The LaFontaines

Motherwell is not the most obvious breeding ground for music’s next white rap sensation. It’s a town more commonly associated with call centres and delicate indie bands such as the Delgados. Though, like Detroit, home of the world’s most famous white rapper, Eminem, it once had a thriving steel industry and still has a perpetually underwhelming football team.

All this clutching at straws has become necessary since the formation earlier this year of the LaFontaines, whose merry mincing of hip-hop, pop, rock and electro has stirred up all kinds of excitement. The five-piece band have already pushed their way onto the bill at this year’s Live at Loch Lomond Festival (they were immediately asked to appear at the after-show party for the Sex Pistols) and played to packed houses at King Tut’s and the Carling Academy. Named after the legendary Hollywood voice-over actor Don LaFontaine, who died in September, they take their musical cue from bands such as Faithless and N*E*R*D. It doesn’t quite add up, but it sounds fantastic.

“We’re not really trying to be a hip-hop band,” says the band’s drummer, Jamie Keenan. “There’s an element of hip-hop to what we do, but we’ve been playing to more of a mixed audience because there’s not a huge audience for rap in Scotland anyway. People just seem to like what we do — they might have thought it was a bit of a novelty at first, but it’s just snowballed from there.”

Fronted by 19-year-old Kerr Okan — who looks like a cross between Paolo Nutini and Zac Efron from High School Musical — the LaFontaines have a sense of humour that should stand them in good stead as they stride out into a world sceptical of Motherwell’s rap pedigree.

“Rap’s just for people who can’t sing,” it says on the band’s MySpace page — but this is, with tongue firmly in cheek, a vast underselling of their talents. Okan, who has been rapping since his early teens, when he went by the stage name Prime, has an effortless charisma and undoubted talent.

Given the lack of gang warfare in his neighbourhood (and with no ex-wife to rant at constantly), he has had to turn to teenage introspection to provide inspiration for the group’s lyrics. “Baby, listen, I’ve got no reservations/a relationship with me comes with certain complications,” he reveals on the single Superstar, which is released in the spring.

The other four members of the band — Jamie, Anna, Darren and Iain — provide jaunty pop harmonies to complement Okan’s raps, and there is just as much rock and electro in there as rap. It shouldn’t work, but it does. The LaFontaines are the real deal.
- Sunday Times