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Las Vegas? Sure, it’s a fun place, says Hot Hot Heat lead singer Steve Bays, but compared to the resort isle of Ibiza in the Mediterranean Sea it’s sort of a joke.
Ibiza’s seamy summer season is rife with bustling nightclubs, world-class DJs, packed beaches, hot bodies and narcotics, if you know who to ask.
Hot Hot Heat was in Ibiza last year and the Victoria-born dance-punk band is playing Capital Ex’s Ed Fest stage tonight. Tickets for the show are $25, which includes gate admission to the fairgrounds.
Over the phone from his home in Vancouver, Bays’s recollections of the Balearic paradise are foggy ones.
It’s the kind of place that’s great to visit, he says, but you wouldn’t want to live there. And unless the band was booked there again, he’s not sure he’d otherwise go back, especially in light of what happened.
“Originally, we went there to play at a club called Manumission. It’s crazy; the club has a capacity of about 10,000 people. We were also supposed to shoot a video while we were there, but it was a really weird trip and we ended up not doing it.”
Manumission is a dance club that usually books DJs, but Bays says there’s a new movement in Ibiza hoping to rope in more live acts, more rock ’n’ roll. The idea might be under review, however, after Hot Hot Heat totalled one of the two cars it was furnished with.
“Nobody in the band was hurt,” Bays says. “Our road manager broke a rib and our guitar tech was hurt. It was kind of weird how it happened. We had to run and it involved us paying off a police officer.”
The Heat’s paying off the heat isn’t the worst transgression of the bands that played Manumission last year, however. Gigs with electroclash acts like New York’s Fischerspooner and Brit indie rockers the Futureheads went fine, but the Babyshambles booking was, well, a shambles.
Bays chuckles, saying he heard the band destroyed the villa it stayed in, possibly even burning it down.
Hey, what happens in Ibiza, stays in Ibiza.
In a way, Bays says the car crash, manic Ibizan lifestyle and sights and sounds of touring Europe influenced how Hot Hot Heat approached putting together its new album. Due out this fall, it’s all over the road, but in a good way.
“This album was written totally differently,” he explains.
“When you’re on tour, different cities inspire different things. Every song is totally different from the last and I think that could have only happened because we were on the road.
“This last year was also the first time we’ve ever done an arena tour, so it makes you want to write these huge rock songs. Because it’s on the road, it’s more of a rock record – a big, live rock record.”
Hot Hot Heat has been around since ’99, breaking through in 2002 with its first major-label album, Make Up the Breakdown.
The band has since released Elevator and its success allowed for the rerelease of the group’s lesser known debut album, 2001’s Scenes One Through Thirteen.
Climactic changes in recent years, at least musically, have been good for the Heat and so too for the band’s contemporaries, acts like Scot indie rockers Franz Ferdinand, Canuck nu wave revivalists Metric and dance-punk hybrids like Death From Above 1979.
Bays also likes the growing crossover happening in music, the idea of rockers and dancers, at long last, coming together. With that in mind, Bays says he’s looking to solicit dance producers for more functional DJ-friendly remixes of the new album’s singles.
As for just who will be remixing the new album’s singles, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and the MSTRKRFT boys, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop Bays a line.
“The new album is all about keeping the party going,” Bays says. “There’s really only one overt dance song on the album, but they’re all dance songs in that they keep your head bobbing.”