Get naked on stage? No problem

Of Montreal’s flamboyance can even extend to getting naked on stage, writes Ed Power.

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes wasn’t planning to take his clothes off on stage. One minute he was fully dressed. The next he was romping around in his birthday suit. He shrugs. These things happen.

“The time I got naked, the time I rode around on horseback … It’s a mystery to me that all of that occurred. It was very organic — the moment passes, I forget about it and then other people keep reminding me. For everyone else it was exceptional — that is why they remember. It doesn’t stand out for me as significant.”

Barnes is a cult rocker with a difference. His music, a highly-strung psychedelic pop, is informed by his lifelong battle with depression. In concert he garnishes the weirdness with full-throttle exhibitionism: Of Montreal shows feature wacky costumes, colourful backing dancers and, if the mood takes, nudity and horse-riding.

“At the beginning of my career, I had a very punk rock attitude that you should go out dressed in your day-to-day clothes. I felt there shouldn’t be any pretentiousness, that what you did ought to be raw. I quickly realised this approach wasn’t special anymore. It made absolute sense for the Ramones to do that in 1977 as a reaction against the Eagles and Led Zeppelin. We were starting out in the 2000s — contemporary rock was sort of boring. We pushed back.”

For all the flamboyance, there’s something slightly manic about his performance style, typically accompanied by relentlessly outlandish backing videos. He may demur but anyone whipping their pants off halfway through a gig can’t be coming from a place of emotional stability?

“It’s just the way my mind works,” he says. “I’m not nostalgic or sentimental. I live in the moment, am always thinking about the next thing. I don’t get any satisfaction reflecting on past achievements. I don’t carry the baggage of success or failure. I always want to do something new. Always. ”

Besides, he insists, there is an artistic component to the exhibitionism. “It helps the singing — gives it a mystique. Ultimately it makes for a more interesting package. It is exciting for us to explore that side of music — to take inspiration from Kate Bush and David Bowie.”

Barnes was born in 1974 and grew up in a small town in Ohio. He named his band after a woman (from Montreal) with whom he had a short-lived relationship. Released in 1997 his debut album was relatively conventional, offering little clue of the weirdness soon to follow. By 1999’s the Gay Parade, however, Barnes’s originality as a writer was becoming clear. Sonically he was audibly indebted to the golden age of psychedelia of the 60s, but the lyrics had the aspect of a fever-dream and the arrangements were almost claustrophobic. A scary-surreal sensibility hung over the music, more akin to David Lynch than Pink Floyd.

He enjoys the peace and isolation of his home in Athens, Georgia. The quiet is conducive to his songwriting. Every now and then, though, he craves stimulation. For that reason, Barnes wrote and recorded most of Of Montreal’s latest album Lousy With Sylvianbriar in San Francisco. He’s already begun work on the follow-up, sketching out the record at an artist retreat in New York.

“It’s good to get out of my comfort zone, be in a place where I can focus on writing, without commitments and other responsibilities. It helps my state of mind to be in different cities and be influenced by perceptions of that city, the history, the cultural significance — it’s all in there. I spent the past few weeks on a writer’s retreat in Manhattan. I write the core structure of the songs — the lyrics, the chord progressions. I’ll have people come into the studio to help with the arrangements, the orchestrations and so forth.”

Barnes’s sensitive nature has not always made life easy. His wife is Norwegian and they moved to Oslo in the mid-2000s. However, he could not cope with the bleakness, especially during winter. Later, when he became a parent, he found the responsibility to be initially crushing and spent some time living on his own (he and his wife soon reconciled). Today, he believes he has achieved stability: he tours roughly half the year, lives a life of simple domestication the rest. No matter how trapped or bored he feels, something new is always around the corner.

Like many artists who push at the boundaries, Barnes is full of contradictions. Under the spotlights he is brash, triumphantly larger than life (he has a Ziggy Stardust-type alter ego named Georgie Fruit). In person, he is softly spoken and clearly rather shy. Certainly his day-to-day life could not be further removed from the avant-garde chaos of the Of Montreal live show.

“Living in Athens, Georgia, is sort of like living at the end of the world,” he says. “Nothing ever really happens here — you feel you are living in a dream. It’s not touched by contemporary culture in any way. That’s kind of cool. This is not a big city. Not many bands come through, you don’t get any interesting movies. Really, it’s just a sleepy southern town. There are few distractions.”

Of Montreal headline the Body and Soul Festival, Ballinlough Castle, Co Westmeath, on Sunday.