Catching Up With The B-52s
The B-52s played their first show at a Valentine’s Day party in Athens, Ga. in 1977. The love just kept on pouring in. They released the first of their seven full-length records two years later, continuing on to build a legacy out of rock lobsters, private Idahos, love shacks and cruising through the ionosphere. They paved the way for all the music that’s emerged from their hometown and practically became the textbook definition of eccentric party pop.
True to their commitment to the entertaining, lighthearted and bizarre, this week, The B-52s released their first album in 16 years. It’s fittingly called Funplex, and it finally brought the four pop titans back to the studio.
They wrote and recorded the album in New York and Georgia on their own dime, then label-less after departing Warner Bros. A subsequent search brought them to both a new producer, Steve Osbourne (New Order, Doves, KT Tunstall), and a new home on Astralwerks.
Paste caught up with singer Cindy Wilson to chat about the band’s new record and label, its place in Athens musical history, and where they got those trademark beehives.
Paste: What are your hopes and expectations for Funplex, and how does it feel in relation to your previous work?
Wilson: I can’t tell you how excited I feel. We’ve waited so long—it’s been amazing to have to be so patient. We’ve been working on it for about four years. It’s been a long time from getting the business and getting all our ducks in a row to actually recording and mixing and getting Astralwerks involved. So I am just about to burst, personally, because I think it’s one of our better records, and it’s surprising a lot of people. Even people who wouldn’t necessarily be our fans are talking to me honestly and saying, “You’re really surprising me. It’s a strong record.” I feel already that we’re successful with this record just by getting it out and touring with it again. So whatever it does after this will just be icing on the cake.
Paste: Can you tell me a bit about how you ended up hooking up with Astralwerks for this project?
Wilson: We left Warner Brothers. Our contract was up, and we had written this really great bunch of music and recorded it, actually, and were shopping it around. And Astralwerks was so excited about it when we brought it to them. And they were fans as well of the band, and they felt that we would be a great band to have on their roster. We all benefited and they were as excited as we were to sign with them. They’re a cool label. It reflects on us, too, it’s great.
Paste: It’s been quite a while since you guys released a record. Sixteen years, right?
Wilson: Yeah, since good stuff. We did record “Debbie” and “Hallucinating Pluto” and put them on one of those compilation albums [1998’s Time Capsule: Songs for a Future Generation], and we’ve been touring all that time. But we haven’t had a product out. We didn’t promote ourselves. We were kind of under the radar, as it were.
Paste: What were your motivations for laying low for a while, and what brought you back now?
Wilson: It wasn’t really a motivation, it was just that we weren’t writing. We were just doing small tours in the summer and corporates, and making a living off of our music that we had done. But we decided that if we were going to take this thing any further, if we were going to go tour any more, then we had to have some new songs. Actually, that was the reasoning behind working on new music. We just wanted some new songs to do.