Talking Shop: Filthy Dukes

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/entertainment/8034666.stm

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Watch the video for Filthy Dukes' new single Messages

London indie-dance trio Filthy Dukes know how to get a crowd on their feet.

They run London club night Kill Em All, which hosted early gigs by the likes of Bloc Party and Friendly Fires, and as remixers they have lent dancefloor muscle to bands like The Maccabees and Late Of The Pier.

Now they have been signed by record label Fiction (Elbow, Snow Patrol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs). Their debut album Nonsense In The Dark has received rave reviews, with The Independent calling it "remorseless, relentless and contagiously exuberant".

Below, founder member Olly Dixon discusses recording in people's bedrooms, disastrous photoshoots and DJing in an igloo.

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The band are Olly Dixon (left), Tim Lawton and Mark Ralph

Everyone says this is going to be a big year for female synth pop. Have you considered a sex change?

Maybe if we were girls we'd be getting a bit more attention, but we're never going to be hyped as the next big pop sensation. We've got beards for a start.

Your single Messages is an out-and-out pop song - is it your big attempt to go mainstream? To a degree. The album is really varied - there's hip-hop stuff and melancholy, disco bits. It reflects all of our different tastes in music and all the acts we've had at our club night over the years.

Yet it all sounds a bit like the Human League... Using the equipment we used - like the Juno 60 and the Moog Voyager - once you combine those older synths with a beat, it naturally sounds like the Human League!

Your logo is a big creepy eye - how did that come about? We've always been into simple graphic design and we wanted something slightly Masonic, slightly sinister. We looked at a lot of old, weird prog rock covers and there was this odd eyeball that we liked.

The problematic album cover, complete with glowing Evil Eye prop.

For the album cover, we said, "we can't just have a graphic, it needs to be a photo". I loved The Who's cover for Who's Next, where they're urinating on a huge concrete monolith in the middle of a quarry, so I got it into my head that we needed to take the picture in a quarry, and that we needed to make the eye.

So we got this four-foot eye that glows and flashes, and we carried it down to a disused quarry in Dorset. But we couldn't get it down the cliff! It was a mile-and-a-half walk to get it down, along with the generator and all the lights and the cameras. And then it started to rain and it got dark! It was a nightmare.

But anyway, the album cover looks good, and we have this eye that we take on the road with us.

Exactly how much does a flashing evil eye cost? Quite a lot! It was about 5% of the cost of making the album.

Initially they wanted us to build a small one and use perspective tricks to make it look bigger but I didn't want any Spinal Tap, Stonehenge moments.

There are a lot of guest vocalists on the record. Was that hard to co-ordinate? When we first started making the album, we didn't have management and we didn't have a record deal, so we were doing it all ourselves.

One of the first tracks we got vocalised was This Rhythm, which was Sam [Dust] from Late Of The Pier and that happened because they played our club night three times before they'd even released a single. They were still resting their synths on ironing boards!

He recorded the vocals in his bedroom, and his mum was asleep next door so he couldn't sing too loud in case he woke her up. So there are certain bits that have this certain whispered quality. He did come down to the studio, but we never got a take that was quite as good.

Filthy Dukes have toured with Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem

You're big David Bowie fans. Would you like to get him on a track?

Yes! David Bowie and Bjork would be our two favourite people to get on a track. I always thought it would be pretty good to recreate that Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney track [The Girl Is Mine].

Is it true that you've played in an igloo? Yes, we DJ-ed at Snowbombing [a festival in the Austrian Alps]. We've done that a couple of times, it's a very strange experience. Very cold.

Do you set up the turntables on a block of ice? Pretty much! Everything is ice.

In fact, last year I kept having to turn around during the set and rub my girlfriend's feet because she'd got so cold. I was drinking hot mulled wine, playing records and rubbing my girlfriend's feet so her toes didn't fall off.

Last week, you wrote on Twitter that you were considering DJ-ing in your pants. Would you do that in an igloo? No, I'd have to be pretty mad.

So where did that idea come from? I find myself on my days off buying records in my pants on the internet. I thought, maybe I could take the next step and DJ in my pants. But I haven't plucked up the courage yet.

Why not? Lady GaGa does it every night! That's true, that's true. In fact, we've just done a remix of Paparazzi for her. I did that in my pants, too.

<i>Olly Dixon was speaking to BBC News entertainment reporter Mark Savage. Filthy Dukes' album is out now on Fiction records. Messages is released on 6 July.</i>