The ‘background music’ stigma has been a difficult cross to bear for Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland.

The term implies all that pop music shouldn’t be: generic, dull, meant to go unnoticed. In fact, it’s possibly the worst thing you could say to a musician. At least Linkin Park get noticed? Even if they are bloody awful.

Some might say that Röyksopp have brought the label on themselves, though, by letting they’re music be used as the background to a number of adverts and other commercial opportunities. It’s an argument the Norwegian pair are justifiably riled by. We’ll go in to that later.

When Röyksopp headline The Xfm Stage at Clapham Common’s Get Loaded In The Park Festival later this month, they’ll be anything but in the background. Playing songs from recent album Junior (which many have seen as a conscious effort to escape the elevator music stamp), I wonder how the duo intend to tackle the age old problem of making electronic music a suitably captivating spectacle for a festival stage?

“That has been the catch, if you will, for years with this kind of music,” says a wordy and – I’m soon to discover – rather philosophical Svein Berge from a hotel in Bern, Switzerland. Explaining that Röyksopp aren’t yet quite in the league of Jean Michel Jarre (“we can’t afford to have people playing saxophone from space - we are saving that for later”), the Norwegian tells me Röyksopp try to replicate the rock band format for big live shows as much as possible, rather than compensating for the ‘two men hiding behind laptop’ line-up with grandiose visuals.

“We try and make our live experience to be all about the music, but then also about having fun. We want it to be as if you were attending a rock concert. We have a bass player and me and Torbjørn also play as much as we possibly can live.

“Obviously there is stuff with our music that has to be done with a sequencer or a computer because of the way we have programmed that bit of the song. People might say ‘why isn’t the drummer playing the drums?’ and we would say ‘well, because a drummer cannot play as tight as we have programmed it’, and also the sound of acoustic drums are different to the sounds that we prefer to have; so we do have a sequencer running for some of the things that are too intricate to be played live.

“Torbjørn and also I play keyboards, do a bit of percussion, a bit of singing and we also have two live vocalists and a guy playing strings.

“We have to balance it though. We don’t want to just become something else and loose all of the identify that we feel we have in our sound - our sonic soundscapes. If we swap all of our analogue synthesisers for guitars and banjos it won’t be Röyksopp anymore.”

So then, what is Röyksopp? Weirdly, there’s a feeling about their latest release that makes you wonder if the band had become uncomfortable with how people were beginning to perceive them. Junior is a much more punchy album than the subtler, more introspective affair that was 2005’s The Understanding. Much heavier on vocals (a range of different guest singers that included the Swedish pop singer, Robyn, were brought in), it’s generally more bouncy, catchier and more accessible than anything that’s gone before. People danced in elevators everywhere?

Berge tells me that each Royksopp album represents the way the band were feeling at the time – a stage in their life and creative journey. And that accompanying Junior will be a second release, Senior, at the end of the year, which will be a more withdrawn, ambient counterpart to the more energetic, Junior - so the band couldn’t truly be said to be reacting directly to ‘background music’ criticism.

“I think that the music we make is pretty much a document of how we feel at that particular time in our lives,” says Berge. “I think it is quite evident – at least in retrospect – that when we made our first record, Melody A.M., we were very poor and skinny and living off rice and potatoes.

“Perhaps this meant there was a higher level of freedom and curiosity and also some sort of search in trying to find a musical identity - we wanted to make something that stood out and sounded unique - and I think on that album you can hear that it is playful and we haven’t quite found our own thing. I think we were trying to stretch something in so many different directions.

“On The Understanding I think we were confused and bewildered about the role that we had now been given and the expectation of what we were to do now - that whole difficult second album thing. When we made Melody A.M. no one knew who we were, where as after that million selling album it was harder to get
cracking on the next one. We also hadn’t fully taken in the change in our lives. We were being recognised, etc and in the public eye. There was a lot of searching and not quite knowing where we were.”

Just as Berge sees The Understanding as a reaction to the popularity of Röyksopp’s first release, he says that Junior – with its confident use of more energetic and accessible dance beats – was a result of having toured so much. Having been on the road playing and being in so many clubs, the band found themselves returning to their house music roots and produced their third album as a result.

The creation of Senior to go alongside Junior was Röyksopp at their happiest and most financially secure. Berge says the simultaneous creation of the two albums was the most comfortable and easiest project that Röyksopp have ever been involved with – a mark of a band who truly understood where they were in their lives.

So then, being happy with exactly where they are at this moment in time, what of that niggling question? The reason that Röyksopp have attracted some doubters over the years? Why all the adverts?

“I think it about 2000 when we broke through,” says Berge. “We were two Norwegian guys. It was hard. We were mainly into instrumental, electronic music so it was difficult to break through – especially difficult getting air play on radio. As far as I am concerned the business of getting air play is equally dodgy or as dubious as using your music in ads – that’s my take.

“We thought at that point we’d find that one advert in the UK; one company that would be willing to use our music just to get it out there and create a buzz. We chose to use a track called ‘So Easy’ and it was a song where we had sampled a song by Burt Bacharach. We made no money on that song. He probably made enough to buy a new piano and a new tan and colour his hair even greyer. We just wanted to show that we were not doing it for the money, that we were doing it as a long term plan to get noticed. At that point we felt it was okay. I know it was frowned upon but we felt we could justify it in some ways. We have turned down lots of ads since then.”

So then. Röyksopp plus adverts equals Burt Bacharach more tanned and more grey. That’s a nice place to leave it I think?

Röyksopp play get Loaded In The Park on 30 August.
For more details go to: www.getloadedinthepark.com