rise

above and beyond

abo How Above & Beyond

took America
Words Duncan Dick Photos Zach Cordner

T
here’s about three
minutes of silence before
Above & Beyond take to the
stage at the Hollywood
Palladium. Silence in terms of
Left to right:
music, anyway. The crowd, an
Tony, Paavo undulating, tentacular mass
and Jono of raised arms and smiles and
Anjunabeats T-shirts and slogans and flags and
flesh, is anything but mute. Whoops and cheers
and chants rise to crash against the stage in
waves. When tour manager Seamus Morley
creeps up to switch on the intro CD, the roof
nearly lifts off the famous venue. When Paavo
and Tony, two thirds of Above & Beyond, bounce
from behind the thick curtain to take their place
behind the decks, headphones clutched like
rosary beads, to the strains of a driving remix of
Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’, the reaction is primal.
LA is almost a home from home for Above &
Beyond. They reckon they’ve played over 15 gigs
here. But tonight is the culmination of two years
of preparation, working with design companies to
create a stage layout and visual show that would
blow people away. It seems to be working. The
set-up is simple but powerful. Seven by 12 metre
high-def Oracle video screens from floor to
ceiling behind the DJ booth and to both sides
show visuals that range from spinning triangles
to fish and faces, while 136 lights – a record for
the venue, with some of them worth $15k – turn
the shiny, magnolia-painted interior into an
immersive rave fortress. “We really admire
amazing stage designs like Etienne de Crecy’s
‘cube’,” says A&B’s Tony McGuinness. “But when
we thought about it we decided that the

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 above & beyond

communication between us and the audience –

celebrating the joint experience, interaction – was the
most important thing.” The boys’ favourite element
of the show is clearly the text facility that allows them

ve
to type their own live messages for display on the
huge screen: ‘Los Angeles has never looked so
beautiful’, ‘We thank you for a million goosebumps’.
“We’ve come back to a show that’s about everyone
in the room,” says Tony, “not just us.”
The Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard is
one of the Los Angeles’ most famous landmarks,
never mind venues. Built in 1940 with the kind of
swooping ‘Streamline Moderne’ curves you see in the
teardrop shaped Chryslers and Cadillacs of the time;
giant balconies snake around a huge, sunken circular
dancefloor. The 4000-capacity venue is a sell out;
some fans have been queuing in the LA sunshine
for four hours before the gig to secure their position
down the front. But then Above & Beyond have
put the groundwork in. If the new live show is the
culmination of months of work, these landmark
shows are the product of years of some of the most
innovative and effective marketing and fanbase
building that dance music has ever seen. To conquer
America, you have to conquer the internet.

W
e realised early on,” says Tony, sitting
poolside on the roof terrace of the ultra-
swish London Hotel with the city of Los
Angeles laid out behind him like a giant
tray of overturned white Lego, “that we couldn’t count
on traditional media – radio, magazines – to come to
us all the time. We had to get on with it.” From the start,
they have understood the importance of the internet
in everything they do, helped by the fact that one of
their members, Paavo Sijamaki, is as at home behind a
computer as behind a DJ booth (“he dreams in the code
from The Matrix”, jokes one of the crew, later). “From the
beginning we had a website,” says Paavo. “We had a
forum. We were always really excited about connecting
directly with people who liked the same music.”
“And Paavo had the ability to code the website and
build the forum,” says Tony. “He moderated it and grew
it into the biggest forum for trance fans anywhere.”
Facebook and Twitter have since been seamlessly
pressed into service. Paavo recently coded an iPhone
app in between gigs. The trio’s radio show has also
been a hugely effective tool. ‘Trance Around The
World’, on satellite radio, the internet, and 237 FM
stations worldwide, has 30 million listeners each
week. In December the group celebrated the 350th
episode with a marathon eight-hour live broadcast
from the Palladium, with A&B playing a two-hour set
alongside guests like Super 8 and Tab and Cosmic
Gate. “We had a Twitter map where we could watch
the location of all the tweets coming in,” says Tony,
“from LA and the UK to Hawaii and Iran! We became
the number one trending topic on Twitter. The real
power of the internet is that whatever you are into:
stamp collecting, sauvignon blanc, or sad trance music
– you can find other people who feel the same.”

