Chromeo

Chromeo and I go wayyy back. Let’s just say I made a YouTube video of myself dancing in ’80s pumps to their song “Needy Girl” back in 2007 and (very proudly) posted it to my LiveJournal. Yeah, it was that long ago. (Don’t bother Googling it, people. That shiz is on lockdown.) As it turns out, Dave 1 and P-Thugg stopped by the Fonda Theatre right here in L.A. to play a show before they headed off to the desert, and I got to chat ‘em up about all the latest haps—their upcoming album White Women, festival fashion, and their love for JNCOs. (Seriously.) Check it out below. —Chrissy Mahlmeister

So, you just kicked off your huge summer tour. Tell us about it!

Dave 1: We’re doing our new show, which we’ve been preparing during these last couple of days. It’s a new stage design, new set design, and new songs from the new album. And all the classics, too.

What’s the inspiration for the set design?

Dave 1: The basic concept is the infinity mirror. We have two huge 10 by 10 infinity mirrors behind us, and we have a lot of strobing going on. The cool thing about it is that everything is chrome: keyboards, guitars, everything.

P-Thugg: Every single thing that’s chrome-able is chrome. (laughs)

Dave 1: And the infinity mirrors are cool because at first you just think they’re mirrors, so the light reflects off of them, and then they light up from the inside, and they become tunnels. You can even light them from the back. There’s this really cool Blade Runner look in the show as well. It moves in different ways. It’s a show with a real narrative to it. At first, it’s all strobing in black and white and in the middle it’s these really warm colors for all the Kumbaya songs and in the end you’ve got really ’80s colors, like sharp pinks and stuff.

Can you tell us how you pack for tour? What are some of your essentials?

Dave 1: Great question. Number one on my list, and should be on everyone’s list in the world, is wet wipes. That’s the touring musician’s best friend.

Really? Just wet wipes?

P-Thugg: I mean, do you need a diagram? If you do, it’s just an arrow facing down. (laughs)

Dave 1: Definitely a man’s best friend in festivals.

P-Thugg: Jewelry, gold chains, gold teeth. Outfits and merch.

Dave 1: Sneakers. Can’t forget that. I have this system where I have two suitcases—one big one and one small. Everything’s that’s in the big, I transfer into the wardrobe case, which stays on the tour bus. And the small is because I fly half the tour—I don’t take the bus that much—so I take the small when I fly. I actually wear pretty much the same thing everyday. I have a few pairs of jeans, two pairs of boots, the same T-shirts every day that I have doubles of just for laundry, and leather jackets. That’s it. It’s incredible how compact my packing is.

You’ve got it down now.

Dave 1: You just have to find the one outfit that works. I think it’s easier for a dude. Then you just double up if you need to. I have one biker jacket that I’m wearing every single day, it’s great.

So, do your on-stage outfits differ that much from your everyday wear?

Dave 1: I don’t think it does that much.

P-Thugg: Not that much. Even my turtlenecks. Oh, put that on the list. A black turtleneck.

Dave 1: P’s doing the turtlenecks on this album.

What about your leather jacket? Where’s it from?

Dave 1: Saint Laurent.

Dang.

Dave 1: I don’t like talking about that because it’s really expensive, but it’s an investment because you just wear it all the time. I think these things look better the more you beat them up, so it’s good to buy a good one and then a year later it looks cool. Leather releases this kind of sheen after a while. All this grease comes out, and it’s really nice after a while. Anyway, yeah, I have jackets that I just wear for shows. Wayfarers I wear everyday. We pretty much are in character 24/7 with this band.

What’s one of your weirdest or most memorable festival experiences?

P-Thugg: Playing in front of a lake.

Dave 1: It was so weird. It was the weirdest shit we’ve ever done.

Wait, why was it weird? Was there a lake where the people would be?

P-Thugg: We were literally on the shore playing in front of the lake and people were on the sides.

Dave 1: It was so weird. At one point we were like, “50 euros for whoever jumps.”

P-Thugg: And 50 guys jump in.

Dave 1: And they swam to us and came for their money!

P-Thugg: I actually paid one of them. I paid the first guy that came. (laughs) Most of the fun stories were at the beginning. Like the Chippendales show.

What happened?

Dave 1: No, that was sad. In the early, early days, we were supposed to open in Santa Rosa in Napa Valley before the Chippendales. And the Chippendales guys got into an accident—some of them died. That was sad, we shouldn’t talk about that. It wasn’t at a festival.

P-Thugg: One of them died, but the point is that we still played the show. There was no one there, we played for the sound guy. It was sad.

Dave 1: I think the lake is the funniest festival story to this day. I wonder if that festival still exists. It was in the Netherlands, but in a kind of an off-brand Netherlands city. (laughs) You know what I’m saying! Not like Amsterdam, like off-broadway Netherlands.

