Hogmanay interview: Groove Armada

THE past year has been a big one for Groove Armada, but not for any reason to do with record releases or live dates. Back in March, Andy Cato and Tom Findlay entered into the kind of trailblazing commercial sponsorship agreement that might change the future of music – working not with a record label but with a drinks company.

"We'd just left our label," explains Findlay, "so it seemed a good idea to try this initial one-year deal out. It's the shape of things to come, I think, that more and more bands will get involved in branding, rather than entering into traditional relationships with labels. We'll be bringing out a four-track EP through Bacardi in January, and we've done a lot of live shows and DJ gigs for them. They've taken us to all sorts of new places, like Russia, Brazil, Mexico."

Nobody buys music any more, or so we're told. The future direction of the music industry in the era of MP3s and file-sharing has been a big story in 2008 and a group like Groove Armada jumping into bed with a commercial partner made waves when it was announced. Contrary to reports, though, this hasn't been an attempt to tear down the business single-handed.

"We planned to spend a lot of this year on the road, anyway," says Findlay, "so doing a deal which involved performance as a central element made a lot of sense. This relationship is more like the deals that Live Nation have been doing with people like Madonna, where it's more based around gigs.

"To be honest, I think it's a bit too early for bands like us to go it alone completely. When it comes to releasing a record, there's a certain amount of expertise within a record company which means they're probably still the best people to work with, and they're much more efficient and purposeful organisations than they were a couple of years ago. The demise of the CD market means labels have been forced to grow up; they're cleverer and leaner, and much more accountable."

So Findlay says that next year's album, Groove Armada's sixth in a decade, might mean a return to a major label, albeit as "a joint venture or a 50/50 deal – I'm not going to sign my life away, because I've been doing that for 15 years".

As far as Groove Armada's new work goes, this week's Concert in the Gardens show will act as a definite endpoint to all that's gone before. Findlay says the gig will be on the scale of their weekend-closing headline set on the Other Stage at this year's Glastonbury festival – a definite highlight of 2008 for the duo – and will feature the same large band, dramatic lightshow and video backdrop. After this, they're going to all but tear the whole thing down and start from scratch.

"You've always got to freshen things up if that's what's needed," says Findlay. "The production we have harks back to an earlier era in dance music, to that overblown Chemical Brothers idea of an überdance event. We want to scale it back and really concentrate on the musicianship next year.

"If you look at groups like Friendly Fires or Klaxons, both of whom I'm really enjoying at the moment, people go to see them and not their production. Justice, who are the dance band of the year, put on a show that's just two guys standing in front of cardboard cut-out Marshall amps and a big cross. It's an arresting image, but it's also a lean, inexpensive set-up, which really focuses on the music above all else."

That doesn't mean, however, they're leaving fan-favourite songs such as I See You Baby and Superstylin' behind. Concentrating on the music, Findlay says, he and Cato are currently working on two albums, which will probably be released separately and a few months apart. One, he says, is a straight house music album inspired by their visits to Ibiza this year, and which may well come out on a smaller, specialised dance music label, or even as an online giveaway. The other is a full band production, and recording sessions for that have already gone ahead in Cato's place in the south of France.

More than that, Findlay won't say, and he's being tight-lipped about Hogmanay as well. "We'll still have all the same pyrotechnics and effects we used at Glastonbury," he says, "because this is the kind of show where they'll go down perfectly. The nice thing is that, because we're playing both sides of the Bells, we're in a situation where we'll probably get to walk out on-stage three times, if you count the encore. And we've got one or two nice little local surprises up our sleeve too… but I can't tell you any more!"

• Groove Armada headline the Concert in the Gardens in Edinburgh on 31 December.