Life is bouncing along for José González - but how did a quiet Swedish lad with a Spanish guitar become one of the biggest pop sensations? Kevin Courtney finds out
There's a quiet music revolution going on, and this one is being televised. In fact, you've already seen it advertised on the telly, on internet sites and in the cinema. It's hard to miss: 250,000 huge, multicoloured balls come bouncing down the steep streets of San Francisco, to the soundtrack of a single Spanish guitar and a lone, clipped vocal. The ad is for the new Sony Bravia LCD TV, and the slow-motion spheres are dancing to a tune created by a 27-year-old musician from Gothenburg, Sweden - José González.
The commercial has proved so popular that not only have sales of Sony's latest-model LCD TV gone through the roof, but the tune itself, entitled Heartbeats, smashed into the UK Top 10, probably the only song in the current charts to feature a classical guitar. And not only are people rushing into the electrical goods shops to order their Sony televisions, they're also queuing up at the instrument shops to trade in their Les Pauls and Stratocasters for a nice, nylon-stringed guitar.
González's debut album, Veneer, has also benefited from the exposure: it's just risen to number seven in the UK albums chart. We must watch more TV ads than the Brits - the album is currently at number two in the Irish album charts.
"That's amazing," says González in a slow, measured voice that suggests the opposite of amazement. "I've seen the figures - I follow the figures every week and I think I haven't grasped it yet, but in a way I'm not surprised in the same way I was when I first heard that it might go up into the charts. That was when I was most surprised."
González is at home in his apartment in the old part of Gothenburg, enjoying the solitude while it lasts and working on songs for his next album, which he hopes to release by next autumn. It's a typical Swedish pad, with all the usual mod cons, except for the obvious one: the giant LCD TV that Sony plainly owes him for helping to shift their product. González lets out a slight chuckle.
"It's on its way," he says. "We have talked with them, of course, and they seem to be selling good. And they stopped showing the commercial because the TVs were out of stock. So, yeah, I think they're happy too." Well-established acts can afford to be picky about which product they lend their music to, but there's no shortage of unknown bands who would gladly soundtrack an ad for Sellafield if they thought it would shift a few copies of their latest single.
González, though, didn't see a problem with advertising televisions: after all, there's one in every home. But he didn't just jump at the offer from Sony - he wanted to see the ad first to ensure it was to his taste.
"Yes, they had already made the footage, so I got to see before deciding whether or not to have the song on the commercial. And it was great, yeah. It was visually striking, and that was one of the main reasons why I thought it was a good idea." However, not even Sony were prepared for the enormous success of this particular campaign. The ad was filmed over two days in San Francisco by Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig, who got his 23-man crew to catapult a quarter of a million coloured balls down the blocked-off streets using compressed-air cannons. No computer graphics were used - these were real, live bouncy balls. In keeping with the keep-it-real scenario, Sony eschewed the usual over-produced rock soundtrack for the simple, string-plucking tones of Heartbeats.
NOW, THE QUIET Swede with the hispanic name is being propelled along by the ad's momentum, and his diary is rapidly filling up with gigs, appearances and other commitments. He's in Dublin's RDS on Tuesday night, opening up for local lads Bell X1, then touring the UK in February before heading off on a Stateside jaunt in March. These gigs will be, by their very nature, intimate little affairs, so it should be the quietest "hello, Cleveland" you're likely to hear.
How did a quiet Swedish lad with a Spanish guitar become one of the biggest pop sensations? González recalls a childhood in Gothenburg, toying with a guitar owned by his dad, an Argentinian exile. Noticing his son's interest, his dad gave him two music books, one featuring Beatles songs, the other containing bossa nova classics. Young José started feverishly studying both.
"There was a summer when I started playing music, and with those two books I learned the basics by myself - I was about 15 - and then a year later I went to this teacher and started learning classical guitar lessons. My idea was that I thought I'd like jazz a lot, and I wanted to learn jazz guitar. So I started looking for teachers, and this teacher was working at my school, and I asked him if he could teach me some, and he actually didn't know jazz guitar, but he was teaching classical, so I ended up learning classical guitar instead."
GONZÁLEZ'S PARENTS HAD fled Argentina in 1976, following a military coup in March of that year. José's father had been studying in university in San Luis, and was a member of a left-wing political group.
With the military junta ruthlessly rooting out dissidents and activists, José's parents and older sister had no choice but to escape the country, or risk becoming one of the "disappeared".
"First they went to Brazil, and from there they got in touch with the Swedish embassy and they ended up in Gothenburg. They had to hide on their way out of the country. Some friends of theirs disappeared, and others had been in prison for a year, so it was nasty. When I did history in school you have to sometimes choose a topic to write about, and I looked up some things that happened in that period and wrote about it; but apart from that I always felt really Swedish, and I haven't spent that much time in Argentina. I went there to visit a couple of relatives.
"It's a different political climate now. My father moved back five years ago, so he lives there now. I was seven the first time I went back, so that was very interesting. You don't think that much about politics and stuff when you're that age. It was just about being in a warm country and picking peaches from the trees."
GONZÁLEZ'S MUSIC IS still inextricably linked to his South American roots. As well as being influenced by such late folk heroes as Nick Drake and Elliot Smith, González was inspired by flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia and Cuban guitarist Leo Brauer. But there was a time in his teens when González put aside the classical guitar and formed a hardcore punk band with some friends.
"Yes, I liked really different types of music; even when I was younger, the band I started playing with, we were like Black Flag and Misfits and Dead Kennedys and that kind of stuff. But yeah, I also like NWA and Public Enemy music too." But the pull of the classical guitar proved irresistible, and González continued to perfect his technique - a low, thrumming, hypnotic style of playing, based on repeated motifs and rhythmic thumb work.
Although he's listened to a lot of virtuoso guitarists, he says he hasn't got the dexterity to play it fast and furious - a Speedy González he is not.
"Not being a storyteller, I find it nice to use the same sort of lyrics as in repetitive club music, or music from Africa, people like Fela Kuti. I think you can get away with two lines if you can do it well. I always liked the repetition in other forms of music, like post-rock, which I was listening to when I was doing the album."
GONZÁLEZ STUDIED BIOCHEMISTRY at Gothenburg University, and never had any intention of making a career out of his relaxing hobby. However, in 2000, he decided to cut two of his own songs, Hints and Lightweight on Velveteen, into a limited edition seven-inch single, just to have something of himself on vinyl. If you have one of the few copies of this single, complete with artwork by the composer himself, you'd probably fetch a few bob for it on eBay.
Eventually, he signed to a Swedish label, who did a distribution deal with UK label Peacefrog Records. The album, Veneer, was released in 2003; Heartbeats is the only song not written by González - it was written by his friends, brother-and-sister duo The Knife.
For González, fame is a welcome way to get his music heard and enjoyed by a generation more used to loud, irritating bleeps than the slow, relaxing hum of nylon strings. But it also means he has to perform in public a lot more; for someone with Latin American blood running through his veins, that shouldn't be a problem, but González admits that he is more of a sanguine Scandinavian than a hot-blooded Latino.
"I'm very Swedish. Very introvert. And now with a lot of touring and meeting people I've changed a bit as a person, but I was rather shy when I was starting out. I enjoy performing, but I just sit there and play guitar. I don't talk that much."
Veneer is on Peacefrog Records. José González plays the RDS Main Hall on Tues, Jan 31, supporting Bell X1 www.jose-gonzalez.com