by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

James Murphy has his work cut out for him. Not only is the outspoken, New Jersey-born artist the backbone of the shit-hot band LCD Soundsystem and co-producer/co-founder (with Tim Goldsworthy) of the fiercely independent New York dance-rock label/production team DFA, but he just fired his manager and now has the unenviable job of sifting through the deluge of interview requests and personally getting a hold of each interviewer to co-ordinate for the two days he has left before his band goes back on tour.

While it may be rare to hear that one of the most in-demand underground producers/DJs/label heads around is cold-calling journalists, it’s exactly the kind of take-charge, cut-the-bullshit, no-nonsense move that has made Murphy a household name in hipster circles the world over.

Seven years ago, if your party was getting stale, Murphy was the go-to DJ who could be relied on to delight and confuse with anything from Carl Craig to Can. His groundbreaking productions for the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem would subsequently be credited with teaching indie rock kids how to dance (and dance kids how to rock), prompting pop stars like Britney Spears, Janet Jackson and Duran Duran to seek his services. The Mirror recently caught up with the outspoken Murphy to discuss ecstasy, renaissance-fair jousters, high school bands, Ultimate Fighting Championships and his secret weak spot, poison ivy.

Mirror: I’ve read a lot about your rock ’n’ roll past, but not about how you got into dance music. Usually, there’s some kind of moment of epiphany.

James Murphy: Right, usually there’s a bunch of drugs, and in my case it was actually... a bunch of drugs. No, actually, I was working on a David Homes record after being focused on being a sound guy and building studios and live soundsystems. Tim Goldsworthy was his programmer and co-producer. Saturday would come and they’d all go out and I’d go and have two beers, stand at the bar and complain about how expensive the beers were—y’know, what New Yorkers do at dance clubs. Then Saturday number four rolled around and somebody gave me a Mitsubishi E and I freaked out, and danced around to records I brought for the DJ to play, like the Stooges and Can and stuff like that. At that point I had a lucky realization—I actually liked to dance, I probably always had but never allowed myself to like it. And I actually enjoy having fun. Stuff like underground music in its various forms, whether indie rock or IDM—the most horrible appellation ever—tends to beat the fun out of you while sitting on your forearms with both fists. And suddenly I was like, this is actually fun! I started making dance music from the perspective of being fucked out of my head at a techno club and looking at my friend and going, if somebody played “Loose” by the Stooges now, I guarantee you all these people would freak out and love it!

Of course, I proved that wrong many, many times, much to my own physical hazard, by doing just that—being E’d up and going to DJ at techno clubs and coming out and putting “Loose” on, and people literally taking it very seriously, like, “I paid 15 dollars to get into this fucking club, and you are not going to ruin it with your rock ’n’ roll bullshit, and I’m gonna drag you out of the DJ booth in front of my girlfriend and beat your head in! I took a train into New York to see Miss House DJ #487 and you are fucking with my Red Bull and vodka!” People would get really mad. That’s the funny part—it’s hard for people to believe that only a handful of years ago, you could nearly get your teeth knocked out for quote-unquote mixing rock and dance.

The right age to rock

M: While you’re pretty outspoken in being critical of other bands, you’re probably your own worst critic, which is something I find a lot of acts not doing enough of.

JM: This has been my new thing, the thing I’m newly fired up about—that and Ultimate Fighting Championships. I’ve been thinking more about this, asking the question even before DFA: What’s the point of being in a band, what’s the point of making music? My early answer was, okay, I won’t, and now I think that that is kind of the interesting question, the question music needs to ask itself. For a long time, the great natural age for a person making rock was 18 to 22, in the ’60s and ’70s, because you could just come out furious, not really know what you’re doing and have a couple of good musicians, if you’re in the Who or whatever. Your natural relationship to the culture around you, and your natural emotional state, and even the medium you were working in, those things all lined up perfectly for a 20 year old, or if you’re Keith Moon, even younger. They just sat right for Iggy. And all those gestures that come from that age—that’s the Byron age, the original great poetry age, 24, 25, not 30, like it is now. Now good writers, young writers are 40 year olds. And so you had this great rock that comes flying out of people and it sticks.

Now, to go for any of those gestures, you’re doing them under the shadow of your betters. Not that anybody from the past is naturally any better than people now, I don’t think they were more talented or better, I just think they happened to line up with the culture better. I was on a panel with Brian Eno and he said something that kind of struck me—“Oh, in those days, ’74, it seemed like if you just did something, put some effort in, you were gonna be good.”

That is not the case now. Bands that are that age, or even later, they’re like high school bands, and what high school bands do is that somebody in the band really likes the Faces or Sisters of Mercy or whatever, and they just decide, “This is what I want to be, I want to be this thing that’s over there.” And they just ape it. Maybe they’re feeling it, whatever, but in terms of relevance, it’s totally irrelevant. All these moves and plaintive faces and fuck-you attitude are tired! They exist in better, more streamlined, seminal form on records. They’re great, it’s awesome, I can go pick up the Stooges and your little fuck-you was meaningless by comparison.

The thrill of the fight

M: At the same time, I’m sure when the Stooges started, like any high school band, they didn’t know that they were gonna be relevant.

JM: Well, it’s like, being a renaissance-fair jouster is not the same as being a knight. Through no fault of the renaissance-fair jouster, but at a certain point, do you really want to be part of some weird subculture that has nothing to do with the rest of the world? If you do, more power to you, but just recognize that that’s what it is, you’re a renaissance-fair jouster. Whether the posturing turns into something good is a question of whether the culture of pressure on artists lessens. That’s one of the things I would like to achieve.

M: That, and participate in Ultimate Fighting Championships, of course.

JM: Yes, that and be a mixed martial artist—y’know, drop elbows on people.

M: Actually, I know for a fact that you used to be a kickboxer.

JM: I did use to be a kickboxer, which is highly amusing when I think about it. Essentially, I didn’t like being hit in the face, which made me win all my fights very quickly. No, I was a kickboxer, then I got an incredible case of poison ivy, which sounds funny but I get it really bad, and it laid me up for a month and a half. When it finally wore down to where I could work out again, I was like, uhhhh, no. I’ll just move to New York. Clearly I didn’t have the eye of the tiger, or the heart of a lion.

M: More like a weakness for poison ivy.

JM: Yeah, exactly. I was taken down by poison ivy. I was the kind of fighter, like, if I was like, my ankle hurts, then I would stay home. Whereas my brother would be like, “I got two broken ankles and a broken arm—put me in, coach!” He was real small and scrappy, I was huge, so I was like, “I’m a little tuckered, there’s some really good TV on, can we move the match to tomorrow? I got a hangnail, this is gonna distract me the entire fight, I’m gonna sit this one out. I really need some cookies...”

With the Juan Maclean, Shit Robot, Jordan Dare and Sean Kosa at the I Love Neon party, Anthem magazine launch at SAT on Saturday, Nov. 19, 9 p.m., $30

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