Credit: Found On Internet

30 July 2007 Café Kick, Shoreditch

The former Test-Icicle, Lightspeed Champion is late, ironically. When he joins Music Towers in London’s Café Kick, Devonte Hynes is still reeling from last night’s “disastrous” gig. A broken guitar string and a lack of sleep are blamed. Significantly, his debut LP due in January 2008 is all about sleep deprivation. “The album’s name Falling Off The Lavender Bridge is a reference to a lavender-filled frog my mum gave to me because I’ve always had trouble sleeping,” he says. “It’s really bad actually. The album’s pretty much about sleeping and dreaming.”

Falling Off The Lavender Bridge was recorded over January-February 2007 with Saddle Creek Records’ house producer, Mike Mogis. Dev had to fly out to Omaha to record it but he is used to cross-Atlantic flights, returning regularly to his birthplace Houston. “I go back to Houston for Christian-related family holidays, to see my aunties. I also went to a Christian camp there,” Hynes reveals. “I believe in religion but don’t believe in a religion. When I was 15, I was really really Christian! I still have a huge interest. There aren’t many religious undertones to my music just a really low level through the songs.”

His connection with America doesn’t stop there. He claims his influences are all American. “ I paw over the American Billboards on a weekly basis.  I have really really commercial tastes. I love Maroon 5! I love American hip hop, John Brion, Jason Mraz, The Dixie Chicks, the new albums from Ciara and Ryan Adams. And there’s a rapper called T.I. who went to Billboard number three in the week of release! I’ve never had an interest in UK music. I don’t know anything about what’s going on here and because of that it looks like maybe my tastes are more obscure but actually it’s bigger!”

Dev’s former band Test-Icicles may have been another one of those misconceptions. “It was awful, truly awful,” Hynes says of the trio’s latter days. “We had just been a group of friends who used to form bands every day, record an album’s worth of songs in a day. Suddenly we were being offered recording contracts. I’d hate to see a band that I liked not bothering and it was getting to that point. So we stopped.” Now his live band is assembled from a pool of musician friends who perform when they can. “They are a fixed group of people and they randomly play when they’re available. I play with them when they’re doing their stuff.”