I Monster: 'Charli D'Amelio's using our track with herself putting make-up on and it’s getting millions of likes'

Gosling, who also records under the alias Regal Worm and is part of the psychedelic duo Cobalt Chapel with Cecilia Fage, recalls that he was actually introduced to Honer around 1990 by a friend. “We were in the music section at Sheffield Central Lending Library where they had the CDs and they’d still got a bit of vinyl at the time and I was flicking through that when my mate who was I with said, ‘Oh, this is Dean, who I’d been talking about.’ He asked me what I was into,” he recalls.

Having played in a heavy metal band in the 1980s, Gosling’s tastes were then evolving while he was at college. “It was indie music, the Manchester scene, which was crossing over into dance music, which I got really into. With going to the venue The Leadmill, which was also a nightclub, they’d play all the indie stuff at the time and then they’d have a half-hour or 40-minute window of playing bleepy techno from the newly established Warp label. It was all those early singles like Sweet Exorcist, LFO and Tricky Disco. I thought it was amazing this music, and Dean was listening to the same kind of thing.”

Honer suggested they get together at his studio to try to make some electronic music of their own. Gosling remembers: “I’d got an Atari ST, the gaming computer which you could also make music on, and we got together and started making tunes. It was bleepy, techno-y kind of music, which was what we were into, then it kind of drifted off. We weren’t making house music, we weren’t DJs, we weren’t into going to raves or anything like that; we were into the more cerebral, Kraftwerk-style electronic music. So that’s what we did for the next seven or eight years.”

“At the time all that technology became available,” says Honer. “Cheap samplers, cheaper computers, which meant you didn’t have to hire out a studio to do it. You could take your time experimenting. We were playing about and then it was sort of how can we make ourselves sound different from anyone else?”

That was the point at which they started sampling older records. “Not just breakbeat stuff, but easy listening and more obscure chartity shop records,” Honer recalls. “Mixing that with drum machines, synths and vocoders is how Daydream in Blue came about.”

The chorus on the duo’s best-known track, which would become a top 20 hit in the UK, was sampled from a 1970 recording by a German group. Gosling had discovered it on an easy listening compilation that he bought in a charity shop in Ashton-under-Lyne. “It was by a Polydor act called the Günter Kallmann Choir doing a version of a song which I didn’t know at the time had been a European hit single by a Belgian psychedelic band called the Wallace Collection,” he says.

“I only found that out in about 1999 or 2000 when I was working in a record shop and I saw the vinyl which had the track Daydream by the same writers. We’d already done the track by then and released it. Until then we just knew the Günter Kallmann version which we thought was interesting and part of it’s catchy, it had great production, which a lot of those Polydor records had at the time, like James Last.”

Neveroddoreven also features samples of recordings by other easy listening artists such as Val Doonican and Jim Reeves. Gosling says they simply them as building blocks from which to construct their own songs. “I think the first vocals that we used on our first album These Are Our Children, which we never released because it’s full of samples that weren’t cleared. If you listen to a big band...it instantly takes you somewhere, like a film, it’s evocative of something, it might be the late 60s, a strip club or something specific, that automatically influences a kind of singing style and the lyric. So that’s what we did initially.”

Honer adds: “A lot of our stuff now, we might sample something very obscure, even like off YouTube and then write something over the top of that and then get rid of the sample. It gives you a template, whether it’s chord changes, it inspires something that you might not sit down and come up with yourself but you re-work it and re-work it. It’s often a good starting point for writing, sample a couple of bars, it might be a piece of classical Chinese music or whatever, it gives you a road that you might not have gone down if you’re sat there yourself with a piano.”

Latterly, I Monster have enjoyed a huge streaming hit with their song Who Is She which teenagers began using as accompaniment to animé clips which they posted on TikTok. “Then loads of people started doing their versions and it grew...Then there were influencers who we’d never heard of before like Charli D’Amelio, she’s got millions of followers, she’s the number one influencer in the world, apparently she’s using that track with herself putting the make-up on and it’s getting millions of likes. Kim Kardashian has got a clip with her and her daughter, baby clips, a bit cheesy but with the track on it.

“So we thought, this is interesting, we need to think about how we might milk it later on. So that’s how that happened through something nobody knew about 20 years ago when Who Is She first came out, it didn’t exist and the people making it viral probably weren’t born either.”

Neveroddoreven reissue is out now. I Monster play at The Leadmill, Sheffield on June 21. https://leadmill.co.uk/event/i-monster/