Info about Strip Music
"Hope you like our new direction": words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of every clued-in music fan. Forget being indie rock one minute and country and western the next. The best bands have one amazing idea and stick to it - like The Ramones, or the Sex Pistols, or My Bloody Valentine. Strip Music are one of those bands. Their debut album 'Strip Music' is 45-minute cascade of keening vocals and sheet-metal guitars and synths, heart-stopping drama and epic atmospherics, as relentless and glittering as a rainstorm. Songs like 'Oh My God' and 'Never Die' are anthemic enough to call to mind mid-Eighties U2, while 'Plastic Doll' and '2.75' have the shadowy, trance-like qualities of The Cure. There's a strong industrial element in there somewhere too, while the icy purity of singer Henric de la Cour's voice gives Strip Music a strong flavour of their native Scandinavia (Stockholm, Sweden to be precise). "It's big and it's intense with an arena feeling," summarises Henric. "We wanted to take wide steps and let it all out. Stand with our chests out instead of with our heads down." This is Strip Music. It's also big music.
Strip Music emerged from the wreckage of much-loved cult band Yvonne, named after a Swedish winner of Miss Universe 1984. Henric was the founder and frontman, while Christian played bass. Strip Music was originally an Yvonne side project with a concept - for Christian (by now playing synths) and Henric to make "really minimalistic music" unlike Yvonne's Joy Division-meets Kraftswerk synth goth assault. When the band disintegrated in 2001, the pair started to concentrate on Strip Music full time while doing a day job selling classified ads on newspaper 'Gula Tidningen'. At first, they had rules - only three chords maximum in every song, only two instruments and only lyrics about love. Unsurprisingly, this soon became restrictive, and Christian and Henric started recruiting musicians to bring the new, more expansive music they were writing to life. There was one stipulation.
"They had to look good," says Henric. "We didn't want people to say about anyone 'Well he's the ugly guy in that band.' We didn't have the option of ten guitarists standing there looking great and we took the most good looking, but I think we had a bit of luck - they look terrific."
They found Fredrik Balck (drums) in a club called Nightlife in Stockholm. He introduced them to fantastically named bassist Valdemar Asp, with whom he used to play in a band called Vendor. Patsy Bay (guitar), was Yvonne's old guitar tech, while Jens Hellqvist (synths) knew Christian from the days when they were both in a band called April Tears. As well as being the men to build the wall of sound in Henric and Christian's heads, the band indeed look great, a skinny, androgynous crew who wear a goth-tinged, slap-smeared twist on classic rock 'n' roll attire. "I like bands who look like they're an army," summarises Christian, whose super-delicate looks often get him mistaken for a girl.
"A pack of dogs," agrees Henric, proud wearer of a widow's peak. "Us against everyone."
The band started to record some demos without really knowing what to do with them (Henric: "we didn't send them anywhere, we just had them"). Then in September 2003 Yvonne's manager, by now also an executive at Swedish label Playground Music, told Henric that it was high time Yvonne got together to make their fifth album. "I told him 'that's not going to happen but check this out, this is Strip Music' and he said 'this is really good, maybe we can work something out' and the whole thing started clicking."
Since their first gig that month, Strip Music have played over 50 dates around Sweden while their single 'Desperation' gained considerable airplay. Nevertheless, their ambition is to break out of the bounds of their homeland and give their widescreen music the international mass audience it deserves. "People in Sweden go for the most easy thing," says Henric. "'What's on TV? OK, I'll buy that record or download it from the internet.' The thing that people see and hear every day, that's the thing they're going to buy. That's the way people work in Sweden - they're like a flock of sheep."
Strip Music seem destined to gain a stateless army of fans who don't want to be part of that flock, but instead immerse themselves in the exquisite melancholia of Henric's lyrical universe. "The lyrics are me," he states simply. "They're about getting the hell out of it. Out of relationships that don't work, out of the sickening thoughts that you have... I wanted to show that underlying desperation in every song. Every last line is from my own experience."
The result is an album that has elements the bleak perspectives of Joy Division the pop joy of early OMD, the 'dirty arena' dynamics of mid-Eighties Simple Minds and the synth attack of Suicide, fused into an overwhelming sound which is Strip Music's alone. As for the band's attitude, you can judge that from the fact that Henric's hero is not John Lennon, Kurt Cobain or anyone else plucked from the rock canon, but Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten. "He's the coolest musician ever," he enthuses. "He's good looking, really smart, with an idea about music that he shares with no-one else. 'OK, we're banging on whatever's available.' On one record he plays the cigarette. That's inspiring to me. No boundaries at all."
The plan now is for Strip Music to take their metal machine-dream music to Britain. "It's always the hardest country to do," ponders Henric. "We'd never thought of going over until recently, so whatever happens is great." What's sure to happen is that songs like the lyrically vicious '2.75' and the emotionally pulverising 'Halber Mensch' will see Strip Music take their instensely wintery place on the pop music map. And for the second album? "The idea will be the same", says Henric. "We're not going to be a smorgasboard where one song's county and another's the blues. The concept is clear." And it's perfect.
Strip Music are:
Henric de la Cour, Vocals
Christian Berg, Synthesizer
Jens Hellqvist, Synthesizer
Fredrik Balck, Drums
Valdemar Asp, Bass
Patsy Bay, Guitar
