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| Date |
City |
Venue |
| Sat 9/13/08 |
Morrison, CO |
Monolith Festival |
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"The
average musician who sits down and decides to write a song,"
says Pop Levi, with absolute certainty, "gets out their
guitar, and then goes into a studio to record it, well, there's
something dead about all that. It's why music is the state it's
in. And everyone knows it." He pauses to let his message
sink in. "But there's another way of looking at that. You
study what you're doing to the point of obsession, cutting and
pasting ideas, and reducing things to mathematics, stealing
magick from Marvin Gaye as well as Michael Jackson. There is
magick afoot. Someone like Little Richard dressed in mirrors
and sequins on stage - that definitely involves magick. Hendrix
was heavy into magick, The Beatles, Dylan, Syd Barrett. I've
always been into these ways, you know."
This idea of magick should be familiar to all music obsessives
- call it alchemy, that ability to turn technique into gold,
the whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts equation. Pop Levi,
born in London but for years a gypsy of no fixed background,
is clearly not about to celebrate the mundane or the established
order. His transcendental debut album 'The Return To Form Black
Magick Party' may be named after a ceremonial gathering that
Pop threw in Liverpool, but it's also a state of mind, a place
of worship, a point of view. Besides, "I like the idea
of making your first album a 'return to form' he explains. "To
me, it's more about the poetry of it. It's an album that sounds
like the title."
The poetry, then, is what matters, not the incidentals. Mr Levi
was lucky enough to be born with 'Pop' as his middle name, but
what's more important is that the words Pop and Levi epitomise
the man - a combination of the instant and the traditional,
a sound both glisteningly modern and yet rooted in classicism.
So much about Pop appears to be a magickal twist of opposites.
His sound is brittle and lush; it swishes but it's precise;
it's soulful and pyrotechnic; it struts and seduces. You might
recognise some of Pop's heroes but you won't have heard someone
like Pop before. If we're being specific, there is a line that
joins Eddie Cochran to Prince and The White Stripes and Pop
Levi is the newest addition to that line. But that's just one
view of what Pop himself calls "a truly bizarre whirlwind."
(Prepare to be swept up and away!).
"One thing you can't afford to do," he vouches, "is
take to heart other people's descriptions of your music. One
thing that turned me on to Dylan was hearing his famous Swedish
interviews in '66, where he said he didn't hear his music at
all like folk music; he was hearing mathematics, and love songs.
That really hit a spot for me. My music is Future Pop. It sounds
like true jazz to me - it's more about the attitude, more the
free thinking." He takes a moment to summarise. "This
record doesn't sound like an empty commercial venture, does
it?!"
Conceived in one of the capital's hospitals by a Jewish doctor
and a Gentile nurse, his childhood was steeped in music. He
studied piano at three, joined a gospel choir at seven, started
collecting records at nine and wrote his first song that same
year: a 12 bar creation 'Through The Window Of My Life' that
came right out of the ether.
In the 90s, he moved to Liverpool, lived on the breadline and
took his chances. After forming a commune with new pals Snap
Ant and Karl Webb, the trio conceived Super Numeri, whose two
albums for Ninja Tune, 'Great Aviaries' (2003) and 'The Welcome
Table' (2005), showcased arguably the first band to truly contemporise
the cyclical-groove mechanics of Can with the amorphous fluidity
of jazz. Post-Rock never sounded this free-thinking, and if
you doubt that, then head for 'The Welcome Table's 25-minute
opener 'The First League Of Angels'.
"We were trying to make something that was truly astral",
Pop recalls. "With my own album, I wanted to make astral
pop music. To me, it's the same thing."
In between Super Numeri opuses, Pop's solo quest began with
two 7" singles, 'Rude Kinda Love' and the Christmas single
'Reindeer In My Heart', both for Danny Hunt's Invicta Hi-Fi
label. Hunt, a good friend of Pop's and one of the male members
of the electro-pop-orientated Ladytron, had invited him to join
the band on bass guitar, so during 2003 and 2004, Pop found
himself on Ladytron's world tour and contributing to their third
album 'Witching Hour'.
