The Retro-Futurist Soul Disco: Shmoo

Shmoo are a 5 piece electronic who have converged on Manchester from all over this green unpleasant land to craft some of the finest retro-futurist, outer space soul disco you couldn’t create in your dreams- fine, funky, funny and furious, they are one hell of an awesome spectacle live and something a little out of the ordinary in the world of circuits, wires and flyers. We gather (appropriately enough) in a bar called to Space and 3 of the band are present this evening- brothers Dave and Neil (electronics, gadgets, moog, keyboards) and singer Rowena. The ludicrously tight and funky groove machine of bass player Harry and drummer Andy are absent, undoubtedly working on new ways to make us twist and contort our bodies in the best possible taste.

As these things go, we push Shmoo for a bit of biography and Rowena takes up the tale. “Basically 4 of us went to Salford University, 3 did music degrees, I did media and Dave is Neil’s brother so there was that obvious connection.”
Neil: “The best thing about the music degree is about meeting other good musicians to be honest and it’s almost like throwing a load of musicians in to a pot and then you kind of find out who’s on your wavelength.”
2 years were spent refining the sound with an intense period of writing…
Neil: “This was like pre-production for us, getting stuff finished before we went gigging…”
Rowena: “…and his was mostly down to the nature of the music and the complexity of working with all these synths and samples and the electronic elements.”

Shmoo’s influences are more diverse than the usual comparisons that occur when people write about their music, a lazy list that reveals the narrower experiences of the journalist rather than the group: Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Air and Blondie (for Rowena). Neil remarks, “Goldfrapp are more of a modern day comparison rather than a true influence. When we first heard them we were kind of relieved, thinking oh wow there’s someone else out there doing what we’re doing.”
Dave: “It was a real buzz seeing them do it live.”

This impression with live music is a telling one. Their debut single (check the singles section) is a super-fine concoction but this is a band that cares about its physical presence and a band that can really kick it live. Neil begins “I think that it’s the live element that really makes us stand out from the crowd. Most electronica bands and then you hear the music its just usually one guy with a laptop and its not that we don’t respect that but its just not….
Dave: “Fair enough, a lot of work has gone into that music but it just doesn’t have the impact. I think the thing- well, we wanted to be a live band- there’s something about the energy and that’s one thing we definitely play off, the energy, and we all play off each other.”
Finding like-minds and audiences on a still electro-phobic live circuit has proved to be a bind though.
Dave: “There is a lack of bands similar to us doing the live electronica thing and since we’ve been gigging, when we first started off we got put with a lot of indie bands cos there’s few and far between.”
Rowena: “It has such an impact- we get so lost in it - once we get going- we usually start with the same song  ‘One on One’ and as soon as the hard beat kicks in- we’re gone- jumping and stomping and shaking our heads.” She continues, “We’re not trying to create any particular kind of atmosphere I think we’re just naturally… What happens on stage is what the music creates within us.”