Calvin Harris Channels Prince and George Clinton for Coca-Cola

Posted on Oct 8th 2009 11:00AM by Mike Ayers
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Towards the end of Scottish electro-dance musician Calvin Harris's second album 'Ready for the Weekend,' there's a curious track that simply goes "yeah, yeah, yeah/la, la la." While the music is what Harris does best -- synth-driven dance beats -- these lyrics were actually commissioned by Coca-Cola for an advertisement, and it wasn't exactly a dream come true. "It was difficult, because it's not the sort of thing I'd say in a song," Harris tells Spinner. "So I went to sleep on it and woke up and I thought it would be something like George Clinton or Prince would do. About a million versions later, I got it down. The one on the album is the director's cut, with me being the director."

'Ready for the Weekend' was released this week in the US but has already been burning up the charts in the UK this summer. "It's always a shock to me when something like this happens," he says. Listening to the album, it's full of pop-happy tracks that would indeed make one ready for a weekend night. "I like descriptive titles," he says. "For me, dance music is for dancing, not thinking. But it's not exclusively a weekend listen. I find its good when you're in a car or at the gym."

While Harris concedes that a lot of dance-oriented music is thriving in the underground, he's not necessarily what the die-hards would gravitate towards. "I see myself as the most ultra-commercial dance music there is in the UK," he says. "It's a product of the fact that I love dance music and I love pop music. I couldn't do the two exclusively. I'm the guy that dance purists hate and pop purists hate."

Harris will be kicking off a six-week tour of the UK starting Oct. 15 in London, alternating between live band shows and DJ sets and will include shows on weekdays, too.