On the poop deck of a party boat puttering slowly out into the Adriatic stands a gently balding and teetotal Canadian in studious specs and sandals. Dan Snaith looks as if he’s about to deliver an informed running commentary on Istria’s Roman remains; instead, he pulls up the fader on another tropical disco banger and a boatload of expectant ravers go politely bananas. The Caribou frontman may resemble a nerdy tour guide but here at Croatia’s Dimensions festival he’s as revered as any leathery DJ legend.
Ever since kickstarting his musical career by moving from Canada to London in 2001 (initially to complete a maths PhD at Imperial College), Snaith has been stealthily cultivating a loyal audience on multiple fronts, wooing indie and techno fans alike. 2010’s Swim was his breakthrough record, bolstering the electronic whimsy for which Caribou were initially known with strident dance rhythms and an abundance of wonky hooks. It was named album of the year by both Mixmag and Rough Trade shops. Caribou soon became a surprisingly hard-gigging unit, supporting Radiohead on their 2012 arena jaunt at the same time as Dan was touring the world’s premier techno clubs under his dance alias Daphni.
New album Our Love brings all this together: the spindly psychedelia, the thrusting rave breakdowns, the tender positivity… even a convincing tribute to the glossy R&B of Rodney Jerkins and The-Dream. None of it comes across as forced or dilettantish; Dan is one of the most genuine and thoughtful musicians you’re ever likely to meet, and crucially he’s found a way to transmit that humility through his music while reaching out to an ever-expanding audience. Caribou’s combination of vulnerable vocals and persuasive dance beats certainly seems to hit a sweet spot. People really feel they can relate, which is why Dan can’t walk for more than about 10 metres across the Dimensions site without being stopped for a selfie or a hug.
“I like it,” he grins, as a succession of wide-eyed festivalgoers fiddle with their camera settings. “It still only happens at festivals where we’re playing, it’s not like I get stopped walking down the street in London. But that is my personality. Why would I be behind the velvet rope, staring out at everybody? You do see some bands who are at the same mid-level as us and who have this conception of themselves as being super-important, which is ridiculous.”
Dan comes across as eminently huggable, not just because of his unusually generous music, but because of the way he carries himself onstage. Three days before he plays the boat, Caribou headline Dimensions’ opening party at a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre in Pula. Despite the imposing surroundings, Dan and his three bandmates (who don’t contribute to the records but who are equal partners when it comes to the live show) manage to engender a sense of intimacy by clustering together in the middle of the stage. Dressed all in white, Dan is a conspicuous presence onstage 30 minutes before showtime, soundchecking his own equipment without a pot-bellied roadie in sight. Surely Caribou could afford someone else to hump their gear now? “I guess we do have that option, if we wanted to pay for it! But I like that it sends a signal. Sometimes when I see bands at festivals and they’ve got everything on big risers that the roadies push out while they’re backstage swilling champagne, it feels like that there’s this distance [between them and the audience].”
That inclusive attitude is precisely what powers the new album. Dan reveals that one of the reasons it’s called Our Love is to reflect the fact that Caribou now feels less like a lonely endeavour and more like something he’s sharing with the world. The uplifting title track is Dan’s celebration of his acceptance by a wider audience, as well as an endorsement of the classic utopian rave spirit. When Caribou play Our Love at the amphitheatre, people turn away from the stage and sing the two-word refrain at each other: “Our love.” It’s simple, corny even. But it works.
