Interview by Dimitri Kalagas
As soon as Pop Levi picked up the phone, I knew this was going to be an interesting interview. Enigmatic and mystical, yet acutely aware of how he is perceived; Pop’s personality oozes a sense of nostalgia for decades past. Which is no surprise really, as he openly refers to artists like Hendrix and the Beatles as having the mysterious quality that he aspires to harness, that elusive and undefinable element he calls Magick.
DK: Hey Pop.
PL: How are you doing sir?
DK: Great thanks. Whereabouts are you at the moment?
PL: I’m in Paris. It’s a clear sky, real nice man, real nice. I’m overlooking the Seine with a huge reefer in my hand.
DK: That sounds like an excellent moment.
PL: Absolutely, and it’s only half ten in the morning.
With a musical background that includes membership to avant-garde psych rock outfit Super Numeri, and a stint as bass player for electro poppers Ladytron, it seems as if Pop has finally come into his own with his debut LP The Return to Form Black Magick Party. Comprised of glistening psychedelic pop songs and bluesy fuzzed out numbers, Pop has managed to capture a genuine spirit of the 60s and 70s and seems well on his way to channelling his own supernatural powers of Magick.
DK: So how did you get into music originally?
PL: Well my Dad was a concert pianist, so there were always pianos around, and I learnt to play the guitar, saxophone and clarinet as a kid. I was always listening to music, and I started to collect records at an early age as a lot of people do, so that’s it really. The rest is down to taste and what I got into.
DK: Where did the title of your album, The Return to Form Black Magick Party come from, and what does it mean?
PL: It was the name of a party that I threw, we were actually going to throw some more as part of the launch campaign for the record. It’s the idea of throwing a party that is not only a black magic party, but is a return to form, like when you’ve been away from something and you get back on it. You start to do things in a way that you’ve always wanted to do them. It’s a poetic title, open to interpretation obviously.
DK: So do you feel that this album is a return to form?
PL: Well yeah, I like the poetic idea of making your first record a return to form. It’s like a comeback before you’ve even started. That’s like the black magic part, where you do things backwards and you turn things around, or you see them from the other side. That’s the sinister side of it you know.
DK: You have spoken a lot about the magic in music, and how a number of musicians from the past had a certain magical quality. Can you define what this essence is?
PL: I think when I’m usually talking about that type of magic; I’m talking about the idea of the entire performance and the way everything comes across lyrically and musically in a live performance setting. It’s a performance in itself, it’s an act, and obviously when you have people believing in that act, they have taken on your magic. Lots of people do it in different ways, a band like the Beatles are steeped in magical codes, order, mysticism and numbers. I don’t mean that in any new age hippie sense, I mean it in an age old sense where there isn’t anyone in life who doesn’t involve themselves in getting other people to believe things that they say. A huge group like the Beatles who changed the world were definitely involved in mind control to a certain extent. I think that’s what I’m talking about.
DK: So do you think that sort of quality is something artists such as the Beatles have set about cultivating, or do you think it’s something that has come naturally from certain characters or certain people?
PL: I think it’s totally both man. I mean, you can either be one of those people that does it by total fluke, which I think is like what happened with the Beatles in the beginning, then they got a taste for it. Or you could be someone like Aleister Crowley, and completely be so out of love with the world as it is and try to make it change in the way you want it to, in accordance with your will. So I think you’ve got a tough choice there, it’s one or the other, and maybe sometimes a bit of both.
DK: Your album does hark back to 60s and 70s psychedelic rock and pop sounds, but having said that, it has a strong unforced energy and originality about it. It seems like it was quite an effortless thing for you to write. How simple was the song writing process for you, do you ever get writers block?
PL: No, because I made a conscious decision a long, long time ago that I would never sit down and write music. I always just do things, like I’ll wake up, or I’ll be standing in the street, or doing any conceivable thing, and the song will just happen. I don’t actually ever sit down and work on it. I like things to come naturally. Even for the lyrics I have this technique which this guy called Dr John Dee invented and used in the late 1500s called scrying, where you gaze across saucers full of water, and you allow the blank space and your brain to interact until things come out seemingly out of nothing, and you just interpret space. I’ve written lots of lyrics and music from using that sort of idea.
DK: So you’re essentially pulling ideas from the air?
PL: Yeah man, I’m totally into finding systems where you can do that. I guess from my point of view the less of me there is in my music, the better, because I don’t really want to listen to me.
DK: So do think you’re acting as a diviner? Sort of channelling ideas?
PL: Yeah, I don’t think that it’s necessarily anything special; there are a lot of people who are involved in things that seem to come from a higher place in your consciousness. There’s something really nice about that. It seems to me that a lot of the world’s greatest art was almost automatic. It’s like there is a resonance that exists, waiting for humans to bring it out. I really feel that about ‘Dancing Queen’ for example. That’s a particularly amazing song, I can’t imagine ever writing it, it’s either there or not, it’s on or off.
DK: You have stated in the past that one thing a musician can’t afford to do is take other people’s descriptions of their music to heart. How do you hear your music, what does it encapsulate for you?
PL: Hmmm. I hear astral love songs. I hear systems at work and ticker tape. When you’re actually listening to music you’re only hearing sounds aren’t you, there’s not really any way to describe it. The whole record I think is one big sound collage, where sometimes it comes into focus and a song appears, and then it goes away.
DK: Having spent most of your life in the UK, how did you end up living in LA and what was the basis of your decision in moving there?
PL: I’m really into power moves, and I thought that if I was going to get involved in magick on a deeper level, then I’d have to move to a magick city, and one of them would have to be LA. It has a secular magick style to it. I definitely wouldn’t spend the rest of my life there though. I don’t think there’s a scene in LA that’s very strong, at least not in an overt sense. I’m sure there are loads of people doing really good stuff, but it’s certainly not there to be seen.
DK: And do you think that your album would have come out any differently had you written and recorded it there?
PL: On one of the singles there are some b-sides that were all recorded in LA, and to me they have a completely different sound from the rest of the tracks. In Liverpool I was at a level where I had to make the record using broken microphones, and recording in warehouses in the freezing winter, whereas in LA for the same money you can go into a fully equipped studio on Hollywood boulevard and make records that way. I am really glad that I spent so many years making records in warehouses or at the beach because it’s good to take that attitude and way of making records into the studio rather than being clinical. I’m not into clean records, I like mistakes, it’s like the magick thing, it all about the bit you can’t plan, the bit that goes wrong but ends up right.
Pop Levi’s debut, Return To Form Black Magick Party is out now through Inertia AND Pop Levi's Australian tour Presented by Civil Society and us (Lifelounge) kicks off on the 1st of June, keep checking Lifelounge.com for details.
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