Who could WhoMadeWho be? The general music-loving public knows them as a Danish trio of dancefloor rockers that’s as comfortable performing to massive festivals as they are tiny club gigs, with an irreverant approach that’s seen them tour Australia multiple times over the past few years. But there’s a different side to WhoMadeWho…. Intellectuals with a lycra fetish? Happy pop stars producing disco for the drunken? Inspired by horrible Stephen King film adaptations? The most micro-managed band in the world?

With the release of their new album The Plot, all these questions will be answered and more. Guitarist Jeppe Kjellberg explains everything to ITM in the following interview.

Are you in Paris on tour at the moment?

No I am in Copenhagen. I will talk to you, do an interview, edit some music and we leave for Paris at 4pm. But now it is only 10.40, we can still do a lot of stuff. We are so efficient you know. That is the idea of Scandanavia, no time is wasted.

You met bass player Thomas Hoefdine studying at the music conservatory in Copenhagen. How did the experience of going to music school affect the techniques and ideas that drive WhoMadeWho?

For me it’s a big dilemma. School was a great place to get the skills to play music and to widen your ears. And when I moved to Copenhagen to start at school I got a lot of friends. I met Thomas Hoefdine and also Tomas Barfod because he needed some musicians for a dance project. But creatively the best thing for me has been working with people who don’t have a clue about theory and the traditions of the music – who have an almost anarchic approach.

They are more spontaneous?

I know the traditions and how everything has to be resolved to sound correct and nice, but not how to create edge. So it’s been such a relief for me to work with especially Thomas Barford who is not a musician and is not trained. I guess it’s the combination of the two, the correct training and technique, which we then just destroy from the outside. Whenever I played music with my friends from the conservatory it always sounded too correct or too perfect. I don’t know how you learn to get the little extra thing.

The energy?

The energy and the personality, that’s very difficult. I don’t think you learn that in school. But you can learn the tools and I am still very grateful for that.

How do Danish audiences react to WhoMadeWho? Are there noticeable differences between your audiences in different countries?

There is a big difference in the mentality of the people going out to listen to our music. From day one when we played France, southern Germany, Spain and Portugal it was always a rave.

A rave!

Yeah people were really getting into it – super high energy. But further north in Europe people were just standing around because they were more used to listening to indie rock and being intellectual. The further north you go in Europe the more intellectual.

Even in Moscow?

The further north you go the more people think, is it good enough, is it substance enough, they analyse it and talk it over and then maybe move a little. But this is changing. This whole physical approach to music is spreading all over Europe and also to the northern countries. People like to interact with the lower frequencies and move, not just stand there and analyse. We had some fantastic experiences in Glasgow at Club Optimo and in London and Club Trash – they have very good audiences.

You’ve got a video online of the track This Train by Chicks on Speed that was filmed in a hotel room in Moscow. Mostly you are just wondering around the hotel, playing with the furniture and décor. You look very curious.

Yes, it was very improvised and loosely set up. It was a place where we had a concert, a big apartment. They wanted to sell it and therefore they had us performing there, it was kind of really strange.

Who Made Who is in fact the name of a 1986 AC/DC rock album which was the soundtrack to the movie Maximum Overdrive, based on a Stephan King story. In this movie they words were resung as ‘who made flu’? Have you ever covered this track, or created your own variation, like ‘who made do’?

It’s a Stephen King movie, really? And it’s called what?

Yep, the album AC/DC created is actually a soundtrack for the Stephan King movie.

I never thought of that. It’s so embarrassing.

Have you been tempted to cover that track?

I think I have to download or see this movie. But yes we like to play around with it. We have this loop which is the last song in our set and we always sing and very often we change the words from ‘whomadewho’ to ‘who made you’.

What about ‘I can’t chew? ‘Who made do’? ‘Why don’t you’?

Yes, I have to figure out this lyric and write it down so we can sing it for the next gig. Maybe tonight even.

So how do you feel when you hear the tag line ‘new age dance pop meets advanced disco’?

Well, I guess that’s right. I personally don’t like labelling music. I had an interview earlier today with a guy who said we sound like The Rapture. If people say you sound like The Rapture, or whoever, I always get so depressed. I don’t want to sound like anyone else. But this kind of is advanced disco, it has the positivity of the disco but there is still some advanced layers. It’s not only happy go lucky.

WhoMadeWho’s new album The Plot is out now on Gomma Records, distributed in Australia through Interia.