In 2010, LCD Soundsystem were in the process of booking a tour in support of their third album, This Is Happening. It was to end with a show at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden; evidence of how the band’s career had unexpectedly flourished. Five years on from their debut album, their fusion of dance music, electronic and post-punk, combined with acerbic lyrics, had turned them into one of the US’s most acclaimed and influential bands. They had been garlanded with critical praise, and were recipients of multiple Grammy nominations and album-of-the-year awards. They were authors of All My Friends, a song that frontman James Murphy claims to have felt “embarrassed by, I thought it was too poppy, almost cloying”, but which Pitchfork later said was the second-greatest song of the entire 00s.
Not an inconsiderable achievement, especially if you believe Murphy’s line that he only began making music in his own right because his relationship with the Rapture, the band he was producing, had collapsed, leaving him with nothing to do. He says he was so mortified by the thought of getting on to a stage and singing that it took “a bottle of whisky to do a show”. “Singing’s my nightmare,” he says, blithely. “I was a singing guitar player as a kid and I found it really embarrassing, so I stopped singing and became a drummer. I mean, who does that? I don’t want to be the singing guitar player who writes all the music – I want to play drums and become an engineer.”
But, despite all the band’s achievements, the gig’s promoter didn’t think that they could fill out Madison Square Garden, and suggested they get a big-name support band in to boost ticket sales: “They were like: ‘Well, we’re concerned that it’s a big room.’ So I went, ‘Fuck it, it’s our last show. We’re not selling out.’ I’ve always thought there’s a lot of power in being flippant if you’re willing to carry it through. It’s like, if two people have guns pointing at each other and the first person doesn’t care if they live or die, the other one should put the gun down.”
Some have interpreted this story as LCD Soundsystem announcing they were splitting up purely in order to sell tickets to a big show, but Murphy says, flippant or not, the more he thought about it, the more ending the band made sense. For one thing, he had been predicting their demise from the start: their debut single Losing My Edge, written when Murphy was 32, was about feeling too old to be involved in music; even when the band took off, he kept telling interviewers he was going to quit before he was 40. He was also – literally – sick of touring. “I was probably sick seven months of every year, with bronchial infections, sinus infections, stuff I’d caught on a plane … [I was a] germ factory, low on sleep, probably hungover, taking antibiotics that were like battlefield drugs … like: ‘I don’t know if he’s going to get gangrene and lose the lower half of his body, let’s just give him this because we don’t have an operating table here,’ drugs. I was just like a fucking joke. My wife said: ‘You’re just going to die, I don’t even know why I married you.’”
As a former punk from suburban New Jersey, who had sought advice from the notoriously anti-corporate producer and musician Steve Albini when setting up his first studio, Murphy was uncomfortable with something about the way LCD Soundsystem’s career was heading. “We were set up, especially in America, to make a similar record to our last one, and just be way bigger. And that made me deeply sad. It just kind of sickened me. It’s playing a game, like pro wrestling. You know who’s going to win. And I felt as if I would have to fuck up, make a record that’s like – ‘Fuck you, everybody’ – which is so artificial when artists do that, when they forcefully destroy themselves. So it seemed like the most beautiful and honest thing to do was to just not do it.”
And so, LCD Soundsystem ended with what Murphy describes as “a perfect swan-dive”: the Madison Square Garden show spawned both a documentary, Shut Up and Play the Hits, and a three-hour, five-CD live album. Murphy was free to indulge himself in a bewildering panoply of other interests. He acted in, and directed, films. He opened a wine bar and drove New York’s transit authority to distraction by endlessly petitioning them to change the sound made by the city’s subway turnstiles to “a beautiful electronic symphony”: “We’ve heard from him and have told him many times we cannot do it,” said a weary-sounding official in 2015. With Soulwax, he launched Despacio, a mobile DJ sound system that certainly offers testament to Murphy’s fabled obsession with sound quality, if not his financial acumen. The system is so big that transporting it from venue to venue is “like moving an army”. The costs involved means it loses money every time they use it. “I also got gout,” he adds, saying he now handles the condition by not drinking spirits or beer and “not drinking any wine that’s not natural”.
There was just one problem with all of this, gout notwithstanding. Murphy started writing music again. Worse, it “sounded like LCD Soundsystem”, which obviously presented a dilemma. “The options were: the music I’m making just won’t be released, which seemed really arbitrary, weird and forced; I’m going to have a new pseudonym, a fake, also just absurd; or I’m going to make a solo record, which means I couldn’t play with my friends who were in LCD if I was going to play live.” He laughs. “Which would make me feel like Sting, or something: ‘I don’t want to play with Stewart and Andy any more, so I’ve got to play jazz.’ It all felt so shit.”
