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Musical Adventures at the Arezzo Wave Love Festival
by Anna Battista
Day 3 - The (almost) loved up day.
Arezzo. 15 February 1796. For a few days an earthquake has shaken the town
and its inhabitants. Four people are praying in front of an image of the
Virgin Mary. The image is black, covered by soot and ruined by smoke.
Suddenly the image becomes clear, white and brilliant. The miracle, people
reckon, is a sign from heaven, a sort of comforting sign that marks the end
of the earthquake. Nowadays that same image of the Virgin Mary can be
admired in the cathedral of Arezzo. What a nice story! Easy then, that's
just what we should do, pray for a miracle to invest the mind and hearts of
the press office people who are driving us crazy. Perhaps we might try to
steal the image of the Madonna and…OK, OK, time to stop ranting and rush to
the stadium, since I have suddenly received a secret phone call from my
friends Andrea and Stefano at the local newspaper Il Corriere di Arezzo,
who reveal me that the organisers have just told them that Faithless are
going to make a press conference in a few minutes' time.
Problem is that
this is not true, Faithless' Maxi and Sister Bliss are being interviewed in
the backstage by music channels and radios and they're too busy to do a
press conference. My rage is boiling, the press office people are just
idiotically smiling at me while they reveal the truth and I decide to solve
the problem on my own. After finding Faithless' tour manager, I'm
officially admitted to their dressing room (no gate-crashing this time) and
I can have a chat with the bassist Aubrey Nunn. The only member available
seems to be him and he's nice and kind enough to answer a few questions.
Faithless recently played in the UK at the Glastonbury Festival.
"Glastonbury was amazing,", Aubrey starts remembering, "it was a dream come
true for us. We had only played on the smaller stage, this was the first
time on the main stage and we were only one down on the bill from being the
headliners, as Coldplay were the headliners. It was just fantastic, we had
done bigger shows elsewhere in Europe, but we were in our home country and,
you know, your mum is watching on the television! It was very special,
really a dream come true. People there were amazing. I think it was
probably really beneficial to us to play on the first day of the festival
because people aren't too tired and they're still clean and enjoying
themselves. They were amazing, we had such an energetic audience. I love
Coldplay, I thought they perform absolutely brilliantly, for a band that
hasn't been around for long they were just captivating. We had to leave
that night, so we couldn't see any other band playing, Coldplay were the
only band we actually saw in its entirety, that's the problem with being a
musician, you're always busy!"
Aubrey has been playing with Faithless for
quite a long time. "Six years now," he points out, "I do enjoying playing
with them. I have been in quite a lot of bands in my career, but I'm not
telling you which ones! I think we have a great kind of ethos and people
notice it. We love each other and we try to work it out, we have a good
relationships one with the other. I like a lot of Faithless' tracks. If
we're talking in terms of lyrics, well, then I think my favourite lyrics
are 'Bring My Family Back', it's just the most poetic thing Maxi has ever
written, that track has just the most wonderful lyrics. In terms of my
favourite tune, well, I still love 'Salva Mea', because it means so much
and every time we play I remember six years ago when it was our first big
success, and I love 'Reverence' as well. But every night, while playing,
you hear something different because we play our songs in different ways,
so you can focus on a track in a different way. As a consequence your
favourite track one time is not your favourite the next time."
Since Aubrey
has started talking about their live shows, we talk about how they behave
on the stage when they play live. "Some people tell me that The Dandy
Warhols didn't do many of their best songs, which was quite strange. We're
going to treat this stage in the same as we treat all the other stages:
we're going to have the time tonight to play as many of the songs as we
would like to play. We like to create a set which is not up all the time,
we like to bring people up and then drop them down and then bring them up
again, in much the same way as a DJ would work his audience up with
records, we have this aspect to our music. We will play the hits and plenty
of other things from the new album, it will be a very mixed sort of set,
some tracks will be taken from the very early days, some from today, but we
always try to play the songs like remixes when we play live, they're not
perfect CD quality representations of what has already been recorded. We
like to do things a little bit different, change the structure and the
sounds and give them a little bit more life."
