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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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All pics taken by Anna Battista.