Chilly Gonzales: “Drake is the one collaboration that felt surreal. It felt like I was going to meet Barack Obama”

What total do you get if you add up the titles of your albums containing numbers in them?

“‘Room 29’, plus ‘Solo Piano…’ ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘3’ equals…35.”

CORRECT. ‘Solo Piano 1’, ‘Solo Piano 2’, ‘Solo Piano 3’, plus ‘Room 29’, your joint concept album with Jarvis Cocker about Hollywood hotel the Chateau Marmont.

“I met Jarvis around 2002 when I opened for Pulp at Cornwall’s Eden Project. I asked him: ‘How do I walk to the stage?’ because I was backstage needing to soundcheck. He replied deadpan: ‘Well, you put one foot in front of the other!’ That silly interaction led to a friendship where we hung out in Paris every few months for years. We had the first inklings to do something together around 2013, and the album came out in 2017, so it was a slow-motion process. It was a total pleasure, a bit here and there, with some very constructive debate, but we never butted heads in a way that led to any drama.”

You accompanied Drake’s opening monologue on piano at the 2011 Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys). Which artist does he serenade during it?

“Shania Twain.”

CORRECT.

“Who I have also met. When I first played the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2015, its unofficial godfather, Quincy Jones, was eating his dinner side-stage watching me play. Afterwards, he told me: ‘You’re a bad motherfucker!’ Which I wanted tattooed on my forehead – it’s high praise from Quincy Jones! Anyway, when I returned to Montreux four years later, Quincy Jones was in his eighties and wasn’t travelling as much, and Shania Twain was expressing interest in being his successor. I asked her: ‘Do you want to come up and jam with us?’ and she demurred: ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly…at the most, maybe I could do some back-up vocals’. Fast forward ten minutes into the jam and she’s playing all of her hits and rocking the crowd!”

“Both Drake and I are Canadian, so we grew up on her music. She was our Taylor Swift.”

You’ve collaborated with Drake on numerous tracks including ‘Marvin’s Room’…

“It’s waiting every couple of years for the Drake Phone to ring – an email where he’s asking for new music. He’s in that NBA level of pop/rap music and in the stratosphere, so I have a pretty passive role when it comes to working with him. I’ve been in the studio with him physically three times, and onstage with him once at that Junos, and I’ve been watching his various rap battles and beefs that he’s been going through – the most recent of which [against Kendrick Lamar] he appears to have lost, although I think the deck was stacked against him and I’m sure his career will recover.”

Drake is name-checked on your recent single ‘F*ck Wagner’, a cancel-culture-tackling diss-track against the titular German 19th century poet’s antisemitism (‘He said a Jew poet/ Couldn’t be a true poet/ But have you heard ‘Hotline Bling’?/ A Jew wrote it’). Has he heard it?

“Drake hasn’t given me any feedback on the track yet. My grandfather was my first music teacher, but he was a European supremacist and classical music snob. When he was 11, he told me ‘There will never be a Black Mozart’, but I was watching MTV seeing Prince and thinking, that’s Black Mozart right there. So I had the same thought process when trying to refute Wagner’s claim that Jewish poets can’t be true poets which he wrote in book called Judaism in Music in 1869 at the height of his fame. There are many Jewish poets from Wagner’s era, but I wanted to put a twist on it and Drake is half-Jewish.

“I’ve been thinking of the cancel culture question since my father, who’s Jewish, took me to see Wagner operas. I asked: ‘How can you be a fan of someone who’s saying you’re inferior?’ He said: “I can separate the art from the artist.

“That phrase has been in my mind and as things got heated on this topic recently it made me want to write a song about it. And Kanye’s mental breakdown in which he was spewing some of Wagner’s talking points, whether as a result of trolling or mental illness or sincere beliefs, no one knows, and yet he has doing it in a very public way.”

In the track, you rap: ‘Kanye West is the brand new Wagner’. 

“I love Kanye’s music. I still listen to him, even though I’m not proud of it, but it seems I can make the separation when I have an emotional attachment to the music. Everyone has their own line. It’s not as simple as turning an intellectual switch and saying: “I’m never going to listen to this person’s music again’. It’s a nuanced song, despite it being called ‘F*ck Wagner!’”

Name the three B-sides of the 1996 single ‘Pick Up the Phone’ by your alternative-rock band Son.

“Now we’re getting to Nardwuar levels! Is there a song called ‘Frustration’? No? I didn’t record a lot of other songs in that era, because I made that album in my mother’s basement for no money, so I’m drawing a blank. You got me!”

WRONG. ‘Young Offenders Act’, ‘Noodleheads/Betaboys’ and ‘Honey Ham’.

