Please forgive Luke Slater his synths

By STEPHEN JEWELL

Just as the Datsuns and White Stripes-led garage-rock revival has roots firmly in the 1970s, electronica's latest "new" thing, electroclash, harks back to the past. Artists like the much-vaunted but little-sold Fischerspooner have essentially married modern-day dance beats to 80s synth-pop sounds.

However, electroclash has had no discernible impact on these shores and its appeal in its stronghold, Britain, has rapidly declined, which is why artists like Luke Slater, who will return to New Zealand next week for his second Big Day Out, have distanced themselves from the much-maligned genre.

Slater has been tarred with the electroclash brush as his third album, Alright On Top - his first to embrace vocals and three-minute pop-song structures - boasts a wistful, synthetic quality which recalls 80s electronic pop acts like Yazoo and the Human League.

But while he admits to having grown up on such fare, the London-based DJ insists that nostalgia was the last thing on his mind when he recorded the album.

"It's weird because when I was doing the original interviews for the album, everyone was saying that it was like electro-pop, which I denied," says Slater.

"I don't know how it happened, but it took about a year to write the album. By the time it had come out (in April 2002) there were a lot of records coming out that had been influenced by the 80s, so we inadvertently slotted into that.

" It's what I was brought up on, but I don't want to re-enact the 80s and I'm pretty pissed off with talking about the 80s."

According to Slater, Alright On Top was not just influenced by 80s electronica, but also by David Bowie and Brian Eno's earlier musical experiments.

"Brian Eno has a really interesting way of looking at music and lyrics. He's always headed for that no-rules kind of attitude.

"Rather than confining yourself to a template that's laid down by everybody else, just let yourself go and see what you come up with.

"That's the whole reason why I started DJ-ing and writing music in the first place. And I like the way David Bowie looks at things in his lyrics and some of the ideas that he has about writing them like cut-ups.

"Being an electronic artist, I like abstractness and the improbability of things. Lyrics are interesting to me because I like to mess around with words rather than just write a series of lines. "

Slater co-wrote the lyrics of Alright On Top with vocalist Ricky Barrow, who was part of mid-90s dance act The Aloof.

"Ricky and I have both been around the scene for a while and we met up by accident. We got talking and realised that we wanted to do something eclectic with music and vocals," says Slater.

"It was a funny time when we were writing it, because there's always quite a lot of expectation for me to do an album which is more representative of my DJ-ing."

Barrow will not be appearing at Big Day Out as Slater will be playing a DJ set, which bears little resemblance to Alright On Top and will be closer in sound to his first two instrumental techno albums, Freak Funk and Wireless.

"I play remixes of the singles from the album, which was created with the idea that we could tour it live as a band and keep it that way," says Slater.

"When I DJ, I've always played stuff that I like and the album doesn't relate too much to my DJ-ing. I like to keep things pretty heavy and groovy."

* Luke Slater plays The Boiler Room 6.45pm to 7.45pm.

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