Uneasy Listening
For 15 years Andy Butler has been taking us to the dancefloor and beyond, collaborating with a host of international talents ranging from John Grant to Kele Okereke. He’s recently released the deepest and darkest Hercules & Love Affair album yet – the majestic and rightfully acclaimed In Amber – and finally reunited with his first and greatest muse, Anohni.
Interview Adam Mattera Photography Christian Trippe
Photography Christian Trippe Tank top Collision
When you were doing the fighting poses during the photoshoot earlier I heard you mention that you’d taken up boxing…
Yeah. It’s something I did as a child and despised. Then a few years back I just wandered into a kickboxing gym. I was very intimidated at first, but there was a wonderful sense of respect amongst everyone in the room. Now I train four times a week with a Brazilian ex-professional fighter.
I guess it helps channel a bit of aggression?
There’s definitely an aggressive aspect to it, but it’s deeper than that. When I get to the end of a workout, I feel like I’ve released something and I’m thinking differently. There’s a clarity that I walk back out into the world with. It’s cathartic.
That’s interesting – you could say the same about ‘In Amber’. And it sounds like you got back in training around the same time you were making the album.
It’s exactly the same time, yes. I needed to come to terms with some of those uglier, less comfortable feelings than I had explored before. We’re not always happy, joyous and free. You know, this notion of like ‘chin up!’ we have, this almost toxic positivity… it’s just not natural. We’re not always in a place where we want to be in a nightclub and wave our hands in the air. I knew it wasn’t necessarily what people have come to expect from a Hercules record, but I was okay about that. It’s the kind of thing that needs to be digested over time. It’s not easy listening.
“We're not always happy, joyous and free. You know, this notion of like ‘chin up!’ we have, this almost toxic positivity… it's just not natural. We’re not always in a place where we want to be in a nightclub and wave our hands in the air.”
No, it’s uneasy listening if anything. Lyrically it feels like you’re challenging a lot of the old hierarchies that aren’t working anymore. There’s definitely a sense of some kind of requiem for the old world and maybe a sort of prayer for a new one…
Yes – and Anohni had a big role in that. She’s been staring things directly in the face for a while and naming things that many people are very uncomfortable with. On her last record – ‘Hopelessness’ - there was a recognition of this deep trauma that people are collectively going through.
Photography Christian Trippe Shirt Topshop vintage Harness COMME des GARÇONS
Listening to the album, there’s a 50/50 spilt between the songs you wrote with Anohni that she sings on and the ones you did alone. It seems maybe hers are more outward-looking, while yours tend to be more interior and inward-looking?
That’s a good way of putting it. Anohni’s definitely naming systems of oppression, and how they’re intertwined with each other in late stage capitalism. Whereas I’m sort of asking ‘What am I going to do about me, in the face of all of this?’ ‘How am I going to find some kind of peace within myself?’
I have to ask about the track ‘One’ that you’ve just released an incredible video for. I was interested in that concept of ‘the one’ – it’s something Anohni returns to lyrically a couple of times on the record.
Yes – on ‘One’ she sings ‘magic in my infancy / I was perfect / I was one…’ I think as queer people there’s this sort of fragmentation that takes place as we grow up. The systems of power that are in place impose this shame upon us and we forget that original innocence we once had. And especially for people who are experiencing things like dysphoria, who have been bombarded with this stuff and made to feel there’s something fundamentally broken and wrong about them… So I think ‘One’ is a sort of a rallying cry, especially for people who have been marginalised, and to some degree not even considered whole people. And so (Welsh performance artist and drag maverick) Salvia was the perfect protagonist for our video because she has so fiercely and courageously walked out into this world saying ‘this is exactly who I am’.
“As queer people there's this sort of fragmentation that takes place as we grow up. The systems of power that are in place impose this shame upon us and we forget that original innocence we once had… So I think ‘One’ is a sort of a rallying cry, especially for people who have been marginalised.”
Andy on his track ‘One.’
‘In Amber’ is quite a departure sonically from what you’ve released before – what inspired that?
I think it was a combination of things. Part of it was definitely environmental. I live in a mediaeval city called Ghent in Belgium – I’m surrounded by 16th and 17th century buildings. So you feel the weight of that. Plus I really got interested in the fringes of experimental music – kind of left field outsider pop from Belgium. And also revisiting a lot of records from my youth. The first nightclubs I went to would play stuff like Tones On Tail, maybe some industrial or early techno music. They were the only places young kids could get into in Denver. I must have been 13 or 14. They would serve soft drinks and play Bauhaus and New Order records.
Were these gay clubs?
No, no, they were goth clubs.
So you were a teenage goth then? It’s all beginning to make sense. Did you have black nails and the whole bit?
I painted my nails and stuff. I don’t know if I ever went black – I was always a little more colourful with my take on goth. Plus red hair kind of ruined that, so I couldn’t be ever be really go black. So I would dye it brighter orange and do things like that.
Photography Christian Trippe Flowers Yan Skates Coat Issey Miyake
So was Anohni collaborating with you from the outset on this record?
No, originally it was a couple of demos I’d done of these darker-sounding tracks, the kind of stuff I’ve secretly been exploring for over a decade. And I thought ‘I have these weird tracks, who of my friends would get them?’ So I sent them through to Anohni because I specifically wanted her opinion. And she came back and said ‘let’s do something’. When we finally got together I started developing those tracks with her, but then one day she handed me the microphone and said ‘I’m going out for an hour – record something!’ So she left and I had to write and sing something myself, which I’ve always done a little bit of on the Hercules records, but never in such a prominent way.
So that’s how you came to sing lead on half the record?
