Hercules And Love Affair Re Digging The New York Groove
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A band of beautiful oddballs are on a mission to revitalise disco. Bernadette McNulty meets Hercules and Love Affair on their first UK visit.
As you leave the station a permanent party atmosphere wafts up from the sea front. Bars compete for your attention, but, at the bottom of the main drag, one sign catches your eye. Against the silhouette of a curvaceous long-haired dancer in vest and hot-pants the Deep Bar promises “Disco New York, 70s and 80s - all the best party and cheese”.
It’s probably not a night that New York collective Hercules and Love Affair will be attending. In fact, it’s the version of disco - the Saturday Night Fever, flares and Gloria Gaynor cliché - that they want to forget. Over here on their first tour since the release of their acclaimed debut album this year, the band of beautiful oddballs are trying to bring what they feel is the true spirit of New York disco back to the dancefloor.
Piling into a sea-front fish restaurant, Andy Butler, the main musical brains behind Hercules, looks more like a hip-hop boy than a disco diva in his baggy shorts and vest, baseball cap pulled down over his ginger hair. Best friend and vocalist Kim Ann is a doll-like version of the Eighties Levi’s model Nick Kamen, and second vocalist Nomi is so drop-dead gorgeous in her high heels and bandeau dress with endless legs and arms, that the waiters cannot take their eyes off her - let alone guess that Nomi may once have been a boy.
The three met up in a post-millennium, Sex and the City-era New York shaped by the conservative clampdown of then Mayor Rudi Giuliani.
On this underground party scene Butler met Antony Hegarty - before he found fame with Antony and the Johnsons - and they bonded over a love of Eighties electronic music from the Cocteau Twins to Yazoo. Hegarty offered to sing for Butler, and they put together Blind, the first single from what would become the Hercules album.
“Antony and I had always talked about how much we loved Yazoo and Alison Moyet, but we didn’t think about it when we recorded Blind. We just did it in a couple of hours, and we were shocked when the vocal turned out so much like Moyet.”
Hegarty introduced Butler to 24-year-old New York native Nomi, already forging a career as a singer and possessed of an equally distinctive, powerful voice. Drawing on best friend Kim Ann’s more delicate register, Butler began to piece together his musical vision, underpinned by the disco and house music he had grown up with,
“I was 17 when I first heard music from before 1983. I was excited by the fact that people had gotten together to make these big, crazy, emotional productions rather than the samples I had heard on house records.”
Butler named the project after his favourite Greek myth of Hercules and his distress at the loss of his male lover “because it represents the strongest man at his most vulnerable”. Similarly, his view on dance music is as much about deep introspection as busting a move. “I wrote songs that we could dance to in our living room. But they are not all upbeat. You can dance to sad songs.”
