Actually, at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, in late October, all the Grammy-winning trio wanted the audience to know was who they were.
"Who are you guys?" an audience member shouted two or three numbers into the set, during the silence between songs. The British trio was supporting '80s pop icons and fellow countrymen Tears for Fears on their reunion tour. Singer Steve Smith smiled and politely answered before beginning the next song.
By the end of the show, the polite applause that greeted Dirty Vegas' first few songs had gradually risen to full-fledged cheers. They had clearly won the crowd over- not something an act whose debut album went gold and spawned one of the most memorable singles of its year (the multiformat smash "Days Go By") normally has to do.
Dirty Vegas has changed gears a bit, however. The nostalgia-trip crowd had no idea who they were because Smith and bandmates Paul Harris and Ben Harris (no relation) spent the past two years as international dance music darlings. They toured the world as both DJs and as a legitimate live performance act. They also reminded an apathetic mainstream America, at least temporarily, of the potency of a house groove.
Dirty Vegas' self-titled Capitol Records debut entered the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart at number 7, and the trio collected a Grammy Award in 2003 for Best Dance Recording. Dirty Vegas was a bigger success here than in the band's homeland, and Madonna and Justin Timberlake came calling for remixes in the wake of its U.S. triumph. The album was noteworthy for its inclusion of traditional songwriting and rock influences long before the current wave of guitar-based house tracks became in vogue.
Despite that, the act's sophomore effort, the just-released "One," is a revelation. The guitars are cranked up; lead single "Walk Into The Sun" sounds like a first cousin of U2's "Beautiful Day." It plays at times more like a rock record than dance record. That suits the band fine, they stressed repeatedly during a sit-down conversation at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington the morning before their DC show.
"It's fusing that whole thing together and toying with the two of them," explained Smith, who plays drums, percussion and acoustic guitar on the new album. "Sometimes in the studio, it's not an easy thing to do. Some records don't need a loop just for the sake of having that electronic kind of tack to it, but in some songs, like there's a track on there called 'A Million Ways' and another one called 'In This Life' on the new album, that came straight out of the loops. They wouldn't have happened, being written from a guitar."
"A Million Ways," a storming house track, is one of the few direct bridges to the past on "One." Dirty Vegas' long stretch on the road informed much of the direction of the new record, they said.
"We felt a bit strange, because people were really liking the live show, to go back in and make another really, like, club-driven album, and what we made was what happened to us over the last 18 months," said Paul Harris, who, like Ben, plays guitars and keyboards on the record. "It ended up being a live band album, but it still has that electronic quirkiness to it."
"I remember sitting there when we was in the studio and playing live drums over the loops, you know, which we wouldn't have done before, you know, and then we just cut them live drum loops up, and still give it that loop-based, 8-bar kind of feel to it," Smith said.
