“It was incredibly hard work but it was also so inspiring working with Prince,” Bryan admits, “It was the hardest job I’ve ever had but it taught me everything I know about producing music.”

Six years down the line, Bryan and Mr No are ensconced in a studio-cum- mews house in a Camden backstreet on a bleak, snowy afternoon, to chat about the next chapter of their lives, specifically Motor’s debut album Klunk. The pair have also attracted attention in recent months for remixes for bands including the Delays and Depeche Mode as well as their parallel project X Lover (featuring blonde bombshell singer Nina) though it’s as Motor that they’re now focused, says Bryan.

“Our hearts are in Motor, no matter what happens with X Lover, that’s the sound we’ve always wanted to create,” he explains.

“Ollie and I write the music for both X Lover and Motor and Nina is the live performer for X Lover, but X Lover is basically us, it’s our music,” he continues.

“We started both projects around the same time, X Lover being our outlet for the more electro-disco-pop stuff and Motor being all the experimental stuff we do. It’s just transpired that Motor has taken precedence, it wasn’t planned that both projects would take off at the same time, it just happened like that. We’ve been balancing it for a while but now we’ve decided we need to concentrate on this Motor album which is our full time commitment now.”

Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Starting with the album Klunk, its imagery of black, red and white diagonal is very stark, is there any particular concept?

Motor (Bryan Black): “We started with Din 9 an industrial type of song, which was our first single and is a noise track, I guess the theme of the album is metal, it’s very industrial, hard edged techno- that’s the sound we were aiming for. To experiment and being as crazy as we could be. We wrote the album a few songs at a time over two years without considering the others.”

Skrufff: You’ve done a few Motor remixes recently such as for Trabant and the Delays, and they all sound very much like Motor tracks, do you feel you’ve developed a definite Motor sound?

Motor (Bryan): “I think so, we’ve found that sound on our last few singles and we’re quite happy with how we’ve developed. When we do remixes we approach them almost as if they are Motor songs. We did a remix recently for Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller (Mute’s legendary founder) made sure we did it so the track didn’t sound like Depeche. We thought that was great.”

Skrufff: Do you feel more of an empathy for club or rock culture?

Motor (Mr No): “I guess we’re club-rock because when we perform on stage we have a rock & roll set up and play electronic music but the reaction we get is always rock & roll.”

Motor (Bryan): “It’s performance based, there’s no laptops, it’s all instruments and singing, we do a really high energy show and that’s the rock & roll spirit. The tracks are written, I guess for the dance floor, but we’re not writing music for DJs, we write music that we think is going to kill a dance floor, we try to do something really mad that works.”

Skrufff: Ollie, I understand you grew up on the periphery of Paris, what kind of environment was that?

Motor (Mr No): “The place I grew up in was somewhere that in France we call ‘mushroom towns’, it grew up really fast in the 80s. I lived there from when I was 11 to 16, they’re just wastelands full of factories. It was like a dormant city, and was really boring. I left when I was 16 with the plan of going to either Paris, New York or London. London was the first place because I wanted to learn English and I loved it here, straightaway. I moved to Ireland when I was 17 to take a break from the wasteland then when I was 18 I moved here.”

Skrufff: How easy was it to find work and support yourself when you first moved to London?

Motor (Mr No): “The Dole (unemployment benefit). I also put together a band called Skyscraper in the 90s doing metallic rock stuff and we got a fairly good deal with EMI and Food Records (Blur’s label). Two years later we got dropped then I joined another band who were also signed by the same people; EMI and Food Records. I’ve been making a living making music for the last ten years.”

Skrufff: You grew up in Minnneapolis, America, Bryan, what kind of environment did you live in there?

Motor (Bryan): “It was a really good experience for me because Minnneapolis is like a small version of New York. When I was young and living there, Prince released Purple Rain and that really inspired me. Eventually I moved to London because I wanted to make dance music; electronic music. When I was in America I just did industrial rock so it was a clean break to come to London.”

Skrufff: Was that before or after you stopped working for Prince?

Motor (Bryan): “It was afterwards. After I finished working at Paisley Park I saved up some money from that.”

Skrufff: What did being Prince’s ‘sound designer’ entail exactly?

Motor (Bryan): “My first job was to take all his old records and sample all their sounds and load them onto digital keyboards, that was for the live show. It was a very laborious job which involved working 18 hour days in the studio. He would rehearse then he would do private shows every night of the week until four in the morning.”

Skrufff: What kind of shows?

Motor (Bryan): “He would perform shows at his Paisley Park studios and invite around a hundred people from the city, they’d select people from downtown clubs in Minneapolis to come to an after-party to see Prince play at 3 in the morning and he’d play for three or four hours, for free. He just enjoyed performing and we’d do that virtually every day of the week. So I’d be doing my day job then staying there all night for the gigs. At one point Prince gave me a pager and he might page me in the middle of the night to run up to the studio. I did that for about six months. Though it was incredibly hard it was also so inspiring working with Prince. But I was focused on making music for myself so after a while I decided to learn what I could then have a go myself.”

Skrufff: How did you actually manage to get the job?

Motor (Bryan): “I had a band in Minneapolis and were doing gigs at a club called First Avenue, which was a big club there and eventually he found out about us. We covered one of his songs so he had someone invite us to play at a party at his studio. We did a show, he filmed it and then the next day he asked me to work with him because he liked the sound of the keyboards and the synths. I guess he wanted to beef up the synth sound for his own live shows so that’s what I started to do.”

Skrufff: On your X Lover biog it says ‘Bryan only wanted one thing: to show his former employer how it should be done’ . .

Motor (Bryan): “I wanted to do dirty electronic pop music, something edgy, that maybe Prince should have pursued before he lost his way somewhat.”

Skrufff: Was it a negative split when you left Paisley Park?

Motor (Bryan): “No, not at all. He shut down his studio, I think he was having money issues at the time. I had a good relationship with him, I wasn’t allowed to speak back to him at the time but I wish he would understand what he could be doing.”

Skrufff: You weren’t allowed to speak back to him?

Motor (Bryan): “At the time I wish I could have had more influence on the music he was writing but he does his own thing and doesn’t listen to other people.”

Skrufff: Prince has been on the biggest pop stars ever, how ambitious are you both for Motor, do you want to be as big as him?

Motor (Bryan): “We’re on Mute, the same label as Depeche Mode and they seem to have had an amazing career, we know them too and they’ve been really good to them. I wouldn’t be afraid of that level of success, they’ve kept their integrity and it hasn’t changed them too much.”

Motor’s new album Klunk is out now on Novamute Records.

http://www.din9.com

Article by Jonty Skrufff (JontySkrufff.com)

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