2 Many DJs can spoil the rock 'n' roller, the Dewaeles decided when they set aside their smash hit alter-egos and returned to the business of making music. The Belgian brothers talk to Kevin Courtney about the trials & tribulations of reviving Soulwax
You have to forgive the Dewaele brothers if they're feeling a little torn in two. Here they are, on the verge of releasing their second album and about to embark on a major tour, but they're still finding it hard to adjust to being in a band again.
Steph and Dave have been on a vinyl whirlwind for the past three years, touring the world under their alter-ego of 2 Many DJs. But now the brotherly Belgians are back doing the real day job: getting their band Soulwax on the road, rehearsing the new (and old) songs, and trying to remember how to pull those rock star poses again.
In Belgium, you are either Flemish or Walloon; in musical terms, Steph and Dave Dewaele swing from Flemish to Walloon and back again, depending on whether they're DJing or rocking out, and believe me, it can sometimes really mess with their heads.
Soulwax are rehearsing in a concert hall called La Condition Publique in the small town of Roubaix in northern France, just a few miles south of Lille. The Ticket has driven here from Brussels with Yolande, the band's Dutch PA, stopping off at the band's hometown of Ghent to pick up Steph's American girlfriend, Nancy (the singer in LCD Soundsystem), and the drummer's Danish girlfriend, Birgitte. Add in our French host, Manu Barron, owner of the venue, and we have a pretty international crew assembled here in the middle of nowhere.
Barron built the concert hall-cum-arts centre in an effort to help the rejuvenation of this rundown part of town. When his friends from Ghent needed a rehearsal space, he offered to let them use his premises in return for playing a concert for local kids who have been working on an architectural project here.
"I'll be really honest with you, I don't have that much of a connection with Roubaix because I haven't really been here that much," admits Steph. "But Manu does also this electronic festival, La Villette in Paris, once every two years, and he also does a festival in Lille, and that's very close to Ghent.
"So I knew he was going to do this project, and when it opened up we DJed for him, and Manu Chao came also, because he's a good friend of his, and also 'cos it's the idea for him of having this cultural thing in the middle of Roubaix, which is like a miners' town, one of the biggest immigrant populations in northern France, and this is one of the rougher areas.
"So it's a pretty brave thing for him to do here."
Given the success of 2 Many DJs, it's a brave thing Steph and Dave are doing too, reawakening the sleeping rock beast that is Soulwax and risking all on a record that may or may not be the breakthrough they, their friends and their record company are hoping - perhaps even praying - for.
Soulwax sold a modest but respectable amount of copies of their fine 1999 album, Much Against Everyone's Advice. It earned an honourable mention in Nick Hornby's collection of rock-centric essays, 31 Songs, and kudos for the clever cover artwork (based on classic vinyl seven-inches) and smart, hard-edged alt.rock songs - Conversation Intercom, Overweight Karate Kid and (no relation to the Westlife song of the same name) Flying Without Wings.
Also on the début album was a song called 2 Many DJs, and the brothers adopted this name as their deck-wrecking alter-ego. They displayed their prodigious mixing talents on the hour-long mash-up As Heard on Radio Soulwax Vol 2, gleefully performing brain salad surgery on tracks by Destiny's Child, Peaches, Iggy Pop, 10CC and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Much against everyone's expectations, the CD grew wings and flew out of the record shops, outselling Soulwax's entire back catalogue and putting the Belgian boys on a par with such scratch surgeons as Coldcut, DJ Shadow and Richard X. Mention the name 2 Many DJs, and you'll get frantic nods of recognition and approval from dance fans; mention the name Soulwax, however, and you might only get a puzzled look.
"A lot of people want this to be the album that will break Soulwax, but to be really honest with you, I don't think that." Steph pauses for effect. "I honestly don't think that. I think we made a very difficult album, I think we made something which is not really easy.
"I'm really proud of it, but I think the record industry has changed a lot. It's become formatted, structured, it feels like a big old animal, and I don't think a lot of bands would have had the chance to make the kind of album we've done. We built our own studio in Ghent, and no one came in, 'cos that was the deal we had with the record company. It wasn't like, make us a sound that can be played on Radio 1, or make sure that you have a dance hit on it. Nobody said anything, So we were able to experiment and to go with whatever came out of it. And not many bands get a chance to do that.
"Maybe we've done something very arrogant and pretentious to think we can take some elements of dance music and put them into rock, but at least we've tried."
