Team Perfect – ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’

Musical partnerships can lead to great things. In my lifetime they’ve given us the brothers Gallagher in Oasis, Andrew Wyatt and some Swedish techno dudes in Miike Snow and, of course, Charles & Eddie but to name a few. Like any good team, these people come together for a variety of reasons; family, friends of commerce. What fascinates me is how fluid these meeting are at the beginning of an artists’ career and how rigid and staged they become as one, or both become more famous. Before Wyatt wrote ‘Silvia‘ or ‘Animal’, he worked with heaps of other producers and musicians without much fanfare. Afterwards, you started seeing his name everywhere, particularly with Mark Ronson, who brought him front and centre on Record Collection. And perhaps there’s nothing better to demonstrate this than the cheekily titled and completely bootlegged Team Perfect.

Before he was Lightspeed Champion or Blood Orange and before she declared Dog Days over with her machine, Dev Hynes and Florence Welch were close friends who collaborated seemingly every day. She played in one of the earliest incarnations of Champion and he returned the favour by contributing arrangements and ideas to her debut record. The two remain extremely tight, with Hynes telling me on the phone early this year that he went down to a filming of SNL in New York just so he could surprise Welch at one of her performances. Both of them are now big names, the latter quite obviously but also Hynes, who has managed to reinvent himself no less than three times and pursue a highly successful songwriting career for the likes of Solange Knowles, Basement Jaxx and more. But with Team Perfect you get to hear them raw, unfiltered and going for it just because they can. This is 2007, and anything goes for Flo and Dev. Which kind of explains why they recorded an entire album of Green Day covers on Hynes’ Macbook.

Team Perfect’s recording buzz, hiss and crackle. They’re not clean by any stretch of the imagination, and feed into the seemingly incongruous pair’s youthful obsession with American pop punk from across the seas. Why I love it is that even at this early stage, before anyone really knew who Welch was, it’s clear that she has a massive, untameable voice. She manages to peak the speaker even though she’s not sitting anywhere near it, and when she goes for Billie Joe’s hysterical scream in the solo, it’s just golden. Dev mans the other acoustic axe, providing a neat window of beauty with his mandolin-style breaks in between each verse and those harmonies while Florence thrases those descending chords. It’s almost a fire and ice situation, really. You can honestly sense how much fun they’re having (and in case you can’t, Flo’s ‘That was fucking EPIC’ at the end might be a good indication’) and it’s a unique chance to hear two artists on the way up doing what they love without any studio trickery. This is the real version that Dev himself uploaded and directed me to because I bugged him about it so many times. Turn it up loud and see what a real musical partnership is all about.

Team Perfect – ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’