It shouldn't work but it does: a mixed bag of artistic backgrounds, influences and musical styles. Hercules and Love Affair reveal how difference has become their real strength
The difficulty is to know where to start with Hercules and Love Affair, possibly the most disparate bunch ever to come together, call themselves a band and release an album. The five members walk into the room in a blaze of colour and mismatched clothes like a pick'n'mix bag of sweets.
"Yeah, we're kind of a circus," says band member Kim Ann Foxman when we meet in Paris in the middle of their European tour with the Gossip. "It's not on purpose. We just happen to be these different personalities who are slightly on the fringe." The waif-like Foxman is a Hawaiian lesbian jewellery designer who used to run a notorious New York club night called Mad Clams where people would routinely dance naked, have sex and urinate freely in darkened corners. Today, she is wearing an oversize Janet Jackson T-shirt, a peaked cap and laced-up Dr Martens.
The other band members include Shaun Wright, a big man with a gentle voice, who sports long dreadlocks, white nail varnish and skin-tight black leggings. Then there is the shaven-headed Venezuelan, Aerea Negrot, a classically trained singer who has been dubbed "the Eartha Kitt of the techno age". Next to her is Mark Pistel, quiet and jittery in thick-framed spectacles, the producer of some of the finest electronic and hip-hop tracks of the late 1980s. And finally, Andy Butler, the renowned New York DJ, who is dressed entirely in black, like a pigeon amid a flock of exotically plumed parrots. "I'll probably be answering most of the questions," he says, leg jiggling against his chair. "I've had 12 Red Bulls today."
They are about to release their second album, Blue Songs, a winning melange of joyous dance music, acoustic guitar and stripped-back basslines that shouldn't work, yet does. Their energetic live performances and their unapologetic individualism have won them a devoted following among the A-List ? their fans are said to include Kylie Minogue and Elton John ? and their music has been performed as part of the Frieze art fair in London. "We have a lot of fun on stage," says Pistel, "so it's kind of infectious."
For Blue Songs, the band's influences were myriad, from the "bare bones emotion" of Sin�ad O'Connor to the industrial electronic funk of Meat Beat Manifesto, but one thing remained consistent. "I think more than anything we are just trying to promote authenticity," explains Butler. "If people want to dance and act the freak, then let them. And if you're feeling sad, I think you should be in that feeling. Also, we wanted something provocative. We wanted to make people think."
As a result, the album jumps from the tranquil soul-folk of "Boy Blue" to the Motown disco number, "Falling". Blue Songs is, says Shaun Wright, a deliberate reflection of their patchwork personalities: "It's not so much, 'You're that person', it's actually more that, all together, we can be everything. There's a universality to it." It is a philosophy that links to the band's highly acclaimed first album, Blind, which featured the haunting vocals of performance artist Antony Hegarty (Blind was the New York Times's breakthrough album of 2008 and made Pitchfork's top 10 albums of the year).
After the positive critical reception, Hercules and Love Affair went on the road for a year. After which Butler felt the need to start afresh. He moved back to his hometown of Denver, Colorado, split with his record label and dug out some old guitar licks he had written when he was 15. These would later go on to form the basis of "Boy Blue", a song Butler describes as being "about issues: religion, addiction, just growing up. I was a little surprised by it but, in general, I love the idea of the mystique we've been able to create, all coming from such different backgrounds."
Now, with a new line-up and a new record label (the cutting edge UK independent Moshi Moshi) do the band still believe their role is to continue to give a voice to the outsider?
"Sometimes we feel like a basket of everybody's fears," says Foxman. "But it depends where we are in the world. I don't feel like an outsider in San Francisco."
"Baghdad might be weird," suggests Butler.
"But we don't want to be 'outsiders' because that denotes a feeling of being victimised," says Wright. "There's a strength acquired in being an individual."
For Butler, however, there is a sense that "struggles make the best stories". Growing up in Denver, Butler had a troubled home life in what he describes as "a violent household without any role models". His refuge was the piano ? he began composing classical pieces at the age of 13 ? and Greek mythology: the name of the band comes from the story of Hercules who falls hopelessly in love with another man. For Butler, this "represents the strongest man at his most vulnerable" and reflects the duality between feminine and masculine, strength and fragility, in the band itself.
But he was never destined to be a concert pianist. After stumbling across a Yazoo record by chance, Butler got into dance music and DJed his first club night at the age of 15 (when the police raided the joint, Butler had to hide in the lavatories). "I started DJing because I needed to get out of the house," he says now. "I was, like, 'Take me to the club or there's going to be a really ugly situation at home today!' I found a lot of freedom in the nightclub to express myself and not be judged as harshly as I was at home. I am a gay man and I grew up with a certain struggle and because of that, I have a story to tell."
It is a sentiment echoed by the other band members, for whom music, in varying shapes and forms, represents the opportunity for openness and self-expression. "Dance music especially is a form of ritual release," says Wright, who is sprawled out horizontally on the floor like a wayward teenager. We are in a backstage room at a cavernous Paris concert arena and there is a distinct lack of seating: Butler and Pistel have chairs; the others have uncomplainingly gravitated on to the carpet. "It becomes a way of expressing yourself and challenging social structures."
For Aerea Negrot, their varied personal histories and professional backgrounds enrich the music-making process. "Like all kinds of relationships, we find the common ground," she says. "I come from a completely different background from the techno area but Andy can communicate what he wants with every song."
According to Butler: "Collaboration is only effective when people really put their ego to one side and focus on the real goal which is to produce the best music you can. It's not so much, 'My idea is better than yours', it's, 'What's best for the song?'"
Still, there are some areas of contention, most of which seem to revolve around cleanliness levels in the tour bus. "Five-and-a-half weeks in winter on a tour bus? It's like a wet, mouldy strip club with no sunlight," says Foxman, nose wrinkling at the thought of it. "There's no personal space. We're smelling each other's shoes." And then there is Butler's vigorous snoring.
"I'm a very sensitive sleeper so I need earplugs," says Foxman.
"We all need some kind of plug," interjects Negrot.
Butler nods his head. "It's true. I'm the most troublesome."
The interview is rapidly coming to an end and the five of them have to be on stage in less than three hours. Butler, who is already pushing back his chair, no doubt needs to down a few more Red Bulls. But before they go, I have one more burning question. I am desperate to know what happened to the definite article: why aren't they called Hercules and the Love Affair?
Butler laughs. "I went through two nights of no sleep about it but to have 'the Love Affair' was just too directly referential to a disco band. I didn't want to connote that I was Hercules and they" ? he sweeps an arm across the rest of the band? "were 'the Love Affair'."
"Yeah," says Foxman drily, pushing herself elegantly up off the floor. "It's not like you're Bob Marley and we're the Wailers."
They file out into the corridor, a ragged assortment of people bound by the desire to make infectious and occasionally eccentric music. They seem to get on surprisingly well despite all their superficial differences, even if their shoes smell and one of them snores on the tour bus.
alexander mcqueen casey johnson corey haim paul gray peter steele
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