'Madonna's dead," announces Casey Spooner, one half of New York electro-pop duo Fischerspooner. "Michael Jackson's dead. Britney's OK but her virgin-whore complex is getting on my nerves. The people on the top are desperate. It's time to take over."
It is always bracing to find a pop pretender who can talk a good fight, better still when the records he makes look set to provoke love and hate in equal measure. Madonna and Britney may not be unduly worried, but Fischerspooner and their fellow travellers in the movement dubbed "electroclash" are shaping up to make the charts a more interesting place this year.
The timing is ideal. While Pop Idol has highlighted the mediocrity of mainstream pop, the Strokes and the Hives have cashed in on a growing appetite for intelligent, image-conscious bands. Electroclash aligns itself with the tradition of stylish, charismatic and outlandish pop performers. "If you compare someone like Boy George to what we now consider to be pop music, he's a genius," says Canadian singer-producer Tiga. "It's avant-garde, it's honest, it's taking chances and most of all it's original."
The imminent Futurism compilation on London label City Rockers showcases most of electroclash's leading lights and reveals an unusually cosmopolitan network of like minds: Ladytron and Alpinestars in Britain, Miss Kittin and the Hacker in France, Peaches and Chicks on Speed in Germany, Tiga & Zyntherius in Montreal, Felix Da Housecat in Chicago, Fischerspooner in New York.
Madonna, Pulp, Pete Tong and the Pet Shop Boys are all fans. In fact, Jarvis Cocker appears on Futurism under his Fat Truckers guise. As Futurism compiler Damian Lazarus says, paraphrasing M's 1979 hit Pop Muzik: "New York, London, Paris, Munich, everyone's talking about electro-pop music."
If it seems too good to be true, then perhaps it is. Electroclash's most vociferous champions have been the international style press and fashionistas (Levi's even produced a limited edition pair of Fischerspooner jeans), an unholy alliance that would make your average record-buyer cock a suspicious eyebrow. Because fashion's goldfish attention span is antithetical to the lasting power of great music, few worthwhile bands have come up from the catwalk rather than the street.
The genre is also intrinsically absurd. It's almost as if the Coen Brothers, chuffed with the success of cartoonish German synth-pop nihilists Autobahn in The Big Lebowski, had decided to invent a whole scene to see how many people fell for it. You could make your own generic electroclash record by talking blankly in a vaguely European accent about taking cocaine at fashion parties over the bassline from Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics. Anybody who remembers romo, the shortlived, press-contrived attempt to revive New Romanticism in the mid-1990s may wish to start sneering now.
And yet the same qualities that will raise some hackles will make other ears prick up. With style and absurdity, such rare commodities in pop, electroclash is at least making an effort. "What I like about that aesthetic is that it comments on what's going on, it's got a sense of humour, it's trying not to be normal," says Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant. "In the 80s, pop was aspirational. Then it got taken over by being one of the lads - rave, football, Britpop. It stopped being aspirational and it celebrated ordinariness. I think it's a bit tedious, really. I wish it would go back."
Electroclash began as an esoteric offshoot of techno, revisiting some of the genre's original sonic touchstones: Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, New Order, Afrika Bambaataa and New York disco. The record widely credited with catalysing the movement was I-F's 1998 electro anthem Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass. Bored of techno's rigid formulations, disparate producers embraced such old-fashioned values as songwriting, showmanship and a sense of humour, and forged international connections, many of them leading to Munich's International Deejay Gigolo label. "The people who are into it tend to find each other," says Tiga. "It reminds me a little bit of the rave and techno scene in 1990 - that same kind of camaraderie."
The sound spans the twin poles of early 1980s electronic music: the robotic funk of US electro and the frosty cerebralism of European synth-pop. But in a period of T'Pau reunions and jokes about brick-sized mobile phones, the 1980s comparisons provoke an understandably wary response. "With that you get the whole fashion thing and the stereotypes, which is not the part of the 1980s I'm inspired by," protests Tiga. "What's stuck with me is more the spirit of adventure. I like the idea of conceptual music."
