Words: Mark Perkins
The music scene in 2024 is an unpredictable beast. Ask your average Sheffield to reel off a list of local bands, and after the usual suspects of Hawley, Jarvis and the Human League are declared, it could be some time until they mention I Monster. Yet Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling have been making music together for over 20 years, creating innovative electronic synth-pop which often turns up in all manner of films and TV shows.
Despite not releasing any new material since around 2016, I Monster are about to embark on a hugely exciting 16-date European tour, including venues in Berlin, Budapest, Paris, Istanbul – and Sheffield, of course. All this follows from a totally unexpected worldwide surge in interest in their music from the most unlikely of sources. I called into their Nether Edge studio to find out more.
Before we get into the recent fortunes of I Monster, can we get a brief history 101 of the band? As I know it, you’ve been working as I Monster in Sheffield since the late ’90s?
Jarrod: We first met in about 1991. I’m from Stocksbridge and was at college up at Norton, doing an art course. I was in Sheffield Music Library, back when they still let you borrow vinyl, and in walked Dean. Someone introduced us, we got talking, and realised we were both listening to the same type of music. I’m from a metal background, but in the early ’90s I was getting into the indie scene, particularly the stuff they were playing at the Leadmill on the weekend. In the middle of all the indie tunes, they’d play a block of bleepy techno stuff for about 40 minutes, then some hip-hop, then back to The Smiths. It was my introduction to music by Sweet Exorcist, LFO, Tricky Disco and all those early Warp releases. Dean was listening to the same stuff and starting up a studio in town, so he asked me if I wanted to come down and make some tunes. I’d started making music using MIDI and samples and bought myself an Atari ST computer, so I had a basic setup at home. At Dean’s studio, we just started banging out tunes.
Dean: Around that time, the technology became cheap enough to make music at home. You could buy a sampler for £300 and you were away. I had a couple of analogue synths and the music was mainly based around samples. Jarrod even started sampling easy-listening LPs. We got an Arts Council grant which gave us enough money to put out our first album, These Are Our Children, on CD. But we never cleared the rights to any of the music we used. We pressed up about 500 but had to give them away because we couldn’t sell them officially. One track was an early proto version of ‘Daydream [In Blue]’, using the same sample, but without the vocoder section. A guy from Warner Brothers, Jonathan Dickins, who is now Adele’s manager, heard it and called us. He liked the album, told us he really loved the Daydream track and added that we should re-work it.
Jarrod: It started getting played on BBC Radio 1 after Nemone picked it up and started playing it on her show, so it all kicked off from there. Rough Trade stocked it, sold out, and rang us up late one night for more copies of the single. After that, there were a few labels interested and we got signed up.
Dean: It went into the charts, but we didn’t have an album’s worth of tracks to follow it with. We spent a year recording some more tracks for our first official album release in 2003, called Neveroddoreven.
Jarrod: We couldn’t do the traditional thing of a single, followed by an album, followed by more singles, so we lost a lot of traction and when we finally released the album it didn’t sell very well. We had tracks which we thought were good pop singles, tunes like ‘Who Is She?’, but the record company got cold feet.
“A couple of years ago, something very strange happened, which we just couldn’t understand.”
What were your next steps?
Dean: We did some touring off the back of the album. We were popular in France and Switzerland, and in our live band we had Marianne and Fred from The Lovers. We did a few more singles on the Instant Karma label, but then we left. We released the Dense Swarm Of Ancient Stars album in 2009 as a self-release.
Jarrod: There were some good potential singles on that album, but we didn’t really promote it as well as we should have, and we didn’t do any more live performances. We’d always had other projects that we were involved in running alongside I Monster, and we went our separate ways to work on our own projects for a time. We made the Bright Sparks album in 2016, which was very conceptual, not meant for radio and was the last proper I Monster album of new material.
This leads us to a fairly recent out-of-the-blue comeback for I Monster. Could you tell us a bit about what’s happened there?
Jarrod: A couple of years ago, something very strange happened, something we just couldn’t understand. Seemingly out of nowhere, ‘Who Is She?’ from the Neveroddoreven album started being played on Spotify. Up until then, Daydream was still our most-played song, but monthly plays of ‘Who Is She?’ kept on growing and growing. We knew it wasn’t on any adverts or TV shows, so we couldn’t understand where it was coming from. After some digging, we found out that TikTok users were uploading clips and using the track as background music. As it spread around TikTok, the numbers just snowballed. All this activity led to people going to Spotify to hear the original. Around 18 months ago, it was getting around nearly one million plays a day. Some of the biggest TikTokers in the world were using it – Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato, Charli D’Amelio – all of these people I’ve never heard of. But of course, my kids knew them all. It’s now been played over 125 million times.
As it spread around TikTok, the numbers just snowballed. All this activity led to people going to Spotify to hear the original. Around 18 months ago, it was getting around nearly one million plays a day. Some of the biggest TikTokers in the world were using it.
Dean: People started getting in touch asking if we’d thought about doing some gigs. Using the Spotify analytics, we can see who is listening and where they live. The agents can look at it and put you where the listeners are. We’re playing in Istanbul as apparently it’s really big there, and tickets are selling really well. We’re playing at a large venue, and we’ve sold half the tickets already. We’ve got a new band, which will look very different from the last time we played live – there’s no drummer for a start, and it’s going to be a lot more electronic. There are visuals for every track by Katie Mason, who I worked with in [International] Teachers Of Pop, and Jarrod and I will be doing electronics and vocoders. There are two vocalists, Jenny Green and Hannah Hu. Jenny’s from The Raincoats, and also plays guitar and violin. Hannah toured with the Specials and Primal Scream. Now also seemed like a good time to re-release Neveroddoreven, as it came out 20 years ago, so there’s a vinyl copy, plus some unreleased and rare stuff coming out at the end of March. We’re calling it the ‘Who Are They Tour’. When we’ve played some live dates we’re planning to finish a new album, which we’ve already started planning for.
Do you think you do have a big Sheffield audience? It’s almost like you’re unsung heroes in a sense.
Dean: I don’t really know. We were never even a one-hit wonder. Daydream wasn’t really a massive hit. We were supposed to be going on Top of the Pops, wearing the fly masks we’d had made, and it would have sold really well. But the week we were due to go on, we missed out on being on the show by one chart place. It was in the top 30 for months but never went higher than number 20. It just kept selling and selling. People know the track, but don’t know who did it, and also don’t know that I Monster are from Sheffield. We’ve never actually played as I Monster in Sheffield. In fact, we’ve only ever done three UK gigs: one in Manchester and two in London. Other than that, we’ve only ever played in Europe.
Jarrod: It’s odd really that we’ve never really had to do anything to get the success we’ve had. We just put out the music. We were lucky that Daydream got picked up, and the TikTok thing has just happened without any involvement from us. We’ll be playing to kids who weren’t even born when Daydream came out. One of our worries is that our new fanbase of TikTok-addicted girls will have to lie about their age to get into the gigs!
I Monster play Sheffield City Hall on 24 April. Tickets and more info on their upcoming tour available from linktr.ee/imonstermusic
