Electric energy

Their Oracular Spectacular album is still riding high, they are busy with its follow-up, and now MGMT have secured themselves a slot at this year's Electric Picnic festival. Not bad for a band who claim to lack ambition. "The quicker we move, the better we are," Andrew VanWyngarden tells BRIAN BOYD

‘Hold on, I think there’s a deer in my back garden.” MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden puts the phone down to investigate a bit further. “It is a deer, how cool is that? This place is amazing – I found some waterfalls the other day and there’s a beach nearby and there is perfect spring weather. I don’t want to leave.”

“This place” is a house quickly being converted into a studio in southern California. The Brooklyn-based duo of VanWyngarden (vocals, guitar) and Ben Goldwasser (keyboards) are there recording a very speedy follow-up to last year’s coruscating debut Oracular Spectacular.

You suspect VanWyngarden would be perfectly happy to talk about the flora and fauna around his current abode at some length; for him it’s a lot more interesting than any talk of units shifted, territories conquered and discs going platinum. “The two of us still don’t know why we are in this band,” he says. “This really isn’t what we intended to do. We both have hippy-type parents and we were just messing around together in the college we both went to [in Connecticut]. Sure, we wrote songs together but we never dared to play them anywhere outside the campus. The ambition was not to be in a band at all. It was only after college that we actually went so far as to record some of the stuff we had written. As for hit albums and big tours – we still really don’t know what’s going on.”

He’s on the phone to talk about MGMT being one of the headliners at this year’s Electric Picnic. “We actually requested to play it,” he says. “And we really shouldn’t be doing it because at the moment we’re stuck into the second album and that won’t be in the shops until autumn at least, so it’s not as if we have new product or anything. But we want to do it because we talk to a lot of bands and the name Electric Picnic keeps coming up as a really cool festival. We did the Oxegen festival last year, but from what we’ve heard, Electric Picnic is smaller than Oxegen and it’s more in the country. I clearly remember the Oxegen gig – some woman tried to climb up this big pole in the giant tent we were playing and we had to stop playing and leave the stage until she came back down again. It was nuts.”

Touring is something MGMT used to approach with no little trepidation. “When we wrote the album we had absolutely no idea that anyone would be interested in it, so the subject of touring it just never came up,” he says. “We never thought about how the songs would work live so that’s why they sound so different when we do them on tour. We don’t use backing tapes or anything but I think we really get to the heart of the songs. The really early shows we used to do used to be kindly described as ‘performance art’, although I wouldn’t use that term to dignify them; they were strange affairs. But we were just playing house parties and stuff like that back then. It is still so weird for us to be playing to 30,000 people. We weren’t prepared for that – and then our second-ever festival appearance was Glastonbury, which can be a shock.”

VanWyngarden says the Electric Picnic appearance will be one of just a few “late-summer” festival appearances. The band’s label and assorted other voices have all warned them not to tour until the new album is ready. “We never really listen to that type of advice,” he says. This is consistent with the fact that when their label asked who they wanted to produce their debut album, they replied: “Either Prince or Barack Obama – but definitely not Sheryl Crow.”

If there's some sense that they don't take the industry game entirely seriously, it's been there from the get-go. One of the first songs they wrote together, the global hit Time to Pretend, features the lyrics: "I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life/Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives/I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars/You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars."

"On Time To Pretendwe were satirising something we never thought would happen to us," says VanWyngarden. "The joke was that we were singing about being sell-out rock stars even before we had a record out."

When the song first came out, it was iTunes’ song of the week. There was a minor outrage at the time, with the band’s lyrics been taken at face value. “Not for the first time, people didn’t get the joke,” says VanWyngarden.

At this point in the interview (unsurprising given its ubiquity), the MGMT Kids comes on the radio at my end. “It’s still very freaky for us when we hear ourselves being played,” he says. “Do you know, that was the very first song me and Ben wrote together back at college? He had been out partying and when he came back he came up with this weird electronic loop and later I put the lyrics on it.”

With its psychedelic-pop sound and Hall and Oates meets Spacemen 3 influences, Oracular Spectacularwas last year's sensational surprise hit. Its producer, Dave Fridmann, had previously worked with Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips and it was as if elements of the sound of those two bands were being refracted through a pop-music prism: there was enough on the album to keep daytime radio happy, and enough spacey interludes to get even the psychedelic eggheads interested.

Back when they were just making music for themselves, MGMT came up with a name that they thought would be a good title for a band’s second album. “We’re going to call the new album Congratulations and again it was dreamt up as a jokey clap-ourselves-on-the-back title for a rock band,” he says. “And it probably sounds even funnier now after how well the first one did.”

With Congratulations down for a release later this year, MGMT again defied record-company wisdom of leaving a three-year gap between albums. “Our label have called us crazy for starting the second one so soon. I think you’re supposed to be scared of that ‘difficult second album’; it seems most bands are, but for us, the quicker we move, the better we are.

“So far, it’s sounding really strange – we’ve got one super down-tempo song that sounds like something from The Band and the rest of it is all this surf punk-rock sound – very garage rock sounding everywhere – and neither of us really knows where that influence comes from.”

Congratulations will be their “touring/girls/partying” album, he thinks. “That’s all we’ve been doing for the last 15 months – touring/girls/partying – so it’s going to come out in the music, but in a good way.”

This year’s Electric Picnic at Stradbally, Co Laois, takes place on September 4th, 5th and 6th. Tickets now on sale. www.electricpicnic.ie