Hercules and Love Affair Interview
Hercules and Love Affair takes time out to talk to endclub.com.
Hercules and Love Affair is the musical project of New York based producer-come-DJ Andrew Butler. His self-titled debut album released on DFA has been widely lauded for its brilliant referencing of vintage disco and house, combined with great songwriting. A classy, passionate and emotionally engaging album, who’s guest-vocalists-slash-sometime-band-members include Mercury Award winner Antony Hegarty, who’s vocals on several of the album's tracks have been hugely well received. We tracked down Andrew whilst in London preparing for his DJ debut here at AKA, and chatted about the album, his time as a New York club promoter, the Hercules and Love Affair live show and more…
Endclub.com: Hercules and Love Affair is portrayed as quite a loose collaboration, with various vocalists involved over the course of the upcoming album. Is there creative input from those vocalists, or is everything your brainchild?
Hercules and Love Affair: No, no it’s a collaborative effort. I mean in terms of lyrical content and melodies, for the most part, I’ve written it all. But certain tracks are whole-hearted collaborations like ‘Time Will’ and ‘Raise Me Up’, Antony wrote the lyrics and the melody for those songs, and sung on them. On a couple of songs I would say “why don’t you write the melody, or you write the lyrics”, and the vocalists may have come up with vocal ideas for some tracks. I had to take into account what they were comfortable with, so sometimes if I’d written something they didn’t feel comfortable with we would adjust it…so in terms of creative input, most of the vocalists would personalize the vocal for sure, or they might come up with an idea for a harmony, for example.
Have you got any new vocalists lined up for the future?
Most of the vocalists I have worked with so far have been immediate people around me, I don’t really have a thing about pursuing singers, but I do have a couple of other vocalists that happen to be in my immediate circle. I am producing another band right now, and their singer is a tremendous vocalist, so at some point I hope to collaborate with her. They have pretty much a disco sound, but they’re jazz musicians first and foremost. The sound is kind of like jazzy afro beat disco with a really intense spooky soul singer at the front. They’re super-cool.
How do you think Antony Hegarty’s fans have responded to Hercules and Love Affair?
I think the initial response was a fair amount of shock. But at the same time I’ve always felt confident that listeners who appreciated his work would be able to see the sincerity in this body of work. I just hoped that they would be open-minded to a more up-tempo music that sometimes explores other emotional worlds. I get a lot of people saying to me “I love Antony’s voice so much, I think he’s done a great job”. I think a lot of them have now really warmed up to it.
You recorded the vocals for ‘Blind’ with Antony over four years ago – what was the incentive to dig them out and get H&LA up and running?
We wrote the song four years ago, that’s true. I asked him if he was interested in singing on a really synthetic, electronic texture; it was really done as an experiment. We went into the studio and recorded ‘Blind’, it was done more in the spirit of fun, I didn’t really have any ambitions at the time of putting out a record or anything, I just wanted to hear Antony’s voice against an electronic texture, and we achieved that goal. So I ended up spending the next year taking the vocal and remixing it, I did like ten remixes of it, over and over, and then we went into the studio again and we recorded ‘Time Will’. After a while he put out ‘I Am a Bird Now’, and he came back from England having had the success he had, and he said “put on that song we did a year ago” and I put it on and he was like “oh this is so great”. He was really proud of the vocal, and he asked what I was doing with it. I said “I just like hanging out with it you know?”, and it was at that point that I started hiring musicians to track parts to it, but I only had so much money so I had to do it in bits. So one month I’d hire a drummer and bring him into the studio, next month I’d hire a bassist and so on, so it took a long time. Finally I was in a place where I had a demo and a friend of mine Daniel Lang heard it and he was like “you should take this to DFA and see if they want to pick it up and get the ball rolling”. I never really approached the whole thing from a really aggressive ‘let’s put the music out’ kind of place, it was all done for much more personal reasons than that.
Did DFA love it immediately when they heard it then?
They loved it. James Murphy was in Australia at the time and I sent him a clip of it and he was super-excited about it. Then we sat down and had a great meeting and I got a good vibe from them right away.
So you’re playing a DJ set for us here on the 22nd March – what can we expect?
Generally you can expect classic, and to steal a term from Metro Area, ‘unclassic’, a lot of songs I grew up loving, but in general, music inspired by classic sounds or the original classic sounds themselves. I stick to a classic techno and classic house aesthetic with a really crazy disco component thrown in. I like really solid song structures, I’m interested more in playing songs rather than modern, minimal productions. That’s not to say I can’t get into a full instrumental track, but it has to have a certain dynamic and shape and a life that still deals with the basics of what makes a good song.
Are there any plans for a Hercules and Love Affair live show in the pipeline?
Totally. We’re kicking off in May! We have a big band, eight people in total, a drummer, a bassist, a little horn section…they’re all musicians who played with me on the album. Then we’ll have as many of the vocalists as can be there at any one time. Nomi has some prior engagements, Antony has an album coming out and is going to be hard to pin down, but pretty much everyone else is available regularly, and Nomi is going to spend almost the entire summer with us, which is great.
So the single ‘Blind’ has just come out – to great acclaim. You released remixes from Frankie Knuckles and Serge Santiago, why did you choose those two producers?
Well I’ve been paying attention to what Serge has been doing for a little while. I knew that he was a fan of taking old disco records and turning them into big room sounding tunes, so I selected him for that reason. Frankie, kind of speaks for himself really. I’m really happy with how both of them turned out.
Is it important for the remixes to provide alternative takes within the same genre, so disco and house? Or would you ever look for something really different?
I actually recently thought that I should get some drum & bass guys to do some remixing. I’m interested in spreading the love I guess. I’m into people taking things into different worlds. Also, a lot of drum & bass artists love garage stuff and disco sounds, people forget that sometimes.
Tell us about your work as a promoter – you ran a night with vocalist Kim Ann called Mad Clams at the Hole, and another night called Cazzo Pazzo, are they still going?
Mad Clams went for like three years in the East Village. It was over the top, very mixed – in terms of sexual preference – really crazy, debauched, in a really slimy bar. The sound system was pretty awful, but I played quality music every Friday night. It was a little insane, just the rowdiest bunch of kids you can imagine, it was a total dive. But it was New York, people were just happy to have a spot that didn’t have a $20 coat check, $10 drinks and all that pretentiousness. It was back to basics, I played a lot of classic house and disco, and some of my own stuff got played there.
Cazzo Pazzo was a disco night that I did where I would invite producers and DJs that I loved to come and play, but they were only allowed to play disco though, nothing newer than 1985 or whatever. We had some great people like Metro Area, Derrick Carter and John Selway come down, people that existed more in a house or techno world, but I’d ask them to play disco.
What’s the New York club scene like right now?
It’s getting a little healthier. There’s a spot or two opening up with good soundsystems, but it’s still pretty hard to find an unpretentious, quality dance spot. It’s changing, but it’s still New York, like London it’s a bit of a city for rich people, but it is getting better.
If you were a Greek God, what area of human life would you control?
The underworld. The parties are better down there!
If you were a hero, what would your downfall be?
My interest in romance.
Published: 17/03/2008
