Annie (From Norway)

Seriously good times
Profile: Annie

18 July 2004
The Sunday Times, Culture Section

It's her disco and she'll cry if she wants to: Annie has made a truly affecting pop album, says DAN CAIRNS

If pop has traditionally been music's least valued relation, nobody told Annie.

The singer and DJ from the Norwegian port of Bergen is about to rally the pop faithful to the flag with an astonishing debut album. Anniemal sees the 25-year-old collaborate with Royksopp and Richard X to produce a sequence of at once utterly artless and brutally manipulative disco-pop.

Forests might have been felled in the quest to pin down exactly how pop manages to be both so beguiling and so disposable, but to Annie, refreshingly, such distinctions are meaningless.

"I guess it's like religion," she concedes. "People need to find a way to fit what they like and how they are into categories. And to say you make or you like pop music can be dangerous, because it seems naive and stupid. Of course, there is good pop music and bad pop music. But making depressing music, that can be easy.

To make intelligent pop with a melody, though, and without sounding stupid, is a lot more challenging."

Annie first proved she was up to the task five years ago, when, with her then boyfriend, Tore Kroknes (aka DJ Erot), she released The Greatest Hit, a sublime single that, despite its title, failed to chart anywhere. By splicing a loop of Madonna's Everybody to a snippet from the 1970s Philly-soul band First Choice (pap alongside cred), and running a deliciously ennui-heavy vocal over the top, Annie and Erot became immediate pin-ups with the clubbing cognoscenti -who like nothing better than to dance in inverted commas, relishing the irony even as they succumb to the beat.

"It's dumb, that whole DJ culture," she laughs. "Sometimes when I go to London, I feel almost sad for people; they're so much into categorising everything, it's like an obsession. What's right and what's wrong. What's good, what's bad. And they're never satisfied."

She's happy to burn a few bridges, then, but Annie is deadly serious about what she's trying to achieve, and her journey to completion of Anniemal has tested this resolve to its limits. Two years after The Greatest Hit, Kroknes died from the heart defect he had been born with. "Everything was good," she recalls. "We were going out, going to parties. He could dance, but he had to be careful." She pauses. "But he never was very careful." At the time, the couple had a deal with the dance label Loaded and were in the early stages of recording an album. "You can never let yourself think, 'Oh, he's so sick, this is not going to go away.' You have to be positive, to think he will get cured someday. But he didn't, of course. He died."

Annie had established a club, Pop Till You Drop, in Bergen, and it was a meeting with a DJ she'd booked for a night there that pulled her, eventually, out of her despair. The Finn Timo Kaukolampi, founder of the Helsinki electro-rockers Op:l Bastards, went on to helm seven of Anniemal's 12 tracks. They've nailed with absolute precision dance music's split personality: feelgood togetherness on the one hand, and desolate solitude on the other. Clubbing is ideally, they say, all about love across a crowded dancefloor; but, as Bryan Ferry put it on Dance Away, you're "all together, all alone".

Now, you should only take cultural populism so far (tempting though it is to shout: "You can stick your A la recherche, it's nostalgic three-minute disco distillations every time for me"). Yet the greatest and most enduring dance-pop songs -and Anniemal abounds with them -advance the genre's almost spooky ability to capture in a mere couplet human beings' need for euphoria and simultaneous dread of its passing. Heartbeat, produced by Royksopp and due to be Annie's next single but one, zooms in on this unblinkingly. "There was a time, everybody was around," she coos breathily, "and I was dancing with you. We all went down to the party Friday night, and had a drink there or two."

It's the past tense that's the killer here, as you suspect she well knows.

Disco-pop's greatest trick is to lure us into flailing around with mad abandon; never mind that the song we're flailing to is really a weepie about heartache and loss. If you can maintain a state of denial about this, you're fine. Acknowledge it while you're dancing, though, and you're finished. "Sometimes when I've been to a club, I would start to cry," Annie admits. "It's so good, but somehow so sad.

You're suddenly alone in this place, surrounded by people."

Long past the golden, analogue-only days of disco-pop as we are, fans of the form must now seek solace in music created chiefly by machines. To nonbelievers, the notion of emotive electronic music is an oxymoron. Annie will have none of it. "I remember when Bjork was in this discussion with a lot of journalists; they were saying things like, 'You can't make out of electronic music something beautiful and warm, it's impossible.' She was really upset," recalls Annie, sounding really upset. Pop's most exciting new discovery gives similarly short shrift to the school of thought that her chosen medium produces throwaway froth, unworthy of serious consideration.

"I know this guy who's in a rock band," she mocks, "and he's always talking about how rock is the only honest music; if you do pop, you can't be honest. I just hate that word -what is honesty? The good old Rolling Stones?"

The September release of Anniemal is preceded by the single Chewing Gum, produced and co-written by pop's greatest demolisher of meaningless barriers, Richard X.

Its first incarnation will be as a limited-edition vinyl single. The label 679, which has done such a convincing job of marketing the Streets, will be pushing Annie for all its worth (and so packed with potential hits is her album, it's probably worth scrapping for a rare vinyl copy pronto, before it's selling for a king's ransom on the net). Annie's photo-friendly image, all eye-linered Scando pop-princess beauty, won't harm this campaign. But in the long run, looks alone won't make us dance (or cry) to Anniemal now, let alone in a decade's time. Annie is cool about the photos "It helps," she sighs. "Everything helps" -and earnest about the songs. "It's easy for people to think, 'She's "just" making pop.' And I guess they will say, too, that it sounds like Tore, or it sounds like Timo." She pauses again. "Well, it doesn't. It sounds like Annie." Throwaway froth is safe in her hands.

Chewing Gum is released on July 26 on 679

www.tellerecords.com

this + the danni minogue quotation ==>> annie is clearly a lurker.

(a dangerous attitude, I realise)

hey how come i've never heard of them.

http://www.discogs.com/artist/OP:L+Bastards

I bet a Manc stole my OP:L 10" single like they did my Kid Koala and Major Force stuff when I was playing out once.

Pisces, OP:L had a track on one of those Soulwax bootleg mixes, surely you must know that un?

The Lemon Tree takes 500-550 downstairs. It's just a funny shape.

The Tramway has, funnily enough, halls big enough to fit very many trams in. I think the whole venue can take 1,500 - maybe 700 in Area One?

Seeing as BBC7 is for comedy and drama serials, I wasn't either. Are you sure it wasn't 6?

Still, I'm suitably excited about lcd anyway.

EAT YOUR OWN EARS AND DEDBEAT PRESENT
ESG (LIVE)
KOMPAKT PRESENTS SUPERPITCHER (LIVE) AND JAKE FAIRLEY
SOUL JAZZ SOUND SYSTEM PRESENTS 100% DYNAMITE
ANNIE (DJ SET)
plus special guests and DJs

Saturday 30th April
8pm - 4am
Koko 1A Camden High Street, London, NW1, Camden Tube
T. 0870 432 5527 www.koko.uk.com

It was definitely BBC7. The station appears to have some kind of 'chat and music hour' for kids and their parents hosted by Jez Edwards and a bunch of others in the early evening.

The station appears to have some kind of 'chat and music hour' for kids and their parents hosted by Jez Edwards and a bunch of others in the early evening.

This sounds so nice and old-fashioned.

(Because it's now actually funny watching something so theoretically simple get so royally messed up)

All go out and buy it this week, go on.

Plausibly that's what not helping sales etc.

x-p