The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

“You’re making me miss him, man!” says Danger Mouse down a transatlantic phone line after a barrage of questions about his Gnarls Barkley partner, Cee-Lo Green. “In fact, soon as we’re done, I’m gonna call him.”

Positions. Danger Mouse: Los Angeles, California. Cee-Lo: Atlanta, Georgia. And in the feeding frenzy to speak to this odd couple ahead of their new album release, press duties are being divided. Cee-Lo did early week; it’s Good Friday now and Danger Mouse, despite suffering from bronchitis, has taken over. He leans away from the phone on half a dozen occasions to hack up half a lung, then returns to finish his sentence. He’s friendly, accommodating, maybe fractionally austere, and clearly a little tired. This is his first interview of the day. Imagine how hard the poor bastard who’s got the 6pm shift is going to get it.

If you were offered the chance to speak to either Cee-Lo or Danger Mouse for half an hour, who would you choose? Tricky. With Cee-Lo, you’ve got the extraordinary story of an insanely expressive singer/ MC/writer from Atlanta who’s the son of two ministers, both of whom died long ago - his father when he was two, his mother when he was 18. His mother’s death, two years after she was paralysed below the neck in a car accident, deeply affected him and he often says he sings to be closer to her; that he feels the music he makes is a penance.

Cee-Lo, now 33 to Danger Mouse’s 31, had a psychotic youth. “I was reckless, I was a bully, I was a violent guy, I was a pyromaniac, I almost burned our house down once… and I liked the fire I was causing,” he alarmingly said in 2006. He was even sent to military school to calm down. There, he discovered acid. Bam! But, like his junior high colleague, André Benjamin of OutKast, Cee-Lo was also a music nut. His hip hop group Goodie Mob coined the phrase ‘Dirty South’ and was part of Atlanta’s eccentric and legendary Dungeon Family, along with OutKast. The first Goodie Mob album, 1995’s Soul Food, is a gem and the two others they did with Cee-Lo before he left them are goodies too.

Cee-Lo’s first solo album, the appropriately titled Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections saw him emerge as a fully tweaked-out, inked-up ‘Sly Stone meets Sam & Dave’ figure. He followed it in 2004 with the equally well titled, more organised Cee-Lo Green… Is The Soul Machine, a successful and brilliant record that won him deserved plaudits for the quality of his writing as well as his singing. He also penned ‘Don’t Cha’, smash hit for the Pussycat Dolls, although it was originally meant for OutKast backing singer Tori Alamaze. Kerfrigginching!!!

So, Thomas Callaway, aka Cee-Lo: massive talent, fascinating guy, likes dressing up and, despite his propensity for singing about necrophilia (‘Necromancer’ from the first Gnarls Barkley album, St. Elsewhere) and bludgeoning people to death (‘Would Be Killer’ from the new one, The Odd Couple), his general rep is that of a sweetheart. Danger Mouse: “I was a total fan of the Goodie Mob, and especially Cee-Lo. We have a very special bond now. Sometimes it’s hard to explain. We’re very different but we share something.”

Danger Mouse, a vocal doppelganger for Grandmaster Flash, is the Phil Spector to Cee-Lo’s Tina Turner; a Tony Visconti to Marc Boland; the nerd behind a superstar. Actually, not really. In some ways he seems like a RZA or Dr Dre for the new millennium - a DJ/producer who becomes a star in their own right. But there’s a difference: his ambition, vision and taste seem to know no boundaries. Racial lines, class lines, musical lines mean nothing to him: one week he might be searching for a perfect beat for MF Doom, the next he’ll be in the studio with a little known swirly pop band from south London. It sounds crass, but you’ll read in one interview that he’s black, in another that he’s white. Perfect. Everything in music seems like a fusion of some sort at the moment and you have in the middle of it all a man who even looks like a bit of everything. “I don’t mean to sound corny,” he says when asked what drives him, “but I’m just very affected by music - all kinds of music. I love it and I’m very affected by it and I always have been. To be able to do it makes me feel lucky, but it feels right.”

