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A. G. COOK, the visionary behind PC Music, has already redefined pop with his audacious and inventive approach. His latest project, ‘Britpop’, blurs genre boundaries, exploring the essence and future of pop through a blend of nostalgia, innovation, and a deep dive into British cultural identity.
Words: Martyn Young.
Photos: Sinna Nasseri.
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A. G. Cook is one of few artists in the 21st century who can truly say they have shaped the future of pop. Daring, exuberant and subversive, PC Music, the pioneering record label and collective he founded back in 2013, has been a constant shining beacon of questing experimentalism and pop brilliance that has defined an era, traversing through all manner of genres and wild ambition. It’s been a journey that has taken in triumph and tragedy and has seen the producer forge powerful and inspiring creative collaborations and reach the exalted heights of working with Beyoncé on ‘Renaissance’. Does the unassuming, softly-spoken, long-haired producer consider himself a star as he prepares to release his third solo album? “I don’t see myself as a pop star, but for the last decade or so, I’ve really enjoyed playing with ambiguity,” he smiles from a sun-drenched room in his home in Los Angeles.
Ambiguity has always been central to the PC Music story and A. G. Cook’s vision for what music can be. ‘Britpop’ is perhaps the ultimate realisation of all that ambiguity, creative expression, and sheer bonkers escapism, but is it pop music? Does it matter? Like most things for A. G. Cook, the answer is it’s anything you want it to be. “People can’t even decide what pop is,” he says animatedly. “Every year, it gets less and less clear with the different levels of what’s considered mainstream now. The whole argument about is pop popular or is it like classic pop, what does that mean? Is it a genre? Specifically, I feel like a lot of the music that I’ve worked on with different collaborators hasn’t been shying away from that conversation at all levels.”
He cites 2016 song ‘Superstar’, the first to feature his own vocals and his first solo single, which would go on to be incredibly instructive in the journey of A. G. Cook, the artist. “That song, in the way I recorded myself and the way the lyrics are, and the whole tension of it, is very much a music producer taking centre stage and the awkwardness of that. It plays into a bit of a Napoleon Dynamite quality,” he laughs.
The awkwardness is the charm, though, and that’s what makes it brilliant. The producer began to sprinkle his DJ sets with flashes of performance as he cultivated the vision of his own artistic career and how he might work within a pop space. “The idea is that we’re all documenting ourselves like pop stars in a way because of how socials encourage it,” he says. “I have a self-awareness of the theatre of pop, and that’s the only thing really left in pop, more than the music itself, in a way.”
Perhaps the strongest artistic and creative partnership A. G. Cook has developed over the years, certainly since he first started making music with fellow producer genius Danny L Harle in the proto PC Music duo Dux Content in the early 2010s, has been his visionary work with Charli XCX. Charli is a musical force of nature, and her boundless personality and genius with a hook has provided rocket fuel for all of Cook’s musical endeavours. Working closely with Charli, you can’t help but feel energised. “A lot of the Charli tracks we’ve done together have these outrageous outros where it’s almost like a kind of, victory lap is not the right word, but in my head, I’m like she’s nailed the hook, and it’s so catchy we can go anywhere from here, and anything can happen.”
Anything can happen: three words that perhaps encompass the entire A. G. Cook story and the philosophy that guides everything he does.
“The way that someone like Charli does it is genuinely inspiring because of how much of the writing she can make work as well as her being someone who’s slightly more known in the mainstream and has this amazing stage energy. It’s really the hooks. We could be doing something really casual, and suddenly, she can give it the DNA of a big radio song, and then it can go back to something more lo-fi. She has the willingness to jump between those things.”
“People can’t even decide what pop is”
A. G. Cook
As A. G. explains the joy of working with Charli, some of the principles of his creative vision emerge. The importance of contrast and imbuing different pieces of music with different musical dynamics is central. On both his previous solo albums, 2020’s sprawling and musically adventurous ‘Apple’ and ‘7G’, A. G. Cook fully began to realise how he could make sense of all those clashing musical ideas and bring them together in harmony.
“A real recurring theme for me with my own music or working with other people is this high contrast feeling,” he explains. “I’m not really trying to go for the middle ground of a perfectly blended mainstream experimental thing. I want to go fully catchy and bombastic and then do something much more difficult or sound design intensive. That’s very much related to my own listening habits and how I enjoy experiencing things.”
