If there’s ever a sure sign that a band has “made it” in show business, it’s getting parodied by the Mighty Boosh.

That’s exactly what happened to Ladytron during the height of electroclash mania, on the cult British comedy duo’s famous “Spirit of Jazz” episode. It was a semi-dubious honor at the time — multi-instrumentalist Daniel Hunt recalls “laughing [his] head off” when he first saw the sketch, but says Noel Fielding’s Hunt-like “asymmetric mustache” felt like a “direct attack!” — because the pioneering Liverpool electronic group had always “very much felt like [they] were observers of someone else’s party,” according to keyboardist/co-vocalist Mira Aroyo.

“It became like our catchphrase: ‘We’re not electroclash!’” Hunt chuckles. “I remember someone saying to me, ‘God, the way that you’re constantly denying you’re electroclash is just soooo electroclash!’ We couldn’t escape it.”

But Ladytron did, in fact, escape it. Unlike many of their electroclash/electroclash-adjacent (or “indie sleaze”) peers, who bore the brunt of the movement’s brutal backlash, Ladytron, who always marched to the beat of their own drum machine, continue to survive, thrive, and reach a diverse audience of fans, 22 years after the Boosh spoof.

For instance, Brian Eno, whose Roxy Music inspired the Ladytron band name, became a major supporter, inviting them to join him at the Sydney Opera House and, on historic day that keyboardist/vocalist Helen Marnie describes as “odd” and “kind of funny,” at the House of Commons for a political conference. Christina Aguilera, who cited Ladytron as one of her favorite artists, recruited them (along with Goldfrapp, Peaches, Santigold, M.I.A., and Le Tigre) for Bionic, her once-misunderstood futurepop album that has since become a cult classic. More recently, the surprise TikTok explosion of Ladytron’s 2002 club hit “Seventeen” has introduced them to a new generation of fans (what Marnie jokingly calls “fresh blood”) — including Addison Rae, who has expressed a desire to work with them.

“It was interesting today that quite a few people who came here for the signing were here because their parents listened to us,” Aroyo tells LPTV, sitting with Hunt and Marnie at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after an in-store event for Ladytron’s critically acclaimed eighth album, Paradises. “It’s a sound that’s maybe come back around in the ether as well. It’s a sound that was alien maybe 20 years ago and was just us, and now it’s kind of almost everywhere, in some shape or form.”

“We’ve never followed any particular trend, or we’ve probably done the opposite of what people expected a few times… and yet, we survived,” declares Hunt, when asked about Ladytron’s longevity. “We’ve survived labels going bankrupt, being shut down, all of this other stuff, and here we are.”

“It’s nice that the music is still relevant to a completely different generation, who’ve grown up in such a different way to the way people were when the songs were written,” adds Aroyo with a smile. “It’s like a Jurassic Era.”

In the deeply entertaining and wide-ranging extended video interview above, and in the edited Q&A below, Ladytron discuss their Liverpool, Eno, Aguilera, and electroclash memories with LPTV, and explain why Paradises is their most creatively inspired album in years.

LPTV: Paradises is your eighth album, your second album as a trio, and your longest album, at 16 songs and 73 minutes. And it’s kind of a full-circle record: Some of it was recorded in your old home city of Liverpool, and it’s your danciest record in a long time, the result of one of your most productive phases since those early Liverpool days. Where did this burst of creativity come from?

HUNT: I think personally, because the last record was made in such difficult circumstances, the previous record — we basically started it just one week before lockdown in 2020, which did complicate things slightly. And so, we went through all that and we still made a good record, but now we to want to have fun mainly. And that was a catalyst. … It was this really intense period where every time we went in the studio, after an hour there was a new tune or a new song. And there were various reasons for that — but fun, principally.

MARNIE: As Danny said, there was maybe a lot of pressure on us before, like 2020 on those kind of years. And so, this time around, it was just freer and no stress. And so, I think that probably the best comes out of you at those periods.

LPTV: Your mixer, Jim Abiss, thinks Paradises is your best album since Witching Hour. Do agree?

MARNIE: I mean, he would say that — because he worked on it!

