Hadouken!

Not Here To Please You

      Fuck. It's really good.

      There are a lot of misinterpretations about Hadouken! They're not the new coming of an urban-and-hipster-youth-united "grindie" crossover. They're Bis, they're Oxide & Neutrino, they're Dizzee Rascal's next album, they're Prodigy's 'Charley' and Puretone's 'Addicted To Bass', they're a shit Pulp by way of C&C Music Factory and when frontboy James pleads from the start of this USB key-only "mixtape" "I want a dance like Whigfield's!" it's as big a clue as any as to where they're coming from.

      Even the idea of Hadouken! putting out a mixtape - now more than ever the preserve of the grime authentic - is bound to raise hackles with some.

      But you know what? This isn't grime, or grindie, or even indie, this is Pop Music. It's just the noisiest bastard pop songs you've ever heard. The one thing it does palpably share with grime is the swaggering audaciousness that you can do anything with sound and it doesn't matter who that offends.

      Take the remixes on this mixtape. They're ridiculous. Any semblance of the original is just STOMPED over. In Bloc Party's 'The Prayer', it's only a sliver of Kele Okereke's vocal that is spared in the wreckage of holocaust pop synths and slamming-car door beats. "Tonight make me unstoppable and I will charm and I will slice…"  Kele moans, his voice weakened in distortion as carnage erupts around him. H! could be trying to fuck the song up, make fun of it, but even better they've gouged out the meaning of the song and tooled it up so it actually SOUNDS unstoppable. Even James repeatedly hollering 'OH YEAH! I'M UNSTOPPABLE!' amidst lyrical trash about ASBOs and "Like a rape in your ear!" similes comes out the other side of annoying into hilarious-genius.

      And the 'Noisia Mix' of their own 'Liquid Lives' is exactly that – the cartoony aggro of the original exploded into some great lost Aphex Twin remix. In this context the "I wanna drink drink drink smoke fuck fight! I wanna be arrested, I wanna be molested!" clarion call bit actually becomes almost PiL-like stream-of-consciousness transgressive violence, instead of just, y'know, sounding like an advert for Skins. Not Here To Please You in general sounds like day-glo futurist rave-pop, actually drinking explicitly from rave sounds instead of just invoking it as a stylistic gimmick.

      I remember Neil Kulkarni writing of Audio Bullys' (remember them?) 2003 debut that it could be a Metal Box for the 21^st Century. He was wrong but I could see what he means and listening to this it's tempting to wish that Hadouken! could do something similar. But that's because we're trying to validate liking something ostensibly throwaway by investing it with the canonical power that only makes sense in rockcrit milieu.

      It doesn't work. You'll be lucky if you remember Hadouken! this time next year. They're Blazin' Squad, they're Madness, they're a gorgeous sham, an Energy Flash-in-the-pan, but they're better than the Klaxons or Lady Sovereign – who everyone loved - and, really, if 'That Boy That Girl' had been Dizzee's comeback instead of the Jay-Z-approved hip-hop he did re-emerge with that you all moaned about, you would have thought it was brilliant.

      Hadouken! win, you lose. You're wrong, you're just wrong.

Q/A with Hadouken!:

The mixtape came about in quite a weird way. We originally went into the studio to record a bunch of songs, which we assumed were going to be on the album. But we didn't feel that they were coming together as well as an album could have been, and it was coming to a point whereby 75% of the album would have been songs that people have had in demo form for over a year by the time of release. So we wanted to get them out there to clear our repertoire for an album that would work as a single body of work. The label told us to fuck off when we suggested an EP (apparently they confuse people) and with the suggestion of including the remixes, a mixtape seemed to be the perfect format for this material.  

As soon as we agreed to compile a mixtape we knew that there would be connotations of Grime and the standard Everyman and His Dog: Volume 1 format. But in putting the mixtape on the USB we hope to dodge this ever so slightly. You also won't need to expect two acceptable new tunes, plus four American hip hop instrumentals vocalled, and a whole bunch of badly mixed hard-drive D-sides, every track has been given due care and consideration. We left off a whole bunch of tracks that didn't cut the grade and rightly fucking so.   

The fact of the matter is that of course we don't think of ourselves as an urban act at all, we did the mixtape to show that bands don't have to stick to traditional EP/Album formats rather than to attempt to come across like an urban act. Too many bands are getting signed up really early in their careers because of internet hype and being forced to rush out debut albums that aren't as good as they could have been. We wanted to do the mixtape to explore a bunch of our influences and see where we want to take the sound for the album. 

We were listening to plenty of bands but nothing really left a massive sonic fingerprint on this body of work. I've personally stopped listening to Grime over the last few years so our Grime influence is definitely from the scene a couple of years back, when I learnt the ropes of production. I find sampling classical music or Damien Marley pretty uninspiring, but the techstep of Slimzee and Geenius can still get me excited. But the otherside of it probably boils down to going on tour with Does it Offend You and listening to their electro-house style. When we were at the mixing stage I was given a Hardcore Heaven CD by Joe the Engineer of Steve Dub (an old rave legend, Chemical Brothers/Prodigy etc.) A bit of programming was also done by Greg Wizard who is a breakbeat man who works with Deekline and Fresh a lot, and his samplebank rubbed off a bit on tunes like Love Sweat and Beer. Colon Open Bracket an 8bit band rubbed off some of the gameboy vibe on tracks like the Bloc Party remix.   

To be honest we couldn't care less about people saying we can be influenced by garage/grime or whatever else. It gets boring. It's rarely grime artists speaking out but middle class journalists getting worked up over whether it's ok for us to use square synths and 808 claps in our songs. It seems a bit daft to us, if a hip hop or grime artist uses a guitar riff or rock sample in a track nobody thinks they're doing anything wrong. Of course, if we had proper ghetto lyrics that would be ridiculous, but we're just singing about what's true for us and for all other average kids in the country, going down the pub or whatever.  

Leap of Faith is a more straight up indie/rock tune and there will be a few like it on the album but there's also stuff that pushes in the opposite direction with barely any live instrumentation. Its also a fuck you to the people who have already decided what they think we sound like. It definitely has shut up a few critics.  

I think klaxons are the band they want to be, they haven't changed to fall in line with either their critics or their early supporters, which is exactly how it should be.  

Firstly, we only take on remixes of tracks that we're into. A lot of remixes of indie bands are boring, just adding some token beat under an indie vocal, James' tries to take tracks he remixes in a totally different direction and fill them with as many 'hadouken' sounds and ideas as possible. 

Speaking of which, who do you consider to be your peers? Like, really.

I guess we're pleased to exist at the same time as bands like Does It Offend You, The Ghost Frequency, The Whip, Orphans, Shut Your Eyes and You'll Burst Into Flames, Klaxons, Late of the Pier. I would never call it a scene and I think all those bands draw on very different sets of influences but they're the people we're into at the moment and are happy to be playing with.  

Our live show is developing all the time, when we started last September it was a massively stripped down version of what we achieve on record; just drums, guitar, one synth and vocals. Now we're doing the band full time we've got the time and the money to transpose stuff to live and have started using a whole bunch of triggers, synths and samplers. We think we're finally getting close now but we've got big plans to move further from the traditional band format in the future and start using unconventional technology but we don't want to compromise how live we play. We could do a set standing behind laptops and it would sound perfect but that's not exciting to us.  

We definitely don't get respect from earnest Pitchfork types but I think they're the sort of people that don't really allow any dance/electronic music the status of great bands and songwriters. A lot of our music is fun but our interest is in the music itself, the synths and drum sounds, the hooks, the beats and production etc….which we take massively seriously and I think (hope) those in the same game as us appreciate that.