Like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, it's a combo that should be so wrong, yet The Rapture's marriage of art-rock with disco/dance just hits the spot. Brian Boyd goes on the trail of the hybrid that refuses to die.
Still the biggest selling 12-inch single of all time in Britain and Ireland, New Order's Blue Monday has an import over and above its rhythmic, melodic and lyrical attributes. On its release in 1983, it not only captured a moment but presaged a musical sea-change. Here was a band who were still loosely defined as a "rock" outfit reconfiguring their sound via a propulsive dance track. The most significant thing about the song is not that, like Squeeze's Up The Junction, it managed to be a chart hit without having a chorus, but more that it shamelessly stole from Sylvester's You Make Me Feel Mighty Real, Donna Summer's Our Love and Kraftwerk's Radioactivity. What were supposedly dour indie Mancunians doing messing with Hi-NRG, disco and electronica? Blue Monday was posited as the first great leap forward in the seamless stitching together of dance and rock. The idea was to remain a chimera, though, as dance went on to become the predominant means of music expression. Seattle went its way, Ibiza another.
Twenty years later and a different song mixing guitar rock chords with liberal dashes of acid house - The Rapture's House Of Jealous Lovers - immediately gets the band dubbed "The Disco Strokes" and the dance/rock motion is back at the top of the agenda. With its angular art-rock guitars and its hi-hat disco feel, the song arrived at a curious juncture. Dance music was receding quicker than a babyboomer's hairline and guitar rock was the new (old) sound in town.
House Of Jealous Lovers was hailed as a funk-punk classic and singled out as "one of the most important singles of the decade". Twiddling the knobs was James Murphy - soon to go on to become the LCD Soundsystem - who was responsible for welding the traditional guitars and bass to house beats and bleeps. With all the hoopla Jealous Lovers generated, The Rapture had to postpone the release of their album, Echoes, for over a year as record deals flooded in and expectations ran riot.
"It was so weird because, for a whole year, that was the only song of ours that was being played," explains The Rapture's drummer Vito Roccoforte.
"There was this big fuss about it in the music press and I think quite a number of people didn't believe that The Rapture were actually a four-piece band, they thought we were a DJ outfit. We had in fact been around for years before Jealous Lovers. We were an indie band who were signed to Sub Pop records and releasing guitar music."
When Echoes was finally released, it revealed itself to be a beguiling mix of Gang Of Four/Happy Mondays and house music influences. While it didn't live up to the expectations of Jealous Lovers, it still positioned The Rapture as the arty hybrid mix of The Strokes and Scissor Sisters.
"We only managed to turn our sound around by leaving Sub Pop and Seattle and going to live in New York," says Roccoforte. "Back when we were an indie band, I used to go to raves and I remember thinking that the people at them looked weird. But when we left Seattle, I just found that the songs I was co-writing with Luke (Jenner, the vocalist) were going in a dancier direction. What really sealed it for us was when we got a new bass player (Matt Safer) who could really play these new sounds - and they're not something every bassist can play."
One of The Rapture's early New York gigs was seen by the production team of James Murphy and Tim Goldsworth (aka Death From Above), who saw potential in the band and were looking for a punk-funk vehicle.
"It was a gradual process and we certainly had no idea how Echoes would end up sounding when we started recording it," says Roccoforte. "Although we had released records before, it was a key record for us because it was our first proper full length album done in a studio with producers. Certainly DFA were a big influence on the record - they gave us time and let us experiment. We did get a lot of Happy Mondays and Gang Of Four references in the reviews of the album but then we've heard most everything now. It seems to go from post-punk to no wave to new no wave to electropunk to disco punk to indie dance. I suppose what it all really meant for us is that we were a rock band who could play Manumission."
The follow-up to Echoes is trailed by their first new single in over three years, the impossibly catchy Get Myself Into It, which is already causing a stir on radio. The song was produced by man-of-the-moment Danger Mouse, who was behind The Beatles/Jay-Z-inspired The Grey Album, who has produced Gorillaz and is currently one-half of Gnarls Barkley.
"We didn't work with DFA on this album simply because there was a scheduling problem - there's no bad blood there," says Roccoforte. "We had to sit down and really think about who we wanted to produce this one and we came up with three names. Danger Mouse actually came on board before he did the Gorillaz album. We also had Ewan Pearson because we really liked the work he did with The Chemical Brothers and Gwen Stefani, and Paul Epworth really interested us because he worked with Bloc Party and The Futureheads. You sort of do one track with the producers and, if it goes alright, you're happy to have them there for the whole album. It was kind of a surprise for everyone involved, to see how the dynamic would work. But we had a complete idea of what the record would sound like. We had been writing it for over a year and had about 30 songs. And of course it helped that the three producers we had are all really talented people who can see things in the songs that you can't see".
Roccoforte says he found Echoes a very difficult album to make, but this one was a pleasure for him. "Last time out, we were really changing the sound around and it was painful at times for everyone concerned - the band members and the producers. But because of the three-year gap between albums we had a lot more time to do a bit of creative exploring and really sort through a lot of new stuff. It really helped that we had a large body of songs to work from and I think we really put a lot more thought into this one. This is a much warmer record and we have stuff on it like Calling Me, which is a really soft tune and not something anyone would expect from The Rapture. And already we're really excited by the reception that Get Myself Into It is getting."
One word he doesn't want to hear to describe the new album is "eclectic".
"That's what everyone said about the last one," he says. "It's because we were really stretching out and trying a whole load of new things. I'm hoping the word they use this time is 'tighter', because we have gone back and looked at our influences and looked at our sound and made everything a lot more, well, tighter,"
The Rapture's Pieces Of The People We Love is released on September 15th. The band play the Electric Picnic (Stradbally, Co Laois) on Sunday, September 3rd.