Absolutely, she’s always been a muse to me in that way… I remember her saying ‘you’re an animal – animals make noise! When a wolf howls no one judges it, and when there’s the sound of a grieving mother who lost her child, no one judges that sound… so just make sound.’
Once you completed the record were you concerned at all that it might not fit – and I hate to use this word – the ‘brand’ of Hercules & Love Affair?
Initially, we were thinking it might be something else. Because it wasn’t like anything Anohni and I had done before. But we came to the conclusion it was really the same as what we did at the beginning. We were experimenting in the same way we did with ‘Blind’.
Yes I wanted to ask about how it all started – when you actually first meet Anohni?
It must have been around 2000. We met through mutual friends at a dinner in an East Village Diner. I remember everyone went around the table and introduced themselves. ‘Hi, what do you do?’ ‘I’m Andy. I’ve just graduated from college.’ I think I was working as an admin assistant or something…
I thought you were going to say ‘I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’…
No, that happened later (laughs). Actually those were fun years. Anyway when it came to Anohni she just said ‘I sing’. And our friends were like, ‘oh, she’s being really modest – you need to hear her record.’ And they gave me that first blue record of hers.
‘Antony and the Johnsons’ – the one with the moon behind her like a halo?
Yes – it had just come out the year before. So later I listened to it, and I was like, ‘she’s not just a singer.’ So the next time I saw her, I told her I hadn’t been as moved since first hearing the Cocteau Twins. And Anohni looked at me and said ‘oh my god, you like the Cocteau Twins? I’m obsessed!’ So we ended up spending tonnes of time together just nerding out and talking about culture. And eventually I told her I sometimes made songs and I played a couple for her and asked if she would ever want to sing on one. I thought it would be interesting to hear her voice against an electronic texture. And she said ‘sure’. So we went into a studio and four hours later we had recorded the vocals for ‘Blind’.
I read that you hated it at first?
When we listened back we thought ‘oh no, this is really weird’. We both loved Yazoo and Alison Moyet was another of those amazing big female voices we adored. And those early demos were very synthetic, there was no brass on it then, so it was like super-Yazzie sounding. Anohni was like ’Oh my god, we like totally want to be Yazoo – put that away!’
It’s amazing that at one point you were considering discarding this track that ended up launching your recording career.
We thought it was something we may have listened to it as grannies and laughed at. But then, it must have been around five years later, Anohni was at my house and we pulled it out and listened to it again. And she said ‘that’s actually really good. You should do something with it’. ‘Okay, I don’t know any record labels.’ And she was like, ‘we can find one – you know, I just won this thing called the Mercury Prize in England, I’m sure we can find a label’. And a few weeks later I had an album deal.
Photography Christian Trippe Flowers Yan Skates
On an Alison Moyet note, this might be really trite, but it occurred to me if ‘Blind’ was kind of your take on ‘Situation’ then this latest record is more ‘Winter Kills’. Maybe with a bit of ‘Love Resurrection’ thrown in.
I love that (laughs). I think we were actually talking about ‘Winter Kills’ during the process of making this record, that’s interesting to think about. It was sort of a detour on that album - it was like the freeze in the midst of that super energetic, amazing album (Yazoo’s ‘Upstairs At Eric’s’). I think that’s a fair thing to say. I have to remember that. She’ll laugh at that.
So how up come you and Anonhi never got back together before? I guess you were both too busy with your own stuff?
Exactly. Once ‘Blind’ and the first album came out I was touring constantly. I had a hundred and some shows in the first year. And it had really ramped up for Anohni too. So we were already seeing a lot less of each other. I must have toured for seven years basically after with the first two or three records, it just didn’t stop. Everything got really a lot at one point when I was like coming back to New York from these tours and not able to relax and making no money because we were a big band to tour. I just needed to go back to Denver and crash and try to relax. So then Anohni and I weren’t even in the same city. I was trying to slow down, kind of unsuccessfully, and then I moved to San Francisco for a minute and then I ended up in Vienna, Austria. So the physical distance played a big role in why we kind of drifted. And it’s been Europe since then. I’ve lived in Europe for twelve years now.
“We all know they’ve started to attack women's reproductive rights. They're attacking trans rights. I'm sure that queer people are next. I don't want to be in an environment like that.”
Andy on America
So no desire to go back to America anytime soon?
I do miss aspects of America a lot. But the political climate has been so toxic for so long. So I’m hesitant to make any decisions like that, because it could very easily turn very ugly again. We all know they’ve started to attack women’s reproductive rights. They’re attacking trans rights. I’m sure that queer people are next. I don’t want to be in an environment like that.
It’s been nearly 15 years now since you started the Hercules project. Do you ever look back on this huge body of work you’ve accumulated, all these great talents you’ve worked with, and think ‘wow, how did that all happen?’
Geez, I absolutely didn’t think any of that was gonna happen. If you were talking to me in 2006 I would have been like ‘ I hope one day I can get a job at a museum’ or something. The idea that years later I would have worked with so many amazing artists and learnt so much from them… I just feel very blessed. And now for it to came back to the primary collaborator… throughout our entire relationship Anonhi has just offered so much. I’ve called her ‘my Northern Star’ before and it’s true… You know it’s funny – we chose the name Hercules because we had to quickly come up with a name for a band. And now when I think about the labours of Hercules and the trials he went through – it couldn’t be a more appropriate name because there’s been so much change and so much to contend with over the years. It’s been a journey for sure.
Photography Christian Trippe Shirt Dries Van Noten Hat Issey Miyake
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Team credits
Interview Adam Mattera
Photography Christian Trippe
Flowers Yan Skates
Grooming John Katsikiotis
Photo Assistant Sophie Bronze
Big thanks to Tailored Communication
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