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X-clusive: Ladytron “We’ll Be Fired Out Of Cannons”
With new single ‘Sugar’ currently making friends wherever it goes and the album ‘Witching Hour’ on the way, Reuben Wu and Helen Marnie of Ladytron spoke exclusively to Xfm Online about the making of their new album 'Witching Hour' and their ‘unique’ new stage show.
“This album has definitely been more fun to make than the other two,” Wu begins. “It’s also the most collaborative we’ve worked as writers and producers. Just being able to work with more equipment and being able to learn if you put 'this' through a pedal and put 'this' through a pedal it’ll sound amazing. You use that knowledge to produce the songs from square one. We feel a bit wiser than a few years ago.”
“It feels like a long break, so it’s kind of like we’re doing it for the first time again,” Marnie continues, “But it’s good to be able to start playing the songs live again. We finished our album in September but we were able to go to China to tour which was a really good thing for us because we were able to test our new songs.
“It was weird going over there because the crowds varied from quite normal gigs in cosmopolitan cities near Hong Kong to gigs further inland where no one knew any of the songs. We thought, ‘They don’t know any better, we might as well test stuff out on you!’"
The pair also spoke about their new single ‘Sugar’ and explained that, as with all the best electronic music, just because you can’t tell what instrument is being abused, doesn’t make it a bad thing…
“A lot of people seemed to listen to it [‘Sugar’] and go, ‘Oh wow, you’ve gone guitar’,” Marnie explains. “And it’s like, well, no it’s just a very heavy synths track. We did a cover of ‘Oops Oh My’ and when we were mixing it the engineers were saying, ‘Bring the guitars up in the mix’ and there were no guitars, they were just treated synths.
“It doesn’t matter what you use to produce your sound. Like with Can – you can’t tell whether it’s kitchen pans or whatever because you’ve treated it so heavily. It’s just a waveform.”
Following their acclaimed Wireless set, the band headline the Carling tent at next month’s Carling Weekender and have a few new surprises in store for fans.
“Well we’ve got a new bass player and we’ve just been working on the old tracks up to the same level of energy as the new stuff,” Wu explains, before Marnie deadpans, “We’ll also have loads of fireworks, we’ll be fired out of cannons, we have a live tiger on stage. Hopefully he won’t rip us to shreds…”
'Sugar' is out now, while the album 'Witching Hour' hits shops on September 5 through Island records.
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