When you're receiving high rotation all around the globe whilst playing to three thousand people a night, it's irrelevant how ridiculous your band name is. Introducing Londoners Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, a French inspired electro dance act born in Camden (featuring Charles Haddon, Joe Hutchinson, Anders Kallmark and the delightfully named Caan Capan) who's 'Dance The Way I Feel' has been seized on by Australian radios this year. The band will soon be in town as guests of the Parklife festival.
We spoke to singer Charlie Haddon about their heavy '80s influence, touring with La Roux and, yes, about that name.
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I'll launch into a fairly banal question that I'm sure you've been asked 100 times today. What's with the band name?
Ahhhh the band name. Well, usually, when we're asked this on the radio, we come up with different stories involving Jay-Z, mountains, Amanda Ghost and all sorts of pretty ridiculous things which always end up being fairly exciting. The reality is, the truth is not very exciting. Jo and I used to live in this flat together and we had a lot of random french instruments. Combine them with alcohol and you get a lot of people jumping around shouting things in French, and we ended up coming up with Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, and it kind of just stuck.
When I heard your first single I can remember thinking there's a lot of Depeche Mode and Human league going on here. Is this fair?
We get that quite a lot, mainly just because we do use a lot of the instruments these bands used. We didn't set out to do that on purpose, we all come from different musical backgrounds and none of them are really '80s music. Jo and Caan have a heavy hip hop influence and I used to be into rock and roll. We just got these instruments and jammed with them for a few weeks and made a few demos.
So the band was developed around these instruments?
Yeah, it was literally just the instruments. It was about two years ago and people were just starting to get into the whole '80s thing over here; it really wasn't intentional for us, but we figured if it's popular we'll keep doing it. We don't want to do the '80s thing forever, either. People will get bored of the '80s sound soon.
You have a lot of great synth sounds in there - are you complete gear-heads, or computer plug-in based?
It's a bit of both I suppose. When we sit and do studio stuff for a while, we'll sit down for a month or so and concentrate pretty heavily on what's in front of us and all the computer based stuff. But when we go on tour we forget about all of that and concentrate on having fun and playing our instruments. Which for me, is the greatest part.
You toured with La Roux recently, but now you can demand headline slots?
Yeah, well she really helped us: we basically got to practice in front of much bigger crowds. We were on tour with her for about three weeks and she was playing to two or three thousand people a night, so it was a pretty big step up and you learn quite a lot straight away. Obviously if you get to play in front of that many people each night you're going to pick up new fans - so when we go back to these cities to play again we have fans from the La Roux shows.
Tell me a bit about your live show.
If we're playing in the UK we basically have lot's of synths and a big backing track along with two singers - myself and Caan - and we just run around trying to get everyone excited. It's an uptempo show and we try to have as much fun as possible and make everyone happy. I've never really understood the mopey show.
Ou Est Le Swimming Pool - 'Dance The Way I Feel'
'Dance The Way I Feel' has received some pretty heavy radio play down here. That must be a nice feeling?
It's really good, yeah. When we put that song on the internet we were getting a lot of love from a lot of different places, but you obviously need to sort out record deals in other countries before you can gauge that popularity properly. The reaction off the radio in Australia is crazy though. We've been getting nearly 300 plays a week.
You come down here shortly. What's your understanding of the Australian dance scene?
I don't know really. There's definitely an '80s influence but also a lot more of a commercial sense. It does seem like a really cool scene, a nice mix of my tastes!
You're playing Parklife while over here, which is a great festival to seduce new fans who possibly haven't seen or heard you yet. Do you find this a nice challenge to look forward to?
Yeah, it's just about playing in front of as many people as possible and converting as many as possible. We're going to make sure that everything on our side is absolutely perfect so everyone can enjoy it?
Will there be sideshows?
We were hoping there would be but unfortunately I don't think we're allowed to due to the festival. We are planning to do a lot of promo stuff though, on radio stations and other things. We've had a tremendous showing of support from underage fans - they won't be able to come to Parklife so hopefully we can do something for them too.
Nick Holt
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OU EST LE SWIMMING POOL - AUSTRALIAN 'PARKLIFE' DATES 2010
Gold Coast - Saturday 25 September – Parklands
Perth - Sunday 26 September – Wellington Square
Melbourne - Saturday 2 October – The Sidney Myer Music Bowl and the King’s Domain
Sydney - Sunday 3 October – Kippax Lake, Moore Park
Adelaide - Monday 4 October –Botanic Park, Botanic Gardens of Adelaide