In Conversation

02 December 2008 02:11 BST

Mugison: Bjork is one of my biggest heroes

inthenews.co.uk's Lewis Bazley talks to hotly-tipped Icelandic star Mugison about the blues, Bjork, Josh Homme, home and elephant training.



So, even though Mugison's not your actual name, is it something you've got used to?

Oh yeah, I got that name because my father's called Mugi, and when we were touring in Malaysia and he was singing in karaoke pubs he'd introduce himself as Mugi and introduce me as his son, so the people there started calling me Mugison and I thought it was a great stage name to be born in karaoke pubs and small fishing villages in Malaysia and soon after I adopted that stage name and I released my first album, Early Mountain, people started calling me Mugi or Mugison. And now I think only my mother, my father and my girlfriend call me my real name, everybody else, even friends and relatives have started to call me Mugi or Mugison. So yeah, it just kind of happens, it doesn't p*** me off or anything.

So you recorded a lot of your music at home – why?

Well, everything I've ever done, it's all been on my laptop and it's more just out of necessity to be able to do things. When I was starting out on my first album I had a second hand laptop, really cheap, and I had no place to stay in London, for six months I was staying on my friends' living room floors or sofas, and I had a guitar and a computer and clean underwear in the back, but that enabled me to work on the album, you know wherever I am, and I kind of like that. I've done some soundtracks in churches and different spaces and you know, you can work in hotel rooms or wherever, it's just really handy and it's something I've got accustomed to do, you know my way of working. And now I've got a studio back at home and I still work in the same kind of manner, I've got a laptop and now it's more constant in the same house, and I like that you can be really spontaneous, you can have an idea, sometimes I just record them on my phone and then transfer them onto the laptop and see if I can have fun with it. I think it's really important to get your ideas down on a hard drive immediately, otherwise you'll forget them.

Why have you moved away from electronica and acoustics towards a more bluesy sound?

Um, I guess I had an early mid-life crisis. I don't know, I guess I got a little bit tired of the electronic stuff, maybe because I've been travelling for two or three years doing gigs, only me, the laptop and the guitar. And I've been in this state where I've kind of gone on autopilot for the last few months, I did the same kind of set, I'd become lazy and I didn't surprise myself anymore. It kind of felt like I was doing normal work where you do the same thing again and again and that made me really frustrated, so it was either stop and find something new or just quit and at the time I heard Boom Boom Boom, by John Lee Hooker, it's a really good song, only a guitar and his feet tapping on the floor, and it was really powerful, I heard it in a club, a tacky techno club and the DJ put it on and it filled the dance floor and I realised, you know, that the style of music doesn't matter, it's the amount of love and energy you put into it that's really the essence. It doesn't matter if it's the blues or electronica. And, I started to listen to all that Memphis stuff because of John Lee and Screaming Jay Hawkins and all those guys from 1948 and onwards, where they were making rock 'n' roll.

I think it's really funny, at the same time people were discovering electronica in Germany, so there's a parallel in the birth of rock 'n' roll and the birth of electronica. People often forget. They feel the blues and rock 'n' roll is an old format and electronica is like the space age, when it was born on the same year. But of course the blues has more links to Africa and tribal stuff, when electronica is more new equipment and electronics and weird stuff. But still electronic can be really tribal as well, and based on African beats. I haven't abandoned electronica, I'm working on an album right now with a working title called Music for Club, Cafes and Commercials and I really love working with the computer stuff. I'm a great admirer of Epix Twin and Matthew Herbert and Borton Rasinzski and so many good stuff out there, so yeah I haven't abandoned it, I just wanted to make the best rock 'n' roll album ever made and you know it's nice to have your friends around with you and play music.

So who else has influenced your new sound?

I think that Memphis stuff really turned me on and I saw some videos on YouTube bought all those CDs, like tons and tons of reissued CDs and was just amazed by the power of the performance of so simple but still some of it made me scared. And I kind of started to analyse what it was that made the magic and realized that these guys didn't have click tracks you know their timing is always slowed down or getting fast and I realized that for the last 25 years or so that pop and rock 'n' roll have been too much on the click track scenario, where it's just a constant beat when music isn't supposed to be accurate in timing, it's supposed to be emotional, at least that's what I think. So I kind of abandoned the click track and was focused on just playing music with eyes closed and try to get into the state where you forget about everything and you don't really realise what's happening, it's just guys playing together and you communicate through the eyes and you're just dancing.

Is there an Icelandic blues tradition?

Um, not really, we have some really good guitar players that have played the blues for ages now, but we've been lucky, we're in the middle of the ocean between Europe and America so we get a nice kind of split of influences from both sides. There are some nice blues guys, but there is this one guitar player that's exceptional, he's like the Jimi Hendrix of our country and he's a great inspiration, and there's another old guy, or older guy that sometimes calls my grandfather 'cos we look a bit similar and he's been a great influence and he's got a bit of a bluesy touch.

Are Bjork and Sigur Ros acts you look up to?

Oh yeah, definitely. Bjork is one of my biggest heroes actually, and one of the reasons why I became interested in music. Just the way she's really independent and I think I got inspired by her stuff. She's definitely, I think, the biggest kind of influence on my stuff, for sure. Just the way she experiments and writes music and is having fun doing it, and nobody can say or tell her what to do, she has her own kind of voice and the way she goes about things and I've tried to adapt that into what I do probably because of her. And also, I love the Sigur Ros stuff, I think it's amazing. We've got somewhat of a link together, a friendship, and they've got a spiritual quality that I really love.

To read the rest of the inthenews.co.uk interview with Mugison, click here

To read the inthenews.co.uk review of Mugiboogie, click here