It's Time for Den Haan

Search for Den Haan on Myspace, but beware of straying too far. Nick DenHaan, an overweight drummer from the Deep South, is the unfortunate second hit on the search engines. His page offers a lonely video of a dog humping a stuffed toy, and a slideshow of him and his mates posing on cars in sweat pants. With guns. There's the obligatory spattering of low quality XXX adverts featuring lip-linered girls in cheap underwear. This is seedy territory.

Back in the safety of the genuine Den Haan page is the welcome return to form of original retro sleaze. This is the stuff Nick DenHaan was brought up on. It's Hi-NRG italo disco straight out of a 1970s porno, set in a wood-panelled Spanish motel, with the stars strewn all over the grainy flyers. There's pouts, heels, and tanned guys with ’taches.

Thing is, though, they sound really good.

Every hand-clap, every Glitter-esque foot stomp, every masculine grunt (there's a few) is presented to you so crisply, so enticingly. Hell, if you've got a mirror and a pair of tinted aviators, stick them on. These guys are making the genre irresistible.

It's taken a while, but it's time for Den Haan. By day, Matt Aldworth is a part-time technical analyst for an investment bank. “He's a banker! Ha!” quips Gardi, a freelance assistant film director.

“The people in my work know I'm in a band but I don't really talk about it,” Matt says. “I only do it to pay bills and keep my mind active. It gets me out of bed at 6am every weekday.”

By night, they are Glasgow's hardest working music geeks. And, as they happily admit, everything suddenly seems to be coming together for them. “At the beginning of 2008, we were doing a lot of work. All our spare time was devoted to it. Then the first record came out, we got a bit of interest, and since then it's just been gathering force. It's growing arms and legs all the time.”

Last month's launch event for their record label, The Courier Of Death, was a celebration of the move away from bigger, institutional club nights towards cosy, specialist parties.

It also saw a room of ecstatically sweaty men punching the air to latest single Release the Beast, what must surely be an ode to sexually frustrated male exhibitionists across the world. “You're allowed to sing along to this one. It's OK,” deadpans Gardi as the opening stomp of Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Part 2 kicks in. His tongue-in-cheek humour pulls the crowd back down to earth: sparkling Euro disco-pop it may be, but they're dancing to it in a basement down a dirty Glaswegian alley. It's probably best not to take it too seriously.

“I don't like the way that when so much of a fad is created out of something, it can die a death quite quickly,” says Gardi. “Our music's Hi-NRG, disco, italo, yes, but we're never going to tie ourselves down to a certain style. What comes out is up to the way we're feeling at that time. We know when we've got a song in a certain position and it feels right. Whenever it gets a little too serious we go for a pint and turn it on its head...”

Their shows, however, do bring together two serious obsessions: finding the perfect equipment to make that authentic retro sound, and making live music, well, live again. “When people just plug in a laptop, it sounds terrible, like an MP3 or something,” says Gardi. “For years in the 90s you could just play with a DAT tape made in a studio, that whole DIY ethic. But now I think people are sick of hearing tinny sounds on a laptop.”

They use analogue synths - “the real equipment” - which they've been collecting since they were 12. “It's now collected into this kind of Starship Enterprise of equipment in my flat. That's probably why I'm single. It has always been an issue with anyone I've been out with...”

Who better to impress with sound geekery than Glasgow's foremost purveyor of all things credible, JD Twitch? “The first time we played [Optimo] we put loads of effort into the stage set, visuals and sound, and Twitch just said, 'Fuck, the sound quality is way better than an actual club'.”

So was it just a case of right place, right time? Matt, who has known the Optimo guys since 2000, released his solo album, as Crème De Menthe, on their label OSCarr in 2005. From there, it was on to the hallowed Optimo Hogmanay slot.

“This year's was amazing, the biggest gig we'd ever done. We are fortunate getting that. But at the end of the day, if they hadn't liked our stuff, they wouldn't have bothered with us.”