Any tips for Nasty Gals heading to a music festival for the first time?

Dave 1: If you don’t have the big hat and that flower crown, I don’t think you can get in. Seriously. You just get instant VIP access if you’re over 5’7”, and you have a big hat and a flower crown. It’s the truth! Oh, another principle for all my Nasty Gals out there: the bigger the hat, the bigger the sunglasses, the shorter the shorts. Am I right? It’s a system of direct proportions. That’s what it’s getting to. It’s so dope! Coachella is bringin’ so many dimes. We have a song called “Sexy Socialite” on the new album, and it’s really about those kind of girls. I love girls from LA that are like, “I cant wait till Coachella!” And I’m like, “Do you have a ticket?” and they say, “No.” How are you so convinced that you’re going?!

P-Thugg: They go to parties! They just go.

Dave 1: They’ll find their way in. I’m getting text messages from people that I don’t remember who they are. What we used to do traditionally—Friday you go at night. You get there at 5. Saturday, only parties. Sunday, you go and you stay till the end. Because the end is the magical moment. Actually, the two times we’ve played previously we played on the Saturday. Saturday is just kind of annoying I find.

Why is it annoying?

Dave 1: Ehhh, it’s just sandwiched in the middle. You’re tired from Friday and you’ve gotta save energy for Sunday, and I think it’s Saturday night the Jeremy Scott party where all those girls flock. I love that. You just gotta play the game.

Can you tell us about your album coming out May 12^th?

P-Thugg: Lots of guests.

Dave 1: Yeah, guests. Toro y Moi, Pat Mahoney from LCD.

What’s the vibe? What does it sound like?

Dave 1: It’s definitely a return to the party Chromeo of 2007. Like the “Fancy Footwork” era. In the last album, we went almost a little more night by night, it was more rock. And “Don’t Turn The Lights On” had that sort of dark thing. This one is back to the fun. We have this song “Come Alive” with Toro, and it’s very lighthearted. It’s a return to that with the production stepped up a lot. Some of the songs sound, pop-ier, but hopefully in a good way. There’s other stuff on the record though that’s more indulgent, where we have 7-minute songs and interludes and stuff.

P-Thugg: We have slow songs too.

Dave 1: Yeah, the song with Solange is really special. It’s very un-Chromeo. It’s a ballad, and it’s really pretty.

How did you end up hooking up with Solange for that?

Dave 1: Well, she was on our last album, but she only sang a hook. But for this one we went to her house, we spent the night there, she recorded, she wrote. It was a real collaboration.

That’s awesome. I’ve read before that you’re really inspired by Helmut Newton. Can you tell us a little about who curates your Tumblr, and why it looks so dang good?

Dave 1: P curates the tumblr. Do you wanna tell them your secret? We get images not from Tumblr.

P-Thugg: We go outside the internet and nobody has those.

Where do you go?

Dave 1: Tell them what you do.

P-Thugg: I collect old magazines.

Dave 1: And he scans.

P-Thugg: Photo Magazine, Interview magazine, ’80s European editions, Lui magazine from France—’80s, early ’90s. They have amazing ads, and Photo Magazine is all photographers. Every single issue has a capsule on a different photographer, and it’s sick. And it’s very erotic. At any given time Helmut Newton is featured, Guy Bourdin is featured, Herb Ritts is featured, Henry Clark is featured, Jean-Paul Goude is featured, and they do spreads of like 15 pages of special photos for each person.

Dave 1: And they’re cheap to find, right?

P-Thugg: Super cheap.

Dave 1: That’s why in a way I feel like our Tumblr is a little underrated because the “likes” aren’t that crazy on the pictures. That’s because usually when you get a picture with 11,000 “likes” it’s been re-blogged. Our shit is all original content!

P-Thugg: From scratch!

A lot of people probably don’t know that.

Dave 1: Our Tumblr is…

P-Thugg: …our best kept secret.

Dave 1: It’s a window into our visual inspiration. If you look at the Tumblr, and then look at our album covers, it makes sense. It sort of connects with that. It was to point people in that direction that we called our album “White Women” in reference to that Helmut Newton book. A lot of the stuff we do when we’re in the studio is just look at old record covers or magazines. It inspires us the same as listening to music. Obviously we’re a very visual band.

P-Thugg: Record covers, magazines. We bought Helmut Newton’s “White Woman” book—first edition, in German. It’s in the studio. It’s there, we look at it.

