'Commercial pop music has lost its magic'

Kindness, the name for Adam Bainbridge’s musical project, has attracted a resurgence of attention recently, since he first appeared in 2009. After months of an intriguing and impressive reinvention campaign – during which vinyls and 7-inches illustrated with moody black and white self-photographs, a 16-page newspaper that included a thought-provoking interview with the printer Robin Bell, and invitations to a couple of secret shows were siphoned off to the chosen – the album World, You Need a Change Of Mind is out and Kindness is live. His shows at SXSW, the key festival for new music, finally threw him into the gladiator ring

In a world where pop music is churned (chundered?) out by hit factories, amid branding exercises, perfume ads and pedestrian music videos, the Kindness approach is a breath of fresh air. He’s going back to the old school. Take his album artwork. Inspired by Barney Bubbles, the late graphic designer who made radical covers for Ian Drury and the Blockheads, Hawkwind and Elvis Costello, Bainbridge chose analogue, instead of digital, methods. Gee Up and the Cyan videos were filmed on 16 mm film and the “overall concept was that everything should be untouched by photoshop”.

The album was recorded in a studio in Paris, instead of on a laptop. Overlaying a hazy, monochrome, almost melancholy aesthetic with a funky, disco sound was intentional. Bainbridge explained why when I interviewed him in Austin, Texas:

The album artwork was meant to be simple, unadulterated, a little bit traditional. I thought it would be interesting to make music that was quite ambiguous in terms of its time period or what genre or scene it belongs to. Ambiguous in time and space, and then put on top a fairly traditional record sleeve.

It all comes back to using the most appropriate tool for what you're doing and I think shooting films as a photographer has never been surpassed by digital and recording in studio has never been surpassed by a laptop.

The record pulses with the thought that’s gone into it. On a tangible level, there are little secrets. Each track goes up one key, like a musical stairway. The seconds between them are carefully thought through so that certain tracks run into each other. Philippe Zdar, the French house legend, produced the record and was at pains to find the right tools and recording methods for the job. Is it, then, more of a work of art than other pop albums? Bainbridge cringes:

It would be horribly pretentious to call it a work of art. It's a bit of a hippy answer but I always felt that even if the impression was subconscious, if you put so much effort into something, people feel it in the end result even if they don't know why. I think that was what motivated the artwork, videos and music.

Sonically, he’s been compared with Prince, because of the funked-out guitars and R’n’B vocals. It certainly stands out from the music of our time. Disco crooning with a funky house edge could sound a bit wrinkly, but it escapes this, thanks partly to Zdar. The dichotomy of disco and funk -  upbeat, propulsive music in a major key that makes you want to dance, underpinned by often sorrowful lyrical content – is central to Bainbridge’s ideology. He explains why:

I think it's two things. It's the dynamism of those kinds of music and it's a reflection of those genres of music which were often started by people marginalised in society. I identify more with the outsiders than the insiders even though now I'm probably appeared as insider. Collaborator number one! The roots of disco and the universal roots of funk – be it the civil rights movements or Sly and the Family Stone – strike a chord with me because they say more about the human experience than guys writing dreary rock ballads about a night out in Camden.