On December 4, Femmes Regionales-clad WhoMadeWho frontmen Tomas Hoefding and Tomas Barfod, dressed as harlequins in black and white beads, prep for an unannounced New Year’s Eve show for friends at the Ritz club in Copenhagen. After a solid, traditional Danish Christmas dinner of herring, pork and schnapps backstage, third member Jeppe Kjellberg buttons the final jumpsuit collar, snaking himself into a lycra all-in-one, CassettePlaya-lite animal anime stretched across his alabastair torso, a minimal threadcount leaving nothing to the imagination. The trio saunter to a stage, freshly varnished, and get an old-school Danish viking party vibe going. The bassline tremors across the floorboards, leading Jeppe into a fit of stoic dance moves - his body creates shapes not yet invented, the triangles of his knees buckling, unbuckling, losing themselves at the part where knee becomes thigh, where leg becomes torso. People drinking, dancing and kissing everywhere. Bodies packed, climbing over each other, sugar mountains of twenty-something fans drunk, high, clambering for the stage where their fists of fingers reach to touch their warbling friends. Bass player Tomas’ girlfriend breaks her leg in the fray. The raucous bellowing drowns out all the screaming.

 

Three months later. Injuries abound from stage acrobatics at Paris Paris, Walter Van Beirendonck and Manish Arora lycra-bound, the three musicians clambered majestically on stage, bursting into a flame of gesturing limbs. Their bodies suddenly a wrangled knot of muscles. Feral. Feral arms and legs and the music, the music ripping from the lip of their throats, fairytales created on their pencil-thin lips. A roar of ecstasy. It is an event the media will later moniker “A show with schizophrenic tendencies”. Asking the audience of pill-popped dancehall stalwarts, legs more than anything, if they want “a crazy experience”, Jeppe breaks into the encore track, Keep Me In My Plane, at it’s peak smashing his head into the ceiling prop, falling like a bag of broken floorboards, rolling onstage on top of the drums. A cacophony of snare hits and drum hiss from his rocking limbs that crash against the kit as they tend to the source of pain: the swollen head now the colour of par-boiled meat, the xylaphone spine that fell thud to the floor. He later gets diagnosed with severe concussion. The band continue, finishing the encore. “I am sure it must have looked extremely schizophrenic,” Jeppe says fondly, reminiscing about his contorted body dancing in pain, clothed in the band’s favourite skeleton body wrap suit donated by an MTV dancer, “Just imagine the image,” he says. I do. “There is something strong about the graphic imprint of a skeleton - both a bit scary and beautiful at the same time…” he laughs, Daffy Duck yuk-yuk-yuk. 

 

Heaven knows what the sold-out Hoxton Bar and Grill set and Scala headline as part of the This is Not London show will contain. “Um…” Jeppe hesitates. A beat. Another beat. “I'd prefer not to tell too much - it needs to be a surprise!” he says, wobble-lipped as he maintains composure, steady, eloquent, somewhat less audaciously cartoon than his stage persona, in woven Carhartt shirt, Pierre Hardy Colorama sneakers, and Acne jeans - the same jeans Mark Rohnson wore religiously around London Fashion Week. Though tight-lipped about the theatrical specifics, Jeppe and Barfod, duly one and then the other, assure that the live performance will teem with the same hillbilly disco-techno energy that has abounded in all their recent gigs. We can look to recent forays, such as their audacious, if overtly camp, dance-a-rama in Carhartt, Alife and Woodwood duds on the catwalk of Costume Regionales for clues. And they shan’t tone things down for the “Pale and spoiled UK crowd of intensely over-drugged teenagers.” No? “No - Because we know you don’t accept musical bullshit here.” 

