"It felt like the old days, two mates in the studio having fun and enjoying the process."
Recording their eighth studio album was the ultimate nostalgia trip for returning dance titans Groove Armada.
The legendary duo of Tom Findlay and Andy Cato are back for the first time in 10 years with the infectious new single Get Out On The Dancefloor – an aptly named, major club banger that combines dizzying house beats over David Byrne-esque stream of consciousness vocals from Empire of the Sun’s Nick Littlemore.
Get Out On The Dancefloor was majestically crafted using off cuts tucked away in hard drives from sessions recording 2010 album Black Light, and saw Tom and Andy weave their magic in piecing together hundreds of extracts of Littlemore’s recordings to produce a bonafide modern day floor-filler.
Its brilliant accompanying video is a snapshot of life in self-isolation as Groove Armada superfans filmed themselves enthusiastically dancing along to the track in their disco light-fitted homes, complete with cameos from Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Rose McGowan.
Following Black Light's release in 2010, the pair returned to their roots. Just two blokes with record boxes and a shared appreciation of dance music, releasing house records White Label style and hitting the club scene.
But getting back into the recording studio after a prolonged break conjured a fresh new perspective for the Grammy award nominated tour de force.
The sessions resulted in the boundary-pushing forthcoming album, which Findlay describes as a record drenched in “loving nostalgia”, invigorating memories of a stellar 25 year career that spawned top 10 hits like I See Ya Baby and Superstylin’.
Get Out On The Dancefloor proves Groove Armada are as vital and pioneering as ever.
Daily Star Online held a lockdown Zoom chat with Tom from his London home and Andy at his farm in France to talk about Get Out On The Dancefloor, what we can expect from their eagerly-awaited new album, their stellar career and their hopes for the music industry in a post-pandemic world.
Hi guys, how are you both coping in lockdown? Are you working on things to keep busy?
Tom Findlay: "I’m ok. We mastered the record before the serious bit of lockdown happened. I’ve been thinking about that while not panicking. It’s kind of finished and not finished so we can make a few tweaks. Essentially there’s enough done so we can crack on and start the campaign.
"It’s surreal. We’ve got the same concerns as everybody else. I’m worried about my folks who are elderly. It’s just odd. When you want to be close to people the best thing you can do is keep away."
You’ve returned with the big new single Get Out On The Dancefloor. How did the song come about? What was the writing process like?
Tom: "It’s been in the back of a hard drive somewhere for six or seven years.
"We were working on the vocal. Nick Littlemore is the vocalist we did with the Black Light record. When we made the decision a year ago to properly think about making a record we started going through off cuts from various records and just seeing if there was anything lost on the cutting room floor which was worth revisiting. That vocal just stood out immediately.
"'Get out on the dancefloor' is a good line and the delivery has the David Byrne-esque, Talking Heads kind of vibe to it. We thought could make something out of this.
"Andy got that up. He’s got a band out in France. They just jammed that out in a shed somewhere in his farm. The first initial groove of that came from there and he brought that over to my studio in Stoke Newington where we tend to get together and mix the records, so we started tweaking it then."
Get Out On The Dancefloor is an aptly named song for a comeback and for the style of track. Was it a title you had in mind before writing it?
Tom: "There’s a few tunes that potentially felt like comeback records from the album. That one just felt quite timely. It’s what we want to do. It lends itself well to the video. It all seemed to make sense. It’s a nice tune to come back to.
"Just before this all happened we were due to play the Teenage Cancer Trust gig in March, which is a big moment for us. We were really excited for that. That was the first tune we imagined we could incorporate straight into the set. We were playing that tune a bit, ready to go with that record and when we finally come out of this and can play live again, that will probably be the first song we stick in the set. "
Speaking of Nick Littlemore (Empire of the Sun, Pnau) - what did he bring to the track's formation?
Tom: "He’s a real creative live wire. He’s an ideas merchant. When we work with him, it’s like almost trying to contain the amount of ideas that are coming at you. Our job was trying to capture those ideas and bring some form and structure to it all."
Andy Cato: "Nick is definitely a genius in an unconventional way of working. Get Out On The Dancefloor was one of the many bits of gold dust on the Black Light cutting room floor.
"The Black Light album was very intense. It got a bit Colonel Kurtz, we went a bit mad. And a lot of things ended up on the cutting room floor as a result.
"I came across a whole folder of Nick saying all kinds of crazy things. That slowly was cut, shaped, pushed and pulled into a collage that became the tune. It was outtakes of several different tunes put together that took on a mad identity.
"With some of the local boys here, we got the old 8-track out and jammed it out."
What was it like putting it all together?
Andy: "It was one of those things. What happens when Tom and I are in the studio, you can see the idea in there and picture the whole thing.
"That’s really exciting – then you’ve got to get there. There’s a lot of cups of tea, a few beers towards the end of the day and a lot of putting things up, putting things down.
