The duo of Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes, collectively known as Death In Vegas, make music in defiance of musical categories, bridging the worlds of rock and dance with their hypnotic rhythms and claustrophobic barrage of sound. Likewise, they blur the boundaries between music and more traditional perceptions of art. Fearless and Holmes exert the same degree of creative control over their visual aesthetic – indeed, every element of their image as a band – as they do over their music. Backed by a team of collaborators at their studio, The Contino Rooms in London’s Clerkenwell, they are equally responsible for the films they use on stage (a device to overcome the fact that they use guest vocalists in their work) as well as their videos, photography, cover artwork, stage design, and even graphics.
Initially, Fearless trained as an artist at
the London College of Printing (LCP), studying fine art, textiles and
graphic design. ‘I always thought I was going to be a painter,’ he explains.
But he became swiftly disillusioned by the art world and turned instead to
music. It was at LCP, while running clubs and DJ-ing at the legendary
Heavenly Social club, that he started Death In Vegas with Steve Hellier, a
sound engineer for the BBC World Service. Their 1997 debut album, Dead
Elvis, incorporating such diverse elements as dub reggae, Vegas-era Elvis,
sixties Pop Art and James Ellroy thrillers, was critically acclaimed.
When it became clear that the band was becoming a full-time career, Fearless
recruited the album’s recording engineer Tim Holmes to replace Hellier.
Their first collaboration, The Contino Sessions, injected equal elements of
psychedelia and psychosis into their sound – ethereal melodies floating over
ominous, repetitive beats – and used guest vocalists including Iggy Pop and
Bobby Gillespie. Their latest album, Scorpio Rising, benefits from the duo’s
travels on the Indian sub-continent and has a lighter sound compared to its
predecessor – a mood characterised by Fearless as ‘good coming out of evil’
– with singers including Liam Gallagher and Paul Weller.
Death In Vegas are currently working on an ambitious project inspired by the album, commissioning a series of short films to create a visual version of Scorpio Rising. Fearless is masterminding the project, for which he has invited a number of prominent film directors – among them Ratcatcher/Morvern Callar director Lynne Ramsay; the Turner Prize-winning video artist Gillian Wearing; and photojournalist-turned-filmmaker Robert Frank – to make a film for each song on the album. The initial idea was for each to conform to a strictly egalitarian budget of £10,000, although this has been pruned to £5,000 since their record company is loath to back a project that does not conform to the established criteria of music videos. For Fearless, that is precisely its point: ‘With so many videos now, the treatment is geared towards MTV. That’s really sad because they want a certain style and a certain pace, with the result that the artistic element in music videos has become lost,’ he says. Besides, he feels that music is already the ultimate expression of its creator. ‘You shouldn’t have to illustrate that with visuals or interviews. You’ve been working on a body of music for 14 months and you’ve said something by releasing it.’
Nevertheless, he regards his forthcoming film project, to be released on DVD and toured in art galleries and at film festivals, as a continuation of the process that produced Scorpio Rising. In addition to the films, the DVD will feature a ‘making of’ documentary about the album, featuring Fearless’s film footage of the recording with the guest singers and the construction of the artwork. Fearless and his artistic partner, Will Beaven, designed the sleeve in London and took it to Chennai (formerly Madras) in India, where they recorded the strings with violin virtuoso Dr Subranamian. Local poster painters were recruited to replicate the cover art of a scorpion rising from a pentagram, hand-painting a huge 55-by-35-foot, two-and-a-half tonne sign, which was subsequently shipped back to Britain. They hope to retrieve it from storage as a backdrop to their live presentation of the film(s), though Fearless admits there are few spaces – Tate Modern would be an ideal location for such a music-and-film extravaganza – that could accommodate its vast scale. ‘Because we can play along perfectly, we would like to perform live with the films,’ he says. ‘It would be a bit of a happening.’
Fearless admires other artists working in the field of film, particularly Bill Viola, Stan Brakhage (originally a boy soprano and pianist before becoming an experimental filmmaker) and the late Harry Smith, another multi-tasker whose talents encompassed filmmaking, painting, musicology, anthropology and linguistics. ‘I especially like Viola’s hand-painted stuff on film and Harry Smith’s early abstraction work from the fifties,’ enthuses Fearless. ‘I find that stuff fascinating. Anything that’s based on repetition I find inspiring, going back to Warhol. When you repeat something enough times it borders on hypnosis, and hypnosis is something I find fascinating and which is an integral element of our music – repeating things to the point where they change. I’m a massive fan of people like seventies Kraut Rock groups Harmonia and Neu, and traditional Indian ragas. What’s really appealing about a lot of art films is that they are on a loop and you get drawn in. That’s what I’d like to do more and more with the films for the band – even if the people at the record company don’t find that appealing! I like the idea that a DVD can just be two people kissing for four minutes or a bag blowing in a corridor. I think that’s what’s missing from so many music videos: that simplicity.’