 

It’s no wonder that WhoMadeWho are pegged a live band. The act was born for the live experience. “We started out as a club band playing for the ravers late at night,” says Barfod, though they now also play more old-school rock venues and festivals, haunts that don‘t necessarily go hand-in-hand with Brechtian acts of glamorama. Though that’s exactly what they get when a WhoMadeWho booking is made. As a live band WhoMadeWho are an unforgettable. So good are they that they’ve managed to hold their own alongside genre bending contemporaries Daft Punk [“Yes, we saw them backstage without their helmets, but we didn‘t know who was who because we had not seen them without their helmets before“], Soulwax [“I‘m embarrassed to say we didn‘t know about them before“], Hot Chip, Justice and LCD Soundsystem. Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age even covered ‘Space to Rent’ after seeing them rattling bones in their skeleton garb on tour with his friends. Their crowning moment of the last tour was being pushed up the bill to headline the main stage at Benicassim 2007 when Klaxons failed to show. The collective lightbulb that shone above 40,000 people as they decided this was A Good Idea led to a riotous reception and they instantly converted the unsuspecting audience.

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Their story begins years before this… 

 

Let’s begin at the start. Just who did make who? “Who made who? You answer me. We don’t have a clue. It´s too complex to answer,” says Jeppe. Yuk-yuk-yuk not far behind. “You’d think after a few years we’d have an answer by now. But we still don‘t. It’s the ‘is it the chicken or the egg?’ thing,” he mock-ponders, finger to mouth in classic pensive pose, losing his hands at the wrist. Philosophical nature of the name aside [just for the record it’s in reference to the title of an old AC/DC album found in Barfod’s stash, the band’s spelling and grammar etiquette dismissed “to differentiate from the album title and make it easier to google”] a more literal answer to “Who made who?”, or, more aptly, “Who made WhoMadeWho?” starts with a drunken talk between Barfod and Jeppe... “We just planned it there and then and swiftly hooked up with Tomas Høfding [whom Barfod had worked with before on a now defunct dance number] and instantly we 'founded' a band together,” says Barfod, as though forming a band is as simple as deciding how you would like your eggs in the morning. 

 

The band formed in 2003, with falsetto voiced bassist Tomas Hoffding coming from the Scandinavian Rock underground, singer songwriter/guitarist Jeppe Kjellberg from the avant garde jazz scene, and drummer Tomas Barford – who also records as Tomboy – a rising star of electronic music. They released several 12-inches on leading German disco label Gomma Records including ‘Out The Door’ and ‘Space To Rent’, culminating in their eponymous debut album in 2005, an album which was a result of just one day's jamming session, fusing a spectrum of sound from electro-rock and dance through to folk and Italo disco. The promotion for first album led to a tour schedule that has pretty much ensued ever since. The last six years are a blur of rabbit costumes, high hats, German beer, and groupies semi-adept in the band‘s Danish tongue. Well, they try at least. “We’re not famous in Denmark, so the fans don’t speak our language.” WhoMadeWho’s second album was a covers album of their own work. A re-imagining of their lauded debut. “The whole concept and our live sound got better and better. But then at one point we got fed up with doing the same thing all over again. That's why we did the cover album of our own songs, that was just for fun.” Which leads us to our meeting today: an upcoming third album, “Though we consider it a second album, as it contains new material.” 

With the launch of The Plot, WhoMadeWho have matured, sonically at least. “Well, we had three years to do it, we had so much time and raw material that is kind of crazy. It's more minimal, more pop sometimes more rock, it's all different parts.” The album was recorded, of course, whilst touring. Always using a foundation of beats and basslines as a raw backbone, the songs then written over the top, alongside the unusual additions of oboe, castanets, electro synth or vocal harmonising. In Australia they holed up in a flat to finish some of the tracks and a chunk of the album was done in Tomboy’s bedroom studio. The record is rich with atmosphere. Listen to ‘TV Friend’ and try not to think of the best of 80s underground, when disco went avant and pop had bite. Think Human League, ELO and Blur. Think 80s coke jam disco, think slut pop, think rumbling bass and high octane trills. Then turn on ‘This Train’, with its Led Zeppelin pretensions, “Stupid monkey drumming,” Thomas calls it, explaining the finer touches of techno, a regular feature of his Tomboy productions. Rousing. Impassioned. WhoMadeWho’s would-be sophomore effort is everything your record collection lusts after. “What ingredients made the record what it was?“ ponders Jeppe. A beat. “Touring. Interviewing. Sleeping and eating in a long endless stream!” And, of course, a spackle of animal costumes and daredevil theatrics. “Of course,” booms Jeppe. Yuk-yuk-yuk. 

 

The Plot is out on March 23rd on Deadly Records.