The Shock of the New - a conversation with The Bridge of Sighs by Pablo Mozart reprinted from NME 31/2/04 Dr Doria Dandolo leans back in her office chair, flicks the ash from her cigarette into her ashtray and raise her eyebrows quizzically to the autumn sun streaking across her desk. ‘Providence’ she says ‘... and luck’. Dr Dandolo is of course referring to the oft-repeated stories behind her meeting with Attila Borobudur and their subsequent musical partnership The Bridge of Sighs. For those of you who havn’t heard the story already, it is the stuff of legend. Two strangers who happened to decide to top themselves on the same day at the same location (the bridge of sighs) simply decide ‘bugger this, let’s form a band’. Several cups of tea later - (most drunk by Borobudur) - they picked up a rag tag bag of broken instruments and commenced to write the songs that would define the now legendary ‘alt-oth-alt’ movement and send The Bridge of Sighs all the way to number one. Where Dandolo oozes a kind of quiet confidence that has often had her tagged in the popular press as ‘the thinking mans crumpet’, Borobudur reaches for metaphors so extravagant as to be intangible. ‘A bridge ... certainly ... i mean we were there, now we’re over here and probably later on, we’ll be ... somewhere else. That’s logical.’ He pauses. ‘I think it is, anyway’. Such is the mystery of The Bridge of Sighs. Together, they form a kind of yin and yang balance that can only be described as pure alchemy. Picture this; in one corner, the ever versatile Dandolo, either delicately plucking her guitar to find the heretofore hidden melodies of popular music or ra-ra-ing her way to raucous parts wounded, inspired and unknown, Borobudur on fuzzed out upside down guitar weaving rippling eddy’s of melancholic cinders amongst Dandolo’s fire. Phew. Their latest album is a tribute to visionary academic and founder of conversation analysis Harvey Sacks. Dandolo sees nothing wrong in tackling such powerhouses of intellectual thought in the realms of popular song. ‘We’re not afraid of the unknown ... when I think of the ‘Sighs I see a kind of situationist dialectic not unlike that of the Pistols relationship to the popular media and received notions of church and state in 20th century Britain. We’re simply fighting that battle on a more personal and intellectual front’ ’. ‘Borobudur chimes in - ‘It’s all rock ‘n roll’, after all, innit?’. Spend just 20 minutes with The Bridge of Sighs and one comes away almost feeling as if you had almost, before this moment, barely been alive. Their new album fizzes with the kind of multi-instrumental and lyrical dazzle of a young Byron or Sacks. It is not an experience for the faint-hearted. Dandolo: ‘We’re not pussyfooting’. Borobudur; ‘But we like cats’