The Rapture's Choice

IN EARLY JULY 2007, AS THE SKIES BEGAN TO DARKEN on a humid, cool summer day in London, the band The Rapture turned onto a pretty little street in Notting Hill, towards fame, fortune and their ultimate doom.

Two months earlier a mortgage lender called New Century had filed for bankruptcy, and opened the portal to a financial crisis. Two days earlier Steve Jobs had stood on a stage in California and introduced the iPhone, another kind of portal to roughly the same chaos. The world waited without knowing it was waiting.

One side of the street was lined with chocolate-box perfect houses (mostly still owned by people, not corporations headquartered in Liechtenstein or Cyprus). The other side of the street was dominated by an old church. Since the 70s, it has housed a recording studio, and record company offices. A plaque on the front commemorates Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. But the plaque could equally have mentioned Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music, Black Sabbath, Harry Nilsson or Band Aid.

The Rapture had been founded in the hardcore tradition by the singer, Luke Jenner, skinny and intense, with a mop of curls, and the drummer Vito Roccoforte, mellow and personable and just in every way a drummer, in California. For Jenner, reading between the lines of his public interviews, making music and moving audiences was a way to escape. "My mom was suicidal when I was growing up," he told Self Titled Magazine in 2018. "My job as a kid was to keep her alive. My dad would go off on these long business trips and I’d be home, trying to get my mom to not kill herself."

He and Roccoforte bounced around the west coast, getting into scrapes and sleeping in vans and making music, before they ended up in New York, signed to Sub Pop records. They were joined by Mattie Safer, six or so years younger, ambitious and creative, and Gabriel Andruzzi, a multi-instrumentalist, and were collaborating with DFA, otherwise known as James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy.

It worked. House of Jealous Lovers came out in early 2002, with an album, Echoes, not long after. They were, in their own way, smash hits. The Rapture were hot. They were everywhere. They were punk, and dance, and energy, and movie credits and Shynola graphics and all the things that were about to define a whole era of music on both sides of the Atlantic.

It had catapuled them to that heady level of fame where their idols had started to see them as peers. Where David Bowie wanted to chat, and where, one night in Miami, they were told that Timbaland wanted to meet them at his studio. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic. He loved the song Killing. He wanted to work with them. He was working a lot with Justin Timberlake, and he put Timberlake on to them. He told them Sexyback was partly inspired by The Rapture.

They were also touring constantly. And one morning in London, Safer was hanging out with his friend, a musician called Ben Rymer. The two had been DJ-ing together, and were hungover. Rymer's girlfriend was annoyed with him, and someone joked that there would be no sex for Ben. It stuck with Safer. And he turned it into, in his words "a loving diss track", inspired by the Go-Go music of Washington, DC. Jenner was into metal guitars, Scorpions, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Justice, so he added these huge jangly riffs and power chords over it.

"Ben wasn't too stoked about it,' Roccoforte says. His own band, Fat Truckers, were not having the same scale of moment as The Rapture. He just had no way to snap back on equal terms. Even when they had him record a verse, a reply, to make him feel more comfortable, he was not sure he was not merely being used.

The point was moot because they could never quite figure the track out. It was happening more and more. At first, Safer says, the band was "just jamming things out in the room, then forming a song out of it". But as time passed "people's creative interests drifted further apart". The focal point for that tension was Safer and Jenner, as the two vocalists.

They had also drifted away from Murphy and DFA. (Murphy says this was his catalyst to start LCD Soundsystem. Those who know him suspect this is revisionist history.) Their record deal was up, too, and they were taking meetings everywhere, with everyone who mattered.

When Rockstar Games approached them to do a track for Grand Theft Auto, they thought of No Sex For Ben. Timbaland had a deal with the company too, so it meant a chance to work with him. He and Justin Timberlake were in London to record an album about the perils of fame and fortune with Duran Duran, who were in the upstairs studio with their considerable entourages. Timberlake was also playing sold-out gigs at the O2 Arena (the ninth largest building on earth). In the midst of all the bright teeth and shiny hair, was a business proposition. An offer that would fatally divide the band.

"There were always creative tensions," Safer said. "In the earlier stage they made the music more interesting. But we had reached a point where they pulled us further apart." It wasn't helped by the fact that a year or two earlier, Jenner had had a son, and his mother had, in fact, killed herself.

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As they started to load into the studio, Roccoforte realised it had been a bad idea to order seafood pad thai on a pub menu earlier that day. It was the one Thai dish. The outlier. It couldn't have been ordered that often. Timbaland and his crew rolled in, with a palpable air of creative excitement that Roccoforte could feel alongside his rising nausea and dizziness.

When they met him, he was the chief executive, between meetings. Worn down by his own success. Moving from thing to thing. Tired from being on the road. Tired from working a lot. "It was like 'OK what are we doing'," Safer said, "OK, it's another day".

When they played him the demo, as he sat by the recording console, he sat silent. And then he seemed surprised. He had expected something different. Something more like House of the Jealous Lovers. And then he seemed inspired. He came to life in front of them. "Alright, now I'm excited," he said.

He suggested changing the groove a little. Keeping this. Discarding that. He believes in working quickly, and keeping things fresh. And then he started beatboxing. Laying down a rhythm in his mind. And then he got to work recreating what he heard in his head. "The way that he builds rhythm is really amazing, just as a fan," Safer said. "And to be able to sit and watch that happen that was very exciting."