The breadth of his musical palette was highlighted in the vast expanse of both his 2020 releases. “I felt this very much when I was doing ‘Apple’ and ‘7G’ as a sort of double album where the real album is somewhere between the two,” he says. “There’s a 49-track way of doing things, and there’s a ten-track way of doing things, and they all have their focus. You can kind of assemble it in the middle.”
For A. G. Cook, music is never anything as prosaic as a functional collection of files. It has to be a real living and breathing thing within its own distinct world. “I don’t want to target streaming specifically, but I as a listener can get underwhelmed even if it’s an artist I’m excited about and following then the release date comes, and you get tiny artwork and a little playlist,” he says. “It’s not that everyone does that but we’re all slightly channelled or made to do a version of that. For me, the material, whether it’s someone else playing the song or me doing a DJ edit or someone else doing a remix, songs or tracks can have a life outside of just ‘Here is the final master on streaming that we’re going to rinse’. It’s high contrast but also the personality of different artists or different genres and the feeling that it’s in dialogue with itself.”
It’s fair to say it’s taken a while to work out who the artist A. G. Cook is as opposed to the label head and producer. “A big part of the artist journey for me was not doing an album for 7 years of being A. G. Cook,” he laughs. “I had one sort of EP online, and then these singles, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Superstar,’ were important moments. I relished not having an album. Not having an A. G. Cook sound.
“Obviously, after a while, I went full circle and found a window that made sense for an A. G. Cook project, but I never wanted it to be a producer album with lots of features. I enjoy those, but that feels like its own category that is cynical at times, I think. You can have all the instrumentals and just farm them off. It took time for me to figure out something that would not just be personal to me and be a bit self-reflective but would just be interesting in the context of PC Music and the other artists I work with.”
Inspired by the artists in his orbit, the possibility of A.G Cook’s solo work became more tangible. “The year that ‘Apple’ and ‘7G’ came out, I also did this album with Jonsi, which was really interesting. Working on Jonsi’s album at the same time as working on the Charli self-titled album with all these things going on suddenly gave me such a wide frame of reference. Obviously I’m always writing my own songs and bits of stuff. Somehow, between the vantage point of those two things and PC Music and all the things I was doing with that, I was like, ‘Oh, ok, an A. G. Cook album could be like this’, and I started to devise what became ‘Apple’.”
Something of a breakthrough came when he started using his own voice more and more on tracks and tapped into a whole different kind of emotion and way of working. “It’s not just cool tracks,” he enthuses. “There’s something that this can explain. I was really enforcing the literal, personal computer music name of PC Music. To do that after bits and pieces of singles and collaborations and production work and artist aliases, it somehow felt right to wait about seven years and then really do a lot.”
The burst of creativity that spawned those two albums is really quite staggering as Cook branched out into all the weird and wonderful corners of his musical imagination as he performed a high-wire act of balancing countless styles that could tip over the edge at any time.
“What’s been interesting since then is how to keep some of that energy for what I’ve come together with for ‘Britpop’ and not just repeat it with the idea of doing a really long album or two albums, but how can I find something to latch onto by playing with the album format but it still has to be part of an A. G. Cook album?” he ponders. “I like the idea of giving people multi vantage points and giving myself the opportunity to not be too literal with how I interpret electronic music or pop music. I want to find some conditions that can make it get a little bit out of control like I’m improvising rather than making the perfect album.”
“There’s a 49-track way of doing things, and there’s a ten-track way of doing things”
A. G. Cook
So, we arrive in 2024 at ‘Britpop’, and yes, A. G. Cook knows what you’re thinking, and that’s ok. He’s ready to take you on a journey of what Britpop means to him, one that’s much darker and stranger, yet ultimately gloriously uplifting, than you might imagine.
“There are a lot of reasons why I wanted to bring out a phrase like Britpop and use it in a particular way,” he explains. “It’s an incredibly loaded phrase. I can retrace it, but even pop is an incredibly loaded phrase. All the different categorisations of being a Brit are very loaded. It’s also loaded in America. It’s loaded in the UK for different reasons. There’s all kinds of confusion for what Britain is, the British Isles versus England etc., so there’s already all that tension there.”
