![]() "I think the lineage of bands that we're following right now is more the 80s English underground bands that were influenced by 60s psychedelic rock," says Goldwasser, before reeling off a list of names that starts with Felt, takes in the Monochrome Set and the Cleaners from Venus and ends with the Deep Freeze Mice, Leicester's premier exponents of lo-fi psychedelia during the Thatcher years. ![]() It's not that Congratulations is wildly uncommercial in the way that, say Merzbow's 50 CD box set of screaming noise was, merely that it's co-produced by former Spacemen 3 frontman Sonic Boom – not, it has to be said, the first name that springs to mind when you're looking for someone with the Top40-friendly production touch – and doesn't really sound anything like their debut, or indeed anything that's ever come within sniffing distance of the charts. Indeed, a naysayer might suggest that VanWyngarden and Goldwasser make the most of their current surroundings, room-service smorgasbord and all, because on the evidence of Oracular Spectacular's follow-up, Congratulations, they're not going to be staying in places like this for very much longer. We got a glimpse of that and shrunk back. People strive for that, where everything is taken care of for you and you don't have to think for yourself at all." A mouthful of dessert. "When you're touring," he opines, "you have everything taken care of for you. It's hard to keep that naive-19-year-old-at-college philosophy going when you're writing a second album." He pauses and his eyes return to the dinner table. "I'm not saying that Kids and Time to Pretend are stupid songs, but I think there's at least partial irony and sarcasm. ![]() And all of a sudden that song was, like, a single, and we had to play it every day for … two … years." He laughs ruefully, then corrects himself, perhaps for the benefit of the million people who went out and bought MGMT's debut album Oracular Spectacular, stupid songs and all. "When we wrote Time to Pretend, we were totally taking the piss out of the rock star thing. "They thought Time to Pretend and Kids would be big songs," says VanWyngarden. "We really didn't consider ourselves as a band and we were more interested in pulling pranks on people," says Goldwasser.ĭepending on your perspective, it all sounds either like iconoclastic fun or perfectly insufferable student wackiness of the look-at-this-picture-of-an-alien-saying-take-me-to-your-dealer school either way, the band had more or less run its course when a major label heard an EP they had made 18 months previously, decided that the songs Goldwasser and VanWyngarden thought were really stupid weren't stupid at all, and signed them. It is, they concede, all rather a long way from Wesleyan University, the famously liberal establishment labelled "the coolest college ever" by the US press, where MGMT began as a kind of LSD-inspired joke, taking the stage dressed as giant snowmen, playing the theme tune from Ghostbusters for 45 minutes, giving obnoxious interviews to the campus newspaper "bullshitting about all our groupies and drinking whiskey and playing Russia" and "trying to fuck with people by making the poppiest music imaginable, that we thought was really stupid". "This is what it's all about." VanWyngarden nods. "We can't eat all of this," he says, with a wave of the hand. "Chocolate mousse," offers Goldwasser, absent-mindedly. The attention to detail extends to the trilby, which sits above the kind of face you automatically imagine with a cigar sticking out of.Īt the centre of the room Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden sit, staring at a table groaning with food and drink. He seems to be wearing almost exactly the same clothes as Colonel Tom Parker in the famous photo in which Elvis points a gun at him. In the background, barking an order for a room-service club sandwich, lurks their manager, who has helpfully turned up dressed as a hard-assed American manager. Minions scuttle round, arranging transport for a forthcoming trip to Paris. High above Kensington High Street in an expensive part of west London, it's roughly the size of a small country, albeit an incredibly tastefully furnished one. If you were looking for a perfect vignette of life in a platinum-selling rock band, you could do worse than the hotel suite MGMT are currently occupying.
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