We’re not even halfway through 2008 and it’s already looking like this will be Danger Mouse’s year. Of course there’s the new Gnarls Barkley LP, which may not contain a new ‘Crazy’ but still pulls off the task of being as substantial and plain odd as its predecessor, but there are also a slew of other projects just out or soon to arrive: Danger Mouse-produced, soul-injected albums by The Black Keys, Deptford’s The Shortwave Set, former Tricky singer Martina Topley Bird, and Beck. And if you needed any more proof he’s the man with the golden touch at the moment, know that the four of those that are completed would be up there in a top 10 or 20 of the best albums of the year so far. It’s staggering. The 2005 The Mouse and The Mask album he did with Doom is a proper and inspired hip hop record and yet he’s just at home with a two-piece blues rock band from Akron, Ohio. To misquote OutKast, the dude’s poo poo really does smell of roses and in the toss up between getting half an hour on the blower with either Cee-Lo or him, you know that right now it has to be Danger.

Those other projects first. “We’re mixing the album right now and it’s sounding good,” is as far as he’ll go with Beck, but about The Black Keys, he says: “I’ve been a fan of theirs since around Rubber Factory [2004 third album] and I approached them about doing some music for this Ike Turner record I was working on. For obvious reasons, that didn’t get finished, but we decided we should carry on and do an album together. I think it turned out well. It wasn’t very difficult - they were great to work with and we had a good time doing it.”

So you didn’t meet any resistance to your ideas for the record?

“Not at all. It wasn’t like I had to force them to do anything - they were happy to try something new and I was really happy to be part of that process.”

Danger Mouse knew Martina Topley Bird from her trip hop days and he remains a massive fan of the genre, saying he bonded with Cee-Lo over their shared love of Portishead. That he would end up working with The Shortwave Set, who also managed to scoop Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale for the record (not bad for a then-unsigned band), is more of a surprise. “I got their debut from Rough Trade - I think it was Album of The Week when I went in there one time - and I thought it was great,” he says. “So, when the time was right, I said to them, ‘I’d love to do a record with you.’ They came out to my studio in LA and it was fun - we had a good time - and, again, I think it came out great.”

Riding the wave of international recognition that the lead Gnarls Barkley single ‘Crazy’ brought him in 2006, Danger Mouse would say in interviews, sometimes pretty pompously, how he thought of himself as an “auteur”; how he couldn’t find a career in music that he wanted and how he looked to film directors as models, particularly Woody Allen. “If you put Jay-Z on a record with Radiohead, it’s a gimmick, because there’s no central person you can depend upon to contextualise the ultimate product. But you can easily put two different actors in the same movie and still have it make sense - if the right director does it.”

Today, he claims to think slightly differently. Asked whether he still imagines himself in the film director’s role, he pulls back: “That’s not too far off. It’s not always exactly that way but I definitely feel like I have a kind of overall vision for what I’m trying to do.”

And you find more of a precedent for that in movies than music?

“I think so.”

Do you believe you’re doing pioneering work?

“Um, ‘pioneering’ is too self-satisfied, but I’ve always wanted to do things differently from other people and not really because of any specific reason.”

If Danger Mouse is less keen to define himself as an auteur now, it’s possibly because he’s worked out that his principal gift as a producer is not for trampling over a band or artist’s existing sound, but getting into their headspace and working with them to create a different, unforeseen and often singular musical shape. He might need to be in control and he does have signatures (a cinematic sheen, round-sounding drums, bass upfront, even with the bass-less Black Keys), but he’s a team player. There’s always depth and detail in his productions but he’s a “big picture producer”, as Andy Pettitt of The Shortwave Set said recently. In this age of single-song downloads and quick fixes, that also marks him out as being unusual. When Danger Mouse first played Cee-Lo some of the music that would end up becoming the basis of the first Gnarls Barkley album, Cee-Lo said, “We should hook up and do a few tracks.” Danger Mouse responded, “Well, I don’t really do tracks.”

Whether it was with The Grey Album, his mega-boffin mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album, the Gorillaz’ Demon Days, or any of his recent productions, Danger Mouse says he has to be fully immersed in the project he’s working on and none of them take priority in his own mind. He might have reached his biggest audience with Gnarls Barkley, but Gnarls Barkley would be no more important to him than doing something with a Hawaiian slack key guitar band. “Every record, when I’m done with it, I think is going to change the world,” he says. “And I think you have to think like that. I feel great when they’re done and I feel like that for quite a while afterwards. I always think a record’s gonna hit; that something’s gonna happen with it. And, of course, I like when people get excited.”

But surely you can’t have anticipated what happened with ‘Crazy’?

