Louis XIV - Sex Sells!

  Abandoned on the floor of Atlantic Records’ squeaky-clean headquarters, and utterly incongruous in liberal Kensington, is a copy of Wednesday’s Daily Mail. The latest catastrophe to hit the upstanding citizens of the right-thinking world is encased in a pink box and entitled: “Why married women aren’t having sex”. It would be churlish to suggest this might be due to spending their time worrying about immigrants giving Chlamydia to orphaned squirrels, so it’s fortunate that we have consummate gentleman and author of the wittiest sex lyrics since Bowie, Jason Hill, on hand to offer advice.   “If you’re married I think you shouldn’t be afraid to say ‘Look, I’d like you to do this’,” says Hill, slightly bewildered by the Mail worrying about marital sex and the government on the same page. “People want to say certain things or live out - I guess they become fantasies - but the problem is there becomes a darkness to all these fantasies when they’re not lived out.”

Hill, guitarist Brian Karscig - getting a vitamin shot to cure a tour-caused partying illness - and drummer Mark Maigaard - getting to grips with Marlboro Lights and Diet Coke on the sofa - have recorded and played together for over two years. Their first songs were taped in a Parisian basement, and subsequently released on Hill’s Pineapple label where they attracted attention for their jaunty tunes that put a rocket under the idea of sex in music. Bassist James Armbrust joined when Hill and Karscig got fed up with swapping instruments, and the band’s louchely amused sound soon lead to stints supporting Hot Hot Heat and The Futureheads, as well as catching festival organisers’ eyes while touring with their friends, The Killers.

After a self-released EP and album, The Killers connection got Louis exposed to bigger audiences – Jason and Mark reflect on the weirdness of playing to audiences of between 3,000 and 16,000 people with The Killers and then 200 at their own gigs. The partnership has spawned a song which Hill describes as “our ‘Life On Mars’”, recorded on the last night of the tour in a make-shift studio on a bus. “Brandon leaves these little messages on my phone with bits of the song or lyrics and it’s awesome,” Hill enthuses, going as misty-eyed as a man in a waistcoat can. “We were thinking about getting Tony Visconti to write a little arrangement on it.”

You have to understand that, unlike Brandon and his Vegas-looking band, Louis are a strange prospect to be waving the flag for sex. 24 passed them a while back, so the sexiness comes through sound rather than becoming some teenager’s fad. Mark is polite and funny as well as kohled and bleached, while Jason – resplendent in said waistcoat and sideburns – looks more like a Victorian shopkeeper than a sexual revolutionary. Yet this is very much revolutionary stuff. Louis XIV are in a minority of non-rap groups to bring a proper frisson of sex into their lyrics (although Hill does claim that their music is, in many ways, “oddly enough, very similar to rap music and hip-hop.” Right you are.).

Still, the attitude is vastly different. You’ll get hot girls in Louis videos, but they’ll be players rather than backing dancers. The sexual content and lazily infectious tunes often result in comparisons with AC/DC, but the band’s attitude towards sex shows that today’s libertine is turned on just as much by respect and morals as by, well, sex.   “If people were having great sex all the time I doubt they’d be getting into fights or wars,” says Hill, with the mild bafflement of someone to whom lack of said activity has probably never been an issue. “That doesn’t mean everyone should go out and **** each other - I’m certainly not that way, none of us are. We (the band) are gentlemen in all cases, we really are, and I think that women should be women, they shouldn’t necessarily screw everything.” Window shopping is still very much an option though, as shown on the marvellous ‘Finding Out True Love Is Blind’ which involves Hill listing an assortment of desired girls in a reckless purr. It seems he’s wide-eyed and really not that picky: all girls, it seems have a mojo. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Bridget Jones…

The endearingly appreciative way that Louis XIV detail sex as a jaunt has got them a large number of female fans, but it seems they can take it too far. Legendary feminist pin-ups Suicide Girls made an accompanying video to album track ‘Paper Doll’, which Hill wrote after listening to his girlfriend talk nonsense while drunk. “I’m very glad they did it but it was too blatant,” he says, regretfully. “Paper Doll’s very sly, very playful, and they made it a bit too pornographic.” This from a man who, in ‘Pledge of Allegiance’, wrote the immortal line: “Milkshake, milkshake, I love to feel y’sweat/ We don’t need to go to the pool if you want me to make you wet.” “It’s the girls favourite, across the board actually,” Hill explains half-defensively. “There’s nothing sinister about it.”   This was something clearly lost on certain member states of the US when, earlier this year, Louis XIV were banned from playing a scheduled concert in Alabama. The PTA (Parent Teacher Association for those who never read Sweet Valley High) went up in arms about the band’s content and attitude, declaring them to be a corrupting influence. “We didn’t even get a chance to find out what happened,” says Hill, “Although according to what we heard, PTA meetings. We were booked for months and then someone decided to listen to the record or watch a video or something.”

Understandably for a band carrying the flag for songs about sex in a culture where it has been devalued and sanitised for public consumption, the band have a slightly martyred-glance-skyward attitude to people who cast them as raincoat-wearing perverts. “I think that was lost on the people in Alabama,” says Hill wryly. “Seriously, I don’t think they listened to the album properly because to me it’s about conversation. The women are not pushovers in any of the songs. They’re very lovable but they’re giving me shit! There was a comment (about ‘Pledge of Allegiance’) where somebody wrote, ‘This song is about possibly unprotected sex’. I just loved that, ‘possibly’ unprotected sex!” He sighs in mock exasperation. “Well, possibly protected too.”