Connan Mockasin talks dirty

(© Jen Carey)

He comes from New Zealand, got to know Jimi Hendrix’s music through the soundtrack for Steven Seagall's Under Siege 2, is friends with Charlotte Gainsbourg, and has just released his second album. But what else do we know about Connan Mockasin?

"I was feeling really flirty when I was making the record, so that may be where that soft-porn-style atmosphere comes from,” says Connan Mockasin with a grin when we put it to him that the sexy soul-pop of Caramel, his second album, reminds us of photographer David Hamilton’s 1997 film Bilitis. “I’m too scared to do it in real life, so it’s nice to do it on record. Someone once called me a mellow Prince, maybe because I’m not averse to some dirty talk. I find that a lovely compliment.” [Laughs]

Mockasin, who lives in Manchester these days, recorded the subdued psych-pop of Caramel during a four-week-long retreat in a hotel room in Tokyo. Judging by the photographs in the CD booklet, he was surrounded by a harem of Asian beauties as he did so. [Chuckles] “Those were just friends I made there. Japan is really mysterious; their culture is intriguing. I like recording music in places where nobody has ever done it before. In a studio there are too many possibilities: I find myself paralysed by them. Creativity grows out of restriction.”

“The title was there first,” the Kiwi singer says of Caramel. “Don’t go looking for anything nostalgic behind it: it has nothing to do with sweets from my childhood. I just wanted to make a record that would be the musical equivalent of caramel. How does that sound? Smooth, sort of slick. I like it when image and sound correspond. That’s why I get so carried away by soundtracks. The soundtracks for the Studio Ghibli anime films by Joe Hisaishi, for Hayao Myazaki’s Spirited Away for example, I find really poetic. And the soundtrack for Rush, by Eric Clapton, occupies a special place too. We had it at home on cassette, still do in fact, we used to play it a lot in the car. But I didn’t much care for the film itself.”

A while ago, Mockasin was quoted by one of the English quality papers as saying that he never listens to (recent) music. “Of course I do listen to music. I’m just a bit too lazy to go looking for new things. To be honest, I don’t think much of the whole music business. It seems like we have been standing still for the last twenty years. Albums are often not entities any more, just a bunch of singles. The only thing that matters is how your music can be positioned in the market and how many followers you have on Facebook and Twitter. I’m not interested in keeping up, in trying to be a successful musician and playing that game. Maybe I’ll actually go and do something completely different.”

Connan Mockasin • 30/1, 20.00, €16/19, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be