"I think we're a lot more of a
rock band when we play live than when we play on our records. Some people
prefer us on records, some people prefer us live. The feedback we're
getting recently is amazing, people like the things we do live, they like
that element of power that sometimes lacks on records. One thing that bugs
us are bands who claim to play live and really aren't. Their live shows
aren't live performances, when you see people voting for them as the top
live band, while we know they just plug in the amp and have live vocal,
it's frustrating 'cos it takes a lot of effort to have a proper full
instrumentation. I think we all love people who play live music. Live
performances have a soul and a spirit of their own. The great thing about
them is that you never know how they're going to be. Maxi is an amazing
performer and does his very best to get everyone involved in this unity. As
a band we don't really play in clubs, we play more in sort of traditional
live venue. We're a big band and not many clubs are geared up for us. We
tend to keep the live band separate from the dance world. Our audience is
much broader than that, we have a much larger spectrum of people than just
club goers. I'm sure that a lot of people who like us have never been to a
club. We really enjoyed playing at Wembley Arena, because for us it was
another ambition that we knocked off our list. But I think we do prefer
when things are slightly smaller, I think some of our most successful gigs
have been at the Brixton Academy in London because it is big enough to feel
like playing a great gig, but it is small enough to feel some intimacy. At
present our biggest territory is the UK, but we're probably the most famous
band in Belgium. We have to play other gigs in Italy, two during festivals
and one it's our own show. We've done two tours before in Italy and a
festival about four years ago."
Faithless' latest record is entitled
Outrospective. "It probably took us longer than any other album to
record it," Aubrey admits, "We did the first album in about three weeks.
When we recorded that first album, we had no idea it was going to sell ten
thousand singles, we made an album and we thought we were going to sell ten
thousand albums, but we sold more than that. From then on, every time we've
made an album it has always been a little bit more considerate and we've
been more aware of what people like and don't like about us and what we
like about us as well. This last one took about maybe, a total of four or
five months, but that doesn't mean four or five months of solid work every
day, but four or five months from conception to completion. The main core
of the band is Maxi, Blissy and Rollo, the producer. Rollo has an awful lot
more to say in the studio than most people think. I think it's just easier
for me to talk about when we play live, when everybody has an input live,
'cos when we play live we rework the tracks anyway, so more of us get
involved live than we do in the studio."
Aubrey seems to be really happy
about Outrospective: "I think we're really satisfied with it. We all
really enjoyed it. People on the outside of the music biz tend to think how
old a record is by the time it is released. Outrospective was finished
four or five months before it was actually released. So, of course, we have
moved on from it, if we had made the record now, we would have made a
different record. We're really looking forward to doing the next record. We
still haven't got any new material, because our new album will be probably
released at the end of the next year. We think we're going to take a break
and to make a distinction between what we've done and what we're going to
do. Now we need to go and live our lives, otherwise everything we'd write
would be talking about the backstage of the various gigs we've done and
things like that. You have to live a life otherwise you don't have anything
to write about. I think every time we make new music it's an experiment of
sorts. I don't think we'll be looking at this next album to distance
ourselves from our past. You often get asked 'do you do records because
it's what people want to hear?' you only really make records to please
yourself, even if you knew that the world was crying out to do a particular
thing, unless you liked it, you wouldn't do it. I think that we won't know
what we're going to do with our next record until we start recording it."
The reviews we got for Outrospective are very mixed. It's funny how some
publications which haven't liked things you've done in the past suddenly
find something they like about you, it depends on the journalists
themselves. And sometimes, some publication that has liked you goes off to
you. I mean, we expected the reviews to be very negative for our third album
because we have come so far so quickly. I don't know how the Italian press
is like, but in England, if the press have assisted you and created
something of you, then they like to knock you back down again, but that
hasn't really happened to us. Fortunately, people who don't like us have
tended not to review us at all, rather than give us bad reviews. We don't
care anyway about what they say. Sometimes, you even wonder after reading
the reviews if people have really been listening to the record. And
sometimes when we do a live show, people write the next day about it and
they say it was an awful show, they say we played this song or that song
and it was rubbish and we didn't even play any of those songs they
mentioned, so they obviously weren't there. Their agenda is set before they
even see the show. If we get bad reviews, it is at least good if we feel
that there is a reason why this person hasn't liked the show as opposed to
why this person wasn't there."
Soon Faithless' fans will get a surprise. "We do have a remix album that is coming out in September this year, which is called Retrospective, in much the same way as we released remix albums
of our previous albums. We have lots and lots of remixes, some that are
already known because they were on some singles and some other are brand
new. I like remixes, I think remixes are fantastic, it is always great to
hear how people hear your music, that's the wonderful thing about a melody,
it's a melody and people can work it in all sorts of ways, it's just like
having a fifteen words sentence and you were jumbling around with words to
rearrange them in a different way. I don't know if you have limitations
when you release singles in Italy; we were only allowed to put out a
certain amount of remixes on our singles. The great thing about remixes is
that a particular remix done in a particular style might find you an
entire new audience. You might find your track, which is made as a house
track, rearranged as a drum'n'bass remix and suddenly it would be played in
drum'n'bass clubs so that new people might get to hear your stuff. Remixes
expand your horizons."
