Interviews - 3D World Magazine

3D World Magazine, Australia.

Nine Lives, Sixth Sense
By Carlisle Rogers

From the halcyon days of the Sneaker Pimps comes the voice, if not the beats, with a new trip…


“Psychic Cat, a lot of the album, and that song certainly, is based on a real psychic cat in Santa Monica. It reads your fortune for a dollar. It takes it out of a little box on a rolled up piece of paper and hands it to you with its paw."


Boy, back in the days of Becoming X, Kelli Dayton was the saving grace of electronica. Her canted magic breathed life into an otherwise wallpaper act, another electro-outfit that should have faded into the vast oblivion of the heyday of all things electronic. After what the band suspected was a fairly lackluster release rocketed them into the glaring light of international stardom, they realized that they couldn’t repeat what they had just inadvertently invented. As the band worked on their second album, Splinter, began to take shape, personal problems as well as musical ones slowly shunted Kelli further and further from the nucleus until, as she describes it, they just started forgetting to invite her out to dinner while on tour.

Act two has a strange beginning though. We find Kelli Dayton (now Kelli Ali) knee deep in praise for her second solo LP, while the Sneaker Pimps labour away in parallel. Neither outfit really has the magic that was there when they were recording together, but there is an honesty in Kelli’s new music that was remiss when she was singing other people’s lyrics. Kelli sums up her feelings on the past few years: “I think quite obviously we were really young, and I think we were just from different corners of thinking. It just came together pretty quick and it ended quick. It was just one of those things. I’m glad it did though. I’ve realized after embarking on my own journey that I want to say my own thing, really. When you need to move on, life moves you on.”

Kelli describes her first solo album, Tiger Mouth, as a learning experience. “When I started Tiger Mouth that was my first solo record. There was a lot of learning on that. With Psychic Cat I feel like I’m using a lot of the stuff I learned to make it better actually.” The two albums both approach the same thing, but Kelli is the first to admit that this time she hit a lot closer to the mark. “[With Psychic Cat], I wanted there to be a bit of an energy there that I haven’t been able to capture before.” While the first album gleaned its title from a term in Kung-Fu to describe an energy point between the thumb and forefinger, the new album gets its name from a Santa Monica local. “Psychic Cat, a lot of the album, and that song certainly, is based on a real psychic cat in Santa Monica. It reads your fortune for a dollar. It takes it out of a little box on a rolled up piece of paper and hands it to you with its paw. It’s on the Third St promenade, you can’t miss it.”

Psychic Cat is reminiscent of Peaches latest offering, Fatherfucker. It of course isn’t nearly so confrontational, but seems to come from the same kind of place musically. She hasn’t heard that album, but counts Peaches as an influence on her style. And why not. Both albums hark back to that marriage of the punk ethos and electronica. Only, with Kelli’s latest, her voice hasn’t lost any of the magic that lured so many people to that first Sneaker Pimps recording and held the music press hostage until the day she just wasn’t in the band any longer.

For die-hard fans, there hasn’t been any slack in her schedule. She says she has thanked a few fan site operators for their efforts, collecting the dozens of magazine photos of her, interviews and other paraphernalia over the years which add up to some sort of picture of where she’s been so far. As to the future, Kelli says that despite a few trips back to Santa Monica, she hasn’t been able to find that psychic cat. “I’m not really sure where I’m going. I’m just playing my guitar and writing songs. There is no master plan. I’d like to think that things are going to be interesting. I’ve given up thinking where I’m headed and just put my head down. I’ll get there.”