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Gotyettes
Welcome to our website, dedicated to the phenomenon that is Wally De Backer
We are very grateful to Keith Duncan as well as to the other members of The Chap for their willingness to contribute with this wonderful write out of how they met Gotye. We truly hope that that pending remix by Gotye comes true soon. After all, Twitter isn't a huge waste of time, is it?
Gotyepedia>Collabs & Supports>The Chap
The Chap are an experimental pop band from North London that Wally loves, as he has expressed a couple of times on Twitter. You could define their music as pop-improv-disco-rock.
They toured with Wally De Backer in the European leg of the tour in 2012 and gave their personal humorous touch to Gotye's "State of the Art" with their "cyber-melodic downtempo" remix titled "State's of the Television", the lines of which "I threw out the kids and the wife/ I threw out the television" show their braveness and personality in their music.
Keith Duncan was very kind to share with us the story of how The Chap got acquainted with Gotye (or rather, the other way round), thanks to Twitter. Ah, the interwebs!
One day a few years back, a whole bunch of Australians started following us on Twitter. We quickly found that a guy called Gotye, who was following us, had been tweeting nice things about our music. He had about ten thousand followers at that point. We thought: “That's nice” and followed back. Memory fails us as to what exactly happened next but somehow, we got distracted, didn't investigate any further and soon forgot about the whole thing.
One late night in Mid-January 2012, one of us was walking home drunk from one of the many nice bars in the Berlin district of Neukölln. There was a large amount of posters all over snowy Neukölln, advertising an arena show by a new superstar called Gotye. He seemed puzzlingly familiar on a personal level. Twenty minutes later, in a warm living room, aided by more beer from one of Berlin's countless “Spätis” - late-night Kiosks that look like this, it finally clicked and the drunk Chap member sent a Direct Message on Twitter, asking the new superstar to provide a remix of one of our songs.
The next morning, there was a direct message from Gotye telling us he'd love to do a remix and if we could discuss this via email.
So far, that remix has yet to materialize – he's a busy man! - but soon after our introduction on Twitter, we met Wally in person and concluded that he is a very charming, bright, enthusiastic chap with good manners. He invited us to support him on several European dates – playing to crowds fifty times the size we are normally used to. That was really fun and very interesting.
Also, we got to do a remix of his song “State Of The Art”. We ended up doing about five different mixes, including one in which we took his very cool vocodery vocals and cut them up to say “We threw out the kids and the wife” in the style of a church hymn. Wally liked that one best. It came out earlier this year as the B-side to the original on pink vinyl.
The last time we saw Wally, we took him and his band out to one of those bars in Neukölln. It's a place where a lot of people who pretend to be anarchists hang out. Chatting about music software with a global popstar in an anarchist bar, having a tune issued on pink vinyl, playing to 5000 people at the Hammersmith Odeon – our time with Gotye has been full of exciting new experiences.
Twitter isn't just a huge waste of time after all.
The Chap are Claire Hope, Keith Duncan (back), Berit Immig, Johannes von Weizsäcker and Panos Ghikas (front).
You can find The Chap's "State of the Television" on Gotye's "State of the Art" limited edition vinyl. Listen to it on Soundcloud.
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