Lightspeed Champion

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Lightspeed Champion will be playing Sunday on the Gaymers Great Escape Stage

"I obsess over songwriting to the point where when I listen to music I hear the song rather than the genre," says Dev Hynes, the genial creative force behind Lightspeed Champion. "The first music I was into was musicals: stuff like Hair and the Rocky Horror film. Those songs had a big effect on me. And I'm an unashamedly huge country fan. My aunt in Houston always played the country stations. I'm pretty out of date with the new indie bands, though I still listen to a lot of hip hop."

This most unassuming of sonic polymaths is best known as the guitarist with the hot pink axe in precocious trio Test Icicles: pick 'n' mix purveyors of garish riff and agitated rhythm, who lit up the UK underground in 2005 before calling it quits a year later with a headline show at London's prestigious Astoria Theatre. "Test Icicles was one of many projects that the three of us did," explains Dev. "We weren't doing it for money or to be famous, so when the music stopped being fun we moved on. We didn't want to cheat people, especially because it was mainly kids who were into Test Icicles. But none of the success was lost on me - I appreciated the fact that we got to play the Astoria, for instance."

Although still friends with his former bandmates, the split allowed him to focus on the sweetly melodic fare that's closer to his soul, revealing more of himself along the way. Still only 21, Dev was born in Houston but his family moved around a lot when he was a child - from Texas to Edinburgh, eventually settling in Essex. As a six year old Dev would follow his big sister everywhere, which is how he came to play the piano - she was taking lessons and he'd go with her. Three years later he started learning the cello, and by the age of 12 drums had entered the picture. Dev's early teens were spent teaching himself the guitar and logging time as a bassist in "bad hardcore punk bands".

After finishing school he upped sticks to London, which is still home.
The sound of Lightspeed Champion, however, was shaped thousands of miles away in Omaha, Nebraska by experienced studio hand Mike Mogis, resident producer for Saddle Creek records.
Backed by an informal band that included multi-instrumentalists Mogis and Nate Walcott. The Faint's drummer Clark Baechle and guest vocalist Emmy The Great - not to mention moonlighting members of Cursive and Tilly And The Wall - Dev was able to furnish his gently humorous, open-hearted songs with an unaffected warmth. He has fond memories of this communal experience.

From the pedal steel introduction that opens the album to the luminous coda that closes it, the results are revelatory. The sound is spare and semi-acoustic, with country-rock and folk-pop flourishes. Lead single Galaxy Of The Lost sets the emotional tone, hinging on the ambivalent
couplet: "I feel better now I've seen you/But deep inside my bones feel like timber".
It's that time-honoured 'can't live with 'em, can't live without' scenario. Not that you'd guess from the accompanying video: an eye-popping monster puppet promo devised by Dev's friend Ferry Gaul (from the band Semifinalists), which sees our man being attacked by malevolent furballs.

The swaying gait and stirring chorus of Tell Me What It's Worth belies its terse, wounded lyric, which concerns the peculiar verbal abuse Dev receives from other black people. "The only racial hatred I ever get walking down the street in Dalston is from rude boys. It's really weird.
I listen to hip hop the most: I actually wrote the majority of the Wikipedia entry on hip hop rivalries!"

This unhappy topic is revisited - with added self-loathing - on the chamber-pop miniature Devil Tricks For A Bitch. The latter shares its orchestral DNA with the plainly monikered All To Shit, a wonderfully economical interlude which essays the disintegration of a relationship in 67 seconds.

Dev concedes that "there are some seriously harsh titles all the way through the album. I've got a really crude sense of humour. I actually toned some of them down! There was a funny moment when I realised the string section were middle-aged women and might be offended, so I changed the titles on their scores to something less offensive."

The album's astonishing centrepiece is also liberally strewn with profanities. Clocking in at just under ten minutes and constructed with the aid of meditation, Midnight Surprise is an airy, hook-laden epic which sees its author variously alluding to sexual frustration, the popular video game The Legend Of Zelda and his own eponymous stage name.

"That's one of the songs that ties in with the Lightspeed Champion comic that I've been working on. It's about this guy who's so obsessed with this girl that he has to live in this dream world in his head, because that's the only place she'll see him. I wanted to finish the book in time for the album release, but the chances of that happening are slim.
It'll come out someday.
Maybe."

Midnight Surprise also houses a searing, Steely Dan-meets-Weezer guitar solo, in tribute to Dev's rocker pal Camille, who house sat for him while he was in Nebraska. "Before I left, the only thing she said was:
'If there's no distortion on this album, you're dead to me'. And that's the only bit of distortion on the whole record!"

The shimmering, fx-gilded intro of I Could Have Done This Myself was the result of a long Beatles conversation with the studio engineer and some judicious use of guitar loops. The tune's aural sophistication counterpoints its subject matter. "It's about losing my virginity,"
grins Dev, "which is why it's called I Could Have Done This Myself. I later realised that it was actually referring to the second time I had sex; the first time was so traumatic I'd just blanked it out of my memory."

There's further experimentation on the Salty Water: an impressionistic piece of oblique ambient artistry which evokes Test Icicles' rise (key
refrain: "I've dreamt about this so many times before") and inevitable demise. The folky, literal Dry Lips stands in direct contrast, describing the last time Dev - who has to lead a relatively sober life because of stomach ulcers - had a hangover. There's the horror of the journey home in the morning after crashing at someone's house, getting the first train with all the rush hour commuters. "I felt like shit," he recalls. "The Echo Park reference is in there because I used to skateboard when I was younger and some of the weirder, late '80s/early '90s skate films were just dudes hanging out in that part of Los Angeles looking really awesome. I had this dream about going there."

Let The Bitches Die is another fingerpicking damage report, albeit this time in the third person. Emmy The Great receives a titular credit for her yearning co-vocal on this track, though she can be heard shading Dev's soft tones throughout the album. "I wanted her to have at least one credit," he says. "She's such a great singer. We have a really self-deprecating friendship where we insult each other constantly."

On an LP packed with autobiographical numbers, Everyone I Know Is Listening To Crunk is perhaps the most lovably personal, its sunset pedal steel and deftly pattered woodwind cradling an unabashed country love song updated for our trend-saturated times. Hence the title... and the namecheck for a certain indie-friendly US television drama.

"I'm openly obsessed with The OC," admits Dev. "I love it so much! I'm never going to watch the final episode because I don't want it to end. I actually wrote the song an hour after I broke up with my girlfriend.
We're still great friends now. I tried to make the lyrics funny, so there are some really ridiculous lines in that song, like the one about The OC."

No Surprise (For Wendela) brings the disc to a close with a gorgeous blend of lyrical soul searching - "In your head, did you work out the route to conquer all of you fears?" - and musical harmony. Imagine a classic Lindsey Buckingham production hewn from the perspective of a questing post-adolescent. It's that good.

"I wrote the music for my mum, that's who Wendela is," says Dev. "I kept trying to bring that Fleetwood Mac influence in. My mum hasn't heard it yet, she'd be really into it! People who just know me for Test Icicles might be surprised by Lightspeed Champion, but I'm really proud of this record. The feedback I've had from our old fans on myspace has been positive. I always joke that I want to win a Grammy, but it's not completely a joke. I want people to like it. We'll see what happens."