"As long as you’ve got the idea and you know it’s going to be as good as you think it is, you’ve just got to put the hours in."
As a final product, you must be proud with what you’ve produced from it.
Tom: "I think it’s a really great piece of music. It’s going to be a massive live track for us, with the way it’s set up. It’s killing me that we have to wait potentially to play the thing live!
"As Andy said, he jammed it out with his band in France so it will translate incredibly easy to the stage. Those drops are just built for it, maybe extending them for another 16 bars and then wallop!"
It’s your first studio release since 2010 - how have you kept yourselves occupied? Did you ever think you’d make music together again?
Andy: "When we did Black Light, that was the coming together of this pretty unique combination of guitars and electronics that we’ve had going in our live shows since we decided to take the mad decision to, at the beginning, play dance music properly live.
"It came together with this big sound. It was a studio version of that. But just as we put that out was when the big festival stages hit peak EDM. So the tolerance for bands playing that kind of dance music was lower than it had been previously, which is why we decided to do our ritual five nights at Brixton and go back underground. ‘This has been amazing, we’re going to stop now.’
"We decided to go right back to the beginning. Two guys with record boxes and we started making the house music we’ve always loved and putting that out on little labels, white label style.
"For the club heads we haven’t been anywhere, we’ve been more present than ever in fact for the past 10 years, DJing all over the place.
"For the people who are for the festival and live kind of things is where we’ve appeared to have disappeared for a while."
Has much changed of the landscape of the industry in that time?
Tom: "Yeah, with the benefit of hindsight we made the right decision to step away from the live side when we did.
"Not naming names, it was that super stadium DJ experience, loads of razzle dazzle. Although we’ve got a fair bit of razzle dazzle you can’t compete with a bloke slamming something through a CDJ player and dry ice blowing everyone’s ears off.
"I felt that it was the right time to step away and take our music underground. Coming back now there’s much more of a tolerance for that and far more people making electronic music that we love and playing it live well.
"We look at people like Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem, and Caribou, who are all doing the sort of stuff we feel comfortable doing on those sort of stages.
"It’s the right time to come back with this. We’ve gone away 10 years and, I don’t blow my own trumpet too much but I will on this, I haven’t really seen anyone come along in those 10 years and see us better what we do live."
What can we expect from the new album? How did the recording and writing sessions compare to your previous releases? Did the break do you good?
Andy: “One of the reasons why we love Black Light was that our diversity over the years has been a strength and a weakness. Black Light was getting the band together and doing what we do on stage in the studio – it had a real cohesion of sound about it.
"When we did that last tour and played that record, it felt great because of that.
"Again with this record it draws heavily on the yacht rock, blue-eyed soul influences that were such a big part of when we were on the tour bus and people would look at video footage and mistake the tour bus for a nightclub.
"The soundtrack to all those days when we were on the road were always drawing from that era of music. It was kind of inevitable and quite appropriate that finally we’ve made an album that fits in that space. Some of it goes more ragged and has a contemporary edge to all of it, but it’s definitely on that tip. There’s a coherence about it which puts it right up there with Black Light for me."
Tom, you say the theme of the album is “loving nostalgia”. Was it emotional to create?
Tom: "It’s why I feel relaxed about how you judge the success of this record. It reflected a really nice time of that slightly soul influenced side we’ve always have. I’m thrilled to have made a record like that. I like the fact that all the albums we’ve made have had a different character and personality.
"Black Light was a record we’re both enormously proud of but it was not the easiest experience to write it. We’d just come out of a major label deal and there was a bit of uncertainty in where we stood with everything.
"It was nice to make this record together. It felt like the old days, two mates in the studio having fun and enjoying the process. It had that magic back. That was really nice to really enjoy it. We’d approach those weekends of getting together with excitement.
"When we’d come out of that label deal there was a certain sense of not having direction. This time I was thrilled to be making a record.
"But this comes along, and everything we’re living through now, extenuates that times 10, that you’re able to do this and hopefully able to then tour this again and never take any of those experiences for granted."
Did the recording process bring back a lot of memories?
Tom: "I think it did. The process of us making it was very similar to those earlier album like Vertigo when we were more shoulder-to-shoulder."
Andy: "I agree. It was lovely and a bit nostalgic in that way. When we went to do Northern Star back in 1874, or whenever that was, that it was basically the two of us in a cottage in the Dales. Why it was the Dales has been lost in the mists of time. It was all a Boddingtons supply and potato waffles. That was it.
"What I love about it still is the clarity of purpose. You close the door, the phone’s off, and you’re just in that room. There’s one thing to do and that’s sit there. There’s a real joy in that. When you get those moments when Tom and I know we’re on to something, and what we’ve got to do is carve it out. When the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you know you’ve got some hard hours to come to making it real but it’s there. That’s just magic."