After leaving Faithless' dressing room, new shit
hits the fan: the press office claims that Rinôçérôse haven't got any
time for all the journalists and will only do the "most important" music
mags. A massive quarrel starts, a discussion which involves 1) the press
office; 2) two pretentious arseholes who claim to represent
Rinôçérôse's record label and bar the press conference room thinking
they are Swiss guards protecting the Vatican. Swear words, threats and
other mixed shit of the same nature follow, but fortunately we manage to
talk to our French friends Jean-Philippe Freu and Patrice Carrié nicknamed
Patou all the same, and discover that they never expressed the desire to be
interviewed only by one or two mags, but people from their record labels
decided for them. Rinôçérôse are fucking cool people. Jean even asks
where we come from and feels very sympathetic about our misadventures,
claiming, that for Rinôçérôse there aren't good or bad journos, but
everybody's the same. Cheers man!
We thank them for being so kind with us
that we'd like to cry and get drunk with them, but instead we start
chatting about Italy. "Last time we played in Genoa people threw us stones.
I left the stage before finishing, it was a nightmare, a nightmare,"
Jean-Philippe repeats thoroughly shocked. "We also played in Milan at the
Tunnel and at the Magazzini Generali, but it was good, it was really nice.
Tonight we will be hot! Some of our songs are very good when played live,
for example 'Music Kills Me' or maybe we're gonna try to make a good
version of 'Dead Flowers' tonight. We are touring in some festivals in
Europe at present, we'll go to Benicassim, in Spain, in August. Tomorrow
we're going to Lisbon." "A lot of travel", mumbles Patou, while
Jean-Philippe starts again, "I expect that they won't throw stones like in
Genoa! This is called 'Love Festival', they should throw flowers at us."
Not everybody knows that the people who threw stones at Rinôçérôse
threw stones at two psychologists. "We have a society together, we are
psychologists," Patou reveals, "He teaches psychology at the university and
I organise lectures, conferences." "With our latest album," Jean-Philippe
continues, "we appeared on a lot of covers in local magazines, we were on
TV, so some of my students recognised me! At present we are professional
musician. We work 20% in psychology and 80% in music, even 10% in
psychology and 90% in music. Sometimes I miss working at the university,
because it's a very different scene, but on the intellectual point of view
it's really interesting." he states, letting Patou continue, "But we prefer
when people don't know anything about us, it's just better."
Jean-Philippe
and Patou might be considered in a way, part of the French renaissance
together with Daft Punk and Air: "We were a part of that music environment,
but we didn't exactly come from the same scene. They are from Paris,
whereas we come from the south of France. Besides, we have an indie pop
audience, we were much more influenced by all the progressive house music
bands from the beginning of the '90s, such as The Orb or 808 State, but
also Primal Scream. You see, Primal Scream can do a good dance track, but
they also do really good '70s rock," he concludes. "And the music is not
the same, their music is for dancing," Patou points out, "Daft Punk are
club culture. People who like rock, house music and electronica enjoy our
music. We feel very close to Primal Scream. We were also influenced by My
Bloody Valentine and by all the British movement that came from Manchester.
And we absolutely love Cornershop."
Jean-Philippe and Patou take also their
inspiration from another form of art. "We take our name from a painting by a
guy who lived in a psychiatric hospital in the '50s. He painted animals in
very strange ways," Jean-Philippe remembers, "He wrote Rinôçérôse using
the wrong accents. We are interested in paintings in general, we have a lot
of books on paintings and sometimes we leaf through those books to find the
inspiration for an album, or a song. Painting influences our music and we
love Andy Warhol," he explains while Patou adds, "We are fan of the pop art
and of art in general".
Rinôçérôse recently released the album Music
Kills Me. "We usually write songs rather quickly because we have strong
inspirations," Jean-Philippe admits, "but we take a lot time to make the
structure of the song on the computer. It's a very complicated thing, since
it's technical stuff." "It took us a year to record the new album," Patou
adds, "We usually write the guitar part first and work with a programmer,
Johnny Palumbo. I use Pro Tools and Palumbo the programmer uses another
programme. Pro Tools is very easy to use…" "It's very easy for her!"
Jean-Philippe protests and we all laugh.
Jean and Patou are very cool and
this is proved by the message they want to spread among the crowd tonight.
