Brightest Young Things

It was five to one, and I was in panic mode. Despite having just replaced the batteries on my Sony IC recorder, the damn thing refused to keep charged. And thanks to hopeless American engineering, I was unable to put my cell phone on speakerphone without consulting the manual. Punching a wall was not going to help, either. And my usual grab bag of 1/8” cables and speakers was nowhere to be found. I was gonna have to do this one by hand. Never mind the fact that it is nearly impossible to write as fast people talk, I often have trouble reading my own handwriting. To paraphrase Modest Mouse, it seemed as though I was dead before the ship had even sunk.

Firstly, congratulations on the release of your new album. I must ask you though, how do you approach your singers when you ask them to cover a song they’ve never heard before?
It’s quite simple actually. We work with very young female singers who are not into music from the punk or new wave era. Most of them were born around the time that these songs were released, you know 1978, 1980. So most of them have not heard this kind of music.
We play the songs to the girls with only a guitar, as if they were our songs. We play the songs very simply so that the singers can catch the melody.

That’s very interesting. I figure it would be difficult to cover some of these songs because some of the songs you cover have re-entered the public conscious in the US and the UK. I’ve heard quite a few of these songs in commercials.
Ahh, that is the one thing. In France, punk and new wave is still very much indie.

Fair enough. So why not French songs from the late 70s, early 80s.
The quality of music in England and America has always been of a much higher quality (than in France). (It seems as though) all over the world, the music was better than what was happening in France. The music we had at that time was very poor. It wasn’t until the 1990s that French music started to get better, with groups like Air, Daft Punk.

Well it definitely seems as though the French have really carved out a niche in the world of ambient pop and dance music. Slightly off-topic, do you remember a song called “Love at First Sight” by Stuart Moxham (ex-Young Marble Giants)?
Why, yes.

So you remember the French cover that Etienne Daho did. Errr “Paris le Flore” or “Café le flore”
It was “Paris le flore.”

Yes! That’s the one. Sorry to geek out, but it’s very rarely that I get to speak to someone who has heard both the original AND the cover. It’s just sad that a lot of French people never took the time to look into the original song. It’s always a tragedy when such a great original song becomes a faded memory or gets lost on cassette somewhere.
Well for a lot of French people, they were not interested in the song if it wasn’t in French. So when Etienne Daho released that song in French, people didn’t have to worry about understanding original.

Nouvelle Vague happened because we wanted to revisit certain songs. “Dance With Me” by Lords of the New Church (featured on Bande a Part), for example. You know, the Lords of the New Church had a very small audience in France. This song could’ve just disappeared on cassette. But we wanted to revisit it.

I totally agree. I’ve noticed on your new album, you cover “The American” from Sons and Fascination / Sister Feelings Call. I've gotta tell you, I recently become a really big fan of Simple Minds’ early work. In Europe, I know their big breakthrough was the album New Gold Dream, but for us here in America it was the song “Don’t You Forget About Me.” You also cover “All My Colors (Zimbo)” by Echo and the Bunnymen.

In short, why are you now focusing on the lesser-known tracks by post-punk and new wave artists?
We have an interest in “lost songs.” “The American,” for example? Why was this not a #1 single? In fact it’s interesting to examine the earlier work of an artist who’s already popular. It’s more interesting to cover a song that was not a #1 hit. It’s exciting to pick a song that was not popular.
We insist on covering songs from this period because it was filled with great bands. It’s unfair that only a few became successful. And it’s not fair when people do not consider all the work that bands like Simple Minds did before they became famous.
It’s a challenge to remind people that a band is not just one song.

OK, so why do these songs in the style of bossa-nova?
It was Marc’s idea, actually. Bossa-nova is perfect style of music to cover punk/new wave. Many of the of the original songs are so filled with anger and power and sung by men. Bossa Nova is the opposite. It is calm and clear, and you can always hear the vocals really well. You can get a lot of opposites by doing punk and new wave songs in the bossa-nova style with female vocalists. The words – they are what this band work.

It's interesting that you chose to play bossa nova under the name Nouvelle Vague, as bossa-nova means “new trend.”
Well today not so much! But fifty years ago, Brazil was very different from what it is today. The country was still a dictatorship. Bossa-nova was the sound of rebellion; it was made by people who wanted to change things.

Speaking of post-punk meets bossa-nova, do you remember the group Antena?
Ahh, Isabella Antena. I mean, she's an example of someone who was incorporating new wave with bossa-nova. Everything but the Girl was also doing something similar in the early 1980s. This thing that we’re doing now, it was already in the air, it was always something happening.

I have the reissue of Antena’s Camino del Sol, but I don’t have any of Isabelle’s solo records. They’re pretty hard to come by in the states, and I always forget to look for them when I go to France.
Well even here it is difficult to find her albums. You can only find her songs compilations.

E-bay it is, then. So are there any songs didn’t make it on the new album? I remember reading that you and Marc sometimes had trouble translating these songs into the Nouvelle Vague style.
This time we achieved every cover that we wanted to do. We now know what works. Earlier we sometimes had trouble. We tried to do songs by Madness and the Stranglers, but they didn’t work on guitar. For some other songs, if we figured out an arrangement on gutiar, we couldn’t find a singer who could sing it.

On your new album, you have quite a few guests including Martin Gore (Depeche Mode), Barry Adamson (Magazine, Visage) and Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen) and Terry Hall (Fun Boy Three, the Specials). Do you have any colorful stories about any of these individuals?
I have a few colorful stories because they are all colorful people. With Martin Gore, we did “Master and Servant” virtually. Martin was not able to come to our studio because he lives in Los Angeles and was working on the new Depeche Mode album. Each of us would record our parts and then send the files through the internet.
All the other guests came to our studio in Paris. And each of them was very willing to share stories about their lives during the late 70s, early 80s. While we were doing “All My Colors (Zimbo)” Ian McCulloch explained that he was originally singing “jimbo,” not "zimbo."

Really? I always thought that zimbo, or jimbo, was just filler for a chorus!
The word was sort of a joke, and people in the studio laughed and told him to keep it because it was a good idea for vocals. Eventually it became Zimbo.

(It is around this time that I am informed that buddy in musical geek-dom has another call in a few minutes)

OK, final question. Why such a short tour?
We wanted to do a small tour because we missed the USA. We really wanted to present ourselves to America again. But because of scheduling and promotion, we were unable to do a longer tour. But we will be returning to the US in September and December 2009, as well February 2010.

Nouvelle Vague perform tonight, June 18th, at the Maison Francaise.