Interview: Backstage with WhoMadeWho

Interview: Backstage with WhoMadeWho

2 April, 2009 | 11.33AM

• Written by: Dan Cole
• Filed under: Music News: gomma, the plot, whomadewho

For those out of the loop WhoMadeWho are a Danish trio that specialise in mad capped performances, stoned rocky electronic dance music and general craziness.

Consisting of Tomas Barford, Jeppe Kjellberg and Tomas Hoffding the band have just released their second album ‘The Plot’ on Gomma (listen to it in the player below).

Having managed to defy conventions, WhoMadeWho have managed to create a solid album that combines elements from David Bowie and nu disco through to Queens Of The Stone Age and Talking Heads, yet their LP still manages to flow perfectly.

The band are also known for their intense live performances, for covers of Benny Benassi and Mr.Oizo chucked in mid set, and for unpredictable set endings. They are, in their own words, total chaos.

Beatportal caught up with singer and bass player Tomas Hoffding, who was attempting to keep warm backstage at the Maria club in Berlin, before the band took to the stage.

You play Berlin a lot, ever thought of moving here?

We talked about it, but it’s so close to Denmark and the guys have daughters and sons back home, and girlfriends.

I thought about it but I feel quite comfortable in Copenhagen. Also with Danes it’s quite the cliché to go, ‘ooh we make electronica let’s move to Berlin’.

I think that’s a cliché for everyone. How has the overall feedback for the album been – are you pleased with it?

It’s been really good. Maybe they spared us from the bad reviews?

I think we got better reviews from the first one because we think of ourselves now as more of a band. Whereas with the first one it was more like, ‘let’s make some music that we can dance to in the middle of the night’.

It was very important for us to expand in every different way; make more melodic, more crazy, more clubby, more advanced, more simple music. So we tried a lot of different stuff.

The “TV Friend” video, what’s with all the nudity and body paint?

It’s about being weird in a basement. Always with WhoMadeWho is about being naked.

The song is about alienation, loneliness and about watching maybe too much TV, it works on many levels.

And what about ‘The Train’ video?

We played in Russia – in this big apartment for a lot of rich people.

We just hung out with Chicks on Speed and they brought us these costumes and we were just hanging out spending some time and we got very drunk later, we had fights and they videoptaped everything.

If you watch the video there are these security guys with walkie-talkies in the background, thinking ‘they’re crazy – lets fuck them up and throw them in the river’.

It actually ended up with us being thrown out by our friend saying ‘guys you have to leave right now otherwise these guys will to hurt you so bad’.

Are these videos an expansion of expressing yourself more creatively?

The way we work internally in the band, I don’t spend a lot of time saying to Tomas Barford ‘I don’t think that hand clap is kind of bad’, when I do the signing people say ‘that’s cool’ and that’s how we work.

So when we have people do the videos we’re not totally up our ass we just think you’re cool to make a video the way you think it should be.

There has always been two sides to WhoMadeWho; the audio and the visual. With the costumes you wear, is there a thought pattern behind this or is it just random?

It’s pretty random actually. Not going with the flow but very much going open to the spare of the moment and the possibilities that are ahead of us.

The skeletons was, we just played at a party in London and this guy said ‘hey don’t you want to try out these skeleton costumes’ as there was a painting show before with these skeleton costumes, and we did, and we stole them.

And we had a photo session the next day and we said, ‘what shall we wear shall we wear? Our stupid contemporary rock suits or just the skeletons?’.

And it has been the same way with all of our dresses, except for the last ones where these Danish designers said, ‘hey we’ll make you look cool, can we please do you some suits?’, which are these new harlequin suits in the press photos.

Very expensive and I threw one away in Australia.

Do you steal all your costumes then?

We actually played in Brussels last Saturday and they gave us these pig masks and we wanted to steal them but we forgot. We looked really bizarre, harlequin costumes and pig masks.

I saw you last year in the middle of the May Day riots dressed in sheikh outfits rocking out in the heart of Berlin’s Arab district. Was this coincidence or a mis-understanding?

It was a coincidence; obviously we know it has some meaning. Sometimes I also wear this rabbi hat, people also go ‘oooh what’s this about?’

I think you need to know what you’re talking about when you’re making political statements as a musician and I don’t think anyone in the band knows enough about this to do statements.

So it is more like abstract art in a way, you don’t need to say, ‘this picture is a picture of this and that, it’s just my painting and I choose some symbols that make people make connections in their head’.

Whether we have angel wings or we have this Arabic thing going on.

Have you played any more riots since?

Yeah we play a lot of very different places.

Riots yeah, we played at this demonstration in Copenhagen.

We did a lot of stuff where we would play in the street with no PA system or anything, we would just drop in, play for 20 minutes and then leave a big party in the street, way more lo-fi than what we did in Berlin.

We played these sets in art receptions, and we played at the Berlin opera house opening and an art museum. We really like to play art places, that’s actually one of the things we lose when we get a bigger name.

People put us more in the mainstream category where in the beginning we were very much an art band.

This is an open invite, ‘please invite us to your strange openings’.

What kind of bands were you in before?

I used to be in this old school inspired rock trio and then I worked as a bass player for a lot of artists. Jeppe’s played a lot of jazz, avant-garde stuff and Tomas Barford was doing his electronic stuff.

We’re very eclectic, or confused.

There’s a lot of individuality in the band, do you struggle in any way to combine all your styles?

Instead of fighting it, you have to go with it.

I think it’s a struggle being in rock bands as when I was younger where we made this melodic rock, and everybody loved the same music so they had so many opinions on the same thing.

The same you are the band the more you struggle.

The more diverse you are the less you struggle, because obviously Barford knows more about drum sounds than I do in electronica because he’s an electronic producer. Of course I know more about which chords are right and how to sing this because I am a songwriter. In all these cases it makes it easier.

With the other kind of stuff that all you guys have done do you see WhoMadeWho as an alter ego for the other sides of your production work or an outlet for your crazier sides?

WhoMadeWho is definitely fun and crazy.

It started that way but it got more and more serious as it took more and more of our time and it’s going really well and it would be silly if you didn’t go with it.

We just bunch together and inspire each other to produce stuff. I’m making some solo stuff which is more melodic and a bit more serious in a way.

WhoMadeWho is vacuum cleaned and not very personal. It’s not about expressing yourself as a singer, we’re not so emotionally involved in the music, but we take it dead seriously because we want to make it really really good.

Coldplay is writing songs to express themselves and the reason you like it is because you reflect to this emotion.

WhoMadeWho is not about this at all. Our other (solo) stuff is, I know Jeppe’s is and I know mine is.

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