HUNT: And he produced Witching Hour.

MARNIE: But I think he’s right. The best thing you’ve done is, you would hope, the last thing you’ve done. We always feel that way — that we’ve put out the best thing that we possibly could.

HUNT: The objective of making a new record is you should be aiming to make your best record or it’s pointless. We double down on that because we felt freer and we didn’t have these external circumstances like obstacles. But Jim might be right in some ways. It feels like if not the best, one of the best ones, to me.

AROYO: It’s the longest record.

LPTV: Do you consider Witching Hour and Paradises to be companion pieces? Is there any throughline between the two?

HUNT: I think the connection to Witching Hour for me would be that it feels like a jump — it’s a jump in terms of ambition, and I think it has that in common rather than the aesthetic.

AROYO: If anything, it kind of reminds me actually of the earlier two records, sort of in a state of mind. I don’t know why, but it just kind of takes me back to that era of writing or working on 604 and Light & Magic. There’s an innocence to it, somehow.

LPTV: I mentioned that some of Paradises was recorded in Liverpool, which is where you’re from. A lot of people associate Liverpool with the Beatles, obviously, but there’s a rich electronic and post-punk history there: OMD, Dead or Alive, the KLF, the Farm, the Teardrop Explodes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Big in Japan, A Flock of Seagulls, famous ‘90s clubs like Cream and Voodoo. Was any of that history informing Paradises? I know you’re not especially nostalgic people, but there is some nostalgia to this record.

HUNT: Yeah, it’s subconscious. It’s something that basically forced its way out. … Cream every Saturday, so many people came [to Liverpool] from outside, and me and my friends had this little party on a parallel street, like one block over. Those people would end up coming to our party and dancing to Northern Soul and weird underground records or whatever, but they would be reacting to them as if they were house music.

LPTV: Scouse house? I’ve heard that term.

HUNT: Yes, that’s really a thing. … I had a studio and well; it became a studio because the guy next door was a Scouse house producer. I got talking to him one day and this was just different worlds of music. I felt like we had nothing in common at all, but I saw how easy it was, basically. I went in the studio and I was like, “Wait, you just make records here and just release them and you don’t sit in a rehearsal room with a band four nights a week and doing all these things that really take a lot of time and effort, and you just release records?” That was like an epiphany. He basically taught me how to sequence and program. So, I think Scouse house is actually responsible for Ladytron in some way.

You also recorded Paradises in London at the studio where my favorite David Bowie album, Scary Monsters, was made. I’d love to hear about that experience.

HUNT: I mean, that’s like hallowed ground, Dean Street Studios. .. It was Tony Visconti’s old studio. It was Jim Abiss’s idea to do a week in there of basically just chaos, taking a more or less a finished record and just doing this chaos phase where we experimented and turned things upside down and added textural stuff. And it was really worthwhile. It felt like it felt like we needed that phase before we mix to just see how far we could push it.

AROYO: We do always basically all produce stuff at home to a certain level, and then in various studios, and then we gather around and throw in the unknown elements.

LPTV: I mentioned Bowie, which then takes me to Brian Eno. Obviously, I assume your band is named after the Roxy Music song…

Yeah, it’d be weird if we weren’t!

LPTV: True, true. Well, Eno once said Ladytron were “the best of English pop music.” What an honor. What did that mean to you guys?

AROYO: I think the first time [we met Eno], it was [through] his daughter, actually.

HUNT: His daughter introduced him to us. His daughter played us to him. And that was like, “Oh my God, her dad’s heard of us!”

LPTV: Did Eno ever give you any advice?

HUNT: He did, actually. He put us on at this festival at Sydney Opera House that he curated, and I remember he did give me some advice personally. He said after the gig, “You should sing more.” And I said, “What do you mean? Like Ringo Starr or something, one song per album? And he said, “No, no, you should use your voice as a kind of layer underneath Helen and Mira’s voices.” And I did actually start doing that. That’s really been the way we do things, since he suggested it. So, he’s basically executive producer of our last four albums. Arguably.

AROYO: Now he’s going to want the credit!

HUNT: I’ve really opened a can of worms here, haven’t I? Yeah, I shouldn’t have said that.

