Pop Levi
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Pop Levi live - Skip Ghetto at Bar Islington Academy
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Biography
"The
average musician who sits down and decides to write a song,"
says Pop Levi, with absolute certainty, "gets out their
guitar, and then goes into a studio to record it, well, there's
something dead about all that. It's why music is the state it's
in. And everyone knows it." He pauses to let his message
sink in. "But there's another way of looking at that. You
study what you're doing to the point of obsession, cutting and
pasting ideas, and reducing things to mathematics, stealing
magick from Marvin Gaye as well as Michael Jackson. There is
magick afoot. Someone like Little Richard dressed in mirrors
and sequins on stage - that definitely involves magick. Hendrix
was heavy into magick, The Beatles, Dylan, Syd Barrett. I've
always been into these ways, you know."
This idea of magick should be familiar to all music obsessives - call it alchemy, that ability to turn technique into gold, the whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts equation. Pop Levi, born in London but for years a gypsy of no fixed background, is clearly not about to celebrate the mundane or the established order. His transcendental debut album 'The Return To Form Black Magick Party' may be named after a ceremonial gathering that Pop threw in Liverpool, but it's also a state of mind, a place of worship, a point of view. Besides, "I like the idea of making your first album a 'return to form' he explains. "To me, it's more about the poetry of it. It's an album that sounds like the title."
The poetry, then, is what matters, not the incidentals. Mr Levi was lucky enough to be born with 'Pop' as his middle name, but what's more important is that the words Pop and Levi epitomise the man - a combination of the instant and the traditional, a sound both glisteningly modern and yet rooted in classicism.
So much about Pop appears to be a magickal twist of opposites. His sound is brittle and lush; it swishes but it's precise; it's soulful and pyrotechnic; it struts and seduces. You might recognise some of Pop's heroes but you won't have heard someone like Pop before. If we're being specific, there is a line that joins Eddie Cochran to Prince and The White Stripes and Pop Levi is the newest addition to that line. But that's just one view of what Pop himself calls "a truly bizarre whirlwind." (Prepare to be swept up and away!).
"One thing you can't afford to do," he vouches, "is take to heart other people's descriptions of your music. One thing that turned me on to Dylan was hearing his famous Swedish interviews in '66, where he said he didn't hear his music at all like folk music; he was hearing mathematics, and love songs. That really hit a spot for me. My music is Future Pop. It sounds like true jazz to me - it's more about the attitude, more the free thinking." He takes a moment to summarise. "This record doesn't sound like an empty commercial venture, does it?!"
Conceived in one of the capital's hospitals by a Jewish doctor and a Gentile nurse, his childhood was steeped in music. He studied piano at three, joined a gospel choir at seven, started collecting records at nine and wrote his first song that same year: a 12 bar creation 'Through The Window Of My Life' that came right out of the ether.
In the 90s, he moved to Liverpool, lived on the breadline and took his chances. After forming a commune with new pals Snap Ant and Karl Webb, the trio conceived Super Numeri, whose two albums for Ninja Tune, 'Great Aviaries' (2003) and 'The Welcome Table' (2005), showcased arguably the first band to truly contemporise the cyclical-groove mechanics of Can with the amorphous fluidity of jazz. Post-Rock never sounded this free-thinking, and if you doubt that, then head for 'The Welcome Table's 25-minute opener 'The First League Of Angels'.
"We were trying to make something that was truly astral", Pop recalls. "With my own album, I wanted to make astral pop music. To me, it's the same thing."
In between Super Numeri opuses, Pop's solo quest began with two 7" singles, 'Rude Kinda Love' and the Christmas single 'Reindeer In My Heart', both for Danny Hunt's Invicta Hi-Fi label. Hunt, a good friend of Pop's and one of the male members of the electro-pop-orientated Ladytron, had invited him to join the band on bass guitar, so during 2003 and 2004, Pop found himself on Ladytron's world tour and contributing to their third album 'Witching Hour'.
But having served an apprenticeship - including performing in a Nazi fallout bunker and been rendered penniless, topless and lost in Bulgaria - Pop knew he must focus on himself. He'd tried to release an album (with the working title 'Foxwatch') in 2004, but no matter; it wasn't the right time - and nor the right place. He was to find that shortly after.
"I went to Los Angeles with Ladytron, and within a minute of waking up there, I wanted to live there. It had blue skies, palm trees, and they've made some serious records here. There's magick in LA, it truly is the land of make-believe. And it was a challenge."
Pop returned to Liverpool, rounded up his current four piece band and then shipped them out to LA, too, where they have been road-tested and whipped into the most dynamic live outfit, super-tight and flexing like a coiled animal, right from the opening song, a hypnotic, prolonged staccato groove. And, in front of them, Pop, eyes closed, fingernails painted, veins bulging, legs duckwalking as he peels off notes like a cross between Hendrix, Bolan and Jack White. It's great theatre, but a great rush of adrenalin, too.
