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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Independent media. “As a teenager you’re pretty much into what’s around you, like Guns & Roses and so on,” says Tunde Adebimpe, lead singer with TV On The Radio. “And then all of that came to a crashing halt when someone handed me cassettes of Sonic Youth and Minor Threat. Then you begin the rest of your life. For me, there’s certain music that made everybody else seem horribly stupid, if only for the spirit behind it.”Tunde and his band are about to have a similarly catalytic effect. While their blend of avant-garde rock may not be measuring rivals for the dunce’s cap, it certainly leaves rock’s mainstream looking desperately unambitious. TV On The Radio are at the hub of one of America’s most thriving boho areas, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Tunde and guitarist/singer/multi-instrumentalist David Andrew Sitek met as loftmates, though he says its image isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “I read that there are more artists living in Williamsburg than anywhere else in North America. That baffles me; I don’t see how it’s true. It’s going the same way as Soho in the late 80s, becoming prohibitively expensive, tidied up and lots of glass and steel going up. It’s somewhere you can buy a dog and then buy a jacket for the dog next door. So I guess it’s creative in some ways, but not in a very interesting way.” Now grown from the trio who made 2004’s Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes to a quintet, Tunde sees the band’s expansion as yet more license to roam. “Five people can tinker around on about 25 instruments per song,” he says. “You’ll just be listening back to a song over and over again, wondering if you can add something else and then calling someone at four in the morning to see if they’re around to do it. There’s a lot of piling things on.”  Indeed, it would be easier to list those instruments or influences that don’t make an appearance in TV On The Radio’s brilliant new album, Return To Cookie Mountain. Yet despite their cavalier approach they never succumb to the temptation to abandon basic tenets like melody or structure, something which has won them the admiration of David Bowie (who croons away in the background on Province), and, more surprisingly, Interscope, who will be releasing their future records. So how will the label which oversees 50 Cent’s gangsta kindergarten handle such an apparently uncommercial prospect as this? “We’ll see what happens,” Tunde laughs. Might they send the album back and demand a single for the radio? “I can’t see that happening, though I’ve been fooled before,” he replies. “I think they’re willing to give it a go and see what happens. But they’re putting a tremendous amount of faith into something that I wouldn’t know how to market.”
Steve Yates
TV On The Radio – Return To Cookie Mountain, released 03 July 06 on 4AD.
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