MGMT are bringing their brand of psychedelic pop-rock here on the back of their hit debut album. They talk to Elisa Bray about shrugging their shoulders at fame and trying to stay young forever
MGMT was one of several bands from Brooklyn to burst on to the music scene last year. While their peers Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors and Celebration favoured Afro-beat indie rock, MGMT dealt in what they call their "future 70s" music, melding psychedelic synth-pop indie rock matched with an equally
colourful dress sense and their trademark headbands.
With Vampire Weekend, MGMT would become the most popular of the Brooklyn exports. But what's the secret to the catchy hooks that drive songs like Kids and Electric Feel?
"For me," says guitarist and singer Andrew VanWyngarden, "it's, like, something pops into your head and you don't try to record it or anything and if it pops into your head again a month later it's probably good. It takes a lot for the ideas to make it through the first round."
The pair, both now 25, met while studying at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut, a private liberal arts institution whose alumni include Santogold and the Dresden Dolls. They put their hippie look down to their university, where they were surrounded by hippies and their parents. "I don't think we call ourselves hippies but we've got hippie
heritage," Ben Goldwasser says.
VanWyngarden's father, who played guitar and drums in a small-town band, introduced him to the electric guitar and Goldwasser's parents are pianists and he was taught to play by his grandmother.
There was no commitment or ambition in their college days; at the time, they were playing in a number of bands.
"We just started hanging out," Goldwasser says. "We didn't really have any ambition for the band at all. We got to the point where we were making songs and we really liked the pop songs we had written by the end of the year. When we graduated, we weren't thinking about taking the band anywhere. We take it more seriously now, but really it was us making music on a laptop computer. We'd record it sometimes, but we never played outside the campus.
It was fun, almost like a joke.
"This band," he adds, "we don't know why we're doing it, it feels like everything we do in this band serves this weird purpose, but the purpose of it definitely is not success or becoming famous or anything like that."
Clearly satirising the rock-star aspiration in their first single Time To Pretend ("Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives") would point towards a reality they had never envisaged when they started out.
"Time To Pretend was referring to this fantasy, this joke of us being sell-out rock stars. We didn't really want that, but it's definitely different now we're playing big festival shows and touring all the time. Some of it is true. It's pretty weird. I don't think the fame is really the ultimate part of the fantasy.
"We wanted to get to the point where we could do really ridiculous things. We want to have some really crazy stage production," says Goldwasser.
MGMT gained a reputation for wild shows early on, and the weird ideas they come up with for their dream stage production seem to be an extension of that, only now they have more money to play with. Goldwasser is still disappointed that they could not have farm animals in their show: "We were thinking of riding a horse off the front of the stage."
From the laughter that accompanies these somewhat wild suggestions, you'd suspect they might be having a joke at the expense of anyone silly enough to believe them, but it's all genuine.
This could be a conversation with a couple of wide-eyed schoolboys; they seem firmly planted in their youth, as the song titles Kids and The Youth show. "Kids was a result of us being 19 years old, in this fantasy college world, which is a little bit like childhood because you don't have much responsibility." Nothing has changed, it seems.
LOWDOWN
Who: MGMT
When & where: Powerstation, Tuesday July 21
Album: Oracular Spectacular (Columbia) - "A kaleidoscopic wonder of a debut which warped pop history to their own weird whims", said TimeOut in the best albums of 2008 list.
- INDEPENDENT
