Photo by Andrew Strasser“Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” blasts through the speakers. Ludacris raps, “Move, bitch, get out the way.” Cali Swag District begs, “Teach me how to Dougie.” MIA shows up to boast, “No one on the corner has swagger like us.” Eventually, Joey Ramone appears to sing, “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
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Gillis first performed as Girl Talk when he was 18 and studying biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He has since graduated from clicking a laptop at house parties to playing theaters and festivals, where he has been known to shower audiences with balloons and confetti while he dances shirtless before large LED screens.
Gillis will appear this Thursday and Friday at the Fillmore Miami Beach, where he says concertgoers can expect two different sets, rolls of toilet paper flying over them and the opportunity to dance onstage. City Link recently spoke with Gillis while he enjoyed a rare day off at his home in Pittsburgh.
How has your tour been so far?
I’ve kind of been on the road for about four years straight, so it just doesn’t really stop for me. It just kind of comes in waves.
Is that hard on you?
Yeah, a little bit. I schedule it so I can be home enough to have relationships with people and see friends and family and everything like that. At the same time, I do like getting out there, and it’s something where there’s always a demand for more shows. … I mean, with always having shows up on the horizon and coming up quickly, it motivates me to keep working.
You are playing two nights in Miami. What will you do to make the shows different?
Everything with the show these days — it’s really grown. For years, it was just me and the laptop, but now, I bring a bunch of friends out. And on a particular tour, we’ll have an LED wall, and I have friends who kind of build custom props and use confetti and balloons and things like that for the show. So for each of the nights, there will be some distinct viewpoints and there will be some overlap. Because it’s like, I’ll put out an album every two years and I’m working constantly on that. Typically, it takes me two years to make 60 minutes of music. So it’s not a very easy process for me just to throw together a new live show that’s going to be distinctively different than other ones. But I do have a lot of material … so I like to have some overlap but different interpretations.
Are the people you bring on tour your longtime friends?
Now, there are some longtime friends, like, two friends who will come out with me on tour and basically be handling more of the physical props, like the balloons and confetti and things I mentioned like that. They are people I’ve known for over 10 years and they kind of do things where — you know, I really like interacting with the crowd and getting in there and bringing people onstage. But still, when I perform live, I have to trigger all the music onstage in real time. So that is something where I have to be on the computer almost the entire time. So I bring friends along to interact with the crowd in ways I wish I could. They’re able to just get out there the whole time and interact with that front row or jump in the crowd and throw stuff on them.
How do you prep your laptop for the shows?
I cover them in Saran Wrap every night because I sweat a small pool up there. And when I invite people onstage, you know there’s always a chance that someone’s going to throw a drink or knock the table over or whatever, and I’ve seen all of that. Every level of fluid from beer to vomit has graced my computer. … I’ve gone through a bunch [of computers] and I would say probably have broken at least one laptop per year for the time I’ve been doing this.
Would the teenage Gregg Gillis have listened to Girl Talk?
Um, probably not. When I was like 15, I was really into abrasive, experimental electronic music. Stuff that would be considered avant-garde. But also back then, I was a fan of pop, and I always kind of listened to hip-hop. But I was pretty dedicated to either the extreme underground or the extreme pop. You know, right now, Girl Talk kind of fits somewhere in between there.
Can you just sit down with friends and listen to music, or are you always looking for that next sample?
I feel like I get in and out of the mode of hunting for a sample. Some days, I’ll work on music and I might have some ideas in mind of stuff I want to get into. I might feel like looking for a sample, or if I feel like I don’t have enough early ’80s synth-pop in my set, I’ll look through my record collection, turn on my radio or go on YouTube and actually hunt it down — not really listen to music but skip through a bunch of things and actually look for samples. Whereas if it’s Friday night and I’m just hanging out with friends, and they’re listening to their iPod, I can kind of turn it off a bit. Especially because I do like to work within the Top 40 spectrum, and a lot of times when I’m hanging out with people, we are listening to stuff that doesn’t fit into it.
How do the artists you sample respond to your work? After 11 years of mixing copyrighted music and not having any legal problems, do you still fear being sued?
Thus far, everything’s been positive. You know, most people I’ve heard from, I’ve met a couple people in person, and a lot of stuff I’ve read is just other people interviewing other artists about my album. It’s all been positive. Some of those artists are even promoting it — putting it on their Twitter, on their home page. I think a lot of the artists don’t really see anything that I’m doing as competition, and it’s not taking sales away from them. I think they see it as something that can open up their music to another audience. Along with that, I think a lot of managers and people from labels see it like that, as well. And in the past years, some of those people are reaching out as well and giving me tracks or sending me CDs, saying, “Check out this a cappella.” “Here’s the instrumental for this album.” Thus far, we’ve had no issues.
Girl Talk will perform 9 p.m. Thursday, May 19 and 9 p.m. Friday, May 20 at the Fillmore Miami Beach, 1700 Washington Ave. Tickets cost $31. Call 305-938-2505 or visit Livenation.com.
Contact Ashley McCredie at amccredie@sun-sentinel.com.
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