Ou Est Le Swimming Pool

Words by Oliver Keens
Images by Dan Wilton

“Who are they? They look like they’re young, dumb and full of cum… They’ll probably go far”. So says a passing friend as we watch the boys from Ou Est Le Swimming Pool getting snapped before our chat. I didn’t want to find out if she was totally on the money, but they’re young, definitely young. Moreover, lady luck seems to be giving them the wink just now. The brash electro-pop of their debut single “Dance The Way I Feel” has been rush-released by their label Stiff, and pop’s most masterful knob-twiddler Trevor Horn produced it no less. It’s a shame then that the group they resemble most are dunderhead synth-jock duo Iglu and Hartly – bands who name-check both Yazoo and early Beastie Boys are too rare not to compare. In person however, they’ve got the cheeky swagger of the original nutty boys, Madness, icons of Ou Est’s own manor, Camden Town. They’re just too nice. They turn up four hours late because they’re getting haircuts, but I don’t mind a bit. They tell preposterous stories about the origin of their name, and I don’t mind that either (keep your eyes open for it, it’s quite a tall tale…)

So, let’s get down to business. Those haircuts…
Caan: They gave me some receding hairline shit.
Alex: You look like Spock.
Caan: Your mum said that so shut up.
Joe: She’d knock you out…

Have you met his mum? Whose mum would win in a mum battle?
Alex: My mum’s pretty tough, oh yeah, she’d win. Never underestimate an Irish mum.

So how are we all feeling anyway?
Joe: Tired and hungover. We played Fabric last night, I think it was my favourite gig so far to be honest. We got through three riders while Chase & Status slowly soundchecked. But the sound there was amazing. We never know what we sound like, there’s a massive discrepancy between the monitors and what you hear out front. You think you sound shit while your onstage but everyone afterward tells you it sounded great.
Alex: At one point so many people rushed the stage, we were all completely hidden from the crowd. We’ve had similar things in Leeds, but it just couldn’t get any rowdier to be honest.

How’s it gonna be different when you support La Roux on her tour?
Alex: The style of music we do means usually we’re usually on around 12 or 1 am. For these La Roux shows though we’re gonna go on around 8, so to me, its all a bit unknown really. I’ve got no idea what it’s gonna be like.

Are you scared at all?
Caan: Nah, really looking forward to it, first time on the road, looking forward to the whole tour experience.
Joe: We’ve done five or six days away at a time, living in vans and hotels already so nothing’s gonna come as a shock. We’ve already had our share of shit Travel Lodge’s and Holiday Inn Express’s, which are way worse than Holiday Inn. You get a knock on your door and there’s a bag of breakfast just sitting there, not even a plate, just a bag of cereal and some rubbish long life milk.
Caan: Butters. Make sure you say that – Holiday Inn are BUTTERS…
Alex: Nah nah, don’t say that. We wanna start a blog reviewing all these shitty hotels…

So what’s the deal with the single coming out early? It’s coming out almost a month ahead of schedule?
Joe: It’s just a renegade move to try and capitalise on all the airplay right now, we’re record of the week on Radio 1 right now. I mean, I download a lot of music y’know, I really don’t wanna get hypocritical, but if there are people who want to pay for the track, I think some of that money should come to us. People obviously want the track, its being downloaded hundreds and hundreds of times a day. Stiff have had to tell sites to take it off.

The song’s first mix originally came out on a small batch of 7 inch’s, but when did Trevor Horn get involved?
Joe: Well when we signed to Stiff. He’s a big part of that, and SARM Studios is where they’re based. I was with him a couple of hours ago…
Alex: It was all because of Jay Z, we haven’t mentioned that yet…
Joe: Yeah, our name… (giggles), well we’d had loads of names in the past. We were originally called The David Miliband! (Named after Britain’s baby-faced Foreign Secretary) The Guardian had been saying that it was the summer of ridiculous names. Anyway, we were at SARM and Jay-Z was there with Amanda Ghost, and we told him we needed a name…

Who, Trevor Horn?
All: No, Jay-Z!
Alex: He just said it really off hand, I think he’d just got back from Paris, and he just mumbled “Ou Est Le Swimming Pool” under his breath.
Where are your socks from by the way? (changing the subject)

I can’t say. What did you make of the Armand Van Helden remix? It’s quite a face-melting mix.
Caan: At first I wasn’t too sure. I just thought it didn’t sound anything like the original really…
Alex: ‘cos you can’t hear yourself on there Caan.
Caan: Nah, but when someone does a remix you expect it to have some similarity to the original. It’s just a house club banger, but it’s really grown on me and I really love it now. It’s fucking great when you hear it on a big system.
Joe: He’s a big name obviously, having had the number one recently with Dizzee. His career seems to fluctuate but he’s still a huge name. I mean, he called us… He heard we wanted a remix…
Alex: Is this Jay-Z?

So when you DJ do you play it out?
Caan: Well we actually haven’t played out for a while.
Joe: Yeah, when we started out we got loads of offers to DJ. But I find the whole thing of guys from bands DJing strange. I’m not quite sure why it happens. Obviously the promoters can use the name, but only pay for a DJ set…

For things like your Lily Allen remix and your own stuff, who actually sits down and writes and produces it all?
Joe: At the beginning, we were writing together at home and then taking our stuff to a guy called Anders who’s worked for years as an engineer at Air and Abbey Road. He earned shitloads working on pop crap like Boyzone in the 90’s, and he’s worked with Kylie on her stuff. We used to take our stuff as far as we could, then watch how he would work on them. But over time we’ve learned to do stuff for ourselves, to the point where we hardly see him anymore.

So do you see yourselves in that light, as a straight-up pop band?
Joe: Definitely, we’re very pop. I mean, we’re not JLS pop…

Give it a few more years, you could get the moves together. But you’ll need to ditch the keyboards and maybe get a keytar instead?
Alex: Well it would need to be a bloody good keytar! Seriously our keyboards are fucking monsters, you just have to press one button and it goes mental.
Joe: Well we just press the “Demo” button. Honestly I mean, all our tunes are just the Demo button.
Alex: We normally just buy a new keyboard for each song. The album’s ten tracks so we bought ten keyboards, pressed Demo for each…
Caan: Someone actually said that though didn’t they, that “Dance The Way I Feel” sounded like someone had pressed the Demo button on a Casio. They texted in to Radio 1 after it had got played.
Joe – I like that. It’s not complementary but at least it’s honest.

So do you obsess about what people are saying about you now you’re so hyped? How often do you Google yourselves for example?
Caan: Not too often. My mum does it though, when she’s at work. She’ll tell me that we’re on some blog or whatever. But I’m not that bothered, there’s so much out there its hard to keep tabs on it all.

Are you worried about what your mum might find out about what you’ve been up to?
Caan: I think she knows. We’ve always been pretty rock and roll.