The Only are quite possibly the most exciting dance act in Australia at the moment. They’ve just released a mix disc on Ministry of Sound’s Electro House Sessions 3 and they’re all set to blow 2010 festivals apart next summer when they tour with holograms. Yes, holograms. Jeff, one half of The Only, took some time to chat with OUTinPerth.
I was doing some reading around – you guys have been described as ‘opinionated, mouthy and ego fuelled’. Is this a fair cop?
I think it’s a little bit of a beat-up so that people think we’re a little more interesting to talk to. But I guess it probably stems from… we’re not backwards in being honest about what we think is awesome or what we think is shit and having a little too much confidence in our own work.
That’s always a good thing, right?
If you don’t believe in it, why should other people, I guess.
What can you tell us about the music you make and your sound?
We’ve been describing it for this series of interviews as ‘stadium electro’. So it’s useful, it’s fun, it’s probably a little bit aggressive. I think a lot of the music we’re writing and releasing and playing out in our sets is probably for people who want to go out and have a lot of fun. If you’re interested in a quiet night out, we’re probably not for you. But it’s big sounds, its big rooms – we like festival dates and lasers and I guess that kind of experience of it suits what we’re doing, I think.
What can you tell us about the mixes that appear on the Electro House Sessions 3?
We’re really excited about how the CD’s turned out. The Ministry of Sound is such a great brand in Australia and for them to ask us to do a CD for them was really cool and very unexpected. We’ve only been together for 12 months so for us, this has all come as a bit of a shock and a surprise. We got to work with the label pretty closely in the track listing, we got to put a lot of our own records on and a lot of our friends’ records and think the CD represents a lot of what’s current in clubs, but also very much what we’re about as well. Things like T-Rex ‘Out my Bitch’ is a really big record at the moment and that’s our opening song and our new single is on there and some stuff from The Bloody Beetroots and Crookers and artists like that. When we were finished up and it was done we went back and listened to it all and we were like ‘Yeah, this is what we’re about’, so we’re really happy.
You said you’ve only been together for 12 months – that’s some pretty rapid success in such a short time.
Yeah, it’s all been very unexpected and I was saying to somebody just late last week in an interview that we can barely keep up with what’s been happening. We met about… nearly twelve months ago and we met overseas completely by chance and that chance meeting led to realising we were both interested in writing music and that became a track that we then gave to a friend and before we even knew what was happening, we were getting offers from two record labels to sign the record, we’d been offered an agent, our manager wanted to manage us – this was just all off one record that we’d given to our mate who was a DJ. So before we kind of knew it, the ball was rolling and we needed a name and we were like ‘We need to make this thing a little more serious’ and as we keep running to catch up with all of that stuff, other things keep happening. We’ve been touring, we had to develop a live show, we’ve done the CD, we’ve done these remixes and I guess for us it’s like we just want to get our heads above the water and catch up to all this stuff that’s going on.
What do you think is the secret to your success?
I guess this pairing of The Only has been quite quick and I think the thing is being honest. I mean, we really believe in the music that we’re writing and the way we’re writing and how we’re doing it and we’re not trying to be anyone else, we’re not trying to ride somebody’s coattails. We’re not trying to take a cheap road to success, we’re just literally writing music that we’re in love with and playing gigs that we want to play at and I guess if there’s that sort of honest approach to what you’re doing, if that makes up for a little difference to a lot of the other guys out there – because God knows, there’s enough of them doing the same thing over and over and over again – then hopefully, maybe that honesty is sort of shining through and labels and promoters and stuff see us as something a little bit different, therefore maybe a little exciting.
The other thing that’s a bit exciting is the two live shows that you guys have developed. What can you tell us about them?
