Hercules & Love Affair

The New Heroes Of Dance Mythology

On the eve of his first Belfast DJ appearance, we speak to Andrew Butler, the man behind the glittering charms of Hercules and Love Affair.

Hercules and Love Affair’s self-titled debut has been lauded from the blogs to the broadsheets. It’s a paean to the heyday of classic house, while at the same time acknowledging that genre’s own debt to the New York disco scene that was at its outrageous height before Andrew Butler, 29, was even born.

It could be viewed as an anachronistic love letter to a lost era if it wasn’t so vividly, joyfully rendered. It has also been sprinkled with a little DFA magic, that production team’s Tim Goldsworthy helping in the studio. Above all though, Butler is a man with the talent, vision and – let’s be honest here – the connections to bring house and disco music back into the limelight.

Butler grew up in Denver, Colorado, a city that is, both geographically and culturally, many, many miles from his long-time home, New York City. Andrew admits that it is “an unexpected place to go crazy for clubbing and dance music,” but insists that “as a teenager, there was a healthy, very thriving scene there.”

Which is just as well, because from a very early age, Andrew developed a love for electronic music: “I encountered disco music pretty quickly. My first exposure to that sound was synth-pop. At the time I was probably nine or ten and the music was six or seven years older so it was already being played as a classic on the radio. Around 15 I started going out to clubs and I got my first turntables and started collecting records. I got really excited about classic house music, and then I started listening to these original disco songs that house tracks were sampling. So I got really excited, like, ‘Oh my gosh, these are the original records!’ It was all about pursuing those sounds.”

And yet, he’s not entirely sure how this music came to define his musical life. Music consumption by osmosis, it seems. “Something weird went on,” he muses. “I don’t think my mom was a big disco fan – seriously, a lot of this music was in my subconscious. It feels like it’s as innate to me in some ways as ‘Mary had a little lamb’. Disco really did make it big at one point. Michael Jackson essentially was a disco artist, Gloria Gaynor . . . all those songs, you’d hear the first two notes and you’d know what it was. In a weird way, less familiar songs feel really familiar, probably because of that.”

The other great love of Andrew’s childhood was a little more esoteric – Greek mythology. The name he has chosen is playfully camp, but it signifies more than just glamour: “One or two of the songs I wrote drew on the childhood love of Greek mythology that I had – ‘Athene’ and ‘Iris’ and of course in coming up with a name for the project. I’ve realised over the last couple of years that it (Greek mythology) meant so much to me. It’s something I’m totally fascinated by. At every moment I could, I would read about it and fantasise about all of these myths. There’s also a group of different voices singing my songs, and I wanted to present something that was a little bit broader than just me. I wanted a poetic device to convey something bigger about the project.”

Continue to page 2

Issue #52 - Very Bro-some

Featuring Panama Kings, ASIWYFA, an investigation into DIY touring, details of what over 25 of the finest NI bands are up to in 2009 and much more.