Column 111: Englishmen in Omaha
Of Target, Chili's and large knives

So I get this e-mail from UK label Domino Records telling me that one of their bands, Lightspeed Champion, was in Omaha recording with superstar producer Mike Mogis at ARC Studios -- the new mansion studio that replaced Lincoln's Presto! studios. Having seen the bands I've covered in the past, would I like to do an interview for Lazy-i?

Devonte Hynes, the mad genius behind Lightspeed, used to be the vocalist in Test Icicles, a band that only a couple years ago was on the verge of exploding across the London musical landscape, thanks to a rowdy style that combined noise with hardcore dance beats. After only a few club gigs around London in '05, Test Icicles became the subject of a fierce label bidding war. Domino won, but a year after the release of their debut, For Screening Purposes Only, Test Icicles broke up. Here was a chance to find out why, while also getting a glance inside what I've been told is the sweetest recording studio in the region.

Domino set up the interview for last Monday. I was to meet Dev at the studio at 7 p.m. It was colder than hell the night I drove up to the large, '60s-style house right on Dodge St. Sure didn't look like a studio. I walked up to the door and knocked, certain that I had the wrong address. But no. Answering the door was Mike Mogis, spoon in hand. He was in the throes of making dinner for his family -- a smiling wife appeared at the stairs, an adorable child skipped across the floor, and even Mike's Brother, AJ, was there, standing next to the kitchen island by a large bowl of salad-looking food. I felt like an ass.

Dev? Oh, he's over in the guest house. Mike pointed out his back window to another house across the compound. He kindly let me cut through his kitchen and out the back door. As I made my way across the frozen tundra, off to the right was the recording studio building, glowing in the night. That was the closest I got to it.

Instead, I made my way to the guesthouse where I was met by Tom Clarke, a cello player and part of Lightspeed. Inside, Dev sat behind a Powerbook near a kitchen table overflowing with sugary Halloween candies. Tiny empty boxes of Nerds littered the table. From upstairs came Ian Aeillo, an engineer who works with Mogis and is working on the Lightspeed project.

"They want to go to Target," Ian said. "I'm sorry about all this." There's nothing like Target in London -- at least not in the part of London where Dev and Tom are from -- and the duo had become obsessed with it, having walked to Crossroads a number of times since arriving a week earlier to begin recording. So we all piled into my dirty Sidekick and headed to the mall.

So far, the English duo's Omaha experience had been like Bowie's in The Man Who Fell to Earth, aliens discovering mysteries in the most mundane things that we take for granted. Tom and Dev's other memorable shopping experience: USA Baby, which they had mistakenly pronounced USA, Baby! and hence, expected a mod fashion boutique instead of a store filled with baby goods. "We have nothing like that in London," Tom said. Nor do they have stores dedicated to cowboy gear, like Wolf Brothers next door -- a store they were too intimidated to enter. "But we're going back," Tom said. "I want hats and spurs."

"I could happily stay here for awhile," Dev said, sipping his tea. "I'm quite content. I don't need much."

Omaha couldn't be more different than the poverty-laden area where Dev lives, an East London borough called Hackney. "It's one of the worst places in the UK," he said. In fact, a few days before leaving for Omaha Dev was jumped by a gang brandishing guns and knives. He recounts the story nonchalantly. "The guy said, 'You want your life to end right now?' and I said, 'I don't fucking care.' My friends had to pull me away, and pull me into my place so I didn't get shot in the face."

"We live there because our friends live there," said Tom, who lives a few blocks from Dev in the nearby borough Towers Hamlets. "London isn't like here. It's so big. Here, it's so small. Literally everyone is in this small place. It's surprising, this Saddle Creek thing. There are a lot of bands in East London, but it's not a connected scene, just a lot of people in bands. Here, it's all local and integrated, it's so awesome."

Becoming part of that scene was the last thing on Dev's mind when he made the demo that ended up with Mogis, who agreed to produce their debut album. "I was quite shocked," Dev said. "He's done some pretty awesome stuff, like Cursive's The Ugly Organ."

