Something Rotten In The State Of Denmark

To stand in front of the speakers in a venue like Whelan’s while The Raveonettes do their thing is to have your brain sandblasted by white noise while your brow is mopped by the melody. It’s an experience that very much belies the somewhat glossified idea the impartial observer can get of the band via spreads in Spin and Rolling Stone. This is hardcore, albeit with a candy coating; sweet but dark. As Kim Porcelli pointed out in her recent live review: “The Raveonettes’ lighting design dictates that we watch them in near-complete darkness, shot through with intermittent flashes of blinding, careening headlight-white: the visual equivalent of the moment in ‘Leader Of The Pack’ when the head Shangri-La screams ‘Look out! Look out! Look out!’.”
The duo, guitarist and songwriter Sune Rose Wagner (great name, one part rock ’n’ roll tattoo and one part crazed composer) and bassist/vocalist Sharin Foo (another great name, sort of Scandinavian Essex girl meets Oriental mysterion), are the latest love child of the union between Europe and American culture, a yoking together of heterogeneous elements that also characterised their peers.
If Suicide owed as much to krautrock as to Gene Vincent, Blondie were hip to Nino Rota and The Velvets had Cale and Nico chafing against Reed, Morrison and Tucker, both Raveonettes’ albums Whip It On and Chain Gang Of Love play on balletic-ultraviolent retro 50s imagery, West Side Story directed by Tarantino for the Thalia theatre. The band take surf rock, doo-wop and Bowery punk for a blindfolded ride down the Euro-autobahn via Mary Chain/MBV style cacophony. Motor City meets motorik. Neu meets girl.
As you join us, the six-foot-something blonde quarter-Chinese Ms Foo has just disembarked from the tour bus and is checking out the Whelan’s dressing room. She’s reserved but not frosty, bundled up in a winter coat and looking something like Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman all in one. Picking at a plate of cheese, she explains how retro-active Americana impacted on smalltown rural Denmark and gave us The Raveonettes’ sound.
“It definitely made an impression since that seems to be very much what we deal with, musically visually and lyric wise,” she says. “That with a little bit of a twist. I think for us it’s both a homage to American culture as well as a bit of satire in there.”
At the same time though, smalltown migrants tend to have a more open-eyed and unadulterated appreciation of rock ’n’ roll iconography. They buy into the idealism wholesale, whereas their metropolitan cousins tend to be more knowing, more sophisticated.
“Definitely,” Sharin concedes. “We were definitely more naive. And again, as you say, it’s a bit of escapism because there’s just nothing happening at all, so that’s a way to get a little bit of excitement. So I guess watching those movies, the glamour, that was the fascination. And then Sune was travelling around the States when he wrote the music for Whip It On, the first album, so that’s also why it has such an American flavour to it, because the songs were written in cities like New York and Las Vegas.”
It’s been interesting to see how American critics like David Fricke and Greil Marcus have taken to The Raveonettes, as if these Danish visions of flaming tail-fins, choreographed knife-fights and highly stylised but soft-focus sex and leather is as foreign and exotic to present day America as the band themselves.
“It’s weird,” Foo avers, “I met someone who said, ‘Yeah, The Raveonettes, you’re like these ghostly kinds of creatures that are surfing in California on a rainy day. I thought that was a really good kind of picture, ’cos it’s not really the full-on American thing, it has a weird kinda… We just like those opposites, for us it just adds more dimension to the feeling of the music. I mean, lyric-wise there’s this whole naive, sentimental, nostalgic, innocent, 50s bubblegum romance, and then there’s the opposite, the whole seedy, dark, weird, sado kinda side of it.”
Which is also of course David Lynch territory: idyllic, almost Reaganite small town settings under which lurk murder, extortion and torture. Mention of Mulholland Drive causes Foo to comment on that film’s pivotal moment, Rebekah Del Rio lip-synching ‘Llorando’, a spellbinding fado rendition of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’.
“I was really blown away when I saw that,” she says. “It would be fun to work with him one day.”
It may yet happen. Stylistically, but not sonically, The Raveonettes often remind this writer of Julee Cruise’s ‘Floating Into The Night’, co-produced by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, with the director’s lyrics interpreted by Cruise playing an eerily innocent but irredeemably damaged baby doll. But as Foo is at pains to point out, the band are wired into every era – from the ’60s girl groups to the CBGBs acts. (Chain Gang Of Love was overseen by Blondie/Richard Hell producer Richard Gottehrer. “Y’know Richard Hell actually sued Richard (Gottehrer) for not being successful?” Foo says. “Isn’t that outrageous?”)
So, the Raveonettes were tailor-made for cinemascope, a factor not lost on video director Sophie Muller, who cooked up a Hitchcock pastiche for the single ‘That Great Love Sound’, which depicted the duo trying to poison each other.
Sharin: “It came from us saying to Sophie that the only idea we had was to not be perceived as a couple, because people kept asking us, and we’re like, ‘No, we’re not a couple’.”
Why does she think people keep asking that?
“I guess it’s a very natural kind of thing. I myself am always very curious if there’s girls and guys in bands and what about the sexual tensions. And then Sophie said, ‘Oh, why don’t we just have you kill each other?’ And then lots of people told us afterwards, ’But that’s the same as… if you really wanna kill someone there’s a lot of passion there’. So that of course creates a lot of speculation about, ‘Oh, there is passion apparently!’ But it was fun… and I wonder who dies.”

Wagner and Foo formed The Raveonettes back in 2000 after the former returned from a stateside sojourn. He was a pop misfit with a then-unfashionable love of ’50s rockabilly and ’60s garage rock; she’d been studying sacred Hindustani vocal music for five years in the Danish Conservatory.
“It was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan that I heard originally,” she says, “I got into those really exotic Indian sounding scales. I knew Sune through mutual friends because we both played music, and if you’re into music that is a little bit alternative in Denmark, there’s not a lot of people, so you kind of know each other. We’d never played anything together; he knew that I had started playing bass and he was kind of looking for that twin vocals thing with a guy and girl, he had all these duos in his head, so we just hooked up. Singing together was very natural and our voices just blended so amazingly well. From the first time we were like, ‘Wow, we have totally the same timing, the same feeling.’
“Sometimes when we recorded we would almost be confused about who was singing what,” she continues, “which is a little bit spooky. I think it adds a nice… maybe not really androgynous, because I think it’s very sexy in many ways, and very kinda male/female, but there is a little bit of that, ‘Is it two guys or two girls singing?’ I think we could definitely explore that a lot more, there’s a lot of possibilities when you have two voices.”
Is there any relationship between the Hindustani music she studied and the drones they inherited from the Velvets, Sonic Youth et al?
“Our music has a bit of that, even though it’s very short songs, but the fact that they’re all in the same key gives it a bit of a drone feel. But I wouldn’t say that you could hear the Indian influences in our music at all. Of course we’re all a product of whatever we experience so it’s in there somewhere…”
Being a six-foot blonde with a Velvets fetish – is she blue in the face from Nico references?
“Well I actually don’t get it that much. She’s definitely in there somewhere, and we’re very proud of all those people that you can hear and see in the music.”

Chain Gang Of Love and the single ‘Heartbreak Stroll’ are out now on Columbia