He sought the counsel of the late David Bowie (Murphy was supposed to be working on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, of which more later). Bowie told him if the idea of reuniting the band made him uncomfortable, then he should do it because being uncomfortable would make him work hard. “I didn’t imagine David Bowie ever felt uncomfortable,” he shrugs. “Because, of course, I’m thinking that David Bowie’s experience of being David Bowie is the same as I would imagine myself having, which would be: ‘Fuck everybody else, I’m David fucking Bowie.’ But that wasn’t his experience at all. He was David Jones, and he’d done nothing but make himself uncomfortable for his entire career.”
Bowie’s advice seemed to settle it, which explains why Murphy is currently tucking into a plate of upmarket bacon and eggs outside an upmarket east London restaurant and talking about LCD Soundsystem’s fourth studio album, American Dream, of which he is justifiably proud. “I knew we were going to have to be significantly better than we ever were, for anyone to say we were even half as good as we used to be,” he says. “The only advantage we had is that there are no photos of us all skinny and unstoppable and handsome – we were always middle-aged.”
Murphy is affable and endearingly geeky company. By his own admission, there are certain topics, including recording equipment and organic wine, that it’s best not to bring up in interviews because once he starts talking about them, he finds it difficult to stop. But it’s hard to avoid the feeling that an intriguing mass of contradictions bubble just below the surface. He says he’s no longer conflicted about LCD’s return – “my wife thinks it’s OK, the other band members think it’s OK, Bowie thought it was OK, so fuck everybody!” – but he is clearly bothered by the negative reactions of some fans. “I underestimated how upset people who really liked the band would be,” he nods. “I was someone who grew up obsessed with bands, how they were and how they treated one another, and how they treated fans. You know, it mattered to me when Lol Tolhurst left the Cure. I was heartbroken. They’re the people I’ve always aimed the band at, and they’re the ones who were hurt, some of them. They were just showing that LCD Soundsystem really mattered to them, that they really identified with it. So I was sorry. I felt sad about that.”
He says he is no longer beset by the kind of fears about irrelevance that fuelled Losing My Edge – “I kept saying, ‘I’ll do it until I feel like it’s embarrassing to do,’ but it’s not embarrassing to do. I play festivals. We are not an embarrassment” – but you can’t help noticing that the subject of age keeps cropping up in American Dream’s lyrics: “This is what’s happening and it’s freaking you out,” he barks at one point, “I’ve heard it – it sounds like the 90s.”
“Well, it’s not going to become less of a theme because I’m not going to miraculously somehow get younger, and the world is not going to fetishise youth less … but I don’t feel old because I’m not trying to make grime, I’m not making trap music. There are scenes that are interesting, but they’re so removed from me culturally that I don’t feel, ‘Uh-oh.’”
He says he loved Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the 00s New York music scene, Meet Me in the Bathroom, kissing his fingers like a chef tasting a particularly sumptuous meal when its name is mentioned – which comes as something of a surprise. The book features a lovely description of Murphy’s MDMA-fuelled Damascene conversion from uptight indie rocker to dance-music fan in a Manhattan club. (“I watched his life completely change in that moment,” says DJ and producer David Holmes, “and it was beautiful.”) But elsewhere it doesn’t offer the most flattering portrayal of him. At one juncture, a former associate describes him flatly as “a complete cunt”: if no one else goes that far, a lot of interviewees seem keen to suggest that behind Murphy’s exterior (it seems to be a legal requirement for every journalist who meets him to describe him as cuddly or resembling a teddy bear) lurks a difficult, calculating control freak. Well, he shrugs, they’re probably right. “I have a very toxic combination of being completely determined, inflexible, controlling and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone’s feelings, hypersensitive to other people’s needs, and it’s just paralysing.”
That was the problem with working on Blackstar, he says. He originally contacted Bowie, whom he had met while working with Arcade Fire, with the idea of making an album “with just the two of us in a room, together”, but by then Bowie’s sessions with Tony Visconti and Donny McCaslin’s jazz combo were under way. He went along, but couldn’t work out what to do. “I feel like I’d possibly been brought in to play some kind of Brian Eno role and that is so far from what I am. Eno is, I think, open, manipulative and confident. I’m shy and self-directed and controlling. I have to micromanage.”
In the end, after playing percussion on one track and suggesting a chord change on another, he quietly slipped away. “I thought, well, I just had a moment where there’s this Bowie song and I suggested the chord change. I can go home happy now. It wasn’t selfless of me to back out. I’m incapable of working in that situation. I’m not being inflexible, I’m not being stubborn, it’s just not there. I can’t produce. I think I’m done producing. I can’t do it.”
In fact, he says, he is coming to the conclusion that the way he works only works with the other members of LCD, which may well be another reason why they’ve reconvened. “It’s an incredible gift my band gives me by going into rehearsals and allowing me to be a complete … like, ‘Hey, infinitely better guitar player than me, can you hand me the guitar and can I show you what I mean?’” He shrugs. “Even in the band I was in when I was a kid, I’d be telling everyone what to do. I’d be leaning over the drums, telling them to tune their guitars, micromanaging. I’ve tried being in democratic bands. I’ve tried. This is the only way I can work.”
American Dream is out now on DFA/Columbia Records