Looking like a bunch of school teachers, The Chap are a European 'modern pop group', who based in London and Berlin, have been around for almost a decade. In their attempt to create music which “sounds wrong”, they released two seminal bedroom-produced classics, “The Horse” and “Ham”, which gathered considerable acclaim. The new album 'Well Done Europe' presents a unique blend of catchy melodies with experimental sounds, exuding summery vibes...

Dazed Digital: What's 'Well Done Europe' about?
Johannes: It’s about being dazed and confused.

DD: I happened to hear the compressed version of your album too, have you been able to listen to it all the way through without feeling slightly sick?
Johannes: Yes, none of us have felt sick at any point listening to the compressed version. We think it’s rather pretty. We once did the opposite, time stretching a four minute song called “Woop Woop” (from our second album, “Ham”) to an hour. That was beautiful. But judging from the music press reaction to our little compressed version of “Well Done Europe”, you guys just want to be listening to “proper songs”. How shamefully conservative of you. Tut tut. Anyway, since our main aim is to get you folks to hype us into the stratosphere, we have written an album of “proper songs” about being dazed and confused (see above), targeting  the fashion conscious late teen and  early twenties demographic. Only it ended up sounding like it was made by a bunch of miserable thirty-somethings (which it was). Still, we see that as a good thing.

DD: What inspires your music?
Johannes: The entire pop canon and our wish to express the love-hate relationship we have with it ( see two questions further down); films; food; drink; free improv; performance art; being friends; being miserable thirty-somethings.

DD: Is it difficult to get so many or you with all these diff instruments to work together?
Johannes: Logistically, it sometimes is a bit of a nightmare, since these days, we are spread over two cities (Berlin and London), but it’s nothing that can’t be sorted out with heavy use of budget airlines and high speed internet. When rehearsing and recording it can get confusing. We sometimes take quite a while trying out different instrumentation for songs before we happen upon something we’re happy with. And live, touring, as we often do, around a bunch of smelly, crap sounding, ill-equipped excuses for a venue whose validation is supposed to be drawn from their being hubs of so – called “underground” or “DIY” activity, it can be a challenge to try and convince the local sound guy not to treat us like some witless guitar-bass-drums punk rock combo.

DD: How would you like to describe it?
Johannes: “Needless to say, it is a masterpiece. It contains hit after hit, quite a few of which mention love and death and stuff like that. It sounds like the coolest new wave pop album ever recorded by a group of teachers (Almost nobody in The Chap is a teacher). It’s the warmest sounding, most catchy record The Chap have ever produced, yet it still expresses their love-hate relationship with pop culture in a most cutting and unique way.”

That’s from our press release. We wrote it ourselves!! Well done us. Anyway, I would like to add that when we came up with the album title, we did not foresee the extent of the current EU crisis. We are quite pleased, not about the crisis itself, but about its timing in relation the release of this album.

DD: How do you feel you fit in with Lo as compared to your last releases say on Ghostly?
Johannes: We only ever released one album with Ghostly, and that was only for North America. Anywhere else in the world, everything we have ever done was and continues to be released by Lo Recordings. Ghostly were cool, though. They helped us go on tour in the U.S. I just think we fit the profile of Lo better, plus they are kind of like our family now. They were there right from the start. God, this sounds so American.

DD: What's next?
Johannes: Touring, world domination, nervous breakdown, acrimonious split, chap biopic, reunion. We are also planning to release another album of stuff which is not “proper songs” in not too distant a future. That album may or may not be called “Gay”.