I’m standing on the two feet of sidewalk between Junior Senior’s tour bus and The Annex, talking to members of the back-up band. They’re chain-smoking, speaking Danish and wearing Mr. Rogers-style sweaters with bright yellow and red scarves double-looped around their necks, the ends dangling at their knees.
The band’s road manager, Steve Davies, hauls a huge plate of cubed cheeses, meats and crackers onto the bus while telling me that they played Fox Chicago’s Morning News at six this morning, and now Junior is feeling ill. He won’t be able to do the interview.
Junior Senior formed in 1998 in Denmark, signing with the independent record label Crunchy Frog three years later. Atlantic quickly picked the band up stateside, and now it has just begun a three-month tour of the United States following the success of the album D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat and its first single, “Move Your Feet.” The track plays like Michael Jackson moonlighting with the B-52s, and it’s the most infective pop anthem of the year.
Steve jumps back out of the bus, followed by Jeppe Laursen (aka Senior). Laursen’s 6-foot-6 frame is encased in a bright-pink-and-yellow-splattered T-shirt and a thick denim jacket covered in pins, the most impressive being one that says “Senior” in seven inches of rhinestone.
As we walk into the bar a fan approaches Senior and throws his arms around him, saying, “I love you guys — your music is just amazing. It’s life-changing.”
When we finally sit down, Senior lumps himself against the wall, and we discuss life before Junior Senior.
“I was in a band called Ludo X since high school. And it was very British-inspired, because that was around ’95, so we had the Brit-pop-type sound, but we mixed it with a lot of Gary Numen and Kraftwerk,” he says.
Senior jumbles his English a little bit, but it is evident that he loves talking music and discussing Junior Senior. He seems surprised at his band’s success. I ask if it had planned on world domination from the start.
“We’re not very calculating. Move Your Feet started out really low key, and if we didn’t sell 800 copies we would have been stuck splitting the cost with Crunchy Frog. In Denmark at the time, 800 copies was a lot for us. All our friends and family only bought about 100. But after the label got a better distribution deal and the album came out all the radio stations picked up “Move Your Feet.” It kind of started its own life, you know; we just said, ‘bye-bye’ and it became a really big song,” he says.
Another song that has been receiving lots of attention on Junior Senior’s debut makes it almost impossible to avoid conversations about sexual orientation. “Chick and Dicks” finds our disco-punking heroes exchanging light-hearted rips as they debate who they’re gonna do after dark. Junior: “Hey gay, get out of my way. Senior: “Hey Straight, you’re always too late.”
“It’s a big part of our personalities. The song wasn’t a way of just playing it down and making it easy for people to relate to us. It was a way to get away from seriousness. Maybe it’s another way of being political rather than making a serious statement; you do it sort of tongue-in-cheek,” says Senior. The band’s distinct personalities are also displayed in their artwork and merchandise.
“It is all very much a reflection of what we are like. We are very involved in everything and very much control freaks, from approving every T-shirt to checking on every flyer and poster around the world. At the end it’s more you. It’s so easy to just say ‘yes, yes, yes,’ and it’s a lot harder to say no and find another solution. But I’m glad that’s how we do it.”
Senior is also excited that his music has been doing so well in the States, especially in the smaller cities.
“In New York and L.A. and those places, people get to the underground stuff pretty fast, and we’ve played there before, but this tour is different. We just played in Milwaukee, and I was pretty surprised because people knew the songs,” he says.
Many of the apparent influences on D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat range from 1960s girl groups, psychedelic garage rock, glam punk and three generations of dance music. The last records Senior bought were Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man and an old Eazy E album on Ruthless Records. I ask what else they’ve been listening to.
“I’m more into the new stuff than Jes, and I usually like specific songs over specific artists, because it’s rare to find a whole album that I like. [I’m into] Timbaland and some of the Neptunes’ stuff — anything where you can hear people being innovative and just not following the stream. That makes it fresh. I also like “Family Affair” with Mary J. Blige, “What About Us?” and other nicely produced, well-written R&B stuff,” he says.
“And Jes and I go to all these record stores. Lots of second-hand stuff there [is] really cool. We’re all gonna have so many records each, and we can’t have them on the plane, because there is already too much weight.”
We discuss the eminent separation of Outkast and how superior The Love Below is to Big Boi’s disc. I ask about Junior Senior’s live show: “What can fans expect?”
“A lot of energy. It works well live. It was the way we always checked the songs. To see if they worked, you played them live. We were never these guys in their bedrooms making music and then wanting to try and play real shows. It wasn’t like that. The songs always have to work live,” he says.
“The rest of the tour will be pretty crazy. We’ve got something like 28 dates in front of us. We were looking at the map, checking everywhere we are going to go. This is a big country. None of us has really traveled around, and it’s a lot of fun.”
When I ask why the album is so short, clocking in at about 32 minutes (if you don’t count the bonus tracks added onto the American version), Senior says, “We didn’t have more songs.” Then Senior tells me about his laptop, annunciating “laptop” loudly in a mock-American accent, making himself laugh.
“Jes listens to mostly vinyl, but I’ve bought a few CDs, because we all have these ‘LAPTOPS,’ and its so easy just to stick it in and listen — you don’t have to wait two months ’til you get home. It kinda becomes your home, your music collection and e-mails. It’s like your room,” he says.
I ask him about name-dropping everyone from J.J. Fad to Sonny and Cher, and he explains his influences. But Junior Senior’s mission statement should be its philosophy behind the song “Rhythm Bandits,” which explains the musical need to regurgitate influences and even directly (through sampling or otherwise) rephrase another artist’s song.
“When we started out around ’98, especially in Denmark, and it must have been the same here, the whole Radiohead/Jeff Buckley thing was big. You have an original artist but everyone just ripped them off in Denmark and everybody wanted to sound like them. And it was just this whole doom thing that everybody got into,” he says. “And we wanted to play a little Robin Hood, so we stole the beats and gave them back to the people and put them back where they belong in the rhythm.”