Such images are the hallmark of the films that Death In Vegas use as a backdrop onstage, in lieu of having a permanent singer. ‘When you go and see a band, so much of the performance is just the front man,’ he says. ‘We don’t normally use vocalists so we work on the dynamics of the songs a lot more, and the visuals.’ Most of the footage is shot by Fearless and his filmmaking collaborator Spencer Bewley, blended with borrowed archive material. One fertile source is the Mondo Magic films, from which they have taken documentary footage of ‘tribal drug-taking and religious ceremonies around the world,’ treated and looped to synchronise with the mood, if not the actual beat, of the music.
The band brings to bear the same degree of attention to their official website (www.continorooms.com) which is, thankfully, far removed from the normal band site. Fearless developed it with a friend from college, meeting once a week to discuss design plans. ‘We deliberately didn’t look at any band sites because I really didn’t want to be influenced,’ he explains. Playfully surreal, their site reinterprets Death In Vegas as a small animated town with features including an art gallery – in the toilet – where visitors can have their work displayed if they pass Fearless’s weekly selection conference.
Fearless himself has shown his artwork – mostly screenprints of digitally manipulated photographs and film – in London’s Dazed and Confused gallery and at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, and is planning new shows in Paris and Japan. It’s a direction he hopes to pursue with increasing vigour. ‘I’ve got more and more back into art and film and photography in the last few years. I see myself eventually going back into it full time,’ he says. ‘I never really stopped. I’ve always been into music and I’ll always have a passion for it, but it’s not satisfying my creative desires.’
One major inspiration is Andy Warhol, who extended his vicarious approach to his art by creating The Velvet Underground, an obvious musical influence on Death in Vegas. ‘When I was 15, Warhol was a massive inspiration to me, as were the Velvets,’ Fearless confirms. ‘Just the whole concept of this person being an umbrella for film and photography, in the same way that people like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons utilise other people to get the thing done. I think Warhol was a master of that. And I suppose, in a way, if there’s anything that has been a role model for the way The Contino Rooms are run, it’s the Factory. It’s a floating group of people with whom we do the music and the artwork and the visuals. The day of doing one thing, for me, is over. I think music is incredibly visual and I find it very hard to think that someone can spend so long working on an album and then give it to somebody else to reinterpret as a visual thing.’
Fearless has directed five of the band’s videos himself and would like to have done more. They are far from your traditional rock video: neither of the two band members appears in them and each has a specific theme. His video for Dirge, made for £200 for a film festival, mirrors the song’s dirge-like exercise in repetition. Comprising a series of still photographs of gunshot fatalities in America, each is reduced to a grainy black-and-white mug shot and a typed caption consisting of name, age and address, with a brief description of how each met their death. A later version, featuring elderly ballroom dancers waltzing in black-and-white slo-mo, was another small masterpiece, as is the kaleidoscope of colour for Neptune City, using hand-held video footage of an Indian religious festival, and the mini-film for their last single, Hands Around My Throat, starring Emmanuelle Seigner in a witty nod to Belle de Jour.
Equally notable is fashion photographer Terry Richardson’s eye-catching video for Aisha, an exercise in paranoia pitting the voice of Iggy Pop as a serial killer on the prowl against a glamorous model fleeing the hidden assassin. For Fearless, the song sometimes provides a template for the video – the traditional approach to music videos – but in other cases the visuals came first. ‘Lately I’ve been coming out with more and more treatments and ideas, and then sitting down to work out what song to use,’ he says. ‘Before that I would tend to think about what imagery would go with a particular song. Sometimes it comes quickly while we are working on it in the studio and the imagery comes along straight away.’
No surprise then to learn that he prefers not to separate music and art as his primary sources of inspiration. ‘Without sounding too corny, you get inspired by life, full stop. I get periods of drying up and as soon as that happens I tend to travel. I’ll go to India for a couple of weeks, usually on my own, or even to Bournemouth: I just have to get out of London. My inspiration could be something visual – it could be two colours you see together, or something spilled on the floor, or the sound of a train or air-conditioning unit. Inspiration comes at the strangest times.’
Death In Vegas will be performing at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in April with guest vocalists and an orchestra.
Tim Cooper is a freelance writer on contemporary music