Car La Land - Neon Neon

“At SXSW we had Yo Majesty do two shows with us; we had Spank Rock do a show with us one night. We had Har Mar there for a few of the shows. When we got to London we had The Magic Numbers perform with us. So when we brought it onto the road we knew that we really had to limit it, otherwise there's no way that you could fund having all those people come with you. So we sort of put Har Mar on doing multi-tasking with us: Yo Majesty's part, Naeem's verses and his own verses on 'Trick for Treat' and just becoming a big part of the show. Really a member of the band, he's playing bass on a song, he's doing drum work, he's a really talented guy. He's a really good musician and I think a lot of people just look at him as a guy who sings pop music and takes his clothes off. He's a really talented songwriter and one of the best entertainers I know, that I've ever worked with, so it's amazing to have him on board with the project."

DeLorean took his show on the road, too. He was from Detroit, but also a global citizen, trying to set up a factory in Puerto Rico, eventually doing it in Northern Ireland. Was it deliberate to not make anything like music from DeLorean's hometown for the album? It has no Motown style soul, Detroit techno or MC5/ The Stooges rock...

"We didn't wanna stretch ourselves too thin with too many genres, so we tried to keep some consistencies, some sort of common denominator on the record. 'Dream Cars' is our song about Detroit and for us, we felt that was like a modernised version of the Detroit sound. It's a pretty bastardized take on it, it sounds pretty Motown-y. Big reverbs and and big backing vocals and it just kinda has a bit of a bounce, so that's about as Motown-y as I think we wanted to go on the record. Plus, you know there's a massive soul revival lately with everything, with Winehouse and with Mark Ronson. We didn't want it to look like we were trying to ride the coat-tails of someone else if we went in soulful way."

Neon Neon went in a mostly electro-pop way, with hip-hop diversions that were criticized as incongruous in some quarters. But surely bling-obsessed commercial hip-hop is the natural follow-on from '80's style glamour-pop? "I completely agree, going back to the common denominator, I think it's pretty much a dance party from beginning to end. It's like dance music for the kitchen or something, that you can do your house chores to and we had these really big, dancey sing-along songs. Electro-pop, or synth-pop tracks and we wanted something to be a bit more edgy, almost a palate-cleanser for that sugary pop that's on the first part of the record and so we really felt the hip-hop balanced that and made it interesting and not only that, you know we're telling the story of a man's life, so it's basically an audio film from birth until death and if you kept it linear and you kept one constant emotion throughout the record, if you translated that to a film, it'd probably be the most boring film you could imagine. It'd just be one emotion throughout the entire film."

Films are clearly a big part of the Neon Neon project, especially the songs described as "dream sequences", 'Alderaan' is Princess Leia's home planet in 'Star Wars'. In 'Michael Douglas', Gruff 'as' DeLorean see's a reflection in the "mirrored sunglasses" of the actor who plays greedy Gordon Gekko in 'Wall Street' (Incidently, Gekko is based on inside trader Ivan Boesky, who's from Detroit like DeLorean). Another artist inspired by cinema is Jay-Z, his 'American Gangster' album is based on the movie of the same name. The Jay-Z and Neon Neon albums came out at about the same time and have many similarites. Both are based on men with a meteoric rise in their chosen fields. Each album also features a love song dedicated to a place, Jay-Z made 'Hello Brooklyn 2.0'. Gruff provides a succinct sumnation of DeLorean's ambiguous motives with his double-meaning on 'Belfast'...
"Thought I could take you for a ride"

Is this an altruistic, 'let me take you for a ride in my car, darling'? DeLorean claimed in his autobiography (the Neon Neon bible) that equal numbers of Unionist's and Republican's were employed at every level in the factory hierarchy. Or was he motivated more by money and fame? 'I'm gonna take you for a ride, you're gonna make me loads of money'. Jay-Z has a more blatent entrepreneurial pride, rapping "CEO of the ROC" on 'Public Service Announcement (Interlude)' from 2003. It's similar to Gruff singing "I'm CEO" at the end of Neon Neon's 'Steel your girl'. With his hip-hop background, had Boom Bip given Gruff some Jay-Z, or any other rappers to listen to?

"Gruff is a massive hip-hop fan. We were constantly exchanging music and I did turn him onto some early rap and some stuff that he wasn't familiar with. During that time we were recording, Egyptian Lover was one, I don't know if you'd call him a rapper or not. He was kinda like the Los Angeles answer to Kraftwerk in the early eighties. He did really basic sex raps onto these basic Kraftwerk beats. Egyptian Lover was one that he (Gruff) just loved when I played it for him. More interestingly, he turned me onto some Welsh rap, which I didn't know existed."

There's a lot of good Welsh music that hasn't been widely heard, another example is Acid Casuals, whose Cian Ciaran also makes music with Gruff in Super Furry Animals. The opening track on Acid Casuals' album 'Omni' is called 'If I'm A Selt, You're A Sunt'. The first song on Boom Bip's 'Blue eyed in the red room' is called 'Cimple'. What's the story? The two must know each other from sharing a tour-bus in the past...
"We've bartered 's's' and 'c's', I've allowed him the use of the 's' and he has basically allowed me the use of the 'c'".
Seriously? Sorry, cerioucly? Corry, cerioucly?
"I didn't even know this."

So it was a case of great minds thinking alike. Hopefully the same men can keep juggling Gruff between Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon.