Is this heaven? Casey Spooner speaks

Music - We meet Casey Spooner in a dressing room in South London, while he is being measured up for a new outfit for the band's first US tour in 5 years. New Yorker Casey Spooner has come a long way since 1998, the year that he formed Fischerspooner with fellow bandmember Warren Fischer. They had global success with hits such as Emerge and Never Win, spent a summer spinning records in Ibiza and worked together with pop princess Kylie Minogue. We talk to him about the new album Entertainment, slapping Kylie's behind, his love for fashion and working with R.E.M. and Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters.




QS: Entertainment is your the third album. How did it come about?

Casey Spooner (CS): Gosh, I don't know. How does any album come about? We finished Odyssey and I decided to take a break from music. For the first year after the album, I worked for a theatre company called The Wooster Group. It was during that time that I started writing again. At that point we were still under contract to EMI and I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do or what was going to happen. I knew we were going to have to deliver a new record fairly soon and we started submitting budgets and proposals for quite a while but nothing was getting approved. Because the industry is in a crisis we ended up being stuck spinning our wheels. We kept writing and started developing things but we were not able to really kick in. Things would go back and forth for a while. We could not book time in the studio or pay musicians so the only thing we could do was write and record a few demos.

It wasn't until we met Jeff Saltzman (The Killers, The Sounds) that everything picked up. Even from our first meeting, he was very supportive and made it clear that he really wanted to do this album. Recording started very soon after that, first with Warren in L.A. and then with me. Jeff also went to the house of our musical director. We set up a studio in his garage and just started recording without worrying about all the bureaucracy.

At that time you could already see the axe coming down on EMI's management. They fired most of their upper management in Europe and then almost every single person we worked with in North America. Every single person we worked with for the passed 3 years, like the A&R team, the CEO, the art department, ..., they fired everyone. This really freaked me out. At first I was like, here we go, we are going to get fired. And then when everyone I knew got fired I was like, holy shit, I want to get fired because you don't want to have to re-educate a whole new team of people to work with. About two weeks later it was our turn. They called us and told us we were free. We got some money and I was like, thank you, don't call me.

QS: How do you look back at that period?

CS: Well I hate it when clichés are true. How the hell did we end up on a major label stuck on a contract in the first place? It was like the story you always hear that someone gets in and they can't get out. So we were lucky really because we got out rather effortlessly.


QS: Where did you record the album?

CS: Some pick-ups were done in L.A. and Jeff did a little bit of work in San Francisco, but for the most part we did everything in a garage in Brooklyn, owned by our musical director.

QS: Where does this album sit compared to the two previous ones?

CS: Warren and me really wanted to return to something more synthetic; more electronic. The first album was consciously made to be as digital and flat as possible. We didn't want the voices to sound natural or the music to be in any way live. There is only one instrument on the entire album, a cymbal in reverse at the beginning of The 15th and that's it. That's the only thing that's not a computer. We wanted to break away from this when we did the second album. I was sick of the sound of computers so we did other things and expanded the sound. For Entertainment I was ready to go back to something more electronic.

QS: Any track or tracks on Entertainment that have a special meaning for you?

CS: God it's really hard to choose. There are so many songs that we had arguments about when we were deciding about singles. I think Supply and Demand, Money Can't Dance, Infidels, Best Revenge and We Are Electric have to be my favourite songs.


QS: Why did you guys decide to focus on just releasing singles in 2008, instead of an album?

CS: At that time we weren't sure how we were going to release our material. Radiohead just released their album in the fall and this was right around the time that we were figuring out what we were going to do. A whole discussion broke loose about what the release plan and the release infrastructure should be. I was all for putting the album online and selling it but Warren came to me and said "I really like this label Kitsune. Let's just release a couple of singles and maybe we only release singles and we never do an album". So that's what we did. We did the Kitsune release and it quickly became clear that people wanted an album. Even though the market has changed and the business has changed, there is still a lot of people who just want a whole album. People don't just want one song, they want a whole world. We then started considering releasing the whole album with Kitsune but since they only wanted to do singles we then had to figure out how we were going to do this. We were not looking to get in a big deal, we didn't wanted to sign anything, we didn't want any money. We just wanted to release the album and be left alone without any high expectations. That's when we were very lucky to find 'Lo'. They were really cool and very supportive. We wanted to be somewhere were we felt that we could be a bit more experimental and we didn't want anyone to ask about radio and about pushing anything. We were just like put it out.

QS: On one of the songs, Dance en France, you vocal part of the song in French.

CS: I do a lot of that song in French.

QS: Is that a hidden talent of Casey Spooner, that he can speak French?

CS: No, the song is about a French friend of mine. This friend met a really stupid guy at the beach who asked her all these questions. When I first started to write the record I was writing all the song titles first and so I was looking for cool titles to start from when she came back from the beach and she told me this story about the guy asking her if they have hot water in France, do they have music in France, do they dance in France and I was like, dance in France, now that's a good song title. She then at some point said another phrase in French and I was like, ok that's good, I think there's something here. So that's how we came to it. Then Myriam (the friend) helped me with the lyrics. We just had fun writing stupid lyrics in French.

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