We thought something was wrong
Music Their first song got 100,000 plays in three days — now pop duo Oh Wonder are learning to cope with fame, they tell David Smyth
I’M SLIGHTLY surprised that Oh Wonder don’t walk backwards into the Brockley café where we meet one sunny afternoon. South London’s Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West have not gone about their electronic pop career in the traditional order. First came an album’s worth of songs, posted online, one at a time, on SoundCloud on the first day of every month between September 2014 and September 2015. Then came a debut album, which reached the charts despite almost every song being familiar already to fans. And only then, on September 16, 2015, at the ICA, did the pair play their first ever live concert.
“It didn’t make sense from a business perspective,” admits Vander Gucht. “But from a fan perspective, it did. If an artist dropped an album now, you’d probably enjoy it for a few weeks and then move on to something else. But if you’ve been drip-fed someone’s music for a whole year, you’re going to really love them, aren’t you? You’ve spent so much time listening to them that you can’t help but part with your money when the time comes.”
Now, belatedly, the duo are a proper band, with a bassist and a drummer who play live and on their second album, Ultralife, which is coming in June. They still worked to a self-imposed deadline on the new material, writing the first six songs during a month spent in New York in April 2016, and the other six in just a week last S e p t e m b e r. H a v i n g deliberately stayed anonymous when they first posted a song online, this time their faces will be on the album cover.
Much of the content is about the change they experienced, going from internet-only nobodies making music in a space at the bottom of Vander Gucht’s parents’ garden, to playing 160 gigs all over the world in a year.
Talking to them, it seems they’re experiencing a little altitude sickness — living the dream, or the “ultralife” as they put it in song, but still far from lost in glamour. When we meet they’re about to head to California to resume touring with an appearance at the highprofile Coachella festival. They’ve got a new lighting set-up, a giant flickering OW, that they’ve had to borrow money to pay for. They joke that after their latest gigs they may need to turn it upside down and try to sell it to the Danish pop star MØ. They tell me about attending a Brit Awards party this year (they weren’t invited to the actual ceremony), accidentally ending up at the same table as Katy Perry and Ellie Goulding, and being too dumbfounded to do anything but stare.
Yet they have earned their place in the same world, whether they believe it or not, with beautiful, soft pop songs sung in their gentle, intertwining voices. Check out the steady piano groove of their new song, Lifetimes — it’s instantly loveable.
The masses took to their music the moment the first song appeared online. “The first one, Body Gold, got 100,000 plays in three days. We thought something was wrong with SoundCloud,” says West, 28. Now, the video for the new song Ultralife has had more than a million YouTube views in the past two weeks. Today they are experiencing real fame, to an extent, uncomfortable though it makes them.
“We were in Berlin for a gig and I put a photo on Instagram of the phone in our hotel room,” says West. “A fan recognised it and waited in the lobby for 10 hours for us to come out.” Yikes. “He just wanted to say hello. If we’d known, we could have saved him a whole day of his life.”
It’s interesting that when she started