Le Galaxie: The Sky is the Limit

Serpico. You’ve gotta think that Le Galaxie, cinematic scholars that they are, love Officer Frank Serpico and the ‘70s film classic to which he lends his name. A pre hoo-ah! Pacino playing a cop who won’t be swayed from his path. An idealist, a loner, a guy with one eye on a move to a rosier place. Awesome aviators too. For the longest time, though, the Dublin quartet’s approach to their sonic craft chimed, inadvertently and unknowingly, with a later police procedural from legendary director Sidney Lumet.

“I was watching a Roger Ebert documentary the other day and they were talking about the famous film critic Pauline Kael,” Michael Pope says, sitting in the space between the strips of sunlight that invade and illuminate The Library Bar in Dublin’s Central Hotel. “Famously cantankerous and opinionated but she revolutionised the industry. Anyway, she referred to one Lumet film [1981’s Prince Of The City] as a ‘case study in confusion’ and I was thinking ‘that somehow seems familiar’! One of our songs, ‘Solarbabies’ does feel like a case study, of how to have an idea – and then how to throw in every other idea you have!”
From across the table, his bandmate Dave McGloughlin moves to the here and now. “We’ve stripped a lot of things back. Now it’s more about simplicity, whereas before we were very excited about the ‘toy box’. It takes discipline to even let the BPM drop a little bit. Which is something we were afraid of before.”
Le Galaxie have gigged so furiously and had such ambition and application in making their shows truly spectacular (they literally added a whole extra dimension to Button Factory proceedings last year) that they have become, essentially, the nation’s house band of choice when a good time is required. But there was a nagging feeling internally that their live rush hadn’t hit in the same way on record. And maybe that they were forcing things a tad across the board, their arsenal of anthemic numbers notwithstanding.
“When we started out, we used to call ourselves ‘musical maximalism’, which I think has thoroughly been cast aside,” laughs Pope. “That’s how we referred to ourselves live. You know when people are skydiving, the whole [puts on as wide-eyed expression and flaps his face vigorously] thing? Like that. Ross from I Am The Cosmos said it to us in the Róisín Dubh: ‘It’s great and all, but it’s just so loud and so intense'. We didn’t take that on board! But it happened very much organically.”
Slowing things down, and removing the fuss and bluster so their melodies and ideas could breathe, came with the confidence of experience.
“It’s like settling into a relationship,” nods David.
So, after seven years, the honeymoon is finally over?
“Ha, yeah,” says Michael. “After a couple of years, you can pretty much get away with your farts!”
Now, the quartet (Alastair Higgins and Anthony Hyland are probably off buying shiny silver jumpsuits or face paint this afternoon) have introduced a new partner to spice things up. A major one. Their second album, Le Club, in the bag for over a year, Le Galaxie were waiting for the right platform to do it justice. A deal was struck with Universal in January... we presume it’s been a blizzard of cocaine and strippers in stretch limos since then?
“No,but we are drinking whiskey at midday on a Tuesday! A lot of bands – and to an extent we would have been guilty of it as well – tend to see a record deal as a finishing line,” reckons McGloughlin. “It’s absolutely not a finishing line. It’s a starting line. Because of the way we came up as a band and the amount of slogging we did, we could see so many other bands rising and falling... So this is where the work really starts.”
“When we were putting this thing together with Universal, their opinion of Le Galaxie had been very positive,” Pope adds. “But it also had been ‘hmm, it’s just kind of a live thing, isn’t it?’ Which is something we’ve struggled with over the last few years.”
A source of irritation?
“No, no, because they were correct! Our manager would say it to us. The guy who released Fade 2 Forever would say it to us: ‘You never quite captured what it was that I saw’. We were aware of that. With exceptions. There were a few times when we nailed it.”
A big grin emerges from beneath Pope’s trademark bushy beard.
“I can think of 14 of them right now on our new album!”
McGloughlin confirms that once Universal heard Le Club, all systems were go. What Le Galaxie have on their hands is a superb collection of bold electronic tunes that hang together wonderfully, evoking a world that is all of their own dreaming.
Unlike debut Laserdisc Nights 2, where “everything was so much more under the microscope”, it sounds like the creative process was a pleasure from the get-go. With a number of songs already penned and road-tested live, the second half came from the band locking themselves in a countryside studio and writing together. They worked quickly in a group, for the first time, and produced seven songs in three days.
The ethos, says Mick, was “as soon as you start to finesse it, abandon it.”
And while they had hoped Laserdisc Nights 2 would masquerade as a piece of work that could have emerged from the cityscpe of Los Angeles, Le Club genuinely has some LA DNA.
Eric Broucek, the famed former house engineer for DFA, liked what Le Galaxie sent him and agreed to mix the recordings. Trouble was, Skyping wasn’t panning out.
“We were so happy with what he’d done because he totally knew where we were coming from and obviously he’s got such an amazing pedigree,” says David. “But you want to be in the room with somebody and be able to look them in the eye. Be able to make hand signals. ‘You know what could work?’ – you never get to say that via email because it’s all very much like giving notes to someone writing a screenplay. You give them notes and they come back with a new draft.”
Eventually, they joined Broucek in LA. So prepped were they that the mixing was completed in just five days. “Which is unheard of really!” says Michael. “It was the most important part but also probably the least work. In LA, you really need a car to get around and we didn’t have a car. So our 25 minute walk to the studio was basically breaking down everything we had to do. At night time we wouldn’t even discuss it. We’d go out, have a few beers, go to Santa Monica. But it wouldn’t really be a conversation until we were on our way down.”
They found themselves in the odd position of working in the exact place that had been influencing the material before they’d even dreamt of seeing it for real.
“There’s a two-parter on the album called ‘AMLA’ and ‘PMLA’, y’know?” says Pope. “It is that ideal of an imagined place.”
“It’s like one of those intros to a film with the credits going by, cars going through the streets, people rushing to work,” says David. “There’s no pseudo-parody or direct references to films or film music, but the album to us, or at least one aspect of it, was very much about the fantasy of that world that we experience through film and TV. This romantic notion we have of the place.”
They say LA lived up to the fantasy.
“I’m dying to go back,” admits Michael. “I’ve a real yearning to go there and play some shows because it just had this energy to it. It was amazing.”
If they were eager to evoke a particular place, they were mindful not to stay chained to a particular synth sound and time.
“We’re interested in progression as well. Which is why, when you hear the album, you won’t hear it sounding like the Drive soundtrack. We do listen to very modern music and dance music, so none of it is particularly retro. It sounds contemporary, but in our own way. There is that musical movement of retro-futurism that we’re big fans of, but they get to a certain point, and even as a listener, you know what it is. I won’t say it’s a brick wall, but it’s... a glitter wall!”
“We wouldn’t want to lock ourselves into a particular set of rules or a template,” notes David.
“You can’t,” Michael concurs, “because then you become ‘the ‘80s act’ or ‘Ireland’s version of College’. When you see us live, that’s absolutely not what we are.”
Their live success at home has encouraged them to set their sights farther afield. The ribbon is about to be cut on Le Club and they want everyone, from the Boyne Valley to San Fernando Valley, to be a member. They realise that it is the strength of their songs that is most important to the audience. No one is hanging around just for the glow sticks.
“They’re absolutely not,” Pope agrees. “We’ve seen with the new songs – and old ones – how they would stay there, and that says a lot. Especially at a festival, where you’re talking about the most fickle audience possible, who can walk in and walk right out again. They’re not standing there for 70 minutes of panto. They’re not. Not that we’re panto! But the spectacle. So we always knew that was there. Now, we can finally back it up with a record.”