Sounds for further down the track

French producer/DJ Kid Loco isn't a kid any more. He's married with children, and on the phone, the man his mother knows as Jean-Yves Prieur doesn't sound mad either - urbane, witty, but definitely not loco. Stick him in a production studio, however, and before too long some deliciously way-out sounds will emerge.

He won't be playing many tracks from his acclaimed A Grand Love Story or Kill Your Darlings album at his three New Zealand dates, although crowds may get to hear some of his 100-plus remixes for artists as diverse as St Etienne, Pulp, Stereolab, Talvin Singh and Dimitri From Paris.

"I never play my tracks when I DJ because I don't consider it to be dance music. It's more classic in terms of the instruments. It's guitar, bass and drums, not so much beatbox. My music is more to make love to than to dance to."

If there's one thing Prieur likes, it's love and the thing he likes more than love is narcotics. His music is supposedly fuelled by the influence of the Camberwell carrot (a jumbo-sized joint made famous in the British cult movie Withnail And I).

It's tongue in cheek, almost to the point of being juvenile. Take for example, Lucy's Talking from Kill Your Darlings, on which singer Louise Quinn intones some deep nonsense about God, Satan and chickens.

"People think that's really stupid," Prieur laughs, "but I like using words like God and Devil because everybody can understand it.

"I in 10 years or 100 years, people will understand what the song means. I don't like people who use brands in lyrics or who talk about famous people from music or TV. In 10 years, nobody will remember these TV shows and so nobody will understand their lyrics."

Prieur, a former punk rocker, started making music 10 years ago and moved from punk into the world of dance music. Now his work lives more at the trip-hop and country/rock end of the musical spectrum.

"I think people who were into punk are also into dance because it is also a do-it-yourself sort of thing. There were the hippies of the 60s, the punk rockers of the 70s and then house music, techno and hip-hop.

"You don't have to know how to play, you just pick up a guitar and you do it. Or you pick up turntables or you pick up a computer."

Prieur's first, sweeping double album, A Grand Love Story, mixed lush electronic sounds with chilled beats. A collection of his remixes, Life For Children Under 12 Inches, followed but it was Kill Your Darlings that lived up to Prieur's lofty ambitions.

He is pleased it has earned comparisons to Primal Scream's landmark merging of rock and dance beats, Screamadelica as he was hoping to emulate that landmark 1991 recording.

"I got into house music and club culture because of Primal Scream, because of the Loaded [the hit single of Screamadelica] remix," Prieur says.

"The first time I heard it I was like, 'What is this?' It was rock and roll, but with a groove. I still hate drummers in rock bands. They are really boring, they play like lumberjacks. It's just bang, bang, bang.

"With Primal Scream, the drumming was so sexy. I said to myself, 'okay, I'm going to do this now'.

"Since then I've been working with computers to make music and it's really opened my mind. I had lots of ideas before but I didn't know how to make them happen. Because of Primal Scream I knew what I wanted to do."

- NZPA

* Kid Loco DJs at Wellington's Sub Nine tonight and Auckland's Galatos tomorrow night.