The catalyst or the main motivation there was we’d written some records and then we started getting gig offers and we kept turning them down because we weren’t really ready to start touring and also we hadn’t really thought about what kind of show we wanted to put on and when we thought about it, the last thing we wanted to do was have another boring DJ thing where someone gets up and plays the same 20 records that everybody else plays. I think there’s too many people doing that already and we’re kind of over that sort of thing so we went ‘Well what’s a way to do that sort of thing more interestingly?’ and that’s where we came up with the main club mode, which is designed around a semi-live approach to the art of DJing where we’re mashing a lot of music together, we’re using a lot of our own re-edits and special remixes so that our sets don’t sound like anybody else’s when we’re doing the kind of club thing. And then the other side of things is the festival show which, you know, heaps of dance acts want to be bands and we’re not gonna pretend to be an indie band when we’re just two producers in a studio playing with machines. So we didn’t want a singer or anything like that but we thought ‘How can we have a front person in our band if we don’t want a singer?’ So that’s where we came up with the idea for developing kind of like a hologram and this hologram character, we develop all the content beforehand and then that person becomes a male for one record, a female for another – they can be anything at any time and they sing all the songs, whether it be a remix we did for a male artist, they’ll then sing that song and that kind of all fits in with the lighting and music and the whole shebang.
The whole idea of holograms and stuff, it’s an idea that Alexander McQueen played with in some of his fashion shows and the Gorillaz did – I think they did a live performance with Madonna – is it that sort of live hologram?
It’s sort of like that. It’s not like the Gorillaz in that we don’t have a virtual band. Or Madonna. It’s like, how do you take music when we’re remixing other artists and we might have five singles with five different vocalists – how do you then pool that all in together and make it one person and we though if we do the kind of virtual reality thing where there’s the hologram-esque front person, they could be anything we want them to be. So that’s kind of what led us to that point and I guess, we’re onstage with the hologram and the visuals are tidy and it’s all one big show, but that kind of forms the front person of it.
Augmented reality, which I guess is what you’re kind of doing, is quite big in fashion at the moment. Is it that kind of idea of you’re adding to the overall experience? How do the audiences respond when they see this?
We’ve only done one performance of it and that was just for our own sake. We wanted to make sure it worked and it worked the way we wanted it to and we’re actually going to tour it for the first time properly towards the end of the year. So we’re on the road now to do the club mode for the CD which is two months of touring around the country and then we’re doing Groove in the Move Festival, where we’re doing five dates with just us and our VJ, who does all custom visuals for all the songs, and then we’ll do the augmented reality, hologram-esque thing at the end of the year. But that’s really cool, to hear that it’s all sort of happening in fashion. I guess a little bit of a coincidence. Alexander McQueen – if that’s what he’s thinking about, then it kind makes me feel good to think we’re thinking about the same stuff.
Do you mind me asking, what’s the feasibility of that? Is it expensive?
It’s very expensive, yeah. It’s funny, Shawn, who’s the other half of The Only, he’s got a background in movie special effects. He worked on The Matrix and things like that in a previous life, so we kind of made use of his expertise and his contacts to start realising our little ambitions in this way, but neither of us had a keen sense of what we were getting ourselves into and as we sort of researched and developed and trialed and errored, it’s eventually gotten us to where we are now which is with the right combination of technology. But it wasn’t easy and it’s not cheap to roll out at a show. You have to control the lighting and all these things that, in a festival environment, are very difficult to control so we have to make sure it’s absolutely perfect.
So who’s fronting this project?
We’ve got comic characters that front all of our press shots, we never put ourselves in the photos and that’s because we don’t want to be at the front of this project. It’s a lot more fantasy and surreal than that and we were originally thinking of animating those characters to form a parallel of ourselves onstage and that was one of the early ideas, but the sheer cost and difficulty of animation, that’s not something we can really do just yet and that led us to do ‘Well, lets get a real person and work backward the other way. Instead of taking something artificial and make it get close to real, lets take something real and then make it look artificial’ and that turned out a lot more successful for us. You know, if we filmed a live person and then actually working them back, disintegrating the quality of the image so it’s got more of a hologram like effect. If we do a collaboration with an Australian artist we’ll probably get them to come and do the content that will then make their performance. It won’t be that person onstage, but their character will be on stage and it will be a version of them.
Where is electro music at, at the moment?
