FUN BOYS THREE

It's not supposed to happen to a band from Minneapolis, the town where planet-straddling native sons SEMISONIC say the prevailing worldview is, "Who the hell do you think you are?" It's a wonder they haven't had their Minnesotan passports revoked. Music365 catches up with the refreshingly semi-serious trio to find out if they've still got homes to go back to. Interview: JENNIFER NINE

Every once in a while, a certain kind of American rock band remembers a certain kind of pop music - yeah, that stuff with ragged guitars and skyscraping choruses to die for - and the results can be as glorious as they are rare.

Like the sublime Posies, self-destructive nearly-kids TheReplacements, Matthew Sweet and Fountains Of Wayne, Minneapolis trio Semisonic have obviously soaked up the best of their powerpop/garage/blue-eyed-soul forebears, from Big Star, Todd Rundgren and Cheap Trick to Hall & Oates and the Fab Four. And made a glorious, heartstring-hooking noise out of it.

Unlike the Posies and Replacements, however, Semisonic have actually beaten the very long odds and found themselves with a hit. Their second album 'Feeling Strangely Fine', due for re-release in Britain on July 12, has netted them a US platinum disc and a Top 20 single, via the wistfully anthemic 'Closing Time', from Singapore and Australia across Europe to Mexico and beyond. More surprisingly, even the UK market - prone to ignoring big American alt.rock noises-du-jour and their tattooed funk-metal - has betrayed its fondness for peerless pop by sending 'Secret Smile' into the UK Top 15.

‘Secret Smile' wouldn't sound out of place on Hall & Oates' 'Abandoned Luncheonette'....
John Munro (vocals/bass): "Wow, that's a great record."
Dan Wilson (lead vocals/guitar): "I can see that. The only thing that makes me a little leery of accepting that comparison is, well, Daryl Hall's very Sting-like public image. He always had that ‘I am the greatest thing since Mozart' thing going on. He had obviously over-estimated his place in the world just a little. I read an interview with him lately and you get the distinct impression Daryl Hall does not understand where he fits in the great scheme of things."

Todd Rundgren is another comparison you attract...
Dan: "I always feel that the comparison to Rundgren comes coincidentally because my voice sounds kind of like his, so people assume he's an influence. I dunno what he listens to, but it probably included a lot of Marvin Gaye and Beatles and early soul, so I imagine we have a lot of influences in common. And even the fact that I listened to The Posies' ‘Dear 23' when it first came out probably gave what I do even more Rundgren-ishness, even if it came more from Ken Stringfellow than him. That's always the way. If I've written something that people say sounds like Big Star, secretly I think, ‘Oh wow, I thought it sounded like The Replacements.'"

Do you still feel like you're a part of the Minneapolis scene? Dan: "It's hard going away for months and months; we come to Minneapolis again after being on tour for ages, and there's a whole new set of bands and new sounds and we have to catch up. . . or risk looking really out of it."
Jake Slichter (drums/keyboards): "Yeah. Why doesn't anyone play the clarinet anymore? Whatever happened to scratching and loops and distorted vocals? Put on some Beastie Boys or something proper, fer Chrissakes!..."
Dan: "We try to be emissaries; we get turned on by something in Minneapolis and leave there and tell everybody how cool everything is back home... and when we go back, there's been this huge turnover and everybody's moved to LA and the bands we love have broken up. Luckily, as far as we're concerned, we haven't had a huge backlash, though we've had some. All of us conveniently forget about the possibility of the local scene turning against you and people thinking that you're stuck-up and arrogant when you never say anything different than you used to say. The aesthetic of Minneapolis is definitely anti-success; the rockers anyway, have a definite ethic of failure."
John: "Though Soul Asylum broke that mould in a way. But that didn't endear them to the locals. I think they were loved for succeeding, and then despised; everyone slapping them on the back... and then they were actually slapping them."
John: "The dominant vibe of the city is, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?'"
Dan: "It's like Japan: the nail that get sticks out will get hammered down."

