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Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, a member of the electronic music royal family DFA will be mentoring Jessie Ware as part of Bacardi Beginnings music project.
For The Bacardi Beginnings project, which also celebrates the 150th anniversary of Bacardi, three established musicians will mentor three-up-and-coming artists with the intention to “help them progress”.
Alongside Joe Goddard, the other confirmed established artists are Scottish super-producer and DJ Mylo and Friendly Fires. Each pair will have £10,000 budget to work with.
Joe said: “I chose to work with Jessie Ware because her name was mentioned and I thought working with her would be fun and interesting. I guess I could have suggested a lot of different people, I was happy with the idea of working with Jessie. I think she has a great voice.”
When quizzed on how he’ll spend the £10k he said: “We’ve hired a great studio called club Ralph in Kilburn where we worked on the Hot Chip album and I brought in my friend Rob Sought to play on the track with me.”
Joe will be mentoring Jessie and remind her to keep pushing herself to strive for the best, he said: “We’ve talked about other parts of the music business. Jessie didn’t want people to dismiss her because she has received a lot of hype recently. I said that you can’t do anything about hype except keep working and try to make good music.”
Joe wanted to get on board with the project to mentor new artists, he is quite obsessed with making tracks and loves ‘exciting’ collaborations.
Do you think a lot has changed for emerging artists since you first got into music? For example, compared to when Hot Chip was breaking through?
He said a lot has changed for emerging artists since I first got into music: “Labels have less resources and people buy less music, plus many, many people have the capability to make electronic music on their laptops – so standing out in this sea of music and creating a career for yourself is really difficult.”
Hot Chip have released their fifth album In Our Heads but he insists he’s not into pleasing hipsters: “I’ve learnt that the only meaningful thing really is to try to keep yourself happy though; trying to please hipsters is truly a thankless task.”
Hot Chip cracked the indie-dance crossover hype and the band is evolving. Joe said: “We can now concentrate on trying to improve our songwriting, our playing, and our technical skills – we’re less concerned with what we’re wearing and what, if anything, the blogs are saying about us. Remaining relevant is a different matter though…”
Hot Chip headline two nights at Brixton in October then hit the road with a tour after Christmas, Joe starts work on the next 2 Bears album in 2013.
Parts of this interview with Joe Goddard originally appeared on the blogs section of The Independent website.