Let’s Get Lost

FORMER TECHNO MADMAN JAMIE LIDELL HAD TO

TRAVEL THE WORLD TO FIND HIS (VINTAGE ) SOUL

BY PHILIP SHERBURNE

Sitting in an empty Berlin hotel dining room, Jamie Lidell is loudly clad in a torn black tuxedo with frilly white shirt and a baby-blue waistcoat, methodically wiping away a fine film of white powder—no, not that kind. Lidell lives nearby, in the immigrant-heavy Kreuzberg neighborhood, but the U.K. native still feels out of place, even when he’s not made up for a photo shoot. He moved here in 1999 “for luuuuv,” but the way he draws out the word tells you how that ended up. And like most of the city’s expat musicians, his command of the language is severely limited. “I got to a point where I’m like, ‘Look, I’m not going to get this, and I’m probably going to leave,’” he says.

Lidell, who has talked of moving to Paris or back to the U.K., also enthuses about New York and Los Angeles. “Berlin is a tragic, decadent sort of place. I’ve come to understand that and love it. But also fear it.” It’s not hard to understand his fear: Berlin is notorious for its culture of 24/7 party people, of Friday nights that run into Sunday afternoon, and Lidell—both a hedonist dandy and a rampant self-doubter—has a fraught relationship with temptation. He spent a recent press week in Manhattan happily sloshing back champagne cocktails at the Soho Grand. In Berlin, he’s moodier, beating himself up over past tribulations, like the dissolution of Super_Collider, his avant-soul duo with Chilean-English techno maverick Cristian Vogel. “We were actually on the verge of something, and I left [England] and screwed it up,” he says. “I don’t know why I did that.” Despite Lidell’s restlessness, this is a promising time for the singer/producer. While 2005’s Multiply moved only 22,000 copies in the U.S., the title track was eventually included on the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack. And where Multiply often sounded like a blatant vintage-soul pastiche—not unlike a male version of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black—Lidell’s new full-length, Jim, puts the emphasis on polished, arranged tunes that are lithe, limber romps uniting Stevie Wonder, D’Angelo, and Van Morrison.

Lidell has also been keeping heady company. Credited as “Energy Arranger,” he collaborated on “So Sorry” off Feist’s album The Reminder and recently toured and recorded with Beck. In L.A., he met Columbia chief Rick Rubin, and though a deal never materialized, the meeting boosted Lidell, who clearly seeks affirmation. “He was like, ‘ This record is a lot better than Multiply. It’s better produced, it’s better thought-out, the vocal performances are really solid.’ I didn’t know whether it was any good. Parts of me are like, ‘ Why can’t I ever capture my other part?’”

By his “other part,” he presumably means his mellower, singer/songwriter side—an aspect of Lidell’s personality that has generally gone neglected in his madcap dash from rave underground to the edge of the mainstream. To support Jim, Lidell is touring with a full band, but he remains best known for his unhinged solo performance style, wearing capes, leopard-print bathrobes, and even a suit made out of film stock. Punching at keyboards, assorted gear boxes, and a laptop running self-designed software instruments, he whips up a maelstrom of beats, croons, shrieks, and howls, improvised and looped on a sampler in real time.

Lidell has had a lifelong propensity for extremes. Of raving at 16 years old, he says, “It was drugs, for me. This full-on, shamanic transition to adulthood: Blitz yourself. I wouldn’t go out for the music, because the music wasn’t music. That was

the cool thing about it: The songs didn’t start and end with people going [mimics an audience clapping politely].” He got his start with London’s mid-’90s Subhead collective, which threw illegal parties in abandoned office blocks and, once, a submarine. His first album for London’s Warp label (which still releases his records) was 2000’s Muddlin Gear, an abrasive spray of digitally mangled rhythms.

But it was his work with Super_Collider and Vogel—who now runs a Barcelona recording studio and makes uncompromising techno for Berlin label Tresor—that suggested Lidell’s future. “Me and Cristian were both meticulous bastards, but we worked well together,” says Lidell. “He’s a major talent. When I worked out how he was doing his music, I was like, ‘Christ, it’s insane!’ It’s just numbers going past on the [computer] screen; it looked like he was trying to hack into this war-games thing. He’s like, ‘F32. 4. A’—just typing in letters, and numbers and beats come flying out.” The duo’s live shows, with a cameraman wearing a miner’s headlamp and Super 8 footage projected onto the performers’ bodies, were as manic and risky as anything electronic music has produced.

That Lidell today is very much about songs, thick with honeyed vocal harmonies and woozy organs, effortlessly balancing verse, chorus, and bridge, owes to a parallel path of his youth. “I had a band at school all the time; I used to play guitar, try and get my Hendrix on,” he says with a laugh. But his attachment to American R&B of the ’60s and ’70s reflects a stronger universal nostalgia. “Growing up, in almost any country in the developed world, you hear Berry Gordy’s influence. Motown! It’s such a crucial part of adolescence. I always made out with girls with Motown on, because it was so sexy. That was the sweetest shit I knew.”

Much of the sweetness of Jim, recorded in Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles, comes from longtime collaborators Mocky (Dominic Salole) and Gonzales (Jason Beck), Canadians who have also worked with Peaches and Feist. Lidell brought melodic sketches to the studio, and the three hammered out versions by trial and error—recording a song faster, slower, more urgent, more subdued. But one of the album’s strongest cuts, “Another Day,” grew out of “getting really pissed one night,” confesses Lidell. “One night I got a bottle of Laphroaig [scotch] and drank the whole bottle. I was so gone! I had the recording setup in my bedroom. I was in a really good mood, almost falling asleep. I wanted to be drawing on shit that wasn’t conscious, those novel thoughts and crazy connections you get, things you wouldn’t think possible just sitting there with a pen and paper. I wrote the whole song in one stream of consciousness. It was weird, like a folk song—sounded like fucking Beck meets Simon & Garfunkel.”

Lidell admits the album might never have happened without his partners. “I need to orbit around other characters and motivators,” he says, his voice becoming more somber as he fusses with a package of nuts from the hotel bar. “I’m quite a wayward, lost guy.” But he also seems to thrive on being lost. I bring up a 2004 solo performance in Montreal when it was obvious Lidell had no idea where he was going—one lengthy “song” found him berating the soundman over a shuddering beatbox loop.

“There weren’t really any songs that night, no,” Lidell says, perking up. “And I loved that. Because among the chaos there’s real gold.”