The Brag

The Whitest Boy Alive
White And Nerdy
By Alasdair Duncan

After a long break over the European summer, The Whitest Boy Alive are itching to go out on tour again. “That’s where the magic can really start to happen,” bass player Marcin Öz tells me. “We like to use our sound-check time before the shows to work on new material; we use our excitement to test new things out, and create new ideas. We always bring a little audio recorder with us, and try and use the ideas we come up with for new songs.” After their last trip to Australia, which saw them play a brief but wonderful set at the Never Ever Land festival in 2008, they’re especially thrilled to be returning for a round of headline shows. “The last time, people had to buy a festival ticket to see The Whitest Boy Alive,” he says. “We want people to be able to see us play a proper show. We feel it necessary to come and play a show for Whitest Boy Alive fans.”

A cover of Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ was a highlight of the band’s Never Ever Land set, and I ask Öz if they’ll be busting out anything similar this time. “We are very connected to electronic dance music,” he says, “so we used to cover that one a lot, alongside ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Armand Van Helden, and ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. It’s really hard to say what’s going to happen this time, though, because we like to make up our setlist in the spur of the moment. It’s kind of like a DJ set, in that we come prepared with all of our songs but we choose which ones to play on the night… In the middle of a show, depending on where the mood is going, we can go off in a number of directions.”

It’s an approach which makes for a highly enjoyable and unconventional live show – as long as everything goes to plan. “If it works, it’s great,” Öz says with a laugh. “The hardest part for us, when it comes to playing songs, is the beginning and the end – so if you run them all together, as a DJ would, you’re never faced with the problem of how to start and finish them. It very often works well, and sometimes it ends in catastrophe. A DJ has to synchronise two records to match the beats, and in Whitest Boy Alive, there are four of us, which makes it four times as hard. We have to do the transition right, and sometimes that doesn’t work properly. When the DJ drops a mix, that’s a huge disaster – and it’s entirely possible for us to drop a mix in our live set, too!”

The Whitest Boy Alive started out as an electronic act, with Öz and singer Erlend Øye, but as they added more members, they stripped back their sound to its bare essentials. And although their roots are in dance, and their songs draw on the more wistful side of disco and electro pop, everything they do is live. In studio, their music is played in continuous takes and recorded without overdubs, programming, or any other kind of technological trickery. It’s a rigorous approach, and it takes an awful lot of work to get it right. “In the earliest days of recorded music, bands would always record live, but these days it’s something quite unique and unusual,” he says, explaining the band’s rationale. “I guess partly that comes down to convenience – overdubs and guide tracks make it a lot easier to record. We thought it would make the whole thing easier and faster if we tried to get the right takes direct to tape, without relying on any technology. That was our great idea, but it was kind of hard to realise that. We ended up playing 200 takes of the one song before we really got it right, then we had to choose which of the recordings was the best one… It resulted in a very long recording process.”

For their upcoming third album, though, The Whitest Boy Alive have taken a somewhat different approach. “So far, we’ve recorded our albums in studios that we’ve built ourselves,” Öz tells me. “Each time, we found a nice location we liked, we set up our gear, and we did it amateur-style. This year, for the first time, we decided that we wanted to try something new, so we went into a great recording studio in Hamburg, rented some time there and recorded some songs. The results have been interesting, because the sound is very different. It’s cleaner than what we’re used to. We’re looking for more songs at the moment to refine more what the new direction is going to be.”

Of the new songs The Whitest Boy Alive have already written, they’ve taken to playing two – ‘Upside Down’ and ‘Bad Conscience’ – as a part of their recent sets, so if all goes well, you can expect to hear these when they play at Keystone Festival Bar early next year as part of Sydney Festival. As for anything else, it comes down to what happens on the night – but with these guys, that’s just part of the charm.

With: New Navy, Future Classic DJs
When: Saturday January 21
Where: Keystone Festival Bar, Hyde Park Barracks Museum
More: For more on Sydney Festival, visit sydneyfestival.org.au