Thong songs

Here’s Har Mar Superstar – maker of addictively amateurish homemade R’n’B, player of Witnness 2003 and compulsive remover of clothes – describing a typically hot-in-herre moment at the only European festival he has ever played to date: last year’s Reading.

“I did a set in, like, this press tent at the last minute,” he says. “The Hives were doing a DJ set, and they gave me half their time to do my own show. And it started raining, so all the press came in – everybody with a camera had to run into this one tent. So there was me, strutting around, gettin’ naked, gettin’ up in everyone’s faces, walking around on the bar… getting everyone’s lenses all sweaty… going, ‘Put me in your magazine. Ya bunch of fuckers.’”

For Harold Martin Tillman – Minnesota native and creator of You Can Feel Me, a debut album so hilariously sex-obsessed it makes R Kelly look like a leg-crossing virgin – the fusing of early-’90s Mr-Lover-Man sexathons with novelty hip hop, endearingly crap white-boy soul and stripping down to a gold-lamé thong is all in a day’s work. Contrary to what appearances might suggest however, he takes his music very seriously and is not interested in analysing why he delivers the funk au naturel.

“I don’t know,” he scoffs. “It’s like: whatever. I’m having fun. If I got up there in a turtleneck or some fucking shitty suit or whatever – if I was trying to be serious – why would anybody care? I wouldn’t go see that. I’d be like, ‘Who the fuck is this Pop Idol retard?’ You know what I mean?

“I like getting dressed up, and I like having suits made, and I like having designers, and I like, you know, making it fucking grandiose. And people can think what they want. I don’t give a fuck.”

Har Mar is currently readying for a residency at legendarily sex-tastic Ibizan club Manumission, as well as for his first headline tour, which will be a bigger affair altogether than his current one-man-a-thong-and-a-Minidisc setup. For one thing, there will be dancers.

“You hang out at a lot of strip clubs, and you see who can dance,” he says of his selection process. “I tend to get a lot of offers.”

Meanwhile, his next single – ‘EZ Pass’, released this month – is a (pornographic) love letter to New York.

“I love that place,” says Har Mar. “I have a ton of friends there. Everything’s open later, and I normally don’t go to sleep ’til 5 or 6 in the morning, so that caters to my schedule better. And,” Har Mar adds crucially, “there are, like, hotter, smarter girls there.”

Because the new wave of garage and electro has so comprehensively taken him to its bosom – Har Mar has opened for everyone who’s anyone, from The Strokes on down – he knows New York’s current title-holder in the Hot Smart Girl stakes, namely Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, very well.

“She’s awesome. She’s really into her art,” Har Mar reports. “Like, she takes everything pretty seriously, but she’s really fun. So she’s like, all defiant about her views, but then she’ll go onstage and dump a bottle of champagne into someone’s crotch. I like her a lot. We compare our stage clothes all the time. When I play shows with them I always have to get new stuff just to, like, keep up.

“Everyone in that band’s really fun, actually,” Har Mar says. “I end up hanging out with Nick [Zinner, Yeahs guitarist] a lot at those shows. Hanging out in the girls’ bathroom,” he remembers fondly. “Waiting to meet the perfect ladies.”

Witnness loo-users: your clothes-dissing, extra-large, sex-n-b Casanova awaits.