The Asteroids Galaxy Tour are musicians on a mission… dedicated to turning pop technicolour, making funk get down with folk and mixing old soul with psychedelia and spaced-out beats. Formed just over a year ago, the band are heading for fame at a speed even they didn’t expect. After a high profile support slot thrust them into the limelight, a demo soon found its way to London and into the hands of David Enthoven and Tim Clark, who have managed the careers of T-Rex, Roxy Music and Robbie Williams. Within half an hour of hearing it, Enthoven was on the phone to band founder Lars Iversen. Within days, he was on his way to Copenhagen to thrash out a deal. Read More...
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour are musicians on a mission… dedicated to turning pop technicolour, making funk get down with folk and mixing old soul with psychedelia and spaced-out beats. Formed just over a year ago, the band are heading for fame at a speed even they didn’t expect. After a high profile support slot thrust them into the limelight, a demo soon found its way to London and into the hands of David Enthoven and Tim Clark, who have managed the careers of T-Rex, Roxy Music and Robbie Williams. Within half an hour of hearing it, Enthoven was on the phone to band founder Lars Iversen. Within days, he was on his way to Copenhagen to thrash out a deal.
Whilst everything seems to be happening fast these days, Lars says he actually spent a long time writing and planning the band’s unique sound. In summer 2007, he met up with former band mate and singer Mette Lindberg to play her some demos. She went home with a CD and returned the day after with lots of ideas of her own. The pair immediately set to work, spending the whole of last summer practically living, recording, eating, composing and sleeping in Lars’ self-built studio in his one room flat in Copenhagen. Every night, after a hard day’s work, they would end up drunk on Lars’ balcony until early morning.
The first songs they recorded were steeped in a shared love of the soul of
Marvin, Stevie and Sly. You can hear it in the horns that honk through the
sexual, shimmery Around The Bend or the bass lines that drive the bands’
first single, The Sun Ain’t Shining No More, a kaleidoscopic pop epic that
demands you to shake your hips on first hearing.
“Mette has an incredible, quirky, unschooled voice that’s so strange, compelling and cool,” says Lars. “It’s her voice I have in my head when I
write every song. She is a great inspiration and the longer we’re together, the more the music becomes a collaborative effort. If I present her with a song she always adds brilliant ideas of her own, or sings it in a way I hadn’t expected, taking the song to a new level.”
More recent additions to The Asteroids Galaxy Tour canon include the more
melancholic, teetering-on-trippy Hero and the deliciously-groovy Lady Jesus, a song based on a recent, real-life event.
“Lady Jesus was inspired by a scary, Danish religious leader who has been
in the papers a lot over here of late,” says Lars. “She bought an old building in
Copenhagen, not far from my flat, famous for its alternative youth culture. A blend of young anarchists, progressive artists and musicians have lived and worked there since the late ‘70s. This woman threw the kids out and bulldozed the building, which caused a riot in the city. There were fires burning and police everywhere. For months we felt like we couldn’t breathe. Lady Jesus still has the dusty, old soul vibe we love, but it captures the claustrophobic atmosphere it was written in.”
What the songs have in common is a sense of adventure and a feeling of
freedom you rarely find in pop music anymore. The sounds of different
decades rub shoulders as though they have always partied together and there
is a genuine warmth that comes partly from friends making music purely for
the love of it and partly from Lars’ vintage recording equipment.
Mette and Lars are the core of The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, but live, the band grow to a six-piece. Included are a fully fledged horn section of trumpet and sax players, clavinet sounds, a drummer and a guitarist. They insist they are neither a duo nor a band. Think of them as more of a collective – a group of dedicated friends with similar minds and dreams. The line-up and the sound will constantly evolve. Who knows… on their second album they might all join in writing songs, they could even have a string quartet, percussion player and backing singers…
Finally, about that name…
“I stole it from Miloud, our Moroccan trumpet player, who runs a hippy
jewellery shop when he’s not rehearsing with us”, laughs Lars. “He’s a dear
friend and a special guy with a brilliant, random mind and a big influence
on the band. He came up with the name and I grabbed it. I like it because it sounds like the title of a film or a book, rather than a band name. It’s asking you to step in to a story and join us on a journey – a trip in our galaxy”.