“The thing was that it all happened so slow. I wasn’t super new - I had a lot of hype behind me - and then that [‘Crazy’] happened,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily expect it, but things were going on for me day after day after day. It wasn’t something that just suddenly happened all at once.”

Danger Mouse, real name Brian Burton, was born in upstate New York and moved to Atlanta aged 13 with his schoolteacher father and social worker mother. He was a thoroughbred hip hop kid who claims to have not listened The Beatles or Pink Floyd or hardly any rock/pop music till he was 18 or 19. He was bright and won a scholarship to the University of Georgia to study telecommunications. “I started out with it, then I discovered music and I didn’t really care so much for school anymore,” he says. “I never did graduated - when I left for London, I had one class left - and I’ve got no regrets: if you know really what you want to do, you should go do it. A lot of people do things to satisfy their parents or because they think it’s the right thing… doesn’t matter - you should go and get it if you know what it is.”

By the time Danger Mouse arrived in the UK in 2001, he had already released two electronica albums under the name Pelican City. He moved to London to become a DJ and seriously indulge in music. It didn’t exactly work out. He hated it here (“the rain, man, the rain!”) and found himself working in a pub called The Rose near London Bridge. By 2003, he was back in Atlanta, but not totally separated from Britain. Some low-key tracks he’d produced in London had found their way to Warp and his debut release as Danger Mouse - 2003’s Ghetto Pop Life with Brooklyn MC Jemini - came out on the label’s hip hop offshoot, Lex. The Grey Album followed, which in turn led to Damon Albarn asking him to come in on the Gorillaz and, later, The Good, The Bad and The Queen project. “I was really lucky to be part of Demon Days,” he says. “Damon, musically, is one of my heroes - he was a big influence on me - so it was an honour to be asked to come to London and work on that record.”

Danger Mouse met Cee-Lo as far back as 1998 but they didn’t work together until 2003, when Cee-Lo was asked to sing on a Danger/Jemini remix. It was then that Danger Mouse played Cee-Lo some early examples of his ideas for a ‘psychedelic soul’ record and he claims he knew almost instantly, by the way Cee-Lo moved to the songs, that he’d found his singer.

St. Elsewhere has sold well over two million copies to date. The Gianfranco Reverberi-sampling ‘Crazy’ did nine weeks at number 1 in the UK, same as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, before the pair decided to pull it from the shops in a rather belated attempt to preserve its magic. They began work on The Odd Couple at the beginning of last year, Danger doing most of the production alone and Cee-Lo writing the lyrics, as before, most of which they recorded together.

So Brian, any different ideas for The Odd Couple?

“Do it better. We could have done a better job with the first one in the way that… I don’t know. We didn’t know each other so well then - we didn’t have the chemistry we have now. I’ve got better too, because I’ve been working with a bunch of other people and so, naturally and hopefully, I’ve developed a bit on this record - found ways of getting to what I’ve always been trying to get to, sound-wise.”

And is it better?

“Initially I thought so, but I look back to the other one and I think it’s still a good thing.”
If anything, Cee-Lo gets more personal on The Odd Couple than he did on St. Elsewhere, directly addressing the memory of his mother and encouraging more and more darkness to creep into his words. I suggest to Danger Mouse that it must be flattering to have a singer expose their soul so acutely to music he’s made. “It’s very personal for both of us,” he says. “We’re very honest with each other - as much as I am with anyone. He says what he says and he knows that I’m there to back him up and understand.”

So Cee-Lo isn’t afraid of giving so much out in his lyrics? Millions of people will hear them.

“I don’t think so, because I don’t know many people who can’t relate to what he says. That’s why they’re affected by the songs; that’s why they’re aghast or happy that someone else is singing something they understand. It’s not such a strange thing for an artist to write about the way he felt at the time.”

Time is almost up and Danger Mouse’s hack is getting more violent. Before he hangs up to call Cee-Lo, he happily announces that, yes, there’s a costumetastic Gnarls tour coming and, yes, there will be a third album: “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet but I’m already psyched about it; to have people already asking, ‘What’s next?’ I just don’t know and I’m excited by that.”

He’s confident, driven, relentless and convinced he’s hardly started on the journey to implement his new musical vision. “I’ve still got tonnes to do,” he says emphatically. “It’s going well but I’ve still got a lot of things I plan to get on with. Little by little, they’ll get done and then I’ll think of other things to do.”

Penfold, shush!