LPTV: Do you guys have any other Eno memories?

MARNIE: There was one time when he invited us to the House of Commons for a Lib Dem conference, like a political thing.

AROYO: That was pretty weird.

MARNIE: It was odd. It was kind of funny.

LPTV: What exactly did that entail?

AROYO: Going into room full of men. Like Brian May. Brian May, next to Chris Martin.

MARNIE: And listening to [former Liberal Democrats party leader] Nick Clegg giving a speech…

AROYO: About the power of creativity.

MARNIE: Yes, it was about creativity, so it was all good intentions. But it was very strange that we were there. .. I don’t think any of us were Lib Dem supporters, but it was fine.

AROYO: It was more like a tourist trip, like, “Let’s go inside the House of Commons!”

LPTV: You’ve had many famous supporters. Besides Brian Eno, there’s the Pet Shop Boys, Trent Reznor… but I want to talk about your contributions to Bionic, the very misunderstood 2010 album by Christina Aguilera. No one got it at the time; there was a really bad backlash to it.

HUNT: I think there was a backlash followed by a fore-lash, I think.

LPTV: Yes, kind of like Art Pop by Lady Gaga. Some pop albums don’t get understood at the time, especially by a female pop star who’s expected to do only one thing. You contributed two classic fan-favorite tracks to Bionic, “Birds of Prey” and “Little Dreamer.” And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but “Birds of Prey” was named by Billboard as one of the “Best Deep Cuts by 21st Century Pop Stars.”

HUNT: Really? When did they say that? Nobody never told us. Good, good. There you go. I think with that record, we always say that the vision Christina had for it at the beginning, when we started working with her, was quite different to how it ended up. A lot of what she planned ended up being like disc two of the deluxe; that was kind of what she had in mind. And I think it was too weird for her audience, and the label were a bit freaked-out.

LPTV: Oh, so it was going to be even weirder?

HUNT: It was way weirder than what you got! The singles, I think, were added later to be more familiar to her audience. But [the original album] was way weirder. “Birds of Prey” was going to be track 1 on it. She was talking about starting their live sets with it and everything.

LPTV: Wow. It’s a shame it only ended up being a bonus track. If you look at the comments on YouTube for both of your Bionic songs, for “Birds of Prey” people say stuff like, “This should have been the single. History would’ve been different.” And for “Little Dreamer,” there was a comment: “This is how the album should have sounded!” But Christina reached out to you directly, right? It wasn’t like some bandwagon-jumping label person saying, “Let’s try to make her sound indie,” or whatever.

HUNT: It was all from her.

MARNIE: If you think about it, it’s such a shame that an artist of that size and talent can’t do what she wants. It’s pretty shitty, really. … Would that happen now? I mean, Gaga can do a jazz album or an operatic album and that’s cool, but…

HUNT: Yeah, I think [Aguilera] would get away with it now. … It just stuck me as very genuine, because she contacted us through management. You’d assume that this is something set up, but it wasn’t. It was from her. She’d basically got a list of artists that she listened to that she liked and said, “I want to work with them,” rather than asking the producer, “Can you approximate this? Make something that sounds like this? — which is how most people work, if we’re honest.

LPTV: Is it true that you considered giving Christina “Destroy Everything You Touch”?

HUNT: No, that’s not true. She was given an instrumental of “Ace of Hz”! Nobody knows that. But it didn’t get used.

LPTV: I’ve heard that Addison Rae is a Ladytron fan and wants to work with you now.

HUNT: Yeah, she approached us, but nothing happened.

LPTV: Were you surprised that a Gen Z, mainstream pop star like Addison was interested in collaborating?

MARNIE: Not really. [laughs]

HUNT: I mean, of course! But load of younger people got into us because in 2021, “Seventeen” viralized on TikTok. We didn’t lift a finger. It just happened. It was completely organic. We just observed it from afar, and I think that’s how she discovered us.

MARNIE: Basically, nieces and nephews and friends’ nieces or daughters would get in touch and say, “Oh my God, have you seen this??