“I was asked to come up with a theme song for a sitcom that was going to be a spin-off from Friends, so I wrote ‘Honey Ham’ which was rejected but I liked it enough to put it on the single. The other two B-sides are tracks from our album ‘Thriller’.

“At the time of Son, I still believed in ‘90s indie-rock authenticity where you shouldn’t seem like you’re trying to please anybody with your music and if you have fans, it’s a bonus – the ‘Oops, I’m successful’ mythology. In the early 2000s when I moved to Berlin, I was determined to leave that behind and wanted to be playful and ambitious, and luckily rap music came along to save me, because the rap world was not bothered by questions of art and commerce – the most avant-garde artists were also the most successful.

“I decided to create Chilly Gonzales, and call myself a ‘musical genius’ – which allowed me to escape into a fantasy giving me full impunity to act however I wanted onstage, warts and all. I had learned from Son that I’m not going to succeed if I’m performing authentically, and I will instead be an authentic performer.”

You won a 2014 Grammy for your piano-playing on Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’. Can you name any of the records it beat to Album of the Year?

“I don’t follow enough mainstream pop music to know!”

WRONG. ‘The Blessed Unrest’ by Sara Bareilles, Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Good Kid, M.A.A.D City‘, Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’ and ‘The Heist’ by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.

“I’m not really a fan of any of those artists. I don’t know Taylor Swift’s music well, I know Kendrick Lamar’s music pretty well and it’s certainly not in my Top 5 dead or alive, and I only know a couple of songs from Macklemore – although he did reach out and want me to do something with him two or three years ago, but I let it go. My collaborations with Jarvis, Daft Punk or Drake are relationships that happen relatively slowly. In the case of Drake, he used one of my pieces [‘The Tourist’] on his mixtape [2009’s ‘So Far Gone’] – without permission! Which was an interesting way to get my attention! But after several meetings and performing with him on the Junos… all of that led to: ‘Why don’t you come by the studio and listen to something?’ which turned into talking about the song ‘Marvin’s Room’ and eventually saying: ‘Maybe you could try to play some piano on it?’ It was a slow-creep of two dogs sniffing each other’s butts.

“When a random thing like Macklemore emailing saying: ‘Do you want to get into the studio?’ I’m like: I never fell in love with his music before, it doesn’t feel right, and is too much of a risk – taking the plane there, and maybe the day’s weird or we don’t get along, and nothing comes of it.

“I was even asked to work with one of my great idols, Lana Del Rey, six or seven years ago, but her music is perfect. The piano-playing and songwriting is great and if I ended up in the studio with her, would it go well enough to make the cut? And then what? I’d feel like I’d almost corrupted some pure feelings I have for her music, so I ended up saying: ‘Ah let’s see… maybe if I’m in town, I can come to a concert or vice versa’. Maybe there’s a way to start the process of two dogs sniffing each other out for that to still happen.

“I’d met Daft Punk early in 2000, so Drake is the one collaboration that felt surreal. It felt like I was going to have a meeting with Barack Obama or someone. Every second he spends on something is sacred. I had to wait a long time the first time. I showed up in the studio, hanging out for a few hours while his chef served me southern ribs. Eventually, he showed up and then he’s fully present. It wasn’t like being in a rap video. It was nose-to-the-grindstone and as normal as any other session for people who are communing with the gods of music in some way, but everything around it, and up to his arrival, felt like high-stakes.”

Complete the following lyrics: ‘I drink juice by the gallon…’?

“I’m a combination of Joe Stalin/Woody Allen.”

CORRECT. From your 2000 track ‘This One Jam’.

“The people I compared myself to are not always the people who reflect on me in a positive way. That lyric was written before most of Woody Allen’s questionable and downright disgusting allegations came out. I probably would not write that lyric today, but it was an irresistible rhyme. Plus it made me laugh that I was saying ‘Joe Stalin’, even though his name’s Joseph, like I’m not only on first name terms with a dead dictator who murdered millions of people, but I call him ‘Joe’.

“I wrote that in 1999, and I was reacting in an extreme way to the ‘Oops, I’m successful’ performance of authenticity and good motives that I found in the indie-rock universe. When I left that behind, I overcorrected and overcompensated in those early rap albums by wanting to be as villainous as possible. I called myself a ‘supervillain’ back in those days.”

Name the character you play in your 2010 chess-themed film Ivory Tower, which you co-wrote and starred in.

“Hershell Graves.”

CORRECT. It also features roles for your regular collaborators Peaches, Feist and Tiga.