It’s not a song he can have imagined writing 15 years ago. Dan’s 2001 debut album, under the name Manitoba, Start Breaking My Heart, was partially informed by the urgent flex of UK garage but he admits that back then he was largely working “in a vacuum”, a bedroom boffin who commented on contemporary dance trends but wasn’t in a position to influence or interact with them. “When I started making records, there was definitely that distinction [between electronica and dance]. Either you wanted to be like Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin or you wanted to make club music and there wasn’t much crossover. A lot of those distinctions have collapsed now,” he says, too modest to suggest that he and his close friends Kieran Hebden (AKA Four Tet), James Holden and Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys might have played a part. “When we played in Space in Ibiza [in 2011], we confused the fuck out of people. There were these two dudes in Baywatch swimtrunks and LED sunglasses… I remember playing Kaili off the last record, which is a track with no beats that ends with a big atonal guitar solo, and they just looked absolutely disgusted.” Inevitably, though, even the budgie-smuggling Eurodance guys were won over: “By the end of the set they were pumping air to Sun.”
The other reason for Dan calling his new album Our Love is to offer a mature perspective on love and relationships within the context of dance music. “With these UK pop-dance hits,” he muses, “it’s very much this naive, perfect vision of love, something really simplistic or based around a night out. Which is fine for them, but it doesn’t make any sense for me to sing about those kind of things. I’ve got a kid, I have friends who are struggling to keep their relationships together, I’ve lost people close to me; in fact, one of the songs on the album is dedicated to our sound engineer, who passed away in the final months of making the record. So when I turn on the microphone, these are the things I want to sing about. Not that I want to focus on the difficulties. But my experience is that the challenges, along with the joys, are what give life – and music – that richness.”
So far, if you’ve only heard Our Love and the joyous yet humble Can’t Do Without You (dedicated, of course, to Dan’s wife, although he says with a sigh that the sentiment was slightly lost on her after she’d heard the loop blaring out of his basement studio for the 1,000th time) then the final two songs on the album might come as a bit of surprise. Back Home finds Dan prodding the embers of a dying relationship, searching for clues as to what went wrong, while Your Love Will Set You Free is even more bereft, a late-night lament for the caress of an estranged lover.
Dan emphasises that the songs aren’t about his own relationship but about two sets of friends who have recently divorced. “The mechanics of having a young child mean that whereas I used to just shut myself in my studio for 72 hours at a time, now I spend a lot of time sitting in the park as our kids are playing, hearing about the difficulties my friends are going through. So these are the things I’m reflecting on.”
For a man who didn’t sing until his second album, didn’t sing live until after his third, and didn’t take the effects off his voice until his fifth, this nakedly emotional approach is new ground. “My vocals in the past, I was just singing words. I was making lyrics that would rhyme or flow or capture a mood, and looking back I think: ‘Why was I doing that?’ I don’t have a particularly melodramatic or exceptional life but at least I can sing about the things that are happening in my life and it feels so much better and more honest and more meaningful.”
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While hardly startling territory for a singer-songwriter, the juxtaposition of Dan’s wavering delivery with stirring dance rhythms functions as a kind of emotional double whammy. “I guess my relationship to vocals in dance music comes from disco records. There’s a song by Gloria Ann Taylor, Love Is A Hurting Thing; you hear it and you want to burst out crying, it’s the most incredibly emotive vocal. When you play that in the right club, people just lose it because it hits so hard. Not that I have anything like the same vocal ability, but the more you have that personal connection and people can feel your sincerity… You know, dance music isn’t just escapism; at best it’s always been about including the difficulties and challenges of life rather than just being this utopian, bacchanalian zone.”
Ten hours later, as the sun is almost on its way back up, Dan underlines his point by wrapping up his headline DJ set with Cloud One’s plaintive disco stomper Don’t Let My Rainbow Pass Me By (“I’ve waited so long for sunshine… don’t let this chance go by!”). As the festival powers down for the night, Dan descends into the throng, offering a hug to every loved-up raver who wants one. “I do think it’s funny when they’re 19-year-old kids and I’m this weird old dude in Birkenstocks,” he admits. “But I kind of revel in that. I’m here for the same reasons as they are… well, some of the same reasons! I think it’s obvious that I’m not trying to recapture my youth. I’m just enjoying the music.”
Our Love is out on Monday on City Slang; the writer’s flights were paid for by City Slang, and accommodation by Dimensions festival
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