inthemix | Features | Groove Armada: Live and large

2007 has been another hugely successful year for Groove Armada. Tom Findley and Andy Cato have topped the charts, both with the release of their latest long player – ‘Soundboy Rock’ – and their GA10 compilation, released to celebrate 10 years in the business. As Andy Cato explained from his new home in Barcelona recently, the best is yet to come for the duo as they touch down in Australia this week to play a string of brand new live shows. As always, ITM gets the scoop.

Andy and Tom can look back on the last decade with some satisfaction. There’s been no less than five critically acclaimed albums, including ‘Northern Star’, ‘Vertigo’, ‘Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub)’, 2002’s worldwide smash ‘Lovebox’, and of course this year’s ‘Soundboy Rock’. Add to this the launch of their Lovebox club events and festivals, their deserved reputation as one of the most exciting live acts in the world, and it’s safe to say the English lads have done alright.

Not one to rest on past successes, however, Andy enthusiastically explains why they’re so pumped to be playing Australia over the coming weeks, as it’s got everything to do with their new live show, never before seen in Australia. “The prospect of playing Australia on New Years Eve is going to be quite special,” he says. “We came to Australia earlier in the year and did a couple of great gigs there, particularly one at Centennial Park in Sydney [V Festival].”

“But since then we’ve recruited this new lighting guy who used to work with Orbital a lot and he’s a totally inspirational figure. The system he came up with for presenting our live set just blew us away to the extent that we went back to the beginning and we’ve changed all the tracks to be worthy of their new setting,” Andy explains excitedly. “We just finished a tour of the UK where people who weren’t necessarily GA fans before were describing it as the best live show they’ve ever seen so I can’t wait to do that on NYE in Australia.”

As Andy explains, the new show is ‘a huge operation’ in terms of logistics and getting it right. “It occupies a large proportion of the time we spend in the studio as Groove Armada,” he says. “It starts off with me and Tom working out what we’re going to play, putting together a framework of how the songs are going to be because when we play live all the songs are totally different to how they are on the record.”

“We use our DJ experience and live experience to map out this framework. We get together with the band and we try them out with them and then we tie in the visuals and lights and then we take the whole thing into a proper venue with a proper PA system and proper lighting rig and road test the whole thing and make a few changes and go on the road,” says Andy of the process for fine-tuning their live shows. “Inevitably after the first six or seven gigs we make a list of what we need to sort out. Finally, two weeks into the tour everything’s as it should be.”

Australian fans will be pleased to know that this ‘road testing’ period is all but over following Groove Armada’s sell out UK tour earlier this year which means, come this weekend when they step out at the Falls Festival, fans can look forward to a polished, energetic show. While Andy doesn’t ‘pay much attention to reviews’, there is one group of people he and Tom are hell-bent on impressing. “The only review that I’m bothered about is the one you get from the people who pay money to come see us play,” he says. “As long as they’re smiling and jumping up and down that’s fine by me.”

Fans at any of Groove Armada’s five gigs this week and next can also look forward to getting down to a broad collection of Groove Armada material, not just tracks from ‘Soundboy Rock’. “The tour goes beyond any album in particular,” Andy says. “We play a whole range of stuff from the last ten years and we’ll definitely keep doing that because that’s kind of a centre piece of our activity as Groove Armada. The way it’s turned out with the semi collapse of the music industry in terms of CDs and music sold, the focus now is all about the gig and all about the live side which of course is what we’ve been spending a lot of our time sorting out.”

Anyone would think wading through ten years of recordings to choose tracks for the 10 year story compilation would prove a difficult task. Not so though says Andy, “It’s like most things when Tom and I get together,” he says. “The consensus was pretty straight forward. We both ended up suggesting very similar things and we wanted to obviously pick our favourite tunes off the albums but also find room for a couple of remixes that we’d done which didn’t really get much attention at the time but we’d remained very fond of them and also a couple of b-sides that again, were sort of tucked away in our 12-inch drawer but hadn’t really seen much light of day. It was quite easy actually to get to the point where we thought ‘well, these are the bits of the last ten years that count for us.’”

Not quite so easy, it would appear, is getting Andy to pin point a few select standout moments throughout the past decade. “On the one hand it’s just kind of a blur,” he laughs. “On the other hand when I stop and think about it and start playing back some of the images in my mind of the adventures we’ve had and the places we’ve been and the ridiculous situations we’ve found ourselves in over the last ten years; we actually have put quite a bit into it. There’s never been a grand strategy. The only thing that we’ve really focused on is working out a way of playing dance music live.”

“We’ve had a lot of bad luck over the years with dodgy labels and being let down in terms of promotions but one thing we’ve been quite lucky in is that we decided to make the live performance of dance music our focal point because we had control over it.”

Catch Groove Armada controlling their full live band over the New Year period in Australia:

Dec 29 – Falls Festival, Victoria
Dec 30 – Falls Festival, Tasmania
Dec 31 – Shore Thing, Sydney
Dec 1 – Summadayze, Melbourne
Dec 5 – Southbound Festival, Western Australia