As it happens, the new album, Any Minute Now, is packed with tunes that can be played on radio, although the ripped synths and clipped guitars ensure that it won't be mistaken for slickly produced corporate rock albums by The Rasmus and The Calling. The brothers surrendered total control by allowing producer Flood to come in and add his knob-twiddling skills; however, songs such as E-Talking, Please Don't Be Yourself, Compute, Miserable Girl and The Truth Is So Boring have failed to impress the critics at Q magazine, who gave it a measly one star and urged the boys to get back on the decks toot sweet. In the Dewaeles' world, everything - music, audience and critics - seems divided.
"I think there's a very raw element to Soulwax, and I think that was one of the appeals we had live," says Steph. "I find it hard to talk about our music, but also I think the fact that because we are from Belgium. we're able to incorporate a lot of different cultures. Not in a world music, Peter Gabriel sense, we're not about that, but different styles of rock music. We are a cult band, though, and I kind of like things the way they are.
"Sometimes when a band goes to the next level, they lose something. They might get bigger, but the music doesn't necessarily get better."
The Dewaeles haven't stopped DJing, though; Q will be glad to hear that 2 Many DJs are still alive and kicking it, and when Soulwax come to Ireland in September to play the Electric Picnic in Stradbally Hall, Co Laois, they will bring their record bags along too. Inside their bag will be a new Soulwax song, NY Excuse, on which Steph has stepped aside and let his girlfriend take over on vocals.
"It's become a big club hit, which is something that I didn't expect because it's a very rock piece. There's not a lot of dance elements in it. It's a big, monstrous rock riff. It sounds like Kyuss, and I remember Flood listening to it and saying what do you hear? And I said I hear a girl talking, and he said, well, maybe you should go over to New York and hang out with Nancy. Here's your excuse."
Flood also suggested that the brothers open their 2 Many DJs set with NY Excuse, but the singer was reluctant to spin his own song.
"We said, naw, we'd feel kind of weird, and he said, please, do me a favour, play it out as the first track. I have this thing of never playing the Soulwax songs; as soon as I hear my own voice I want to mix it out right away. But I thought, with Nancy singing on it, it's OK, so we did it as the first track and the whole thing blew up. And afterwards we went on the Internet and all these kids were talking about the track, and we thought, hey, it's moving again."
The Dewaele brothers grew up with vinyl in the soul. Their dad was a well-known DJ - the Belgian equivalent of John Peel, says Steph - who had an eclectic taste in music and made frequent trips to London and Paris to buy records, often dragging his two young sons along with them.
"Sometimes we didn't like going to all these record shops. It was like getting taken to museums as a kid - we thought it was boring, but now we're glad they took us. But they've never forced us to play an instrument. When we told mum and dad that we were going to make a band, they said, are you insane? Why? So it wasn't that they were trying to get us to play music, they just wanted to show us there was a world outside Ghent."
Not that the Dewaeles felt particularly isolated in this corner of northwest Belgium. It may be a small country, with an ever-so-slight cultural identity crisis, but it sits very neatly and conveniently at the hub of Europe, the perfect base from which to perfect that world domination plan.
"If you get a map of Europe and put a compass on Ghent, and you draw a circle, you actually have London, Amsterdam, Cologne and Paris. So we are in the centre of things. And that's how I grew up. It's easier for me to go to London from here than it is for somebody to go from Manchester. Forty minutes to Lille, one hour 40 minutes on Eurostar, and I'm in the centre of London.
"Me and Dave are really freaks, we have our Sky digital, we watch ITV and Channel 4, but we also absorb French culture. Belgium has so many different cultural influences; it's like a country without an identity for a lot of people, but a lot of weird things can happen in art and music, and it always comes out of places without an identity because they don't have to keep to a stereotype."
Maybe there's something in the Belgian beer, but Soulwax are the latest in a graceful musical curve that runs from Jacques Brel to Plastic Bertrand to 1980s techno pioneers Front 242.
"A lot of people ask about 2 Many DJs, why we have such a dance culture. I have to explain to people that the R&S label, which signed such acts as Aphex Twin and a lot of house acts, that was based in my home town, Ghent. And when I was 10 years old, I'd sometimes go and see gigs with my dad, and later I started going to bars, and people would play a lot of old electro stuff like Yello, or Nu-Beat stuff, and out of that came Detroit House, and it all merged into this kind of weird style.
"And everything was possible; no DJ mixed three records in the same way. It wasn't about mixing them right, it was about making the place go crazy. People would come up to me after a 2 Many DJs set and say, what a great idea to drop that tune in, and I'm like, look, when I was young, that would be dropped in the middle of a set and you would be like, what the fuck is this? But it would be normal.
"That's an aesthetic in Ghent and that's how we grew up. For a lot of people, being in a rock group in Ghent is pretty weird."
Any Minute Now is out on August 27th. Soulwax and 2 Many DJs play the Electric Picnic on September 4th