Pop's road band, plus a few guests, helped record Pop's first EP, 'Blue Honey', released by Counter Records in September 2006 - the true beginning of this astral saga, and also 'The Return To Form Black Magick Party', though Pop laid down great chunks of it single-handedly.
Pop produced the album too, but co-mixed it with Devendra Banhart's producer Thom Monahan, in Sacramento, California. As befits an album that is imbibed with Delta blues, doo-wop, garage pop and Laurel Canyon excess, the studio was "right next to the Union Pacific Railroad, the railroad upon which America was built!". This is a new start for Pop, but also Ninja Tune, who have signed Pop to a long-term deal and created a brand new offshoot label, Counter Records, especially for him.
As for that album; it rocks right out of the gates with 'Sugar Assault Me Now' - also the new single - a call-to-arms, a rude-kinda-love song. Pop then simmers through 'Blue Honey', goes electric-sweet with the jitterbugging 'Pick-Me-Up Uppercut', mellower and dreamy with 'Skip Ghetto' and 'Flirting', then goes miasmic and spiritual with 'See My Lord' before exiting on the orchestra-drenched flight 'From The Day That You Were Born', a hymn to Pop's unconceived daughter "and the best song I've ever written."
"Is there a theme to the lyrics?" he ponders. "Well, they're definitely all love songs. But then again, I don't know if there has ever been a song that isn't a love song. But 'See My Lord' is a very important track to me. I wrote and played the song at the same time and that is exactly what you hear. I've only ever played it that one time and I believe that it's someone else's song - it's actually the least amount of me in that song, and thus the most amount of me, if you see what I mean. I'm very into the idea of channelling music. I don't like too much of myself in my music. I don't think of my songs as really me. JG Ballard once said that he regarded his novel 'Crash' as his "internal autobiography", and I definitely feel like that about my music. The lyrics aren't about reality, yet they are definitely all about experience."
So let's not bother with the concept of a message but more the method. "I use a technique called scrying, which was invented by the magickian Dr John Dee in the Victorian era. He'd gaze through cracked glass or saucers of water for a huge amount of time, until things were suggested to him. I use my own variation of scrying to write all my lyrics. I'm the vessel. The conduit. I'm not into presenting some bullshit-real-life thing, about going to score, or life on the streets. I want something that's some sort of astral autobiography. I hope that that might turn people on."
What should turn people on is the idea that Pop Levi is not like any other. "Too much music," he concludes, "is too much fashion for me. It suggests you're into what's in and what's out. Things that are truly in are forever in. If I make a good sandwich, you wouldn't say 'that's retro,' you'd say 'that's a good sandwich.' Some things have an innate never-ending quality that's always there. That's why people will be buying T-shirts with John Lennon's face on it long after Justin Timberlake." Amen.
This idea of magick should be familiar to all music obsessives - call it alchemy, that ability to turn technique into gold, the whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts equation. Pop Levi, born in London but for years a gypsy of no fixed background, is clearly not about to celebrate the mundane or the established order. His transcendental debut album 'The Return To Form Black Magick Party' may be named after a ceremonial gathering that Pop threw in Liverpool, but it's also a state of mind, a place of worship, a point of view. Besides, "I like the idea of making your first album a 'return to form' he explains. "To me, it's more about the poetry of it. It's an album that sounds like the title."
The poetry, then, is what matters, not the incidentals. Mr Levi was lucky enough to be born with 'Pop' as his middle name, but what's more important is that the words Pop and Levi epitomise the man - a combination of the instant and the traditional, a sound both glisteningly modern and yet rooted in classicism.
So much about Pop appears to be a magickal twist of opposites. His sound is brittle and lush; it swishes but it's precise; it's soulful and pyrotechnic; it struts and seduces. You might recognise some of Pop's heroes but you won't have heard someone like Pop before. If we're being specific, there is a line that joins Eddie Cochran to Prince and The White Stripes and Pop Levi is the newest addition to that line. But that's just one view of what Pop himself calls "a truly bizarre whirlwind." (Prepare to be swept up and away!).
"One thing you can't afford to do," he vouches, "is take to heart other people's descriptions of your music. One thing that turned me on to Dylan was hearing his famous Swedish interviews in '66, where he said he didn't hear his music at all like folk music; he was hearing mathematics, and love songs. That really hit a spot for me. My music is Future Pop. It sounds like true jazz to me - it's more about the attitude, more the free thinking." He takes a moment to summarise. "This record doesn't sound like an empty commercial venture, does it?!"
Conceived in one of the capital's hospitals by a Jewish doctor and a Gentile nurse, his childhood was steeped in music. He studied piano at three, joined a gospel choir at seven, started collecting records at nine and wrote his first song that same year: a 12 bar creation 'Through The Window Of My Life' that came right out of the ether.