Thankfully, nobody has seen fit to revive the original synth futurists' obsession with the dehumanising effects of technology. "Everyone thought computers meant you were ice cold and alienated," says Tennant. "The only people who still maintain this are Radiohead." Instead, electroclash toys with the imagery of fashion and club elitism. Felix Da Housecat's Kittenz And Thee Glitz album is a wry satire on jetset glamour, while Ladytron's Play Girl skewers the club-hopping style slave of the title. If they ever make a film of Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama, the soundtrack is already written.
"It is an attack on that whole velvet rope culture," says Lazarus. "But the ironic thing is that it's put together in such a cool, glamorous style." Proving the point, Naomi Campbell and Tamara Beckwith have both been spotted at electroclash clubs. Grenoble-based Miss Kittin says: "It shows they are able to laugh at themselves. Or maybe they are stupid and don't realise."
But electroclash's days of having its cake and eating it - making fashionable club records that mock fashion and clubbing - are already numbered. Fischerspooner, however, have no such reservations. "Our goal is to indulge and embrace the superficial and not to get too wrapped up in issues of integrity," says Casey Spooner in his camp New York drawl. "We're completely, unabashedly and absolutely prepared to say that we're pretentious and superficial."
So far, Fischerspooner's aesthetic has manifested itself in a show described by one reviewer as a cross between a Las Vegas spectacular and Cirque du Soleil, with a fluctuating line-up of up to 30 singers and dancers. Spooner, whose background is in art and experimental theatre, is convinced that Madonna, Gucci and Cacherel have all "borrowed" elements of the duo's wardrobe and performance, and if so you can't blame them. There's no fun to be had taking style tips from the Dave Matthews Band.
But electroclash's biggest hurdle is yet to come. While many of the records are too studiously retro to cross over, Fischerspooner's Emerge and Tiga & Zyntherius's version of Corey Hart's 1984 hit Sunglasses At Night are both tipped to enter the top 20. If they fail, the movement might be doomed to remain in the hipster ghetto - but if they succeed, then pop music could get interesting again. "I think it's about time dance music took it upon itself to get rid of the Didos and Will Youngs," says Lazarus. "At the moment it is the in sound, but it's important to see it for what it is - great pop dance music. It's not a passing fad."
Tennant, for one, is looking forward to electroclash going overground. "I'd love it if there were loads of kids running around in make-up listening to Fischerspooner. That would make me really happy." As pop prospects go, it's a damn sight more enticing than the Will Young album.
Electroclash top tunes
Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass, by I-F (Interdimensional Transmissions, 1998) The record that started it all by introducing old-fashioned verse-chorus dynamics to burbling electro in a vocodered homage to Atari-era hi-jinks.
Eurotrash Girl, by Chicks On Speed (Go, 1998)
Munich-based trio coin electroclash's bored-rich-girl vocal style on their debut single.
I Wanna Be Your Dog, by Daker & Grinser (Disko B, 1999)
The Stooges' finest three minutes, remade with the aid of bowel-churning synthesizers and faintly comical German accents.
Play Girl, by Ladytron (Invicta Hi-Fi, 2000)
"Why are you dancing when you could be alone?" sniff Bulgarian-Liverpudlian art-pop quartet. A great dance record despite insisting that clubbing is soul-destroyingly vacuous.
Emerge, by Fischerspooner (International Deejay Gigolos, 2000)
"Feels good, looks good, sounds good," drawls electroclash's unofficial anthem, asserting "style is substance" credo. Due to be reissued in April on Ministry of Sound.
1982, by Miss Kittin & The Hacker (International Deejay Gigolos, 2001)
Grenoble twosome construct litany of classic synth-pop hits (Tainted Love, Just Can't Get Enough), then complain in interviews about 1980s comparisons.
Silver Screen, by Felix Da Housecat featuring Miss Kittin (Shower Scene) (City Rockers, 2001)
Scene pioneer Felix Stallings generates sinister techno while Miss Kittin's jaded narrator lives it up.
Futurism is out on City Rockers on Monday. Sunglasses At Night by Tiga & Zyntherius is out on City Rockers on April 8. The album #1 by Fischerspooner is out on Ministry of Sound on April 29.