, or antecedents like Suicide and the Velvets, is the simplicity of the music. Despite all the hipster trappings, these are not difficult records.
“I absolutely agree with that. When I first heard Spacemen 3 it took me a little while to realise how amazing the music was. Yes, at first it sounds really simple, and if you’re not listening for certain things you can skip over them. Pete’s approach to making music is really amazing. We’ve been learning a lot from him.
“We’re actually going to have Dave (Fridmann) mix the album, we’ll work with him again in the fall hopefully. Dave’s approach is much more... I dunno, I’m totally gonna misrespresent myself if I try to describe it, but I think Dave and Pete complement each other really well, we’re glad to have both of them.”
Fridmann strikes me as more of an astrophysicist.
“Yeah, it’s cool watching Dave, he’s got a really scientific approach, he knows exactly what he’s doing and works really quickly. Working with Pete was fun because we’d be listening to something and all of a sudden he’d just take some crazy effect and put it over the whole mix and turn it up really loud.”
Over the last two years MGMT have played just about every major festival in the western world, as well as opening for Radiohead and Beck. Oracular Spectacular was essentially a studio creation, so Ben admits the touring has had a definite impact on the new material.
“I think so,” he avers, “compared to the first album where we did the whole thing with the two of us, not having any idea of how we were gonna do it live. Now we really do feel like the people we’re playing with are part of the character of the band, and we’ve been writing this album constantly thinking about how it’s gonna be played live and how to involve the other musicians. Our approach has definitely changed a lot. We’re super excited to play Electric Picnic, we’ve heard a lot of good things about it.”
Any new tunes in the set?
“We’ve got three new songs right now that we’ve been playing live, and hopefully more by then. We’re trying to do as much new stuff as possible. We’re getting pretty tired of playing the same songs from the album over and over again. We still like them, but we need a break.”