At a recent Monday night gig in London, Joel Gibb – AKA the Hidden Cameras – took to the stage with his acoustic guitar dressed in a sensible white shirt, looking for all the world as if he’d come straight from an office job. As he played a suite of Hidden Cameras songs old and new, the guitar was dropped, the shirt came undone then was removed, revealing a white vest. The room starting shaking to an electronic backing track, and things got sweaty. “It was a rebirth,” he says from a booth in the studio where he recorded new album of electronic pop pumpers Bronto, “like the indie boy gone bad.”
The synth-driven purr and slink of Bronto makes for a startling shift from country-tinged last album Home on Native Land and the exuberant multi-instrumental pop with which the Hidden Cameras first emerged from Toronto, Canada in the early 2000s. This genre twist was thanks to the melodies largely being written in Gibb’s head on the house and techno dancefloors of Berlin, his home for the last two decades. “I kept singing the same refrains to myself over other tracks – the ‘ooh’ and the ‘ah’, the ‘ah’, the ‘ooh’,” he says, “what else are you going to do? Dance music is very empty, but dancing is meditative.”
