Back in the dance groove

By STEPHEN JEWELL

Speaking before their sell-out Auckland show this year, Groove Armada's Tom Findlay promised the next album from him and partner Andy Cato would be truer to their underground dance roots than last year's Goodbye Country, Hello Nightclub.

That one was created in the daunting shadow of their breakthrough hit At The River and the subsequent success of their sophomore long player, Vertigo.

Now the London outfit's fourth album, Lovebox has arrived, in less than half the time it took the pair to follow up Vertigo with Goodbye Country, and Findlay, at least, believes it is more dancefloor-oriented than its predecessor.

"It's quite immediate, visceral and raw," he says. "Goodbye Country was quite considered and Lovebox is quite the opposite. It sounds a lot madder, which comes from just playing with the live band.

"Recording the album was a good but weird experience. It was a frantic three months and it happened quite manically as it was also in the middle of us being in Ibiza. It was probably not great for my health. Too many late nights and too much madness, but it was fantastic."

The Spanish island-cum-dance music Mecca of Ibiza also influenced on Lovebox's title track, a lush, Balearic-style house tune that harks back to dance music's halcyon days of the early 90s.

"Lovebox has Ibiza written all over it," says Findlay. "It is definitely more of a conventional, hands-in-the-air kind of house record. There are parts of the album that are nostalgic and that is one of them."

However, Lovebox isn't likely to convince Britain's fickle dance music press, who accused Findlay and Cato of pandering to the pop mainstream after At The River's success.

"The dance scene feels a bit let down but I can't get worried about it," says Findlay. "We knew what we were doing and it would be ridiculous to keep churning out the same thing.

"Critics wish we would still be a dance act but we've never had a particularly good relationship with the media. And Vertigo wasn't well received at the time either.

"People now say that it's a classic but they wouldn't have said that when it was first released. But that's a particular thing about being a British act.

"The British media are real neophytes. They don't stay with you for long, while media outside Britain tends to be more committed and openminded."

But Lovebox isn't a complete departure from the Groove Armada trademark formula as, like Goodbye Country, the album features several big-name guest vocalists, including Neneh Cherry, whose main track Think Twice is reminiscent of Hymn of the Big Wheel, her contribution to Massive Attack's classic 1991 album, Blue Lines.

"The strings at the end of the track have that Unfinished Sympathy sound to them," says Findlay, referring to the Massive Attack classic from the album.

"We wrote the track, edited it down and sent it to Neneh. She then wrote the vocal and sent it back to us. Neneh has a unique voice. Nobody else sounds quite like her. She can bring emotion to quite banal-sounding things, not that the song is banal, but the track is really true to heart."

And Findlay and Cato obviously didn't collaborate in person with the late Sandy Denny on Remember, which is sampled from a 1969 Fairport Convention song, Autopsy.

"That was a real headache. We didn't want to break up the feel of the tune, but Fairport Convention wasn't that tight. They were all over the place so we had to write the tune around them.

"We then got the London Community Gospel Choir to lay down a totally new chorus and I think we got away with it."

But Findlay insists the opening track Purple Haze has nothing to do with the track of the same name by another long dead rock legend, Jimi Hendrix .

"There's a similarity in the rawness and urgency. The rock element comes from playing live with our band and seeing how crowds react well to things like that. We wanted to get some of the mayhem of our live show on to the album."

* Lovebox is out now.