Do you think the long break helped in terms of refreshing the ideas and reigniting the passion again?
Tom: "I think it did. It helped in terms of giving yourself a chance to coming back fresh with ideas that we revisited from last efforts.
"The space and time, more from being in clubs and experiencing that, it was quite exciting to be back in the studio with the potential of working with live musicians again, string quartets and be a bit more ambitious musically than we had been for six or seven years.
"It’s about firing that enthusiasm for it. I never thought we’d get to this point. I never thought we’d be in the position to write another album. Just being in the midst of ‘we’re actually doing this, aren’t we?’ was quite exciting and fun to do."
Groove Armada have been around for almost 25 years and have top 10 singles under your belt. How do you think you’ve evolved as artists in that time? Did you ever think you’d get to this point when you formed?
Tom: "We’re of much more outside the mainstream than we were. In the first few albums there was a constant pressure to really deliver singles in a cycle. Black Light from there on we felt like we’re more in control of our own careers. We do things when we want to do them. If we’re not into it, we’re not going to do it. That’s been the main change.
"Some of that pressure you’ve got from external sources like record labels can be a good thing, it can drive you. Now it means we’re making music more for ourselves and for our friends and for our fans, rather than the industry."
Andy: "We’ve been doing some different stuff. Personally speaking when you do that it makes you realise how magic those moments are when you’re sat there together in the studio with this thing we’ve got. We always agree with what’s a killer tune.
"Occasionally there may be some tussle around the edges but even when you’re the person wanting it more than the other, and you’re defending it, you know that it isn’t quite right. When it is right, there’s no tussle.
"Aside from all that, there’s so much water under the bridge and so many experiences we have had. No one who wasn’t there would ever understand. Being together in that way, the further you go down the line and the older you get, you just appreciate that more. You realise that hardly anyone have those relationships but we still have and it’s something to be treasured."
Did you ever think you’d get to where you are now when you first started out?
Tom: "Music was a bit more of a career for Andy. For me it kind of always extraordinary that I could make a living out of it. I find it completely surreal.
"Weirdly I’m reading 1234 by Craig Brown. He’s writing about The Beatles and it’s in my mind that everything they wrote that was brilliant they had written by the age they were 28. It’s insane. All the big hits were by 25 and then they went back in and wrote the White Album. It blows my mind. I’m 46 and still writing albums. I feel incredibly blessed to be doing that, to be doing something that I’m so passionate about and enthusiastic about. It’s awesome but I didn’t get that much done by the time I was 25!"
You’ve got the amazingly creative video accompanying the Get Out On The Dancefloor which includes cameos from the likes of Rose McGowan and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Who came up with the idea of getting people to film videos in lockdown? Was it fun looking back on the submitted videos? It’s cool that it’s going to be a snapshot of this era.
Tom: "We’re quite limited with what we are able to do. No one can shoot anything at the moment.
"It’s been challenging. It’s the first single back, it’s something we’d all love to do right now, getting out on the dance floor, it was that shared experience that we are all going through but in a user generated way.
"It all made sense. They are a lot of fun. We had some fun making it"
Speaking of the pandemic, how do you think the music industry will be after it’s all over?
Tom: "I think it’s a massive question. In the short term, if we want to get back to a place of having festivals, I’ve been relived that all the gigs we were booked for this summer have been moved to next summer from a personal point of view, and that suggests to me those festivals are going to be able to market. That’s absolutely vital.
"I’ve seen a few shots of clubs in Sweden. Plan B, 40 people in a club all social distancing, that doesn’t seem like the way to go. That’s not the experience we want to be having.
"I think there are some things that could potentially be done with VR for now. Even for us, if this goes on for a long period of time, it’s something we could look at.
"But I’m really worried for nightclubs and the people who are relying on that income turning over quickly. I just hope that when we come back we still have that vibrant festival market. That’s so important for the scene in the UK.
"I’m feeling cautiously optimistic, having run festivals myself in the past, there is a way of doing that. Furloughing enough people and coming back with enough energy those festivals could still exist next summer. That’s absolutely crucial".
What are you hopeful for the year ahead? Do you envisage any touring once this pandemic is over?
Andy: "This record is the album that’s going to played brilliantly live. We can picture the whole scene now. We have to get into the rehearsal studio to make that happen. It will be absolutely killer.
"There will be loads of great new solutions, like we’ve seen with the video and other ways to get the music out there and share stuff.
"As society as a whole we need that richness of human contact to come back and we need to hope that the people have got work to go back to so we can look forward to doing all this stuff.
"In the meantime we can be getting music out there, we can adapt and the industry can evolve. But really we are looking forward to getting back into a field again and that’s when the blue touch paper is going to be lit."
Groove Armada's Get Out On The Dancefloor is out now via BMG