There are multiple versions of what A. G. Cook’s Britpop is or can be. There’s the OG Britpop of Blur vs Oasis and all of that. A. G. was born in 1990, so was only very small when the kings of Britpop were lording it about, but like anyone very young or very old in that era, you took everything in almost by osmosis. There’s also a different kind of Britpop, the Britpop as cultural ephemera. Films, television adverts, Supermarket Sweep, the Argos catalogue, Tango soft drinks, football, Mr Blobby, Take That, Dale Winton presenting Top Of The Pops – it’s all there in creating the tapestry of life that A. G. Cook wanted to channel mixed in with some very clear and iconic images.
“It’s funny for me, but my memories of the rock version of Britpop are so meshed into other British stuff. I see the lineage of Geri Halliwell wearing the Union Jack dress, Tony Blair and the Teletubbies. It goes into this attempt to have this Cool Britannia moment. I would have been 6 or 7, and it was all part of the same thing,” he remembers.
The music of the Britpop era would have a slow influence on him as he carefully picked through some of the more esoteric strands and some of the most striking iconography of the time. “I personally got into music quite late,” he explains. “I’m an only child. I had some friends who had older siblings, and they were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to go and see Blur tonight’. I really grew up in a bit of a bubble. I was very into visuals. The visual impact of Blur, who would always mix visuals up, with ‘Parklife’ having a strong visual identity; that’s the stuff that stood out to me the most.
“As a kid, things with really strong visual worlds were the only thing I tapped into. Obvious examples are Daft Punk and Gorillaz. I was definitely aware of Damon Albarn and Blur, but it was Gorillaz that really resonated with me. I was like, ‘Oh shit, it’s this whole immersive world’. Being a bit older, I suddenly got very into music as a teenager, messing about on computers and recording friends, and suddenly, the era I was really discovering everything was the early blog era. The MediaFire era. It was nuts that you could read a review of this really obscure thing, and then the whole album would be there. I was trading mp3s with friends. Even LimeWire feels quite Britpop to me.”
With the liberating freedom of the internet in its most Wild West era, the seeds of A. G. Cook’s pop experimentalism, burnished by the idealism of Britpop, were beginning to take root. A formative time when the whole world seemed to be opening up for him online.
“A lot of it was me discovering things as I got older and getting into music really fast,” he recalls. “That’s why I’m so casual with genre and have these big switch-ups. I really did experience a lot of music in this flattened internet way. Now, it’s quite normal for younger generations to be super eclectic. Someone will be like, ‘Here’s my jazz playlist, here’s my 90s rap playlist’. It’s so carefree to just pick things from streaming. I remember really being on a hunt for different discographies and trying to find a Kraftwerk discography. That’s how I would have experienced Blur in a proper way, looking at all their albums from debut to ‘Think Tank’ and having a lot of respect for the albums having such a different approach.
“I relished not having an album. Not having an A. G. Cook sound”
A. G. Cook
In the late 2010s, with PC Music established as one of the coolest and most inventive record labels in the world, A. G. Cook moved to America, and it was there that he began to question and explore his own sense of Britishness and where his work and PC Music related to it.
“I’ve only really felt more British by being in the US more,” he laughs. “It’s not really something that I’ve thought about when I was growing up in London, but then coming here, there are people highlighting the accent, and I realised that PC Music itself is in this lineage of British eccentrics and inventive pop music, like the Pet Shop Boys.”
Like all his previous work, ‘Britpop’ is conceptual and overwhelming, but when you begin to break it all down, it all begins to make perfect sense. It’s an odyssey years in the making. The use of the phrase itself is an example of the fearless quality of all Cook’s art.
“There’s a lot of joy for me in this phrase that’s overloaded, that’s over spilling with connotations and even some controversy,” he says confidently. This is no Last Night At The Proms, flag-waving celebration, though. “The cover art avoids red, white and blue. I basically banned red, white, and blue from the graphics, which immediately, for me, differentiates it from the much more literal og indie-rock Britpop – here’s the guitar with the Union Jack on it,” he says clearly. “The process of doing that is how I work on music. Playing with these certain elements but looking for ways to reframe them. You always have to start with something quite bold. That can be someone with a strong personality like Charli or a producer with a strong sound or a cultural banner that’s already very overloaded.”
The album is split into three discs, Past, Present and Future, each one telling the story of British pop and electronic music filtered through A. G. Cook’s unique prism. As he experienced more life in America, primarily a year with his girlfriend spent in rural Montana’s relative wilderness, the strange exoticism Americans felt towards this odd little British man became apparent. The relationship between America and Britain has always been part of the Britpop lore as Americans imagined the British Isles as some sort of fantasy island. It was an aspect Cook began to ponder and then sought to embellish as he created this expansive new world for his inventive music to inhabit.