HUNT: And then Steve, our manager, sent us an email going, “Do you have any idea what this is about? ” And it was just a screengrab of the spins of “Seventeen,” the Spotify streams. It was just tootling along at the bottom, and then it was just this vertical line off the graph. I said, “I think it might be the internet.”

LPTV: Yes, that was an interesting trend where it seemed like a lot of young women and girls were interpreting the “Seventeen” lyrics in a profound way.

HUNT: Yeah, a lot of personal interpretations. It was a medium for them to talk about their own lives. It was really quite serious, quite harrowing, some of it, to be honest.

LPTV: Since we were talking about artists you have worked with or have been approached by, do you guys have any dream collaborations?

HUNT: I feel like if we say it, it will not happen!

LPTV: I feel like if you say it and put it into the universe, it might!

MARNIE: I don’t know, because we’ve had things that were going to happen and I have told one person and it’s always fallen through!

LPTV: You don’t have confirm that’s happening, just if you could work with anyone. Like Cher or whoever.

HUNT: Let’s name someone impossible. Cher. Let’s just go with Cher.

AROYO: Barbra Streisand.

MARNIE: No, I don’t want Barbra Streisand! I don’t think her voice is any good anymore.

HUNT: Debbie Harry. … Actually, Andy Bell from Erasure said he wanted to work with us.

MARNIE: Pet Shop Boys would be cool. Or Chappell Roan.

HUNT: Let’s get a kind of “We Are the World “situation. We’ll just have everyone. Get Springsteen in there, Bob Dylan.

LPTV: You could call it Ladytron Aid.

HUNT: Yeah, it’s just our charity. It just comes to us.

LPTV: This wasn’t really a collaboration per se, but I was a fan of “Kylietron” — the mashup on John Peele’s show that was “Playgirl” with “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”

HUNT: I’d forgotten all about that, because it got a little bit overshadowed by Soulwax’s remix of “Seventeen” when they did a remix of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” like a rock version. We were in the studio in Los Feliz [in L.A.] recording [Light & Magic], and I sent the demo rough mix of “Seventeen” to David from Soulwax/2 Many DJs. And he was like, “Oh, this is an instant classic.” And I was like, “Could you reckon you could do a remix like a kind of rock version like you did with Kylie?” And about 24 hours later he sent it back. He just recorded it all, recorded the drums, everything ,and had this version. It basically sounded like Sonic Youth or something. So, I think all of that kind of erased the Kylietron thing from my memory, in the confusion.

LPTV: That was such a great clubbing era. I don’t know how you feel about this term… you’ve talked in the past about your feelings about Ladytron being lumped in with electroclash, but how do you feel about “indie sleaze”? Now people are calling everything from that era indie sleaze, but that term didn’t exist in the aughts.

HUNT: That’s the key thing. I think it’s good, because it’s reappraised that time. There’s a lot of incongruity, things that were not really related to each other that have actually been put into that. With electroclash, at the time we just hated being told we were something, after we’d been independent and doing things ourselves. … As soon as they said it was electroclash, we’d go, “Hold on, we didn’t agree to this!” It felt like we were being press-ganged onto a sinking ship.

AROYO: At the same time, [then Ladytron member] Reuben [Wu] and I DJed at that festival. [Electroclash] started out as a festival, basically; it was right after 9/11 and there was this kind of crazy, hedonistic atmosphere, and it was quite special, actually. But for us, it just very much felt like we were observers of someone else’s party. We didn’t feel like it was our scene. We were allowed in, but it wasn’t our thing.

HUNT: But we didn’t want [to be part of] someone else’s thing as well. We were pushed to the front of it, like we are the definitive electroclash band. One press trip just after we recorded Light & Magic, we were in the U.S. and every interview we did, we would be asked about this and we would deny that we were part of it. It became like our catchphrase: “We’re not electroclash!” I remember someone saying to me, “God, the way that you’re constantly denying you’re electroclash is just soooo electroclash!” We couldn’t escape it. It was like the Streisand Effect.

LPTV: There you go with another Barbra Streisand mention!