“It was self-financed and made with a lot of heart. It’s the first and last movie I’ll ever make. There’s lots of things I try where I have a certain beginner’s luck. I’m smart enough to say: ‘OK, I made something that wasn’t a disaster, that represents me in some way’. Being a dilettante at something is only possible when you have the confidence of approaching mastery of something else. Approaching mastery, but never quite attaining it, on the piano, enables me to be an amateur rapper, filmmaker, and memoir writer – I wrote a biography of Enya [2020’s Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures] for Rough Trade. Without the piano, I’m a failed stand-up comedian onstage or a cringe rapper or I’ve wasted $100k of my own money making a shitty movie. With the piano, all of that takes its proper place in my universe.”

Which two albums do versions of your Feist collab ‘My Moon, My Man’ appear on?

“The original, wholesome Canadian version features on Feist’s ‘The Reminder’, and then it’s turned into a banger of a remix on Boys Noize’s album ‘Oi Oi Oi’. Which led me to work with Boys Noize on my ‘Ivory Tower’ album.”

CORRECT. There’s footage of you playing Erol Alkan’s famed London night Trash in 2002, where she tap-dances while you play synths…

“It was around the time Erol Alkan had blown up with the original Kylie Minogue/New Order ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head’ mash-up. We allowed the rumour to spread that Kylie might perform. Feist is roughly the same size as Kylie, so we arranged to start with the lights out so she would be in silhouette. As the lights went on, everyone reacted with sunken disappointment: ‘Oh, it’s him!’. Before they had a name for trolling, we were doing it!”

At a Sacha Baron Cohen-esque press conference in the early noughties, what title did you challenge Alec Empire for?

“President of the Berlin Underground.”

CORRECT.

“We held it where do press conferences for the chancellery in Germany and it’s almost unthinkable in this post-internet world that I was granted access without anyone checking my bona fides. The venue lent it gravitas which made the stunt work. If I had done the same performance in an art gallery, where it’s understood what happens there is a fiction, it wouldn’t have worked. When you’re in a real place, people question what’s real.”

In 2009, you set the Guinness World record for the longest solo-artist performance. How long did it last?

“27 hours and 11 minutes?”

WRONG. 27 hours, three minutes, 44 seconds.

“I’ve got a certificate. We had an observer from Guinness and a doctor on set to do routine check ups, because your body goes through different phases of reacting to the stress of non-stop adrenaline You can take a five minute break per hour or accumulate them, so I took a 15 minute break every three hours, and psychologically approached it as a series of gigs. It’s like my campaign to rename Köln’s Richard Wagner Strasse to Tina Turner Strasse, who lived in the city for ten years before her death in 2023. It’s been a media firestorm [in Germany]. A lot of projects I do start as a ‘what if?’ moment. It was a joke until it wasn’t.”

Your track ‘Smothered Mate’ was played at the awards ceremony after the 2018 FIFA World Cup Final between France and Croatia. What was the score?

“[Laughs] One-zero?”

WRONG. France 4; Croatia 2.

“I just guessed because so many football games end with one-zero! Forgive me for being distracted because my song was played in Russia with billions of people listening that I didn’t pay attention to the score as someone who is wholly uninterested in most sports! When I made the demo, I thought it had some Rocky energy but it also felt like Steve Reich, the minimalist composer. So I tentatively called it ‘Reichy’, because I could feel the sports energy in it. It only later got named ‘Smothered Mate’, a chess move, when it the album and film were going to be about chess. It had been used a lot by the French soccer team to celebrate victories in the past, but I certainly didn’t expect to see Macron and Putin listening to it! [Laughs] Two dictators shaking hands to my music!”

Tell us about your forthcoming new album ‘Gonzo’…

“I didn’t write lyrics for 10 years since  [2011’s] ‘The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales’ orchestral rap album. I was only doing instrumental music. Most of the reason was because I was in psychoanalysis. Looking back, I realise I wrote rap lyrics back then in order to access unconscious emotions without having to feel them. I’d think: ‘this is a cool thing for Chilly to say’ and the lyrics would pour out as a cry for help, self-loathing, and braggadocio.

“As soon as I started accessing my emotions in a more healthy and supervised way, it took away the impetus to write lyrics. When I finished psychoanalysis in 2021, the lyrics came fast and furious, and I’d amassed a lot of opinions, like on cancel culture in ‘F*ck Wagner’ and what it means to be someone with Jewish origin living in Germany on the song ‘I.C.E.’.”

The verdict: 6/10

“I’ll take that score!”

Chilly Gonzales’ new album ‘Gonzo’ is released on September 13 via Gentle Threat. He plays the Edinburgh International Festival on August 11 London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 28

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