“I was very aware of the mythic quality of being British. Understanding that there was this idea of the UK as somewhere with history and a fantasy quality of kings and queens and wizards,” he explains. “I started to notice that there were a lot of classic American authors like Steinbeck who did his version of Arthurian tales. There’s a Mark Twain book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is a time traveller thing that started to give me this notion that if I was going to do a thing with Britpop or Britishness, I should also mess with history and the idea of eras.
“The idea of dividing the album into past, present and future is also me thinking about how I can relate to the idea of Britain as having this vast, infinite past from Stonehenge to the Roman Empire and everything else. It’s impossible to really comprehend. I started reading more about history in general and enjoying an insider/outsider approach. For lockdown reasons, I wasn’t travelling. It’s the longest I’ve been away from it, so I was really starting to play into the real historical research and the imaginative quality of it.
“I was starting to see that, especially in Montana, where there’s a lot of Cowboy imagery – it’s very connected to this imagined idea of British heraldry, having these crests for cowboys. The whole attitude of chivalry and knights is reflected in the Wild West. I saw it both in the attitude and visually, where you’ll see what feels like a cowboy-style belt, but it has all these embellishments that are very much referencing an old history aesthetic. It all started to stew together.”
The concept established, A. G. found himself freed creatively to really run with it. “I started to amass and organise things, and it almost made it less precious than something being called ‘A. G. Cook Album Number Three’ or whatever; it’s suddenly, ‘Oh, it’s all Britpop, don’t worry about it!’ It gives it a charisma of its own,” he laughs.
He began to think about his hometown and his newly adopted home more and more and how musically he was embraced by America first as Britain took a white to suss PC Music out. “Historically, even from the first PC Music press and engagement with different writers and producers, London was obviously where it was born and where the initial friendships and relationships happened, but in terms of local support or club nights, it was pretty negative, honestly,” he remembers.
“There was something interesting about the early club nights and the amount of things I saw where it was seen as breaking the rules of dance music or not being right. All these things that were issues for an established mini music scene in London and the UK were completely ignored by an American audience who were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is great and really entertaining’. All the early big crossover moments were driven by the US but seen as a very British thing, and looking back around, once certain American publications were like, ‘Oh, it’s a thing’, it opened the doors to a few more UK ones. There’s always been that sensation which after a while was pretty interesting for me to tackle.”
Concept locked and ideas swirling, Cook began to create the music that would soundtrack ‘Britpop’. Disc 1 is the past, and if you could ever say A. G. Cook had a classic electronic sound, it can be found here. “For me, what was amusing is that the classic sound I’m referring to is an innately futuristic one. A lot of that disc is dominated by vocal chops and chords, which was a headspace of how I was very naturally making music in 2013/14, taking vocals and chopping them up and trying to make them exciting. It was quite nice for me. I’ve never stopped making music like that. That’s always been part of it, but I was really revisiting that atmosphere with some updated tools.”
Disc 1 is banger central. “There are longer tracks, 10 or 7 minutes, that play like the journey of a DJ set mix. All the blends are happening with synthesis rather than things just fading into each other. There was a real attitude I was nostalgic for, but I was also still trying to do it in a futuristic or advanced way. That was the most natural one for me because it was a very clear brief,” says Cook.
Disc 2 is where things really get interesting, though, as A. G. Cook goes deeper into this own warped vision of Britop with his own voice on a collection of lo-fi pop songs that are the most personal music of his whole career rather than making them too overtly beautiful, they are often scarred by jolting and harsh guitar lines and sonic textures that sweep in giving the whole thing a blissful yet woozy tension. It’s his most instinctive work. “It feels the most present in the sense that it feels like I accidentally took a photo of something, and I’m looking at the photo. It has an immediate feel,” he says.
“PC Music is in this lineage of British eccentrics and inventive pop music”
A. G. Cook
Despite having done a lot of music in this lane before – ‘7G’ even featured covers of rock staples like Blur’s ‘Beetlebum’ and Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today’ – Cook is aware that the pivot from electronic mayhem might be a bit jarring. “Sometimes there’s a little bit of a shock value thing with the contrast between a typical PC Music thing and something with instruments, but compared to the ‘Apple’ / ‘7G’ ones, I think there’s a bit more of a developed language between the use of guitar and the guitar tone,” he explains.
