The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Unless paired with an appropriately modern modifier, such as ‘punk’ or ‘indie’, disco has become a dirty word in pop music - shallow, hollow, even narcissistic.

“For a variety of reasons, disco appears to have been cast aside or lost favour,” confirms its renaissance man and the kingpin behind Hercules and Love Affair’s dance floor coup, Andy Butler. “With the onset of the eighties, and particularly the HIV and AIDS epidemic, I think people wanted to forget the soundtrack to that period, but that’s just a theory of mine.”

Such self-effacing shyness is characteristic of an artist who has worked against the grain of contemporary tastes his entire career. Andy originally cut Hercules and Love Affair’s current chart stomping single ‘Blind’ in 2003 with Antony Hegarty of he and the Johnsons fame, but it took him a further five years of personal dedication to achieve success and reverse opinions. Little wonder he’s reluctant to create a personality cult around his band.

But theory or not, disco’s disappearance from the zeitgeist is a curious phenomenon. Although many recent acts have plundered genres as varied as soul, garage, techno and prog, disco has remained absent, and also from the reading lists of Andy’s university, where he studied music history: “In college, I was essentially told by my tutors that the music I listened to wasn’t legitimate.”

Andy’s initial reaction to the marginalisation of his chosen subject was not one of shock, however. Aged a mere 15-years-old, he had already been spinning house tunes on the gay club scene in his hometown of Colorado and was no stranger to finding himself on the periphery of accepted culture. “I felt very isolated growing up as gay teenager in Colorado,” he explains. “Those venues started to mean a lot to me. Listening to disco samples being played over house beats and dancing with a bunch of kids felt liberating; it made me feel I belonged.”

As the name implies, Hercules and Love Affair possess an affinity with the classical era, illustrated by the delicately bustling Chicago house-influenced track ‘Athene’, and in ‘Easy’, which hints at a lament for Odysseus’s voyage: ‘Walk, walk slowly, don’t run / There is no where to get to / Walk, walk slowly, don’t run / Stay with your family’. But while Andy openly admits that such lyrics are an invocation of themes and events from his childhood (‘Athene’ was written for his mother), he remains mute on details when probed, preferring instead to discuss his involvement with the bevy of other artists that feature on the album, including the DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy, who co-produced the album.

“They’ve all been fantastic,” he digresses. “The record was very therapeutic for me to make. Things were very confusing at points in my life and this whole process put them in order with artists that I have strong emotional relationships with.”

Andy is also vague on details when asked about the nature of what ‘order’ these ‘things’ were exactly put in, and which particular friends helped him deal with them. The absence of any initial reference to Antony Hegarty is notable, given his presence on what is ostensibly a dance record and the degree to which his association with Hercules and Love Affair has assisted Andy in harnessing mainstream attention.

However, after a small amount of coercion, he describes meeting Antony through a mutual friend in New York during 2003 with a tender air of modesty. The pair apparently bonded over a love for the Cocteau Twin’s singer Elizabeth Fraser, and the legacy of late eighties downtown New York club nights that also held performances of visual artists.

“A lot of our friendship was born out of a shared interest in music and cultural history,” he says. “The nightclub was a forum to go out and witness high art, essentially. What was interesting to me was that this performance art was taking place in nightclubs, amidst the dance culture. It’s similar to the way in which the whole Leigh Bowery and Boy George thing happened.”

It’s a striking comparison. On the one hand, Leigh Bowery, the outrageous monarch of London’s gay scene in the eighties, famous for his controversial performance art and high profile parties, was a massive influence on Culture Club. On the other, Boy George was as a much an inspiration to Bowery and he brought him posthumous recognition in the play Taboo, which he composed the score for. Butler’s assessment is by no means incidental, though. “It’s not so much about me being behind the scenes or being in control or being the voice or not being the voice,” he says, “what I enjoy is the writing process.”

Butler portrays a very classical sensibility and one far more significant than any superficial references to Greek mythology. His passion for music is derived purely from its production and much like Plato, who wrote under a pseudonym and through the voices of his past mentors, he has his character buried so deep beneath his work that while it’s hard to discern, its presence is also impossible to deny.