How would explain your sound to readers who may not be familiar with it? It’s a bit electro, it’s a bit dance, a bit camp, yet it’s totally straight. It’s about having a good time. It’s kinda like if you’ve been backpacking for a couple of months and you get scabies and you can’t get rid of it. So totally infectious and it feels great to scratch the itch? What bands do you compare yourself with? Well, I wouldn’t like to say “compare” ‘cos we’re pretty arrogant in the way we try to be original. If we were going to compare ourselves to anyone I’d say we are like Frankie Goes To Hollywood – but not gay, although people might think our music is gay. We played with Hot Chip who are doing really well over there. Maybe some of your readers have heard of Cut Copy? We aspire to be like the Chemical Brothers but it never works out that way. Ten years ago Australian music wasn’t getting the hype overseas that it is now. Why is that? There may be a few reasons but I think there has always been good Australian presence in music. Overseas they always mention The Avalanches, Jet and Wolfmother. I think they are excited about what our label, Modular, is doing, from Avalanches through to Cut Copy, Wolfmother and now us. For the rest of the world it’s quite an exotic thing – how far away we are. We have a bit of a piracy about what we do, it’s kind of this familiar sound or idea of music, but it’s bastardised with this odd shift in it. There are so many people in the world with a conservative view that we are a breath of fresh air. I don’t exactly know why everyone loves Australian bands… Perhaps it’s because we’re fucking great! I’ve checked out your Myspace site. How does it benefit a band like The Presets? Oh man, I’m so addicted to it. I spend about two or three hours in the morning on it. As a band we benefit greatly from it. It’s almost made our website redundant. We communicate so much through it and it gives us a very safe band-fan relationship area. These people can come and be a part of our world and we can choose whether to respond to them, whether they are crazy or not. They can tell us how much they love us, and we can tell them where we are gonna be, what releases are going to come out without them reading it in a magazine, so we control our own publicity as well as having a relationship with these people. While we were touring overseas we met so many people through Myspace, including some of the artists who remixed us. It’s a huge part of what’s been happening for us. It also has a “cool by association” stigma in connection with other artists… Oh yeah, it’s shameless promotion, and top eights are very political. We have 8-9,000 friends but everyone has a top eight. We pick bands that we’re friends with because we’re a band site and we want to promote bands, but for individuals it’s very political. You guys contributed to the Lenny Kravitz Absolut Remix thing. What was that about? Oh you know, Absolut are trying to keep cool, I think. They’ve done it for a while, stuff in art and fashion and shit. They just think they have a creative way of branding. So they got Kravitz to write a song, and then they got a bunch of people to remix it. We were the Australian remixers and it was a huge honour and it went all over the world so hopefully more people find out about us because of it, but I doubt it. You’re on the road with Chromeo and Digitalism. Can you tell us a little about those two groups? Digitalism are from Germany and they’re the guys I was talking about who found us on Myspace. Modular told us they were doing a remix for us and I was like, “fucking amazing”. We did a tour with them and Soulwax and one of the guys found our song on his friend’s Myspace, flipped out and started calling his manager. He’s done this remix and it’s blowing up in the UK at the moment. They’re these kids that are so hot right now in the electro circle. Chromeo are these guys from Montreal, and they’re like electro-funk with this ’80s/Ray Parker Jnr/Ghostbusters kind of vibe. Beams is out now on Modular.