So far, Clark Baechle, Nate Wolcott and Mogis all have contributed to the Lightspeed recording. "The Tilly girls might do some percussion," Dev said. "The music scene here is a bunch of friends. That doesn't happen anywhere else. Ian and Mike don't think twice about it. The other day they were talking about asking Tim to come over to watch football. I turned to Tom and said, 'Is he talking about Cursive?' It's the way everyone wants their music scene to be."

For the next hour over peppermint tea at Target, Dev and Tom talked about the recording and explained what happened to Test Icicles.

"We'd been saying we would split up for ages," Dev said of his former band. "We didn't like the music, we didn't want the money, we didn't want to be famous, why were we doing it? So we just split up. Everyone was saying, 'Man, you could have played Brixton Academy.' Well, wouldn't you rather make music you like? People around London didn't understand. Now they do."

Dev said Lightspeed Champion gives him a chance to do what he wants. "The music shifts between country, folk and grunge, with a running story line," he said. "And we're doing this comic book with it. It's all completely selfish. Being here now, recording it, it blows my mind.

"It's going to be the best album in the world," he added, half-joking. "Sometimes I'm recording and I hear a whisper in the distance, and that whisper is saying 'Grammy, Grammy, Grammy…' I'm aiming for the shelves of Target, the ones with the picture above it."

Certainly the indie scene could use a savior to lift it from its current doldrums. Dev and Tom seemed skeptical that a savior is coming from London or anywhere else any time soon.

"Nothing's happened on a world-scale since The Strokes, and before that, Nirvana," Dev said. What about Arcade Fire? Dev and Tom both lit up with the mention of the Canadian band, having loved Funeral, but said a lot is riding on the band's follow-up, the forthcoming Neon Bible. "I like to think that no one cares about this sort of thing, but if Neon Bible doesn't sell as much as Funeral, it's instantly going to be deemed a failure. You see it all the time. People are now talking about the downfall of The Arctic Monkeys. How can that band fall from grace without even having released a second album or touring?

"Shit like that is why (Test Icicles) broke up," Dev said. "Things got to a really weird point. I'm sure there are a million bands doing what Test Icicles was doing. It wasn't groundbreaking."

Still, songs like the brazen "Circle. Square. Triangle." were pure dance-floor candy. "I was listening to Dance Macabre at the time that came out," Dev said. "We were listening to Ex Models a lot, and the first Rapture stuff. When we wrote it, we said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if this gets played and the club reopened? -- The song is an ode to the club we played in, kind of like a joke."

Did Dev outgrow his former band's clubby sound? "We didn't grow out of it, we weren't into it as much," Dev said. "You kind of change between 17 and 20. At the time, we all were making new bands every week out of complete enjoyment. We'd play a gig and break up. We did it repeatedly, constantly."

Dev said that after the Lightspeed Champion sessions end -- probably in the next few weeks -- he's going to disappear. "Mike will mix the record. I guess it'll come out in the fall -- it's not up to me. After this is done I'm just going to lock myself away for awhile. I'm going to stay inside and chill until it's time to tour."

Before heading to Chili's to pick up a "to go" order, the four of us strolled through the half-dark, dying mall to Ala-Ka-Zam, a store that features giant, 60-pound Final Fantasy "Buster Swords" (a best-seller, according to the store's proprietor who was happy just to have someone to talk to), along with a collection of bizarre decorative weaponry inspired by comic books and role-playing games -- the kind of stuff you see sold on cable shopping channels at 3 a.m. by guys who sound like trailer-park hillbillies.

Of course Dev and Tom had never seen anything like Ala-Ka-Zam, and took the opportunity to snap pictures holding the gigantic cheaply made metal swords. In a few weeks, they'll be back in London, thousands of miles away from Omaha and Target and our dying mall. Ah, but they'll always have the memories.