It seems as though it’s something that’s relatively new to this millennium, how has it developed over the last few years? It’s a funny one. Electro, probably in the last five years, has started to have a real presence in clubs and it’s been a really big club phenomena for a while, almost to the point where it’s started becoming a dirty word. It’s like all musical terms; once they start becoming popular, there’s a backlash but I think that backlash has probably been amongst the older generation of clubbers who, you know, they’re probably looking for a reason to stay home at night, I guess. And as the newer electro sounds have been adopted by mainstream artists there’s been this new wave of more underground, cooler electro like The Bloody Beetroots and The Crookers and people who are 18 to 22, they’re looking for something a little more raucous and a little more fun. So I think that’s kind of where it’s at at the moment, it’s being led by this new generation of young people who are actually out there and excited about records and they’re the people that we find the most inspiring and when we’re writing music, we’re thinking about those people. We’re not thinking about the record labels or the radio or any of that old guard, we’re thinking about the new, younger people who are, I think, the most excited and the ones that actually care about what they’re listening to.
What do you guys bring, sonically, to the mix that makes electro fresh and exciting?
Sonically? I think we bring a loud sound, so that’s one thing. If you’re talking technically, we try to mix the records so that our records are almost literally louder and bigger and fuller than any other record. Our current single’s got quite an aggressive edge to it, but then we kind of contrast that with what we think are moments of beauty. So you might have a really raucous, hectic record that’s seemingly slamming you over the head, but when we want to put that alongside something like a beautiful Beth Ditto vocal or something like that, as we’ve done on the CD – there’s a record called Sub Focus ‘Could this be real’ and that’s got like a beautiful piano and a really well delivered vocal and that’s kind of like a big breath of fresh air or a shining light after the darkness of the harder records. We kind of think about it in those terms.
You’ve also stated that you’re not in the DJ biz – how come?
No. Don’t wanna be in the DJ biz. There’s way too many DJs. DJing can be such a posy thing, you know – so and so gets up there and they’ve spent more time working on their look than they have their record collection and they’re kind of up there pretending like they’re writing a record using just those 3 EQs on the mixer, you know? And it’s like, come on, guys! I think audiences are a lot smarter than that now. I think they’ve seen all the smoke and mirrors and they know what’s a genuine performance and what’s something that’s a little more posery. So we kind of distance ourselves from that and while we take a lot of care on our presentation aesthetically, there’s definitely a look and feel to what The Only is, we make sure that our performances don’t go down that road. We dress a certain way and present ourselves a certain way for shows, but we make sure that the music and the musical integrity and the performance is something that’s hopefully a lot more unique than the DJ biz.
You’ve almost tied your sense of anonymity into that as well, haven’t you, by using the cartoon?
Absolutely. We don’t want ourselves to be at the front of the project, as I was saying before. We don’t need to be that – we’d much rather people wonder who we are than chuck ourselves right out the front. With every release, the comic evolves, there’s a new character getting introduced into the next artwork and we’ll just keep telling a little story as it goes along. We don’t have this amazing plan for the story, but it’s evolving as we evolve and as the records are being written, that’s sort of inspiring us to what we want to direct the comic into. We’re talking about doing some new press shots with ourselves in them, but we want to do it in a very surreal way and try and have something that’s I guess halfway between the comic world that is the imagery and reality.
What’s your opinion on the Australian club and dance scene at the moment?
I was actually just writing an answer about this before, I was doing an email interview, and I’d written half the answer and hadn’t got it all quite right in my head yet so I can give you half a good answer. I think the club scene in Australia… it’s ready for something new. When we’re talking about where electro sort of started, that’s what brought so much new life and excitement into what’s happening in Australia and I think as that’s sort of become a little bit more commercial clubs have had a little of the same old, same old. Obviously people are excited about going to festivals and things like that and that’s all really great but I think clubland in Australia, I feel like there’s a mini revolution on the cards in the not too distant future. There’s young people out there that are excited about new things and you can see they’re looking for that new niche and that new little things that’s going to get born out of the underground and it’s going to be I think a more art-based phenomena. I think there’s a revolution coming. I just have that feeling.
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Scott-Patrick Mitchell
