Interview: Anders of Alphabeat Fame

Alphabeat are all set to launch their second album ‘The Spell’ (due to hit shops and downloading type places on the 1st of March) and to keep them even busier this year they will be supporting the amazing and wonderful Lady Gaga  on the UK  leg of her tour, to me that sounds like the perfect night of pop. I was lucky enough to have a chat with the too beautiful for words Anders SG and here is the conversation beautifully transcribed for you.

How has your day been?

Good, we’ve just done an awards show this weekend, so we’ve got a couple of days off in Denmark -- that’s quite nice

How does it feel to be home?

Very good, I think my girlfriend would agree with me

Do you get to go home very often?

Yeah, the last year of course we’ve controlled our time ourselves and organised ourselves, coz we’ve made a record and promo. But when we go on tour and all that promo we probably get around one time every three months.

What can you tell us about the new single ‘Hole In My Heart’?

Hole In My Heart is actually one of the first songs that we finished, it very influenced by the 90s dance music and the piano driven dance music back then. And all that bit House-y, bit Soul-y, pop music around that time in the 90s and it’s just a basic love song like all of our other songs.

The video for it’s a bit different from what you normally do, you’re usually all together but this time poor Stine has been left alone to float about your body, did this video feel different to film?

Yeah it was very different. We wanted to do something we’ve never done before coz we’ve done lots of videos now  and you sort of have to keep it interesting, for your self as well becasue you have to get into it. We had two really nice guys from France To do it. When we were working they were just really creative guys and so we decided to just leave them to all the post-production and that and we’re really happy with it, its really different to all the other stuff we’ve done.

It looks really good. Is it inspired by the film Inner Space?

Yeah it does actually, its one of the influences. You can see why people think it’s a bit like that, all the ideas are kind of like that.

If you could be a spaceship in any celebrity’s body, who would it be?

I think it would be quite fun to be in Lady Gagas. I think she’d do some dodgy things a bit. You can really imagine, if you were able to control it I don’t think you would be able to……to make her act a bit more normal.

Have you actually met Lady Gaga now?

Oh no, never. Not yet, so yeah really looking forward to it

I think I would be disappointed to meet her coz like you said shes so weird that she must be quite normal in real life

The outfit is of course something that triggered for me. I’m sure that she is 100% aware what she does is just to make awareness of her, as a popstar and all that. All of the small things she does is just to get some publicity I guess. So I’m almost perfectly sure shes perfectly normal just like anyone else.

You albums due out on the 1^st March here, tell us about it.

The general idea of it was we just wanted to leave behind the whole band sound and just program everything. Because we’ve always done pop music but we’ve always made it ourselves in the studio. Suddenly we started to work a lot more with computers and thats just really a whole new world for us – to produce music on a computer rather than being on guitars and playing keyboards and doing it live in the studio, and I think that’s what triggered the whole dance thing. We’ve always wanted to do songs that make people dance so thought why not try and do some dance music. That area in dance music there’s not a lot of really good songs, its all about a vibe or just one hook that gets repeated a lot so we thought that if we had some really good songs that would be something really quite interesting.

Was producing this album different to producing ‘This is Alphabeat?’

Yeah. Like the total opposite of what we’ve done before because the first album was written primarily by our guitarist and he would sort of have some idea for on a guitar and we would start rehearsing the song, it would lead to a song and eventually when we had enough songs, go into a studio and recorded in a month or two months – the whole record.

And this time around its the exact opposite because we’ve been in a studio for – I think we were in our own studio for 8 months and in that while we just wrote everything and produced everything and it was just relaxing, there wasn’t a lot of pressure if you were in a studio, and you rented that studio and you had to do 7-11 songs in one or two months and they have to be done, everything has to be done. Here we could just do whatever we wanted and the rest was over our own time. And that was really really cool but then again we had to learn to play of the songs afterwards. We spent four weeks, we played them before and then we recorded them – that’s kind of the exact opposite and its been challenging and very fun and we had to think it fun to do this.

Do you think the change in record label had anything to do with producing the two albums?

Yeah. At Polydor we could just do what we wanted to do and the thing about getting our own studio and just messing about in the studio for 8 months and not really knowing what we’re doing down there, I think it would happen a bit more stricter, a bit more restrained at EMI. I think we’ve had a lot of creative space at Polydor and I don’t know if we would have got that if we’d been with EMI. And its really cool now that we’ve sort of changed our sound and moved on to the label and all the people at Polydor think its their sound not EMI’s sound. We can start all over again

As you said you can start all over again, you’ve got a new sound, a new label and you’ve had a bit of a makeover. What is the inspiration behind the new look?

I think when we ended the tours and everything we looked at pictures and everything that we’ve done in that year and I think we just decided everyone was so messy. And if nothing is really structurised in the clothing then its just very confusing to look at so we just started to talk about how we could make us a lot more easy to look at – you know, just a lot more pop as well, pop is what we do so we just wanted everything to be a bit more sharp.

The new album, it seems to be a lot about heartbreak and love, were you all going through a hard time in your relationships whilst making ‘The Spell’?

No we weren’t – well maybe we were coz we were locked away in a basement. We always try do find  the chords and when we do love songs use big words and something that makes it sound cool. It’s just the more dramatic it sounds the more cool it is so I guess that’s why it sounds like that. We don’t really think that much about if it’s a heartbreaking song or a more positive love song.

Whats your favourite track on the new album?

Good question, I think actually that must be DJ song, which is going to be the single after Hole in my Heart coz like the first three songs we did were Hole in my Heart, DJ and The Spell and those songs had been with us a long time so yeah I really like that song.

Your albums called ‘The Spell’. How did you come up with the name?

We thought it was a kind of a funny thing because we’d know people would think ‘this is a bit cheesey’ but there’s Alphabeat as in Alphabet so yeah that was the thought.

You have been announced as support act for Lady Gaga, how will your set change from what did during the more intimate Wonky Pop Tour?

We haven’t really talk about it. I think we’re just gonna do what we do and not at all think about trying to compete with Lady Gaga. We can’t really, we don’t have to because we both do pop music we do something completely different to what she does so I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. I think we’re just going to jump in and see what happens.

Do you have plans for your own UK headline tour?

Because at the moment we are so busy we are trying to work out if we can do the European leg of the Gaga tour as well so we don’t know if we have the time to do our own tour after all the festivals in the summer.

And those festivals would be?

It’s not confirmed yet – I can’t say anything yet, but the headline tours won’t be til after Spring

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