Pop Levi

This idea of magick should be familiar to all music obsessives - call it alchemy, that ability to turn technique into gold, the whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts equation. Pop Levi, born in London but for years a gypsy of no fixed background, is clearly not about to celebrate the mundane or the established order. His transcendental debut album 'The Return To Form Black Magick Party' may be named after a ceremonial gathering that Pop threw in Liverpool, but it's also a state of mind, a place of worship, a point of view. Besides, "I like the idea of making your first album a 'return to form" he explains. "To me, it's more about the poetry of it. It's an album that sounds like the title."

The poetry, then, is what matters, not the incidentals. Mr Levi was lucky enough to be born with 'Pop' as his middle name, but what's more important is that the words Pop and Levi epitomise the man - a combination of the instant and the traditional, a sound both glisteningly modern and yet rooted in classicism.

So much about Pop appears to be a magickal twist of opposites. His sound is brittle and lush; it swishes but it's precise; it's soulful and pyrotechnic; it struts and seduces. You might recognise some of Pop's heroes but you won't have heard someone like Pop before. If we're being specific, there is a line that joins Eddie Cochran to Prince and The White Stripes and Pop Levi is the newest addition to that line. But that's just one view of what Pop himself calls "a truly bizarre whirlwind."

Virtual Festivals: Pop, explain yourself! Or at least what you sound like...
Pop Levi: "I suppose what I'm doing now is what I'd call astral fusion! The average musician who sits down and decides to write a song gets out their guitar and then goes into a studio to record it. Well, there's something dead about all that. It's why music is the state it's in. And everyone knows it. But there's another way of looking at that. You study what you're doing to the point of obsession, cutting and pasting ideas, and reducing things to mathematics, stealing magick from Marvin Gaye as well as Michael Jackson. There is magick afoot. Hendrix was heavy into magick, The Beatles, Dylan, Syd Barrett. I've always been into these ways, you know."

VF: You do borrow from a wide range of obvious iconic artists, from Bolan to the Beach Boys. Is that deliberate?
PL: "I don't know. Sometimes that comes across but there's loads of other things too. I'm into Kurt Vile and Gershwin and Prince and Bob Dylan and Stockhausen. All that stuff is there. I think the glam element is probably there at the moment because of the single we've decided to release, 'Sugar Assault Me Now', but I like the idea of that because I don't think anyone's really tried to make, for want of a better word, glam records with big harmonies in this particular way. I don't think that 'Blue Honey' or 'Sugar Assault Me Now' sound anything like anything like the glam records of the '70s. I'm into fuzz guitars and big fucking vocals and hooks I suppose." 

VF: How does it vary from your time working with '90s electro-Scousers, Ladytron?
PL: "Erm. In exactly the same direction but in a completely different kind of way. I guess if you make music it's a totally different way of looking at things, although I would say music is music and you just make it. I don't make what you'd call electro pop anymore but I don't think I ever did really, that was just a part of Ladytron."

VF: How did you end up in America?
PL: "I went to Los Angeles with Ladytron and within a minute of waking up there I wanted to live there. It had blue skies, palm trees, and they've made some serious records here. There's magick in LA, it truly is the land of make-believe. And it was a challenge."

VF: Are you bigger over there than here do you think?
PL: "I can never tell man. One day I think one thing, one day I think the other thing. It's all to do with press and what's going on at the time so it's difficult to work out. LA's got a great scene at the moment so we've been blasting that and we've done a couple of US tours. That's great but because of the way that England is and the way the press turns over so quickly back here, then that's been really buzzing recently. It's now reaching out to Europe so I don't know man, you can't tell really."

VF: What festivals are you doing this year? 
PL: "Jesus that's a question and a half. Every single one! But to be honest I don't know, do you want me to ask now? (shouts) Does anyone know anything about festivals, am I playing any festivals? Are you talking about Britain? I don't know about that, but we're playing at Coachella and South By South West in America. Just quote me as saying that I'm playing all of them. Headlining every night!"

VF: Have you done either of those before?
PL: "I've been to Coachella with Ladytron but this year I'm actually going to be headlining one of the tents. The Mojave Tent I think. It's an immaculate festival, they spray the grass green - evenly green. Can you believe that?" 

VF: You produce the majority of your recorded music yourself. Is it difficult to transfer that live?
PL: "No, it's pretty easy to be honest. They're a really great bunch of heavy guys and we're all on the same wavelength. We all live together in the same house in LA. They're called 'Woman' by the way, that's the name of them. They're their own band. I put everything Pop Levi together but they are their own entity too."

VF: So we've tipped you as one to watch in 2007. How are you going to live up to it? 
PL: "Err, with a serious amount of fluke and the grace of the lord. And of course really going for it and really giving it up. I'm seriously pumped for it all though. Like today, in the last 24 hours I've been in LA, then I went to New York for the night, and then I flew to London to do a TV show and now I'm about to go to New York in about an hour, so it's a heavy life. Timewise I'm floating somewhere over the Atlantic right now."

You can see Pop Levi floating somewhere above the following stages throughout January and February... His debut album 'The Return to Form Black Magick Party' is out 12 February.   

Fri 19-Jan-07 UK London Water Rats 
Sat 20-Jan-07 UK Stoke Underground
Mon 22-Jan-07 UK Manchester Night & Day   
Wed 24-Jan-07 UK Bristol Thekla 
Thu 25-Jan-07 UK Oxford Academy
Sat 27-Jan-07 UK Southampton Joiners Arms
Mon 29-Jan-07 UK Birmingham Academy 
Tue 30-Jan-07 UK Aberdeen Moshulu   
Thu 1-Feb-07 UK Glasgow Arches 
Sat 3-Feb-07 Germany Berlin Magnet Club
Wed 7-Feb-07 Netherlands Amsterdam Paradiso 
Thu 8-Feb-07 Switzerland Fribourg Fri-Son 
Fri 9-Feb-07 Switzerland Winterthur Indigo Club 
Sun 11-Feb-07 Belgium Brussels VK 
Wed 14-Feb-07 Ireland Dublin Crawdaddy 
Thu 15-Feb-07 UK London Islington Academy (Time Out show)
Mon 19-Feb-07 France Paris Nouveau Casino