"Don't care about any fashion," Jean-Philippe warns, "Be yourself, enjoy
the music, try to get the best vibe of music. Music is entertainment, music
is done to be cool!" When our interview with them voluntary ends
(apparently nobody has arrived to tell us to stop asking questions), we
have only to meet British band Kosheen to complete tonight's list of bands
to interview. By now the people from the organisation have reached a higher
degree of hate towards the journalists running around the dressing rooms,
so they personally escort each of us to Kosheen's haven. They drop us there
and pretend they're going out, but actually wait outside to see if we are
respecting our fatal ten minutes. I get to talk to singer Sian Evans, while
Darren Decoder and Markee Substance are having a chat with somebody else.
"It was a long trip to come here, a long day," Sian remembers, with a very
tired look, "we left really early from Bristol and we flew into Pisa, so it
has been quite a trip, I packed my son off to school and off I went. It
happens a lot, I'm getting used to it now. At first it was difficult, well,
at first actually it was exciting, now it's just a job, that's what I do, I
travel! Tonight we're playing in a festival and festivals in Europe surpass
festivals anywhere else in the world. People go out and have a good time.
Here the weather is good, in Glastonbury we often wondered whether the
weather was going to be good and we were kind of worrying that it was going
to rain, but here it's different as it's very hot. Glastonbury was
brilliant, fantastic. It was a home gig for us as we're based in Bristol,
so there were a lot of people there for us, around fifteen thousand people
for us, it was lovely. You know, there's a problem with bands like The
Dandy Warhols, they just stand there and expect people to love them because
they're cool and this is so passé, totally so passé. In the '80s maybe they
would have got away with just standing around. That's the same thing that
happens with Oasis: they are guys who aren't pretty nor cool, but make nice
music and should give something back to their audience when they perform. I
really believe in that feedback of energy, I really feel like I need to
draw people in and they experience the gig with me and we kind of bounce
energy back and forth between each other. This is what makes my job happy.
I wouldn't enjoy my job if the crowd weren't with me."
Kosheen actually
know really well how to drag the crowd with them, perhaps this is a talent
they have embedded in their genetic code. "I have an extremely musical
background," Sian tells me about her Welsh origins, "My grandfather is a
composer and so everybody in my family learnt to play something. We're a
working-class mining family in Wales, we didn't have any TV, so everything
would be centred around the music room, around the piano, if there was
someone's birthday everybody would come around and play an instrument and
sing. I had a very privileged childhood to be able to grow up around music
like that, to be submerged in so many musical people who encouraged to play
an instrument. My concentration is very short, so I never practised the
piano, I never learnt to play the piano. In the end I thought 'Oh, God let
me sing!' and that was my thing, like my mother before, my mother is a
singer. Music is my favourite thing in the world, music was my toy as a
child and now it's my work. I'm very lucky. Our music is not mere
drum'n'bass, it has the elements of dance music which we grew up around for
the last ten years in the UK. We had the rave scene there and it left a
very strong mark on all those of my generation. I would say there are
elements of dance music in what we do and we use the technology of dance
music, but we push boundaries and try to express ourselves in the best way
we can. And we're very song based, which is a quite traditional thing to
bring to dance music, we really have a very traditional way of writing
songs."
Kosheen's first album, Resists, is a blend if dance and
drum'n'bass beats, the whole adorned by Sian's piercing voice. "Recording
Resists took us an incredible short amount of time. It was an amazing
process, I was very nervous, I didn't know what to expect from the guys,
'cos I thought they wanted me to just do 'Uuuuuuhhhs' and 'Aaaaahhhs' and
'Yeahhh' over drum'n'bass music. But they encouraged me to really open up
as a songwriter and to really sing, we dropped tempos and it wasn't all
drum'n'bass. The creative feeling in the studio was amazing, we probably
wrote a song a day for about a year, we probably wrote fifty songs before
we had a deal and when we were told to submit seventeen or eighteen songs
as an album it was a really tough choice to pick up the favourite songs,
'cos every day we were writing new ones, we are very prolific songwriters,
this is the most important thing to us. Even though we're really touring
now a lot, we're still writing. We're already working on our new album, it
should be out next spring. We have our own dingy little studio in Bristol
and we record everything ourselves, we don't use any other producer or any
other equipment, it's all very home grown. Besides, the Bristol music scene
is really active, for example we have Portishead, Tricky and Massive
Attack, there are so many and the scene it's very breakbeat oriented. I was
really drawn up to Bristol because of the music scene. It's very
high-standing in Bristol as well, because of our peers it pushes your
standards higher, so there's always gonna be a great music scene coming out
of Bristol. Music has got to keep changing in order to keep fresh. There is
a new generation coming through all the time, music is changing and people
are getting braver with music, I think Kosheen's album is a very brave
album, it mixes a lot of different influences, and I think the next big
thing in music is to be brave."