The Present disc is the emotional heart of ‘Britpop’. “A lot of the other songs are a little bit melancholy in a sense. It’s easier for me to drift into that,” says A. G. wistfully. “It really made me double down on the electronic tracks being more uplifting. Some of those electronic tracks are a testament to Sophie as well, sometimes some of the things I’ll do in a DJ set or some of the fun dancey pieces are really as much as a tribute as something as literal as ‘Without’ so I think it’s quite interesting to have both on there. The intensity of the lyrical moments really made me double down on the fun that surrounds it on Disc 1 and Disc 3.”
Disc 3 is concerned about the future, a concept which has always been tied to PC Music. From their formation and throughout a dizzying decade run of music, they have frequently been labelled as pioneers for a new way of making music; terms like future pop merged into hyperpop as groundbreaking visionary artists like SOPHIE began to imagine a bright new pop utopia built on the creative freedoms and invention of PC Music. “The idea of aiming for the future of something is a bit silly, but I’m always generally trying to be quite progressive or optimistic in a sense,” says Cook passionately. “A lot of my really close collaborators from back then through to now, and honestly, something I shared with SOPHIE more than anyone was this ambition to not repeat things. It’s more of an attitude than a sound. SOPHIE was so skilled at making a hybrid between her concepts and actual physical scientific sounds of the drums and the synthesis. That’s all her. No one has really done it at that level. I was nowhere near that level of skill. SOPHIE was someone who could really synergise that and make it such a literal force that it actually confused people. People were saying, ‘Oh, maybe this is objectively the future because it’s so technically advanced’.
“What we shared personally and what I share with a lot of other collaborators like Charli is much more of an attitude than a sound. The idea was that working instinctively and quickly would put your guard down and take you somewhere you hadn’t thought of. We would actually have conversations about it. It wouldn’t be so serious. There’d be a lot of whimsy to it, not afraid to take the piss out of each other, but there’d always be a real sense of how can we always go somewhere we haven’t thought of ourselves yet and challenge and have that feeling that anything can happen.”
There you go again: anything can happen. On the final disc of ‘Britpop’, so much stuff happens that it will leave your head spinning. “Disc 3 is the lost-the-plot one,” laughs Cook. “Having no context whatsoever is quite a nice feeling. The future was like messages in a bottle thrown out in this crazy way.”
Despite the glorious ecstatic feeling of many of these electronic symphonies, they are underpinned by a feeling of uneasiness that persists across the entire album as a whole. “These could all lead to something or nothing; they’re all songs and tracks that I like, but they all take some kind of strange risk that makes me uncertain,” he continues.
“Even on the very last song called ‘Out Of Time’, there are parts of it that are out of time: the pun of running out of time at the end of an album. Each disc has something that makes me not doubt myself but be uncomfortable in a fun way. They’re all hard to pin down which is the most emblematic for the future.”
The future disc offers one shining example of the past, present, and future, all meeting together as one on the lithe pop banger ‘Lucifer’. “There are no features across the thing, but Charli is doing the hook across the chorus,” says A. G. excitedly. “It’s weirdly a demo that I started myself, and she was into it and rewrote parts of it. This is pre-’How I’m Feeling Now’ and pre-’Crash’, so quite a long time ago, I’d been toying with this.”
‘Britpop’ is the start of a new era for an artist who has already reshaped what pop can be and is now looking to hit even greater heights. With PC Music transitioning to an archive label, the focus now is on bringing the all-encompassing world of ‘Britpop’ to life as it is released on A. G. Cook’s intriguing and mysterious new label, New Alias, with all manner of subversive projects and stunts in the pipeline for example the music journalism parody of the Witchfork media website and the aural and visual overload of the much anticipated and hyped ‘Britpop’ shows.
Despite all this excitement and pop nonsense, though, A. G. Cook is keeping his feet on the ground. He’s not a pop star, remember. Or is he?
“I’m keen to do this properly and do some really good shows and then get back to being a producer,” he says with a smile. “For me, the ultimate way of organising my career is this episodic style, a season of A. G. Cook, a season of collaborating. I really do enjoy shaping someone’s sound.”
Just like it was in 2013, the most important thing is always what comes next. Shaping the future by understanding and reimagining the past and what it means to be an artist in 2024, A. G. Cook’s future is filled with endless possibilities; remember what he said: anything can happen. ■
Taken from the May 2024 issue of Dork. A. G. Cook’s album ‘Britpop’ is out 10th May.
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