CHAD PARKHILL chats with irreverent Scot CALVIN HARRIS about the joys of being in a ‘real’ band.

One of the first things you need to know when speaking to Calvin Harris – the 24-year-old Scot behind the anachronistic boast of ‘I created disco’ and partly to blame for the popularity of fluoro clothing – is that his use of the word ‘we’ is not some kind of Scottish affectation. So when he says of his tour, “It looks like there’s a few days off, so I don’t know what’s going on. But we must be filling our time with something,” he doesn’t mean just himself. He means a full band that tours under the name of ‘Calvin Harris’.

It wasn’t until about half way through the interview that I twigged to this, though. Anyone who has heard Calvin Harris’s début, I Created Disco, will know that the album is the sound of one man, alone in his room, twiddling with synthesisers and sequencers, with a few falsetto vocals thrown in for good measure (see, for instance, Acceptable In The Eighties, a paean to that decade’s unique fashion sense). Surely, then, his live shows would be one man behind a rack of equipment, twiddling knobs and hitting buttons, with maybe some white-boy dancing thrown in?

“That sounds like the worst thing imaginable,” he says of my preconceptions. “I wouldn’t come and see me if it was that!”

So how does his live show differ? “When we’re live, we’re definitely a band,” Harris says. “It sounds like the album and everything, but if you’d never heard the album and you went to see us, you would see us as a band. I think that’s important, because playing live shows is just a completely different thing, in my opinion, to releasing a CD. So when we were doing it live, I decided a band would be the way to go, and it was definitely the right decision – we’ve got people who much prefer the live gigs to the CD, and on the whole it’s gone down well.”

So how does Harris replicate his characteristic electro sound on stage with real instruments? “What I wanted to make sure of, from the outset, is that we didn’t turn into a weird jazz club band playing the hits of Calvin Harris,” he says. “The most important thing was to get the keyboard sounds right, get the bass proper, and get a really good drummer. Once we did all of that, it was pretty much plain sailing – we became pretty good pretty quickly.”

Such a live set-up lends itself well to Good Vibrations, which will host, amongst other things, the punk-funk of the Rapture, the gangsta rap of Cypress Hill, and the mellow grooves of Thievery Corporation. How does Harris feel about being on such a diverse bill?

“I noticed they’ve got a lot of house music DJs on the bill, so I think it’ll be a diverse crowd,” Harris says. “The headliners will play last, so we’ll be on – I think we’ll be on around tea-time or something. It’ll be a nice warm-up. I like to think that people like to dance, whatever music they’re into.”

CALVIN HARRIS plays the Good Vibrations festival on Sunday February 10 alongside The Rapture, Cypress Hill, Thievery Corporation, and more. I CREATED DISCO is out now through EMI.

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