Dave 1: You know there’s something interesting about Helmut Newton. When we started Chromeo, we’d dig up Hall & Oates a lot, and they weren’t yet sanctified. They were just cheesy ’80s guys with mullets. And we were like, “No, you don’t understand. These guys are geniuses, and we want them to get that kind of credit.” And eventually, they did. Two to three years after we started telling everybody about Hall & Oates, they became a bit of a zeitgeist. It just became a group that all the magazines started writing about. They know that us and Gym Class Heroes had things to do with that. In a similar way, Helmut Newton wasn’t considered an artist during his time, there was never any museum retrospectives of his. He was just considered a kind of fashion-y photographer and in the last few years, the art world accepted him. Now he’s becoming sort of canonized. I guess we always like to find these people in the margins that we really get inspiration from, that we really admire, but that sometimes only get this mainstream acceptance later. There’s other ones, a guy like Jeff Lynne, from Electric Light Orchestra, I feel like his day hasn’t come, where everyone’s like, “This guy’s the man.”

P-Thugg: He hasn’t had his Pink Floyd moment yet.

Dave 1: He hasn’t had his Prince moment, but the guy is like the white Prince. He did all the ’80s George Harrison, he’s the man! In that American Hustle movie, the main song is him. He’s a beast, but for some reason, no one out there is walking around worshipping him. I feel like people are weird about “Yellow,” but it’s like he doesn’t have that admiration. Why isn’t he on the cover of Rolling Stone? There’s artists like that that we feel haven’t gotten their recognition and we love bringing them back to light and referencing them.

So, what trends are you guys feeling this summer?

Dave 1: This isn’t something I’m going to be rocking, it’s more something P is going to be rocking, but I’m over the ’90s thing already. I’m over girls Tumblring J Lo screenshots already. I think dudes should bring back the 50 Cent, early 2000s look already. P started already… do-rags. Yankees fitted do-rag, baggy jeans, Timbs. I’m waiting for P to come out with the True Religion man. (laughs)

P-Thugg: Two years, two years. We’re too close. (laughs)

Dave 1: I kind of like going back to the early 50 Cent. It’s getting to be that time, it’s getting to the 15 year mark.

P-Thugg: That stuff is starting to show up in thrift stores in Brooklyn.

Dave 1: Sean Jean. Sean Jean. That’s the next thing. I mean for me, I don’t really know because I wear my own stuff that isn’t really trendy, it’s more for my body type.

P-Thugg: He mostly stays with current stuff.

Dave 1: But it’s not even that current.

P-Thugg: I dig in thrift stores, like I dig in the crates for magazines. I dig for clothes. I love it.

Dave 1: For me, it’s more what matches my body type. I retired suits though.

Why?

Dave 1: Played out. Too much, only here and there. Leather, leather is in. Leather pants, tight pants.

So, you’ll never move away from the tight pants?

Dave 1: Never.

P-Thugg: Our motto for this is “whatever fits your body,” and we both live vicariously through each other’s clothes.

You two could never share?

P-Thugg: No, but we teach each other things.

Dave 1: He just pulled out a crazy ’80s suit. Who was it again?

P-Thugg: It was the Saint Laurent one, but the pants are up to here, and the pants go down to here.

Like in Her?

Dave 1: Yeah, not like that. That’s more twee. I’m talking it’s more ’80s Miami Vice-ish saxophone player but dope. What else was there? Today, someone Instagrammed a JNCO ad, and it was so on point. It was so V Files, you know what I’m saying? It was dead on. It was now. I think that shit should come back. It will. V Files next season for sure. Hood by Air 2015 is all JNCO.

So, you’re telling me you’re going to wear JNCOs?

P-Thugg: Yeah. It’s ill.

With what?

P-Thugg: The wallet chain… you gotta bring it back to that! (laughs)

Dave 1: I want to see Venus X with Mars bar lipstick, tiny Chola eyebrows, a pair of JNCOs, Shell Tops and a bare midriff top with a little Japanese character on it.

Earlier you were talking about how you like to dig through vintage. Do you have any tips for scoring the good stuff?

P-Thugg: Well, in New York it’s two ways. You go to your expensive shops, the curated vintage, and you leave your wallet there or you go to the real Mexican joints, where nobody else goes. In the Williamsburg area, you go to the mid vintage shops, where they kind of curate, but not really—then you don’t get any good stuff. If you go deep, deep, deep, where only Mexican mothers go—for real—then you find great stuff. Just pull it out.

We need the locations!

P-Thugg: I can’t give you my locations. (laughs) I don’t know them by heart anyway. I just take my car and I know all my stops.

Have you scored anything awesome lately?

P-Thugg: I just got a really, really, really cheap Versace shirt in one of those stores. It was literally in the middle of baby clothing and wedding dresses. You know, like Quinceanera shit, it was right in the middle of that. $14. And I found an old school gold bomber—$7. Those are the spots, man.