Pop Levi

Born in London to a Jewish physician father and a non-Jewish nurse mother, Pop Levi began piano lessons at age three under their encouragement. By seven he had joined a gospel choir, at nine he started amassing records, and by twelve he had composed his debut song, “Through the Window of My Life.” After playing in Super Numeri and Ladytron, the British multi-instrumentalist forged a distinctive solo path that fuses pop, glam rock, and freak folk.

Relocating to Liverpool in 1997, he took jobs driving an ice-cream van and modeling hair before establishing a communal household with Snap Ant, Karl Webb, and fellow artists inside a rundown Victorian building. There he assembled the post-rock outfit Super Numeri. Early tapes from the group reached London in 2002 and secured a deal with Ninja Tune Recordings. Their debut single, “The Electric Horse Garden,” generated attention that propelled the album Great Aviaries and the EP The Coastal Bird Scene into the British underground.

Soon afterward, Danny Hunt of Ladytron recruited Levi to play bass; he toured with the band throughout 2003 and 2004 while using downtime to write and track material intended for the album Foxwatch on Hunt’s Invicta Hi-Fi imprint. Although Foxwatch remained unfinished, it yielded Levi’s first official solo releases: “Rude Kinda Love,” which reached number 25 on the U.K. indie chart, and the 2004 holiday single “Reindeer in my Heart,” which gained American radio play.

Once the Ladytron tour concluded, Levi formed his own ensemble in Liverpool and began performing live, with early West Coast shows helping to establish his American audience. He completed a second Super Numeri album alongside Ant and Webb, rejoined Ladytron briefly, yet by October 2005—when Invicta Hi-Fi issued the single “Blue Honey”—he had committed fully to solo work. Ninja Tune swiftly signed him to its Counter Records subsidiary for The Return to Form Black Magick Party, conceived in late 2005. Recorded inside an abandoned warehouse and Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, the album blended 1960s rock, disco, and folk elements within a sound-collage framework that incorporated more than a decade of home recordings.

Levi relocated to the United States with his band in 2006; the worldwide release of The Return to Form Black Magick Party followed in 2007, and the follow-up Never Never Love appeared the next year. Two subsequent projects—a set of demos and outtakes titled Micro Sex Tapes and a third album issued under the alternate titles Records and Smack Musick—went unreleased, though his songs began surfacing in films and television by 2010, most prominently in Get Him to the Greek. In 2012 Levi finally issued his third album, Medicine, which was tracked in Norway, Greece, and his Los Angeles studio. He performed nearly every instrument himself, assisted on select tracks by Bunny Holiday on vocals, Luke Muscatelli on bass, and Marius Simonsen on drums.