The Megabomb Is Back - Tiga

In an age of instant Internet gratification, it’s hard to believe that times used to be tough for pop fans. Before broadband afforded us access to a thousand blogs continually updating us in real-time with the progress of Madonna’s latest raid on the orphanages of Africa, any self-respecting music fan would actually have to leave their comfy bedrooms and attend the real world once a week for their fix of pop gossip.

The music press used to look so attractive back then. You’d eye the pages with glee, ready for them to reveal their secrets – Thurston Moore’s noise-core picks; Morrissey’s latest rant – and even though some of the trivia could be pretty droll it felt you were a little closer to your heroes as a result. All that wonder and intrigue in the days in between left you craving those juicy little facts; snippets of the lives of people so far away from your world. And pop stars used to seem bigger and more mysterious for it.

Yet here we are, two thousand and nine, the Perez Hilton generation, suckling on the Tweets of a popstar’s every move and living the digital equivalent of the old upper classes: clicking our fingers and demanding our mp3 snacks are fetched immediately by our Hype Machine and Last.fm butlers. It may be wonderful having your culture at your every beck and call but don’t your pop icons lose some of their mystery when they arrive in .rar format, freshly leaked a month ahead of their release date, rather than wrapped up in a gatefold sleeve after running to Woolworths after school?

So how do you appear as fresh and relevant in 2009 yet still convey that crucial sense of mystique? Well, if you’re Tiga you passionately embrace all the possibilities of Web 2.0 but ensure they work with, not against you. Three years after letting his killer debut, Sexor, slip out and become a word-of mouth electro classic, Tiga has returned with Ciao – and practically set pulses racing by inviting the likes of Soulwax and James Murphy along for the ride. Interestingly, he’s thrown away the rule book of deploying advance promos and seeing 15 months of hard work end up on a torrent site months before its release, instead issuing top-secret directions to the wonderful “Tiga Introduces..” podcast, where he guides the listener through each intoxicating track in his own idiosyncratic way.

Subverting the now so deliciously is classic Tiga. It’s a surprise then that none of this carefully-executed approach has slipped into his music. “I don't think there's anything about Ciao I made as a reaction [to the times],” states Tiga as he finishes a well-earned cinnamon bun after a long day of promotion in London. "You know, I kinda make the music I like at the time. But the strategies surrounding Ciao, I think how people deal with music now and how you release your music, I mean everything that goes into and around it has changed a lot.

“When Sexor came out I think the idea of free file sharing and internet promotion was all a big fringe. I mean everyone knew it was growing but it was still a little theoretical and now it's reversed. Now it's the dominant force and it has to be really factored in. And it's also quite exciting, all the promotion now, as everything about Sexor was either word of mouth or traditional distribution. I never really benefitted from Myspace or Facebook or anything, so now it's quite exciting to see how things go with those new things.”

When even pop behemoths like U2 have recently suffered their hard work leaking ahead of its release, Tiga’s stubborn strategy should be admired – weeks from its revealing and the Internet remains a strict Ciao-free zone. And all the better for it. The follow-up to Sexor is a tantalising dip into the world of Tiga. Part pulsating, glamorous electro – full of gorgeous, preening funk and glitz – and part full-on club masterpiece, it’s a ready made dance classic that will be all the better for the world to discover collectively. What’s more it perfectly conveys the fascinating two sides of Tiga – and reveals him as the perfect enigma for our times.

He is the electro wonderboy after all, the electroclash pin-up that took that genre to its peak with the success of ‘Sunglasses at Night’ and his luscious re-work of Nelly’s ‘Hot in Here’, before riding out its inevitable implosion, releasing Sexor and becoming the super-hot DJ he is today. But while the self-confessed “avid shopper” cuts an ever so dashing figure in photos and videos, he knowingly contradicts the glamour by hiding behind an unassuming baseball cap while delivering his acclaimed DJ sets. And while he swoons over “shoes, hair and gloves” on new single ‘Shoes’, he’ll Twitter with impressive football knowledge on Liverpool’s Champions League game with Real Madrid.