Emotions In Dance: Hercules And Love Affair

But Hegarty is just one of Butler’s collaborator’s. The little known singer Nomi (male), and the acid-house DJ and singer Kim Ann (female) contribute heavily. And everyone involved in the album – including the producer, DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy – are pals. Butler: “It’s a collective endeavour to make fun dance music. When I first started writing I would write tracks and we would push one or other of our friends up against the microphone and we would get them to sing poems on the spot. That was maybe the prototype for what exists now.

“I became friends with Anthony maybe seven or eight years ago. He was all: ‘I’m a singer’, really casually. And I heard his album and was like” ‘Oh right, he’s just a singer’. He was so humbly conveying what his passion was, and we just bonded over shared musical interests

“He was there at the inception of H&LA. And it’s beautiful for me to realise my songs with the assistance of my friends.”

Butler thinks the four of them do a pretty good job of bridging the gap between dance music as fun but sounding like a computer. And dance music with an emotive and personal touch, preferably from a female – or at least female-like – source. “I’m happy with the feminine voice that exists on my record. I’m proud of it, and I really sought that out on the record, I wanted people to feel that dance music could be really listenable and you could put it on and enjoy and you didn’t need to be a high on drugs or be in a proper nightclub to be moved by it or get it.

“It’s an extra level, it’s a very personal component to my album and a real emotional record.”

The soul on the record has a lot to do with where he’s coming from musically. The likes of Arthur Russell, Frankie Knuckles, Todd Terry: people able to inject high levels of personable verve into their music. But the delicate touch and soft edge of the music comes from somewhere else. The band name is a reference to a Greek myth where the strongest man on earth – Hercules – loses his beloved.  Butler is interested “in the idea of the strongest man being at his most vulnerable and the contradiction in that and the beauty in that.”

But his interest in Greek mythology stemmed from an obsession with his “patron godess” Athena. “As a kid I was a big mummy’s boy and I sort of likened her to my mother because she was a strong woman, a goddess of justice and war. But a just war, not just chaotic war: a woman of strategic war. The lyrics [in the song ‘Athena’] are about giving us a reason to fight for. It’s a feminist song. It’s basically a song about my mum.”

But I don’t want to leave you thinking that Butler and Hercules and Love Affair are some kind of girl power band. They are not, at all. And his appreciation of luscious sounds, beat build-up-drop-downs, synths, classic hooks, moments of self-control and originality are expert. Though it his appreciation of what a feminine voice brings to the record that is key to its success.

There’s sensitivity in his work that I hadn’t even noticed was missing in other dance music. But now I do, and it hurts.

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