On the last word pronounced by Sian my
personal nightmare arrives, saying "Your time is over" and making me want to
bite her head off her body. But I manage to calm down also thanks to the
beer Sian offers me, directly from the dressing room fridge, a thing which
drives the Swiss guard waiting for me outside completely crazy and makes me
dementedly happy. After saying bye to Sian, I get to the photographers' pit
and find Alessandro, a photographer from a local newspaper who became
famous last year for taking infamous pics of the panties of the female
singers on stage. He looks a little bit shattered and he's right: this year
he has photographed "the wrong panties", he proclaims.
Indeed on stage
are Boo! an all white band who claims of coming from South Africa.
They basically sound like an average punk band whose singer, nicknamed Miss
Chris Chameleon, dresses like a nurse with spiked heels and visible white
panties. Boo! proclaim they play what they call "Monky Punk", a pretty
mish-mash of punk and rock, nothing new, but they appeal the crowd for the
way they present themselves more than for their music. They aren't totally
unprofessional, but they still have to work if they want to go on playing.
Well, after all this is their first gig in Italy, so we forgive them and
hail Kosheen when they get on stage.
Sian arrives clad in a tight orange
corset and jeans and she's totally ready to give love and energy to the
crowd and to receive the same things, as she foresaw during our interviews.
Drum'n'bass tracks such as "Hide U", "(Slip & Slide) Suicide" and "Empty
Skies" make us all step in while Sian hails the crowd with her shouts of
"Do you know what's drum'n'bass?" before flooding the crowd with an
avalanche of breakbeats. Sian, Darren and Markee are really aggressive and
this is proved also by tracks by the relentless rhythms of "Catch". Kosheen
are terrifically enjoyable: right when you're thinking that they're tracks
are just d'n'b little things, they change style and rhythms.
Most of us are
still jumping around when there is a change of scene and Rinôçérôse
arrive. Before they start playing a screen on the background of the stage
starts projecting images: for an instant we think that this is going to be
an artsy-fartsy thing, but when Patou gets on stage and clutches her bass
and Jean-Philippe arrives with his guitar our impression changes and we
start dancing to the electro-disco rhythm of "Music Kills Me". There are
six musicians on the stage and they produce a dancey and rockish sound, no,
they're not Primal Scream, really, but they make the audience wet their
pants, not because they're extremely sexual, but because their rhythms are
irresistible. Percussion, sax, bass, guitars, flute and pre-recorded tracks
seems to be the main elements of spaceship Rinôçérôse.
When they leave
you can't do without thinking that they and Kosheen have done a good job,
warming up the crowd for Faithless. When Maxi and Sister Bliss get on stage
with the other six members, they are welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd of
fans. Faithless seem to have turned off the lights of the stars adorning
the night sky and to have transported them on the stage to bliss them
during their glittering show. They open with "Donny X" from
Outrospective and follow with the classic "Salva Mea", though we also
have the pleasure to hear "Crazy English Summer" sang by Zoe Johnston.
Strobes cut out of the dark the shadow of Sister Bliss playing her
keyboards and of Maxi maniacally dancing. They chill out the crowd, then
they make the crowd dance again. The night ends up in a rather loved up,
happy atmosphere. And when the stadium starts emptying and one or two
people who can't stand drugs stumble the scattered beer bottles and plastic
glasses lying on the pitch, a melancholic feeling fills up our hearts.
Those who don't passionately love music wouldn't understand how you feel at
the end of a gig or a festival: you feel a weird energy running around in
your blood, as if a lightning had struck you down and had left you with
electric charges buzzing in your body. The night grows darker and then
becomes day again while waiting on the railway station platforms, watching
the clock strike 3, then 4 a.m., mechanically ticking away the music that
exploded in my mind for three days. Yeah, music. Shit, where would we be
without it?
Special thanks to Andrea, Stefano and Alessandro @ Il Corriere di Arezzo
for being so music crazed and so passionate about their job; the Dunia
girls for being so sweet and so angry; Francesco @ Il Corriere Mercantile
for gate-crashing with me in the dressing rooms and backstage, (shit, we
were really pissed off, weren't we?). Definitely no thanks to all those
people @ the Arezzo Wave Festival press office who complicated our job.
Issue 10, July 2002 | next article
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