Bold soul

Techno trickster Jamie Lidell comes clean.
By Peter Nicholson

THE BEST ALBUM from relentlessly innovative electronic label Warp Records doesn't sound a damn thing like you'd expect. With barely a glitchy computer fart within earshot and hardly any techno wankery in evidence, Jamie Lidell's Multiply is at first blush a classic soul album. There are songs about trying love affairs and the cruelty of city life – all with Lidell's chameleon croon front and center. Frustrated singers will take one listen to the title track, with its plucked bass line and falsetto harmonies, and will have their shower soundtrack for the foreseeable future.

But where did this album come from? Lidell is best known for his work with experimental techno producer Cristian Vogel as Super Collider, a project that produced the successful single "Darn (Cold Way of Lovin')" and two albums of fractured, heavily processed blasts of funk, much of which made for rather difficult listening. Lidell's 2000 solo album, Muddlin' Gear (Warp), was even more tortured. So what happened to create Multiply, an unashamedly happy, even joyfully simple record?

"I'd already done a bunch of weird shit so might as well try some normal shit. Well, it ain't normal, but..." Lidell trails off into a cough over the phone line. After a month of missed connections, I've finally caught him, in Berlin on a Tuesday night, where he's drinking beer with a mate and fiddling on a laptop. But Lidell quickly warms to the subject and, once he gets rolling, is clearly happy with his new sound. "It's a different kind of pleasure making a record like that.... I needed to have something that could allow to showcase my voice in a simple way, you know what I mean? Sometimes having the craziest sounds and having the craziest shit and then trying to do something with your voice on top of your voice is like an extra sound on top of the mix as opposed to the main thing. So I needed to [make] it the full feature."

Trust the singer

By focusing the album on his voice – a chimeric creature that growls, soars, and belts out lyrics in a shifting style that has led many critics to namecheck Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye – Lidell lays himself bare at the center of the stage. What of the fact that he's a white Brit who, frankly, often sounds like a black American?

Lidell at first doesn't seem particularly interested in the question. "It's what I grew up with. I guess I'm no different from Mick Jagger," he says dismissively, but then he's off, full of passion and maybe a tad defensive. "I know, whatever happens, I'm always going to be proud of this record. I just know what I put into it was genuine love – it was genuinely heartfelt making the fucking record, and no one can take that away from me. No matter what people say about 'retro whatever,' 'you sound like an imitator,' blah, blah, fucking blah. I just don't give a shit."

With repeated listens, Multiply really doesn't sound retro. "When I Come Back Around" is a song worthy of Prince at his funkiest, but the Purple One never chopped drums into a stuttering crescendo the way Lidell does. Even the spare arrangement of "What's the Use," a gorgeous track with a twin lyrical hook of "What's the use / in figuring it all out" and the chorus of "I'm a question mark / a walking, talking question mark," is pierced at key moments by a crunching drum or gunshot, and the backing vocals turn subtly metallic. Nowhere is there the smarmy irony that has plagued so much electronic music as it revisits the past.

Flirting with cliché

Instead, Lidell presents a heartfelt, lyrical honesty that, when taken out of context, occasionally threatens to cross over into cliché. I ask Lidell about the line "Life may sometimes be sad, / but it's always beautiful," which, though sung with undeniable beauty, triggers my Hallmark Moment radar. "It depends how you say it, man – it's not what you say," the vocalist retorts. "As long as you feel it, it's all good.... Of course, the best sentiment always sounds cliché. [But] it's also easy to hide behind a pack of metaphors and word games. But no one likes a smart-ass, as I found out to my cost. I just thought, 'Why the hell not step in the spotlight and come clean with what I think?' Maybe I am banal at times. So? At least it's honest."

Banal is the last word one would use for Lidell's live show. Hyperkinetic, overwhelming, or, Lidell's own choice, schizophrenic would barely be adequate descriptors for his high-wire act of improvisation. Revolving around a piece of software Lidell wrote himself, the singer beatboxes rhythm parts, adds key samples, and then goes to town, looping it all up into towering, tilting tracks that threaten to spin out of control. And they often do. "Oh, it does! I definitely don't want it to be perfect.... Part of that is making mistakes, and more often than not, the crowd are really excited when I do that and get it back. They're like, 'Holy shit!' They realize even more how the whole show is being as frail as that, and yet that's the first moment they've heard it seem that vulnerable.

"I used to get that kick out of seeing [techno producer/DJ] Jeff Mills playing records back in the early days. He'd be mixing so frantically that tracks would be way out of time, and you'd be like, 'C'mon Jeff, pull it in!' and he'd pull it in, and then everyone would be rushing that much harder because suddenly you realize he's taking mad risks, and it wasn't this perfect beat-matched, whatever, dull-a-thon."

Lidell's one-of-a-kind performances often include absurd costumes like a suit made from quarter-inch magnetic tape, but when we broach that subject, it becomes evident that the vocalist may be ready t o get back to his pint and his laptop.

"So how much of the costumes are for the audience's benefit and how much just to get you in the right frame of mind, Jamie?"

"Well, I dunno," he starts out, before slyly breaking it down. "73/27 on a Wednesday. On a Thursday, it's 50/50. On a Saturday night, I'd say it's probably 60/40." Moments later, still on the subject of his wardrobe, he busts out with a perfectly on-point R. Kelly impersonation, singing that the tape suit is "in the closet!"

Maybe he's a bit weary of predictably leading questions, or maybe he's just tired of trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Whatever the case, once he's had his fun, Lidell talks of wanting to make performances special, something out of the ordinary. He's adamantly proud of the album, but confides that the songs are something of a blueprint, a floor plan from which he builds the live show, and the costumes are another way of taking it over the top. "When I look down at my own body, I like to feel like I'm capable of doing things that I'm barely aware of," he says. "Ultimately, as ironic as I can sound at times, I do really give a shit."

Jamie Lidell opens for Four Tet, Mon/3, 8:30 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $15. (415) 771-1421.