Ali Youngblood always just wanted to perform. But before Black Kids became the toast of the music press, like every other struggling musician, she had to pay the bills with gigs including substitute teaching and working at a daycare centre. To paraphrase Mike Myers’ most famous character, she’d had plenty of joe jobs, but nothing you’d call a career.

“My worst job?” Youngblood says, straining to remember her life in Jacksonville, Florida before Black Kids’ brand of peppy dance-rock took off last year. “It’s a tie between working in a collections agency and doing my temp job at the IRS. Yeah, I’d say the temp job, the temp job was worse. Irate people,” she sighs, a hint of long-buried frustration seeping out.

If you’ve been reading about Black Kids online, you’ve probably noticed music critics getting up on their high horses about “blog hype” and how going from self-releasing your EP on MySpace (their Wizard of Ahhhs EP, which earned them well-meaning but wrong comparisons to the Arcade Fire) to being the toast of the music press in only a few weeks is the worst thing that can happen to a band. There’s some truth to the idea that being thrust into the spotlight before you’re ready is never a good thing. But what stuffy commentators extolling the virtues of “paying your dues” seem to forget is how much better it is to be in a buzz band, even briefly, than to never get a shot at all.

For a start, you get phone calls from minor rock deities.

“We had been thinking about who we’d like to have produce us, and then all of a sudden our management called us and said that Bernard Butler would like to, and everyone peed themselves,” Youngblood recounts.

The former Suede guitarist might seem an unlikely choice to produce Partie Traumatic, the major-label debut from a band whose membership partly came together through playing in church, and who’re more likely to embellish one of their upbeat shout-alongs with drum-machine handclaps than with a wash of ripping glam-rock guitar. But Black Kids’ main songwriter Reggie Youngblood has confessed admiration for the Britpop era’s wry tales of heartbreak — particularly Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics, though it’s not hard to imagine Suede’s gender-bending having an influence on songs like the astonishingly upbeat “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You” (which opens with the line, “You are the girl that I’ve been dreaming of ever since I was a little girl”).



Along with presumably making sure Reggie and sister Ali hit the right levels of hormone-addled hysteria in their vocals, Ali describes Butler’s influence on the record as subtle but important, though they didn’t agree about everything.

“He had ideas but it was always, like, ‘Nah we don’t want that.’ He had some weird galactic sounds on one song, but we made him take them off.

“He had a great idea on ‘Hurricane Jane,’ you know when the line, ‘You can’t spend the night’ overlaps a bit? That was him, and I thought that was pretty awesome. And sometimes he would let us borrow his other keyboards that he had lying around because he had so many instruments in that studio. So he would be, like [in an English accent] ‘I have something that will sound a little bit sharper,’ and bring out this really old Korg or something, and we’d be, like, ‘whoah!’

He was very helpful bringing out brighter sounds for the album.”

While bloggers were working themselves into a frenzy over whether Black Kids would be destroyed by the hype, Ali was having a blast padding around in a north London studio like a college freshman on spring break.

“If someone else was recording it’d be, like, Dawn’s laying down her keyboards, someone’s gonna do the drums and it’s probably gonna take like a couple hours. So we’d just sit there with a hot cup of cocoa and some Jaffa Cakes, watch Scrubs, and have a laugh with Bernard Butler instead. I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun it was.”

Now that they’re on tour in the States, where audiences have been less receptive to their joyous squeals than those in the UK have been — while Partie Traumatic peaked at number 5 in the UK charts, it only hit 127 in the US — Ali assures me that the hard work has begun in earnest. They haven’t had many after-parties, days off are rare and they don’t get their ya-yas out on stage (“We’re not that type of party band who take out like a beer funnel or anything,” she scoffs). And while online music site Pitchfork big-upped Wizard Of Ahhhs, they famously reviewed Partie Traumatic with a picture of two dogs and rated it a 3.3. But with praise from other outlets including Spin and Paste, it doesn’t look like the fun is stopping, or even slowing. The online hype machine built them up, but it hasn’t been able to tear them down.

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