photograph by Illegal Tender
The first I heard of Primary 1 was in early 2008, with Joe Flory doing a version of Metronomy’s ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’. He called it a ‘love letter’ instead of a remix, version or edit - and if he meant it as a love letter based on the quality of his interpretation, it was one absolutely signed sealed and hand delivered. Whilst Metronomy was still learning how to do pop, Primary 1 re-arranged the song into a piano tune with a catchy chorus and weird personality.
Then I turned my ears to the brilliant single he had released a few months earlier (in the now remote year of 2007) called ‘Hold Me Down’. It's the kind of track that makes an artist an overnight sensation and kicks labels into starting bidding wars. But even though the single got a proper release (there were remixes from the Shoes, Yuksek, Rory Phillips and others) and praise enough from journalists, it somehow didn’t reflect back onto his popularity.
But if one great single wasn’t enough to get people’s attention, now, we have plenty of good releases to choose from. We asked this Matt Damon look-alike (who sings as if he's black) a few questions, from working with Ben Affleck to his actual collaborations; but what we should have asked was "How in the hell do you maintain still being everyone’s favourite 'future star' for four years in a row?"
And from this normally precarious position, one of his first demos, ‘Princess’, turned into a single that received praise from erm, none other than Perez Hilton on his monstrosity of a blog, which was before Joe collaborated with Nina Persson from The Cardigans, to create the lovely ballad ‘The Blues’. He went all electronic with Riton via the songs ‘Who’s There?’ and ‘Radiates’, created a highly addictive chorus with the Shoes in ‘People Movin’ and kept popping up everywhere with remixes and demos. And Flory is still yet to release an actual album.
The only thing more difficult than foreseeing when we'll finally hear his debut is to define the type of music Primary 1 makes. It’s pop, but not quite. It’s experimental, but you can sing along. As he says in our interview, it's the type of music that can make fans out of the likes of Erol Alkan to Perez Hilton. Perhaps it’s simply pop without the interference of labels and fashionable genre tags. Maybe it's just Primary 1’s interpretation of pop music. Anyway, it’s good.