Roccoforte started to feel increasingly hallucinatory. "Then Duran Duran comes down, with their wives and girlfriends," Roccoforte says, a squad of the beautiful and fragrant. They reiterated an offer for The Rapture to open for them. And then Timberlake came down. "He came in and was like super nice and real enthusiastic, really into the track, either he asked or somebody said do you want to sing on it, and I remember watching him stack harmonies real quick. There's this idea with pop stars that they're fake. But he's really talented."

"He seemed really excited to meet us," Safer said. "Like he had an insecurity about being this giant pop star, like we were cooler, as if he was a bit embarrassed about what he was in the culture. In some way envious of the idea of being a cool indie band as opposed to being a pop star."

Unspoken, but as present as anything else, was the fact that Timbaland and Timberlake wanted to sign The Rapture to a very particular record deal, backed by Interscope. "They were asking for a lot," Safer says. "To get specific there were these things called 360 deals — they included concert tickets, merch deals, everything. The feeling was that we already had the touring income and a pretty healthy merch income and stuff like that."

The Rapture's manager, Paul McGuinness, who had been with U2 through obscurity and megastardom, hated it. No band he managed, he said, would ever sign a deal like that. Jenner was against it. Roccoforte equated it with selling their souls, pushing in all the chips.

But, Safer says, "you can look at it the other way. In 2008 and 2009 anything those two people touched was successful." For him it raised questions of what the band wanted to be. He hoped and thought that working with them would "push our music in interesting and challenging ways, and push us to get better. The other members were scared that he would overwhelm our creativity."

Safer explained it all to his girlfriend. The creative differences. The split paths ahead of them. "She was like 'wouldn't you make a lot of money if you did this?' And I said yes. And she was like 'why wouldn't you just fucking do it then?'"

Roccoforte started to play the drums a little, but he remembers feeling that Timbaland didn't really work with live drums. He thinks a kick or a snare might have been sampled for the final track. But he was soon passed out, his mind whirling with famous faces, and the vertiginous fear that comes with poisoning. He was hospitalised that night. The rest of the band played their parts pretty quickly, and not long after that, they left SARM too.

"Because Vito was in the hospital we ended up staying extra time in London," Safer says. They took Timberlake up on his offer to come to his shows, and went backstage afterwards. He was friendly, and wanted to make sure they were taken care of, but it was strange and cold. A tour has its own inner life, Safer says, and when you go the backstage on someone else's, it's like you're in their office with nothing to do.

They heard the track a while later. Timberlake's vocal harmonies, and some other vocals, were gone. Ben Rymer's verse, snapping back, regaining some of his dignity (sample line: "trust fund hipsters, college boy gangsters") didn't make the cut. There were more guitars. "We wrote back being like hey what happened to those vocals and could we hear it without those guitars," Safer said. It was made clear to them that Timbaland does not take notes. You get what you're given.

To Safer, "it didn't sound drastically different". Roccoforte says "he flipped the feel in a really cool way." There's something to that vagueness. Listening to the five versions of the track that exist, from the first demo to the final release, it's hard to define what Timbaland did as anything but magic.

The first demo is recognisably the song that came out. It has the same spirit. The squealing guitars and the go-go beat are there. The second version, recorded by Jimmy Douglass, Timbaland's collaborator, and a legendary engineer and producer in his own right, adds a live-feeling clarity and drive. The third, produced by Paul Epworth (who later produced Bloc Party, Florence and the Machine and Adele) adds spacey accents. It's cohesive and chunky, powerful and dramatic. Epworth's second attempt, working with Ewan Pearson, is the same, but stripped back and propulsive.

Timbaland's version is somehow just more thrilling. It has a new tension, and a new clarity. It's breathy and heavy, simple and complex, all at the same time. It makes you feel tougher. Like maybe you yourself can beatbox a rhythm that makes everyone want to move, or rip out little dance metal guitar riffs or slabs of power-chord, or ricky-ticky-tick the fuck out of a cowbell.

It became a radio play pop smash hit in Australia, and a sleeper classic for the band. Jenner said it kept them alive for years. If you put it on at a party, everyone will ask you what it is, because it sounds like nothing else exactly.

A month later The Rapture were supporting Daft Punk on tour. They were almost selected for an Apple commercial. Almost put on BBC Radio One's main playlist. "If all that shit happened things probably would have blown up," Roccoforte said. "But it didn't."

A few months after that Jenner left. Safer left the next year. Since then, the band has reformed — without Safer — to release a really good album, In The Grace of Your Love (produced by Phillipe Zdar of Cassius) with DFA in 2011, and split again, and reformed again — without Safer — to play reunion shows, that were canceled because of the pandemic in 2020. Roccoforte and Safer are now the rhythm section for Poolside. Andruzzi is studying for a graduate degree in ethnomusicology. (His thesis was about "musicians, artists, and healers who engage sonically with plants".)

Jenner was a life coach. He recently re-formed the Rapture entirely on his own, excluding his previous bandmates, and set out on tour. (He did not respond to messages seeking an interview for this story. And there's no word as to whether he's playing No Sex For Ben.)

Record deals have not improved. Spotify launched in 2008, and now even the most famous musicians in the world are tied to onerous contracts, until their music has been streamed billions — with a b — of times. For Roccoforte, with the benefit of hindsight, it all seems simple. "You have to follow your integrity. If it works, great. If it doesn't, then it's still fine." ⸭

This is a free preview of the first story in Bungalow’s first series, Myths and Legends. If you liked it, subscribe here for more.