In the 90s, he moved to Liverpool, lived on the breadline and took his chances. After forming a commune with new pals Snap Ant and Karl Webb, the trio conceived Super Numeri, whose two albums for Ninja Tune, 'Great Aviaries' (2003) and 'The Welcome Table' (2005), showcased arguably the first band to truly contemporise the cyclical-groove mechanics of Can with the amorphous fluidity of jazz. Post-Rock never sounded this free-thinking, and if you doubt that, then head for 'The Welcome Table's 25-minute opener 'The First League Of Angels'.
"We were trying to make something that was truly astral", Pop recalls. "With my own album, I wanted to make astral pop music. To me, it's the same thing."
In between Super Numeri opuses, Pop's solo quest began with two 7" singles, 'Rude Kinda Love' and the Christmas single 'Reindeer In My Heart', both for Danny Hunt's Invicta Hi-Fi label. Hunt, a good friend of Pop's and one of the male members of the electro-pop-orientated Ladytron, had invited him to join the band on bass guitar, so during 2003 and 2004, Pop found himself on Ladytron's world tour and contributing to their third album 'Witching Hour'.
But having served an apprenticeship - including performing in a Nazi fallout bunker and been rendered penniless, topless and lost in Bulgaria - Pop knew he must focus on himself. He'd tried to release an album (with the working title 'Foxwatch') in 2004, but no matter; it wasn't the right time - and nor the right place. He was to find that shortly after.
"I went to Los Angeles with Ladytron, and within a minute of waking up there, I wanted to live there. It had blue skies, palm trees, and they've made some serious records here. There's magick in LA, it truly is the land of make-believe. And it was a challenge."
Pop returned to Liverpool, rounded up his current four piece band and then shipped them out to LA, too, where they have been road-tested and whipped into the most dynamic live outfit, super-tight and flexing like a coiled animal, right from the opening song, a hypnotic, prolonged staccato groove. And, in front of them, Pop, eyes closed, fingernails painted, veins bulging, legs duckwalking as he peels off notes like a cross between Hendrix, Bolan and Jack White. It's great theatre, but a great rush of adrenalin, too.
Pop's road band, plus a few guests, helped record Pop's first EP, 'Blue Honey', released by Counter Records in September 2006 - the true beginning of this astral saga, and also 'The Return To Form Black Magick Party', though Pop laid down great chunks of it single-handedly.
Pop produced the album too, but co-mixed it with Devendra Banhart's producer Thom Monahan, in Sacramento, California. As befits an album that is imbibed with Delta blues, doo-wop, garage pop and Laurel Canyon excess, the studio was "right next to the Union Pacific Railroad, the railroad upon which America was built!". This is a new start for Pop, but also Ninja Tune, who have signed Pop to a long-term deal and created a brand new offshoot label, Counter Records, especially for him.
As for that album; it rocks right out of the gates with 'Sugar Assault Me Now' - also the new single - a call-to-arms, a rude-kinda-love song. Pop then simmers through 'Blue Honey', goes electric-sweet with the jitterbugging 'Pick-Me-Up Uppercut', mellower and dreamy with 'Skip Ghetto' and 'Flirting', then goes miasmic and spiritual with 'See My Lord' before exiting on the orchestra-drenched flight 'From The Day That You Were Born', a hymn to Pop's unconceived daughter "and the best song I've ever written."
"Is there a theme to the lyrics?" he ponders. "Well, they're definitely all love songs. But then again, I don't know if there has ever been a song that isn't a love song. But 'See My Lord' is a very important track to me. I wrote and played the song at the same time and that is exactly what you hear. I've only ever played it that one time and I believe that it's someone else's song - it's actually the least amount of me in that song, and thus the most amount of me, if you see what I mean. I'm very into the idea of channelling music. I don't like too much of myself in my music. I don't think of my songs as really me. JG Ballard once said that he regarded his novel 'Crash' as his "internal autobiography", and I definitely feel like that about my music. The lyrics aren't about reality, yet they are definitely all about experience."
So let's not bother with the concept of a message but more the method. "I use a technique called scrying, which was invented by the magickian Dr John Dee in the Victorian era. He'd gaze through cracked glass or saucers of water for a huge amount of time, until things were suggested to him. I use my own variation of scrying to write all my lyrics. I'm the vessel. The conduit. I'm not into presenting some bullshit-real-life thing, about going to score, or life on the streets. I want something that's some sort of astral autobiography. I hope that that might turn people on."
What should turn people on is the idea that Pop Levi is not like any other. "Too much music," he concludes, "is too much fashion for me. It suggests you're into what's in and what's out. Things that are truly in are forever in. If I make a good sandwich, you wouldn't say 'that's retro,' you'd say 'that's a good sandwich.' Some things have an innate never-ending quality that's always there. That's why people will be buying T-shirts with John Lennon's face on it long after Justin Timberlake." Amen.
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Pop Levi live - Skip Ghetto at Bar Islington Academy