After locking themselves away in a studio in a secret location for a week, Shy Child, Infadels, Zoot Woman, The Shortwave Set and Kids on Bridges will emerge with a reworking of The Human League’s defining album Dare.
And the intriguing results – the latest in the Jack Daniel’s JD Set series of historic musical collaborations – can be seen live at Dingwalls on May 5.
It’s a prospect Infadels’ Matt Gooderson can’t wait for. He said: “We’re going to one of my favourite venues. I saw a great band there in the 90s and wanted to play it ever since. We’re doing covers from one of the greatest electronic albums ever made.”
Coincidentally, well before JD stepped in, the band decided to emulate the sounds of The Human League when they moved away from indie and work on a much more electronic sound for their third album, out later this year.
Matt refused to pick up a guitar this time, instead playing keyboards.
He said: “I’ve a little folder on iTunes called, ‘what I want our music to sound like’, and in that there’s three Human League songs. It’s strange how it’s all fallen into place.
“I’m the most excited I’ve ever been covering a band. For the first time ever we’re covering songs in the way we put them together, because we write electronically. Something like Supergrass is more blues inspired. When you try to put blues and electronica together it doesn’t work very well. Moby just managed to pull it off with Play. It’s going to be a dream to cover something with that same sense of the band.”
The groups won’t be battling over songs, he said, adding: “We’ve already had the fight and I’m really happy because we got The Things That Dreams Are Made Of, one of my favourite. I really didn’t want Don’t You Want Me Baby. I thought we’d sound dangerously like a wedding band. Although it’s an absolutely cracking pop song I don’t associate it with The Human League in the way that they were a lot more avant garde. We went for quite obscure ones and won. It’s going to be certainly the most alternative and dangerous thing we’ve ever done.”
Matt has recently returned from Australia, where he went to recover from “creative burnout”.
“I’d been working on the album intensively for a long time and I just felt I couldn’t continue with anything anymore so I disappeared for a while on my own,” he said.
“I kind of wigged out. I decided in the jungle there was no way I was going to carry a mobile phone anymore so I cancelled it and was planning on never having it again only to return to London and find life incredibly difficult without one. I lasted about a month.
“I spent a lot of time admiring how different the plants and trees are and how dangerous everything is – basically everything in Australia bites you. It did me really good. Everyone in England should go on a national holiday for six weeks in mid-winter when it’s boiling hot in Australia – it means you can absolutely survive the intolerable cold here.”
Matt confessed that although he’s officially the band’s guitarist, he couldn’t play guitar before they formed: “I’m actually a keyboard player by trade – the guitar was actually a venture into the unknown when we started the band. I couldn’t play the guitar when we started.”
Looking back on the band’s inception in 2003, he said: “It sounds funny now because a lot of people have gone in the same direction, but at the time we really wanted to do something different, reinvent what people thought of the band. It came about because we felt people needed live music back in clubs. We were dominated by Coldplay, Travis and Stereophonics, so we got the Infadels together so people could dance – as well as every other band on the planet it seems, but music’s the better for it.
“When we first arrived as an electro-indie band we were laughed at and a source of much amusement. People asked, ‘why would you want to reinvent dance rock?’ I have to safely say we were right and everyone who said that was completely wrong because it has been the most interesting and progressive musical genre of the last decade.
“Now it’s completely common to see a band with no drummers, two singers banging away on tom toms and a keyboard player, and guitarist and that’s the norm and that’s fantastic.”
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