So it's fun having hit records?
Dan: "Yeah, absolutely fun. Ridiculous. Silly. Coming to London and hearing ‘Secret Smile' on the radio 15 minutes into getting to town was incredible, especially since I wasn't hunting for us on the dial. I wasn't counting, you know. So it was like, oh, that's right, we're on the radio here... that's pretty amazing. It's all pretty silly. We're Number One in Mexico right now. Which is great... but that was nowhere on my dream list."
Jake: (licking imaginary pencil): " 'Laundry. Get stamps. Be Number One in Mexico'... nope, me either."
Dan: "Which means that somewhere beneath us on the Mexican charts, of course, is a song by Ricky Martin."
John: "There's also a lot of silly stuff that you never associated with having a hit record. TV shows, for instance, the wacky side of it that you just never imagine you'll be a willing participant in."
Jake (mock Australian TV announcer accent): "‘Hey mates, we've got a little bit on our show that's called Feed The Kangaroo. We usually have the bands come on, feed the kangaroo, see what happens'."
John: "‘Oh yeah, and watch out, that fucker's got sharp claws. He bites!' When we arrived in New Zealand earlier this year, we went directly to an amusement park to do a radio show... and got shot into the air with two fans. And they were the winners!"
Dan: "The joke is that when we arrived, the local radio person says, ‘I know we were supposed to go out to dinner with the fans, but that just seemed so boring. So you're going to ride the Sky Screamer.' G'day - aaaaaaaugh!"

How do you feel about the change in your audiences since ‘Closing Time' became such a huge hit?
Dan: "We've had to get used to the broad audience rather than the narrow audience. We were playing for our rock peers in Minneapolis for a couple of years and now there's a lot of different people in the crowd. A lot of Mexicans, for one thing. But also a lot of people saying, ‘Hi my name is Jessica. I'm 12 years old and my mom and I listen to your album all the time.' And of course at first I thought, ‘Aaaaugh! I don't know what to make of that!' But then I realised that that's really cool. When I was 12, music was everything to me, and I analysed it and read everything about it and was totally absorbed by it. It would have been awful to know that those bands didn't want me as a fan."
Dan: "We're everybody's band now. We are, at least in the States, one of the big popular bands."

There's nothing wrong with having a song on the radio, is there?
John: "Oh, God no. No. We grew up with all that radio music and I loved it."
Dan: "I think I never had that indie ethic that said that hit records were embarrassing... you know, the Minneapolis ethic of failure. The idea that it's better to burn out and fade away, than to try to raise your head above the parapet. The thing about the radio is that... there's something to be said for the public having some wisdom. People of our stripe usually think that the more popular something gets the worse it gets. But I've always been the ‘Greatest Hits' guy. And I think that's partly because the public is right a lot of the time. And when the public like something for three months and then throw it away, they're right too. It's fun. ‘Tubthumping' was great for three months, and I hope those guys didn't intend that song as a hit for eternity because I got really bored with it and threw it away. "Pissing the night away" is the funniest line I ever heard in a song... but I don't laugh any more, you know?

But what about the commercial failure of the brilliant Big Star?
Dan: "OK, so the public was wrong there... but on the other hand, maybe they were right. I don't know if Big Star songs actually would sound that great on the radio, because they demand a sort of listening that isn't exactly radio-type listening. But the reason Big Star was so glorious to people like us was because they weren't successful, so we could all discover them in the '80s, and they'd be like The Secret Beatles tiding us over through Wham! and Kajagoogoo. A little oasis of cool sound."
John: "Jake always says that when you start up a band, you want to make the songs that you want to hear on the radio. So in a way you are conceiving this pop station in your head, saying, OK, this is what should be on the radio all day long."
Jake: "And we've all had the experience of hearing something on the radio and thinking, that's fucking cool - oh, wait, that's ours, that's from our last album ‘Great Divide'."

Speaking of cool tunes, ‘Singing In My Sleep' is about falling in love with someone who's made you a compilation cassette. Have you read Nick Hornby's ‘High Fidelity' by any chance?
Dan "Oh, yeah. John and I both have. I completely understand that book. You know, because of ‘Singing In My Sleep' and its theme of mix tapes, I've been asked so many times whether I make good tapes. And I answer that mine suck but on the other hand, the band makes our own mix tapes. . . which is each of the CD's we've released. The problem when I make tapes is that I tend to veer off on really bad left turns - like, all of ‘Wondrous Stories' by Yes..."
John: "Or, hey, did you ever hear the third track on the first CD of ‘Shut Up And Play Your Guitar'?"
Jake: "Yeah, or the theme tune they didn't use for The Flintstones?"