Musical mixologist Myles McInnes - a.k.a Mylo - has shaken and stirred a cocktail of sound worthy of the finest lounge. The man from the remote Scottish island of Skye talks to Kevin Courtney.
IT'S a good thing Myles McInnes is not a radio DJ. If he was, his drivetime show might feature tunes by Toto, Boston, Survivor and Steely Dan, and he wouldn't be playing a hotly-anticipated gig in Cork next week - he'd be too busy doing a wedding in Aughtermuchty. Growing up on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, the only music Myles got to listen to was whatever drifted in over the airwaves from soft-rock radio station Atlantic 252, cominatcha from a transmitter in Trim, Co Meath, so it's no surprise that echoes of its playlist have stayed with him and even found their way onto some of his own records.
Myles McInnes refers to himself as a producer/musician, and though he has done the odd DJ set, the man known as Mylo prefers to mix his music using keyboards, samples and live musicians. You won't hear any cheesy FM rock songs on his début album, Destroy Rock 'N' Roll, but you might just discern a few dodgy-sounding 1980s samples underneath the cool, electrocentric dance mix. On In My Arms, for instance, Mylo cruelly stitches a sample of Boy Meets Girl's Waiting For A Star To Fall with Kim Carnes's Bette Davis Eyes. Aaaargh!
Against all odds, though, Mylo's cool retro cocktail works, and has seen the young Skye larker being hailed as "The Scottish Röyksopp". With the help of musician friends such as William Threllfall on synths and guitar, Lewis Harley on bass, and Mylo's brother Hector on guitar, Destroy Rock 'N' Roll comes across as a funky, fun-filled hopscotch on the dancefloor, using 1980s pop classics as the chalk squares. There's the Daft Punk-ish Otto's Journey, with its driving disco beat; the Air-like Sunworshipper, with its florid basslines and stoned voiceover; and the vocorder-voiced Drop The Pressure, with its upfront mofo party sample. And then there's the title track, a religious right-wing roll-call of all the evil 1980s rockers who have (allegedly) corrupted the children of the world, including Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Huey Lewis & The News, Thompson Twins, Culture Club, Bananarama, David "Boowie", Madonna and Michael Jackson.
"The record was pretty much just me and the bedroom studio set-up," says Mylo. "So, about a year ago when it was finished, I was chatting with the guys at the label, and we thought it would be a good idea to get a proper live show to go with it, so it was then a case of getting two of my oldest friends who I played in a band with when I was 13 or 14, and redoing all the tracks with them for the live show. Obviously a lot of the bleeps, loops and drum samples are programmed, but it's about as live as we can do it."
Since the success of Destroy Rock 'N' Roll, Mylo has found himself in demand as a remixer - he's been invited to sprinkle sonic parmesan on such artists as Moby and to rework G'N'R's Sweet Child O' Mine.
Living on a Scottish island and trying to keep up with current music can be tough - just ask Colin McIntyre of Mull Historical Society. But though Mylo had to travel to Inverness to buy singles and pick up his copy of Smash Hits, he's wary of playing the "musical isolation" card.
"I was kind of plugged in to the same universal 1980s pop thing as everyone else," he insists. "When the PR people were writing my biog, it was hard to know how much to make of the fact that I come from Skye, 'cos, obviously, it is an angle to a certain extent, but it's impossible to say if my music would have sounded like this if I'd come from Glasgow or London or somewhere. You can never really say. I was talking to Röyksopp about where they come from and how it affects their music, and the only thing that you can say with any certainty is that if you come from a place that's really remote and isolated and dark and windy and wet, then you're probably gonna spend more time indoors in the studio trying to do your tracks and less time out and about, so you'd probably get more done just because you live in such horrific conditions."
Ah, that'll be the Skye tourism people outside the door, armed with flaming brands and pitchforks.
Mylo has, to his credit, seen a bit of the wider world. He went to Oxford University, and got a scholarship to study philosophy in UCLA in sunny California. He took full advantage of the West Coast weather, driving around in an old VW with the radio on (playing Toto, Boston, Survivor and Steely Dan, no doubt). But the music that presses his buttons comes from completely different sources - anywhere between DJ Shadow, The Avalanches, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand and Air.
"I was quite into the way that whole French house thing was kind of cheesy but in such a way as to be cool. To be able to play around with the idea of being cheesy and pushing it as far as it will go. That kind of playfulness is something I was into when I was making my record. . . But I'm aware that you're really pushing a line, and you want to be very careful. You want to do it in such a way that people don't think you're just being dumb."
Mylo plays the Heineken Green Room Sessions at the Half Moon Theatre, Cork, next Thursday. Destroy Rock 'N' Roll is out now on Breastfed Records.