HUNT: But something changed. … What electroclash represented to the kids we met [on tour] was this portal to this imagined New York, this magical Berlin, magical Paris, magical London that they didn’t have access to. Once we started seeing it like that, it was actually a really positive moment. Our opinion of it changed. We never hated it. We just didn’t want to be called it. That was the problem.

AROYO: You look at it now, and I feel like it really did influence a lot of pop culture. It was probably like 10, 15 years ahead of its time. So now it kind of feels nice to be associated with it.

LPTV: I think kids now look at that period and think “Wow, that must have been so fun.” The only phones people had were Razrs, people weren’t filming everything, and everyone was going out of the house…

AROYO: Everyone looked wrecked the whole time!

HUNT: Yeah, it’s nostalgia for this kind of spontaneous, offline existence. There’s also definitely a nostalgia for the ’90s going on, for people who don’t remember it or weren’t born in the same way, just like when we were kids and it was like, “Oh, I wish we grew up in the ‘60s.” I guess it’s no different, but it’s very generationally difficult to perceive how this looks and feels to a younger person, having experienced it.

LPTV: I do think electroclash was an important movement. It was very queer-positive, sex-positive, a lot of women. But the backlash was so brutal. It was almost like what happened with “Disco Sucks” in 1979.

AROYO: I think that there was a little bit of that. I mean, the British press does have quite a sharp edge as well. There was a malice to it. I think that the queer sort of thing, when you look back on it, that was definitely an element. But there were comedy shows that satirized it. … It was an easy thing to satirize. It was perceived to be a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing.

HUNT: The Mighty Boosh’s Ladytron satire was a direct one. That was quite fun. When I saw it, I was laughing my head off.

LPTV: I feel like you’ve really made it if The Mighty Boosh parodies you! Where can I see this?

HUNT: I think the episode is called “Jazz.” They form an electro band and their song is” I’m Electro Boy, You’re Electro Girl.” Vince has an asymmetric mustache, and as I’d only just grown a mustache at that point, and said, “This is a direct attack on me!”

LPTV: Were you guys happy about this spoof, or were you insulted?

HUNT: I was just worried that no one would know it was about us. It was a kind of milieu stuff.

LPTV: Well, obviously, despite the electroclash backlash or anyone thinking you were a flash in the pan, that didn’t happen. To what do you attribute Ladytron’s longevity?

MARNIE: I think songwriting.

AROYO: Persistence.

HUNT: Kind of involuntary creativity. What else are you supposed to do? Making albums that are designed to be listened to, because a lot of records are not designed to be listened to anymore.

LPTV: What do you mean by that?

HUNT: Well, just there are records made to monetize social media presence. There’s a lot of that, and we don’t really do any of that. The records are made to be listened to, and I think that counts as something people appreciate. We’ve never followed any particular trend, or we’ve probably done the opposite of what people expected a few times — like Witching Hour, especially — and yet, we survived. We’ve survived labels going bankrupt, being shut down, all of this other stuff, and here we are.

AROYO: Also, it was interesting today that quite a few people who came here for the signing were here because their parents listened to us. It’s a sound that’s maybe come back around in the ether as well. It’s a sound that was alien maybe 20 years ago and was just us, and now it’s kind of almost everywhere, in some shape or form.

HUNT: It’s funny when you describe the sound and just in its raw components in a kind of unscientific way. I was at this bar in Sao Paulo, where I live, and the waiter was asking me what my band sounded like. I started to explain it: “It’s kind of like electronic, female vocals, drum machine,” whatever. And he says, “Oh, like Madonna.” I just kind of went, “Yeah, actually, that’s enough for me. I’m just going to say we sound like Madonna now.” Why not?

LPTV: It’s not a bad description. I’d take it as a compliment.

HUNT: I used to say “New Order with female vocals” to taxi drivers back in the day.

LPTV: Does it trip you out that you guys have been a band for this long?

MARNIE: Yes. But it’s a good thing, because obviously that means you’ve got fresh blood listening to you. On the other hand, it does make you realize how long you’ve been going and you’re no longer [young].

AROYO: To me, it’s nice that the music is still relevant to a completely different generation, who’ve grown up in such a different way to the way people were when the songs were written. It’s like a Jurassic Era.