Chanson pour les amis Miossec Chanson ordinaires (Pias) 2011 Listen

RFI Musique: You made these recordings with a young rock trio. Would you say you were getting back to basics?
Christophe Miossec: In a way, yes. I found myself with these young musicians who all know each other. We shut ourselves up for three days’ rehearsals in a farm near Rennes, in fairly basic conditions and I had to yell so that my voice could be heard above the music! The trouble was that I also found myself shouting when we recorded the disk. I love doing it on stage, but it doesn’t sound good on a CD. Not many singers know how to yell in French without sounding ridiculous. Bertrand Cantat managed it.

You seem to have found a common influence: nineties noise rock ...
Thomas Poli (Ed’s note, guitarist and renegade from the Rennes group Montgomery) is a fan of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. But that’s old people’s music for me! I used to listen to those groups when I was twenty. We worked a lot together. We’d play for 6 or 7 hours a day, then we’d put down our instruments and madly listen to music until the small hours. Chanson Insomniaque was composed at three in the morning, after listening to the first single by the Woodentops, a British group from the eighties. I loved the drumming and Sébastien (Ed’s note: the group’s drummer) immediately picked up his sticks and started playing, and the track was born. That kind of stimulation doesn’t come about often. You can’t make it happen, but when it does, it’s fantastic.

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It’s probably your most rock album. Why didn’t you do it earlier?
It’s all about timing. In 1995, when I did my first album, it was an era of saturated guitars and electro, and we were just about the only ones in France presenting ourselves as an acoustic band with no drums. We were looking to become more radical, and that’s partly why Boire caused a stir.

This new album is also quite unusual on the contemporary French scene.
That was the idea, but it wasn’t an intellectual approach. I’d had it in mind for a long time, but we had to find the right people. The trio was perfect. We didn’t censor ourselves, we went directly from rehearsals to recording, without getting into the bad group phase where you eradicate all the imperfections.

In contrast, the lyrics are inspired by songs from another era. Why the gap?
I’ve been interested in pre-war songs for a while now. I knew that with the music we were doing, the word “rock” was going to be thrown at us all the time! So, calling these rock numbers “chansons” is a way of reminding people that it’s not French rock. I thought it was amusing to stuff the album with words borrowed from Berthe Sylva and Maurice Chevalier. When people talk about French chanson, they’re always thinking about neo-realist groups, accordions and repetitive chorus lines, which isn’t my cup of tea at all. Mentioning “Having a good friend” on the track Chanson sympathique is funny. French tradition can be dressed up in any sound you like.  

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Would you say you find the chanson world too conformist?
That’s the trouble with French chanson, which has become an almost soulless business. People stick words onto tunes so that they’re dressed up like French, but there’s no depth. I was thinking about that when I wrote Chanson que personne n’écoute. There’s no risk-taking, you just have to appeal to the radio stations with a smooth single and a good tune. The latest trend is groups who’ll do anything to get an advert. Those guys are shooting themselves in the foot. What do you do once the spring’s run dry – stop the music?

After this eighth album, can you at last say that you’re satisfied with your career to date?
I’m coming up to 47, nearly 50, and if I’m not making music that interests me now, for the right reasons, then I never will! I do all I can to avoid self-parody, which is something I’ve been guilty of in the past. That’s why I split with Guillaume Jouan, my first guitarist. We did the first two albums together, and the third was one too many. It’d become our job, it was just what we did. I’ve always tried to renew myself since then, with highs and lows. But I haven’t been far enough, I still don’t think there are enough sharp turns in my records.

Miossec Chansons ordinaires (PIAS) 2011
From 20 to 23 September at Le Nouveau Casino in Paris then on a tour of France.

Translation by: Anne-Marie Harper