Hercules and Love Affair: Affairs of the heart
Hercules and Love Affair's Andy Butler.
On a crisp winter morning in Vienna, Hercules and Love Affair's Andy Butler is delivering an impromptu pitch for the local tourist board. "I love schnitzel," he says. "And I like blunzen [a sausage-like delicacy]. So this stay is working out pretty good."
Flopped in the back of a taxi, Butler is zooming through the picture-postcard streets of the Austrian capital. He's en route to the downtown studio of techno-producer Patrick Pulsinger. Together, they are toiling on the sequel to Hercules and Love Affair's boundary-shattering debut album, a dreamy, glitter-splashed electro record that, in 2008, came very close to starting a disco revival all on its very own.
"There's kind of a new cast of characters on this one," the amiable Butler says, slightly mysteriously. "Some relatively new voices and some voices familiar to the audience. I'm not divulging at the moment."
One voice which will almost certainly be absent from the finished LP is that of Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, whose Honey Monster-goes-to-heaven falsetto was all over Hercules and Love Affairs first record -- and was the magic ingredient in the hit single Blind.
"He was very generous with his time," says Butler. "It was amazing working with him. He was on literally half of the album. And was totally unable to tour with us. And while the product we made was stunning, I thought it would be great to work with other people, people who could come on the road with us."
Though Blind was released only 18 months ago, Hegarty's original sessions with Hercules And Love Affair actually took place in 2004, when he was still a struggling unknown. Watching from the sidelines, Butler had the surreal experience of seeing his old friend suddenly become an international sensation.
"We recorded Blind a long time before [Hegarty's Mercury prize-winning debut] I Am A Bird Now appeared," he remembers. "I knew he was in the middle of writing an album. And I was very much being a supportive friend. I listened to the material and gave my thoughts. And then the album came out and suddenly things got very hectic for him."
Indeed, it was at Hegarty's behest that Butler decided to dust down the old recordings the two had made together and put them at the heart of his new project.
"It was literally years later and we happened to meet up. And he said to me, 'what are you going to do with those songs we recorded before I won the Mercury Prize and travelled around the world five times?' It really has been kind of trippy to see all of that happen for him."
Like Hegarty, who is transgender, Butler knows what it's like to grow up feeling out of place. As a child in stultifying suburban Denver, Butler developed an obsession with Greek mythological heroes -- the hunkier the better. Hence Hercules and Love Affair. As he got older, he began to understand what lay beneath the attraction.
"I came out of the closet at 15 as a gay man," he says. "I didn't really put the whole Greek thing together until I was an adult. I learned all about the homo-social culture ancient Greece had. How men could be masculine warrior types and be equally fluid in their sexuality and capable of loving another man romantically. This somehow felt vindicating for me. I thought it was an interesting commentary on how values have changed over the years."
He discovered dance culture around the same time, immersing himself in Denver's underground scene. "Growing up, it was the ultimate escape. I felt wholly free to explore my identity. I was already on the fringes of mainstream culture. Especially in a place like Denver. Dance music offered a meeting place for all sorts of wacky people. It was a very creative space. It was a huge outlet."
Did he really DJ in an S&M leather bar aged 16? He nods, but insists the "leather" bit was never part of the attraction. "The gay clubs had better music back then," he says. "At the leather bar... there were straight DJs there as well. It was really music-focused. It just happened to be a gay venue, though, as I said, the clientele was really colourful."
Butler's one-person disco revival could easily have been laughed off stage. What other genre has been so derided by so many for so long? In fact, the response was exactly the opposite. Clubbers and critics alike flocked to Hercules and Love Affair, drawn by the music's ability to be euphoric and bittersweet in the same heartbeat. The album was, Butler suggests, a fitting soundtrack for troubled times.
"I think the exuberance of a late-70s dance music and club culture created a space where people could kind of forget the problems of the working week,'' he says. "So I suppose it's not surprising that it should also make sense now. I think people more than ever are in need of emotionally charged music. It offers a relief. Who knows? Maybe the next thing that will happen will be a really angry response in the way that punk rock kicked off."
While Hegarty couldn't tour with Hercules and Love Affair, their live show still had lots that was shocking and awesome. Filling in on vocals for Hegarty was Nomi Ruiz, a six-foot transsexual straight out of a John Waters movie. Did Butler enjoy sending the sexual radars of male audience members into a steamy tailspin?
"Not really. Nomi has lived as a woman for years. In my mind, she is a woman. I think men, upon finding out, had a hard time accepting [she might be transgender]. They're more willing to ignore something like that. She's really female from end to end. It was the typical story of guys chasing a hot girl."
Having spent much of the interview despairing of his conservative Middle American upbringing, you might expect that Butler would quite cheerfully never set another foot in Colorado again. Actually, he recently swapped his apartment in too-hip-for-comfort Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a bigger space back in Denver.
When it comes down to it, he says, there truly is no place like home. "I purchased a really big disco collection. I have thousands and thousands of records, so I needed space. Also I wanted to build up my studio a bit more. Besides, being close to home isn't a bad place to be."
Hercules and Love Affair play Tripod, Dublin tomorrow
- Ed Power
Irish Independent