I
t’s the night before the first gig, and we’re in a
giant SUV heading down Sunset Boulevard.
Paavo is not happy with the radio, reaching
forward to ‘get this shit off’ as yet more hip hop
dribbles from the speakers. It strikes Mixmag that this
opposition to the music and culture that has such a
monopoly on the US is perhaps one of the reasons LA
loves Above & Beyond. The music they make is the
antithesis of hip hop. “Songs about hummers, ‘bitches’
and credit cards don’t do it for me,” says Tony. Paavo,
suddenly passionate, expands on the theme: “I grew

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above & beyond

up in wealthy Finland, and I thought that

happiness was about certain things: a good job,
university, kids playing instruments. Tick those
boxes and you’ll be happy. But I’ve watched
people get all these things and still be empty.
Being lucky enough to go to places like Kosovo,
India and Brazil and see people without all those
things but still happy, I’ve realised it’s not true.
Hip hop is a marketing machine for the idea that
consumption can make you happy.” A listen to

“I thought happiness was

Above & Beyond’s new album ‘Group Therapy’
reinforces the point. The songs are melancholy,
personal, heartfelt, with titles like ‘Love is Not

about having certain

Enough’, ‘Sweetest Heart’, ‘Sun & Moon’. “I like
music that deals with real life: existential
problems, indecision,” explains Tony. Above &
Beyond don’t do bling, don’t do cynicism. They
don’t really do sex either, Mixmag points out. “We
have instrumentals for that!” chuckles Paavo.
things. It’s not true”
Another striking thing about the album is the
fact that, ‘Prelude’ aside, it’s not a collection of
bangers. The group say this is a deliberate choice,
that tunes too geared towards the dancefloor date
fast. Instead, each tune is continually remixed and
re-engineered for the shows. The tracks are written
in Logic (“I’ve been using it for 15 years so it’s kind
of hard to change,” says Jono Grant). Jono and Paav
do most of the production while Tony tends to
concentrate on the lyrics, but they all have input
into everything they do. In fact, it’s the same
across the entire A&B team, at times 15 strong.
From Seamus the tour manager, veteran of
Leftfield and the Prodigy, to managers Soraya and
James, Neil and Spencer the lighting and visual
guys, the fans and friends selling the merchandise
and the team working back home on the label
and web, every one of them has been involved to
some extent in the process of getting here.

O
n stage, Tony – platinum haired and
wearing thick glasses and a shirt – is
all bounce and action. The taller Paavo
crouches a little, grinning uncontrollably.
Every so often they will throw their arms in the
air, mirroring the crowd which spends pretty
much the entire set reaching up to the heavens.
The stage is actually vibrating, like a speedboat
hurtling across a choppy sea. Jono, meanwhile, is
back in the UK, hosting the radio show, running
off a quick instrumental edit of ‘Sun & Moon’
requested by ‘Britain’s Got Talent and getting
ready to start on some club remixes. Having
worked flat out for nearly four months to finish
the album, he contracted a virus on the New York
leg of the tour. Sorry not to be there, he says he
feels much better after a couple of weeks rest –
the longest time he’s had off for ten years.
The pace of the show is fast and relentless,
with none of the introspection of the album. It’s
all bass and heaviness, and grips the crowd from
beginning to end. The encore is pandemonium.
The last track, ‘Miracle’, plays out (pure trance: big
rolling riffs and a melancholy vocal), as Paavo and
Tony sign T-shirts and pose for pictures in the pit
between the stage and dancefloor, and confetti
rains down. They shake hands and admire Above
& Beyond tattoos; there are hugs and kisses,
flashes from a galaxy of cameras, as they connect
physically and emotionally with their fans. Which
is, after all, what their success is built on. They’re
having a rock star moment. They’ve earned it.
Above & Beyond headline the Cream Arena at Creamfields
on August 28. ‘Group Therapy’ is out now on Anjunabeats

[[1L]] july 2011