lost valentinos says...

During the early days of their Conquistadisco national tour, Lost Valentinos guitarist/keyboardist Jono Ma was cornered by Kluster’s Jeff Yiu to discuss wild times in Barcelona, “she-male” prostitutes and dreams of getting all shaken-up by Soulwax.

Jeff Yiu: You guys recently returned from your UK tour and it seems like you’ve hardly had a chance to take a break: your debut album Cities of Gold is set for release on the 09.09.09. What can we expect from Lost Valentinos in the lead up to the album launch.

Jono Ma: We are actually sitting in Byron at the moment and just finished a very looong weekend starting with our first show of the tour at the Great Northern Hotel followed by our second Splendour in the Grass appearance on the Mix up stage. We got to see the Happy Mondays and Flaming Lips which was pretty special. We’re playing in most major cities after that including some rural spots. I can’t remember all the dates off the top of my head but they are all up on our MySpace. 

JY: The last European tour you’d done was a while ago. How did you feel about the whole experience this time around?

JM: Well for starters, we are a much better band now so touring there this time round felt much more substantial. Our sound is definitely more refined and I think we have found “our sound” rather than a borrowed or inspired sound. We played this show in Barcelona that was possibly the greatest show of our lives. So we are basically counting the days until we head back to Europe which, at this stage, looks like it will be very soon.

'Thief' Lost Valentinos

JY: How was the response from the people at the shows, do they vary from city to city?

JM: Definitely. Every city we play has its own experience. In the UK the crowds are very unforgiving and much harder to crack than most places, probably because so many amazing bands exist and have existed there. Plus they get much more amazing international acts through there compared to cities in Australia. But it means that when you do crack them, you know you have really achieved something. Barcelona on the other hand, while still having a great live music scene is a much more “festive” city and that is really reflected in the crowds. I think you could almost boil it down to basic things like climate and culture. The Spanish art of siesta definitely makes the people much more energetic at night.

JY: You had a pretty tight tour schedule, but, was there any memorable moments?

JM: On our way to Barcelona we missed our flight due to a massive TM (tour manager) fail. Ironically she was the only one who had slept the night before. However, just when it looked like our Barcelonan dreams would be snatched away from us, we found the world's most expensive flights on the world's worst airline and made it to our show where we towered over 2500 crazy Spaniards. After the show, we hung out with other people from Sydney - because that's what you do in Barcelona - including our friend Kris Moyes, who had just had his phone stolen by prostitutes. He claims they were “she-male” prostitutes, but this was never proven. Later on, our chaperone Julie, who spoke at least 17 languages, took us to an illegal after-hours bar, where our TM went home with the enormous African bouncer, and we never saw her again. That night. End Barcelona story.

JY: The Shaman influence seems to be present throughout the new LV songs from the visual references of the ‘Serio’ clip and, to a lesser extent, the melody of the track ‘Midnights’. How did the influence come about?

JM: Before we started writing the record, we started to look to non-musical sources for inspiration. We got deep into reading books and watching films to find new ideas for the music. We ended up finding loads of ideas in this cartoon we all used to watch as kids, The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Which is basically a French/Japanese production that follows the journey of two Spanish children into the depths of the Amazon in search of El Dorado. That journey became kind of the creative spine for our album. It probably resonated even more with the band as Pat and Andrew’s parents are from Peru and Ecuador and I have Portuguese ancestors. Then we got further into indigenous South American art from there.

JY: Humour us by describing your music, for all the people who are not familiar with you - must be a nice rock they have their head under!

JM: “Conquistadisco” is how Ewan Pearson described it while we working on the record. We like that. However there are loads of obscure indie, punk and post punk bands and electronic artists that have influenced us. So don’t be deceived by the term ‘disco’. That basically just means we like to dance and we like to see other people dance.

JY: You released three EPs prior to this debut album. Was it a challenging process working on an album; defining the sound you wanted to achieve?

JM: Working on music is actually really easy for us because we love it to death and that is all we really want to do. The real challenge was all the bullshit around it like raising money to pay for the studios, finding the right drummer - we didn’t have a permanent drummer at the time - and getting a team together to push it once we had finished. I think if we had found our label and manager and Simon, our drummer, earlier in the process then the album would have been done really quickly. But it was a great learning experience doing almost everything ourselves at the time.  As far as defining a sound goes I think most of that came naturally just by trusting our instincts on things.

JY: I’ve heard a few snippets of tracks from your ‘Bismarck’ single tour and it certainly sounds like you guys have evolved a lot from the earlier works. What influenced this album?

JM: Cartoons, films and any book about a boat.

JY: There is no doubt you guys have worked with some excellent directors: James Littlemore (‘Man With a Gun’) and Reuben Field (‘17 Deaths’) are two that spring to mind. What made you decide to use Dave Ma to direct the ‘Serio’ video?

JM: Dave is my brother and we have been living on opposite sides of the world for years now doing our own things. He had planned to come back for a holiday in the summer and that timed perfectly with our ‘Serio’ release plans. It would have been ridiculous not to get him to do it as he was living with me for the whole summer, he is my brother, and he is one of the best film clip directors in the world at the moment.

JY: You’ve already uploaded ‘Bismarck’ and ‘Thief’ online as remixes, before the album release. Will we be seeing any more remixes in the near future? They’re generally quite diverse in interpretation to the original versions. How do you pick who does the remixing?

JM: We will always be putting out remixes. All of us DJ regularly and have been very into electronic music since we were kids. It’s really satisfying to send another artist little pieces of a song and let them put it back together in their own way. We have had a great deal of luck with remixes in the past and it is really flattering to have such great talents like Emperor Machine, Shinichi Osawa, Canyons, Bagraiders, Van She, Bumblebeez and Jaques Renault, send back great re-interpretations of our songs. So we are always looking forward to remixes. It’s one of our dreams to have someone like Aphex Twin, LFO or Soulwax turn one of songs into a wall of abrasive dancefloor steam.

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