But having served an apprenticeship - including performing in
a Nazi fallout bunker and been rendered penniless, topless and
lost in Bulgaria - Pop knew he must focus on himself. He'd tried
to release an album (with the working title 'Foxwatch') in 2004,
but no matter; it wasn't the right time - and nor the right
place. He was to find that shortly after.
"I went to Los Angeles with Ladytron, and within a minute
of waking up there, I wanted to live there. It had blue skies,
palm trees, and they've made some serious records here. There's
magick in LA, it truly is the land of make-believe. And it was
a challenge."
Pop returned to Liverpool, rounded up his current four piece
band and then shipped them out to LA, too, where they have been
road-tested and whipped into the most dynamic live outfit, super-tight
and flexing like a coiled animal, right from the opening song,
a hypnotic, prolonged staccato groove. And, in front of them,
Pop, eyes closed, fingernails painted, veins bulging, legs duckwalking
as he peels off notes like a cross between Hendrix, Bolan and
Jack White. It's great theatre, but a great rush of adrenalin,
too.
Pop's road band, plus a few guests, helped record Pop's first
EP, 'Blue Honey', released by Counter Records in September 2006
- the true beginning of this astral saga, and also 'The Return
To Form Black Magick Party', though Pop laid down great chunks
of it single-handedly.
Pop produced the album too, but co-mixed it with Devendra Banhart's
producer Thom Monahan, in Sacramento, California. As befits
an album that is imbibed with Delta blues, doo-wop, garage pop
and Laurel Canyon excess, the studio was "right next to
the Union Pacific Railroad, the railroad upon which America
was built!". This is a new start for Pop, but also Ninja
Tune, who have signed Pop to a long-term deal and created a
brand new offshoot label, Counter Records, especially for him.
As for that album; it rocks right out of the gates with 'Sugar
Assault Me Now' - also the new single - a call-to-arms, a rude-kinda-love
song. Pop then simmers through 'Blue Honey', goes electric-sweet
with the jitterbugging 'Pick-Me-Up Uppercut', mellower and dreamy
with 'Skip Ghetto' and 'Flirting', then goes miasmic and spiritual
with 'See My Lord' before exiting on the orchestra-drenched
flight 'From The Day That You Were Born', a hymn to Pop's unconceived
daughter "and the best song I've ever written."
"Is there a theme to the lyrics?" he ponders. "Well,
they're definitely all love songs. But then again, I don't know
if there has ever been a song that isn't a love song. But 'See
My Lord' is a very important track to me. I wrote and played
the song at the same time and that is exactly what you hear.
I've only ever played it that one time and I believe that it's
someone else's song - it's actually the least amount of me in
that song, and thus the most amount of me, if you see what I
mean. I'm very into the idea of channelling music. I don't like
too much of myself in my music. I don't think of my songs as
really me. JG Ballard once said that he regarded his novel 'Crash'
as his "internal autobiography", and I definitely
feel like that about my music. The lyrics aren't about reality,
yet they are definitely all about experience."
So let's not bother with the concept of a message but more the
method. "I use a technique called scrying, which was invented
by the magickian Dr John Dee in the Victorian era. He'd gaze
through cracked glass or saucers of water for a huge amount
of time, until things were suggested to him. I use my own variation
of scrying to write all my lyrics. I'm the vessel. The conduit.
I'm not into presenting some bullshit-real-life thing, about
going to score, or life on the streets. I want something that's
some sort of astral autobiography. I hope that that might turn
people on."
What should turn people on is the idea that Pop Levi is not
like any other. "Too much music," he concludes, "is
too much fashion for me. It suggests you're into what's in and
what's out. Things that are truly in are forever in. If I make
a good sandwich, you wouldn't say 'that's retro,' you'd say
'that's a good sandwich.' Some things have an innate never-ending
quality that's always there. That's why people will be buying
T-shirts with John Lennon's face on it long after Justin Timberlake."
Amen. |
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Blue
Honey
Counter Records / NinjaTune
2006 |
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