A band named after a trouble-torn city in the Middle East with a Balkanesque sound and a devil-may-care approach to the playing of musical instruments, Beirut make their own rules of engagement. The brains behind the operation, Zach Condon, talks to Belinda McKeon
ZACH Condon is unsure about the internet. There are better things to do on a computer, in his view; like create six homemade albums before the age of 16 using a keyboard, a trumpet, a Fisher Price karaoke machine, a family accordion and an old version of ProTools. Yes, he has a myspace page - 98,000 profile views and counting - but he doesn't use it that often. And blogs? He'll read the odd one. "Mostly I just check my email," he says. "I've never really taken blogs or the internet seriously up to now." Which is richly ironic, like so much else about this 20 year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Condon might not bother much with blogs, but they bother very intently with him, and with Beirut, the band he describes as his "ramshackle orchestra". Blogs made Beirut (the name, was chosen because Condon was attracted to the city's history as a "contentious space". When history became news again this year, he considered changing it. But it remains). Blogs got wind of his debut album, Gulag Orkestrar, before its official release by Badabing records last spring. One track was leaked, then another, and the mutters became a squall. Within weeks, Condon had sold out his first ever show in New York. He had only moved to the city a few months previously, keen to work on his music, but having taken a job in a furniture factory just in case. The first gig was at the Knitting Factory.
The next was at the Mercury Lounge. At both, the audience appeared already to know every song on Gulag Orkestrar inside-out; every twang of ukulele, every trumpet flare. He quit the job. The first six bedroom albums had been for fun - doo-wop, electronica, everything that took his fancy - burned to CD and handed to friends at parties. But this was different.
Condon's stint in a professional recording studio may have allowed him to layer some more instruments onto the bedroom cut of Gulag Orkestrar, but he insisted on keeping the sound rough, unfinished, messy. "I've kind of grown into the idea that I like that it sounds like an old warbly, trashy kind of vinyl. I like the fact that it sounds like I stuck one mic in the room, and it was just like a load of people trying to compete for its attention, you know. So, there was no other way I could have done it"
And this is its charm. Songs such as Postcards from Italy, Mount Wroclai and Bratislava are naïve, heart yanking, bizarre; a mash-up of martial drum and accordion, a nervous first date of glockenspiel and guitar, a rocky marriage of mandolin and cello, violin and horn. Stretched over it all are his deep, eerie vocals, a marriage of drama and dirge. Think Stephin Merritt meeting Joanna Newsom meeting Jeff Magnum of Neutral Milk Hotel. Then think about the lot of them being held hostage by a band of Balkan gypsies. Or by the Jimmy Cake. Or both. It's a sound built of the influences he soaked up as a teenager, when he delighted his parents by dropping not just out of high school, but out of four colleges. At first, he sat around at home watching the films of the Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica; Underground (1995), with its band of drunken gypsies in wartime Belgrade, was a particular favourite. At 17, himself drunk on the idea of the Balkans, he left his job as an ice-cream scooper and went to Paris, where the sounds he had been hearing in his dreams came raggedly, haphazardly to life.
"I still wish I lived there," he says of Paris. "It's everything that American cities aren't. It's a kind of utopia in my eyes, just the aesthetic, just the ambience. I made friends with a bunch of kids that just lived around the peripheries of the city, and we'd go downtown and hang out on the riverside. They were part of a group that bought brass instruments, pawn shop, thrift store instruments, and they would just walk around Paris with these Eastern European marching band songs on a loop, basically. And in the morning, you'd see them crashed out asleep in a bus stop, because they'd play music all night. It was really exciting."
Condon's parents - middle-class, themselves relatively musical, but baffled and worried by their son's slump from good student to slacker - were less excited, unsurprisingly. The Parisians taught Condon to play brassdddd11, but then the money ran out and it was time to come home. A few months later, he had ditched another college after one class and, with his refunded tuition deposit, was straight back on a plane to Paris.
His father got wind of the trip after four days.
"At first he thought I was nuts, and then he sort of sighed and said, you know, you have a cousin you never met who lives in Amsterdam. I'm sure he'd let you stay with him. And the cousin lived in this artists' residence and ended up being a sort of kindred soul."
Even better, the kindred soul had an eccentric Serbian neighbour, recently heartbroken, who liked to listen to loud and frantic Balkan music all day and night. The rest of the building despised him, but Condon was curious, and one night made his way upstairs. The Serbian filled him with wine, blasted him with music, sold him a clutch of records. The next day, Condon scoured the record shops of Amsterdam for more of the same: the Serbian trumpeter Boban Markovic, the Romanian group Taraf de Haïdouks. Returning to New Mexico, he had to dump half of his belongings to make room in his luggage for the CDs and vinyl he'd bought. And when he got back to his bedroom, the sounds that became Gulag Orkestrar began to take form.
Condon knows that what he's doing is Balkanesque, not Balkan, and that his music might not go down well in an authentic Eastern European bar. He knows his sound, which always opts for melodies over lyrics, is chaotic rather than crafted; that he's jumping off tangents rather than traditions. It can be intimidating; that first gig at the Knitting Factory in May, for example, was a complete shambles. He had never played live before. He had found his musicians - in New York, Beirut changed from a one-man operation to a 10-member orchestra - only weeks previously. They had barely rehearsed. He had bought a 10-dollar ukulele from eBay which turned out to be useless, impossible to keep in tune.
His voice trembled; the whole band was sweating. In the audience were the expectant faces of hundreds of bloggers; a group not known for keeping their disgruntled impressions to themselves. "It was a nightmare," Condon shrugs. Yet, incredibly, the bloggers continued to pledge their support. The emails were consoling rather than cutting. It was just one gig, they told him. He had potential. The next one would be better. And a few weeks later, at the Mercury Lounge, it was.
Not that the musicians had much more of an idea about their instruments at that gig, either. Or - though they're learning - at any of the gigs which have made up Beirut's major American and international tour, which has had Condon living on buses since September. The uncertainty is part of the experience, he says. "I mean, I wrote the album with instruments I didn't know how to use. So, for everyone that joined the band when I moved to New York, it was the same. One guy was a guitar player; I handed him a ukulele. One was a baritone sax player. He got a glockenspiel, a clarinet and a mandolin. So nobody onstage is exactly in their most comfortable position. And I don't know if that helps or it hurts, but frankly, it's fun."
Is he still using the eBay ukulele? "Nah. I did the whole rock-star-in-the-back-garden thing. Smashed it. Which is kind of embarrasing, actually, not really my style. I still have a piece of it on my wall."
Beirut play The Olympia on November 2. A new EP, Lon Gisland, is due for release this winter
