Black Eyed Peas interview: The party faithful

Published on Friday 22 May 2009 17:17

IT IS, of course, a sunny day in Miami. At the back of one of the party town's swishest hotels, the outdoor swimming pool is jumping. Techno and house music pounds from huge speakers, waiters ferry cocktails hither and thither, the palm fronds swish in the breeze. All around, sculpted, waxed pool bunnies in micro swimming costumes flaunt their heaving chests. The girls are something to look at, too.

It's barely lunchtime and already a miasma of booze, hormones and hedonism hangs around the hotel's terrace. On the pull in the pool, a few couples are trying out their own take on the breaststroke. It's spring break in America, the annual beachside alcoholiday rave-up for students and gym-toned, cosmetically enhanced idiots. This week Miami is also hosting the erroneously titled Winter Music Conference, the world's biggest dance music festival. French house DJ David Guetta is here, as are electro-punk veterans The Prodigy and dayglo party-popsters The Ting Tings. British dance bible Mixmag, meanwhile, has taken over P Diddy's mansion for four days of partying (and not much eating).

Club Tropicana + club fantastic: it's the perfect environment for Black Eyed Peas to launch their new, club-friendly album The E.N.D. The band who subjected the world to too-naff-to-be-offensive boob-eulogy My Humps and the Sesame Street hip hop of Where Is The Love? have, against expectations, made a corker – an album bristling with turbo-charged party tunes. Frenetic lead single Boom Boom Pow has already been a No 1 in America. Earlier this week it was at No 1 in the UK charts too, on digital downloads alone. This is the sound of pleasingly different Black Eyed Peas.

"That's one of the reasons it's called The E.N.D.," says the band's irrepressible writer/producer will.i.am of a title that also functions as an acronym: The Energy Never Dies. "Everything's changing. Every piece of fabric on the planet is going through some type of change, whether it's politics, the banks, the record industry… So we embrace the change," he continues, sounding like a politician on the stump – that is, with more enthusiasm than coherence. "So we celebrate the change and we called the record The E.N.D. to start new beginnings. This record is really us immersing ourselves in this new sound. And being respectful and responsible in how we approach it. And paying dues.

"So," he concludes, "it's dope."

"For me this record is all about being inspired by new things," says frontwoman Fergie, who was last spotted here punting her solo album The Dutchess. We're talking inside the hotel's restaurant. Before tucking into a salad, Fergie – real name Stacy Ferguson, and known for her candour about her past dabbling with recreational drugs – treats me to a blast, via a reference to Brigadoon, of her (surprisingly credible) Scottish accent. Some of her ancestors, she reveals, were Scottish; she jokes that they were probably deported for sheep-stealing, "which seems appropriate!" she cackles.

While she was promoting The Dutchess and filming a role in the movie Nine (she had a fairly busy career as a child actor), her bandmates – will.i.am, rappers Taboo and apl.de.ap (no one does normal names in the Peas) – were "going out to clubs a lot, and the BPMs of the music they were listening to were faster. Will was DJing, in clubs or at photoshoots, and I got really influenced by that. And that faster music is great for my workouts," adds this woman who is on the light side of rake-thin. "It's going back to the underground clubs and feeling that vibe."

In a former life, Fergie, a keen teenage dancer and clubber, "was the girl dancing onstage in clubs with the glowsticks. But nobody knew who I was."

Now, courtesy of the Black Eyed Peas' 18 million album sales and a string of global hits, everyone knows Fergie. But will.i.am (born William Adams in Los Angeles 34 years ago) is the heart and soul of the band. Such is his way with a radio-friendly tune that he's in demand as a producer. In the past couple of years, as well as The E.N.D. and his own solo album Songs About Girls, he has co-written and/or co-produced Crazy Tonight, a track on U2's No Line On The Horizon; Estelle's American Boy; some tunes for the long-gestating Michael Jackson album; and Yes We Can, the viral song and video that featured Scarlett Johansson and Barack Obama at his rhetorical best – a clip that is credited with helping Obama's presidential campaign capture the pop-culture zeitgeist.

It was Caesar the defiant monkey who led will.i.am to Obama. In January 2008, the would-be president was on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, where he gave a groundbreaking speech in the Democratic Primary. At the time will.i.am was at home in Los Angeles, nursing a broken foot. How did that happen?

"Graffiti-ing on the freeway. I was about to hit 33, I just wanted to get this youth out of me." A keen graffiti artist as a kid, he wanted to paint one last image. At the time he had been watching the Planet Of The Apes films, "and I was geeked on Caesar – the first monkey to say no." He decided he'd spray a big bubbly "no" on the side of a flyover in LA. "So I parked my Bentley on the side of the freeway." He pauses and smiles. "First rule of tagging: don't ever go with anything expensive. And secondly, don't go alone." Graffiti done, he was rushing to get back to his flash motor when a car hit him a glancing blow.

"So I'm sitting at home, broken foot, in a funky place – my solo album was not performing well in America. I'm there, alone, watching TV, depressed…"

But then on came Obama's speech. Will.i.am, who had helped the John Kerry campaign in the last presidential election, had already been asked to supply some musical support for Obama. Now inspiration struck: he took Obama's rolling, lyrical "flow" and set it to a simple tune. Within three and a half days he had recorded it, filmed the video and edited it. In that time he also managed to persuade Johansson and other celebrity friends (John Legend, Amber Valletta) to star in the video and another, Bob Dylan's son Jesse, to direct it. No one hesitated when he called, he says. "It just happened, as if it was supposed to."

Sadly, his record label, Interscope, didn't see it that way. He had approached them to ask them to release the song. "The company couldn't figure out how to solve this Songs About Girls problem (of poor sales]. So it was a very hard thing for me to go up to them and say, 'I've got something here, can you help me?' I was literally in tears." Interscope told him it would be "illegal" to use the company's machinery to support a political candidate. So will.i.am called a friend, who in turn persuaded ABC news to run an item on the hot-off-the-presses, all-star song. They put his web address on the corner of the screen when they broadcast a clip of the video, "so people knew where it came from. And from there it was history…"

Within four days of that broadcast, by the time of the presidential campaign's Super Tuesday, the video had been viewed four million times. Will.i.am met Obama not long afterwards, and says that the man who would be president credited the producer with helping his candidacy.

"But the awesome thing was, they didn't ask us to do it," he says. "They didn't pay for it. And here they were, spending millions of dollars on advertising." Come the time of the Presidential inauguration in January this year, will.i.am was one of the guests of honour at the Washington festivities, alongside U2 and Bruce Springsteen.

That wintry, august occasion seems a million miles away this evening in Miami. All four Black Eyed Peas are zebedeeing around the stage at the huge Ultra Music Festival, the WMC's centrepiece event. True to loquacious form, earlier that day will.i.am had had a fulsome description of the band's new live set-up.

"It's Lamborghini versus Lamborghini. Because the live music world is like a Rolls-Royce. This world – electronic music, digital stuff – is just fast cars. So you don't wanna bring a beautiful Rolls-Royce to that… because it's different engineering. So we have our Lamborghini."

He thought about his vehicular analogy for a bit as Fergie wolfed down her salad, Taboo fidgeted with the huge headphones plonked atop his head and little apl.de.ap fiddled with his BlackBerry. "Actually," will.i.am concluded, "we have a Rolls-Royce with a Lamborghini engine." I nodded as if I understood.

• The E.N.D. is released 8 June, www.blackeyedpeas.com