Ex-Luna Members Talk Music and Matrimony
By Andrew Clayman
Published in Chicago Innerview, February 2008
Twenty years ago, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips were beginning their careers at opposite ends of the pop culture spectrum. Wareham, a transplanted New Zealander and Harvard graduate, was fronting the innovative Boston drone-rock band Galaxie 500, while across the country, Phillips was earning her own cult status as the singing voice of Jem— the “truly outrageous” title character of the popular ‘80s children’s cartoon.
Suffice it to say, there was very little intermingling among their respective fans at that point. But thanks to life’s delightful left turns, Dean and Britta have since established themselves as one of indie rock’s leading couples—not just on stage, but in a very real and legally binding sense.
“I feel very lucky to be married to Dean,” says Phillips, who tied the knot with Wareham in 2006 after a seven year musical courtship. “Our relationship and our rock n’ roll partnership are intertwined. The only difference between them that I can think of,” she chuckles, “is that I’m probably more opinionated about music than our home life.”
Like most rock romances, Dean and Britta’s relationship started out purely professional. In 2000, Phillips was hired as the new bassist for Luna—the brilliant but perennially underappreciated band that Wareham formed after Galaxie 500’s 1991 demise. Though Dean was already married at the time, the unavoidable sexual tension soon set it.
“In Luna, we probably noticed that tension the most when we were on stage,” recalls Wareham. “It was exciting. I guess it comes from being interested in each other, but yet, you’re not supposed to be lovers-- only to be working together.”
“It can be a very intimate thing,” adds Phillips, “singing with someone you respect . . . and who’s hot.”
The hotness only escalated in 2003, when Wareham and Phillips took a break from Luna to record the lush, Tony Visconti produced L’Avventura—an album that harkened back to the late ‘60s lounge duets of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. Having discovered fertile new ground as a duo, the Dean & Britta side project soon became a full-time gig, as Luna was gracefully retired in 2005. Not surprisingly, Wareham had landed on his feet again, showing the vision and versatility that have made him an indie-rock cult hero and a favorite of legends like Lou Reed and Tom Verlaine.
“Lord knows you have to be able to do a few different things if you want to remain interesting over twenty years,” Wareham says. “It’s maybe a paradox of being in a punk or indie band. After a few albums, you get to a point where you are playing better, or growing, and you can’t go on repeating the same formula. Well, you can, but the records will suffer.”
Wareham has been doing a lot of reflecting on his remarkable career of late, as evidenced by an extensive memoir he has written, Black Postcards, which will be arriving on bookshelves via Penguin Press in March.
“One thing that’s different about my book-- as opposed to other rock memoirs-- is that I actually wrote it myself,” he says. “Usually these things are ghost written – a rich rock star talks to a journalist for four days and he writes the book for them. I tried to convey the reality behind life on the road, to write about the humiliations as well as the successes.”
As of late, the successes have been piling up for Wareham and his lovely bride. After writing and recording the score to Noah Baumbach’s acclaimed 2005 film, The Squid and the Whale, the duo now officially known as “Dean & Britta” went to work on their first post-Luna album, Back Numbers, which was released to rave reviews last February. In the year since, Dean’s been busy digging through his past, while Britta— back doing TV voicework on Adult Swim’s wonderfully twisted Moral Orel— has slowly warmed up to a part of her own history.
“I used to be embarrassed by it back in the 90s,” she laughs, referring to her stint as Jem, the animated precursor to Hannah Montana. “But time seems to have made it… um… cooler. The people who watched it have all grown up, and some of them even have good taste in music now!”
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