RFI Musique: How do you view your first album now? Wasn’t there some kind of misunderstanding?
Pierre: We have a soft spot for Forty Love. Even though it’s a patchwork of influences, some sincere intentions went into its creation. The problem with concept albums is that they tend to lack coherence. Some people didn’t get the irony. A few journalists even thought we’d been launched by a sports brand!
Victor: The concept of basing things on tennis, some characters and a story was probably more important than the music. It started off as the background for sparking creative ideas, but the concept overtook the music. The success of the track Oh Yeah outshone the rest of the album a bit, but it got us attention. There are two sides to the coin, but at least there were some coins!
Pierre: We did wonder whether we should change the group’s name…
Victor : … but it’s part of our DNA and it’s only an issue in France.

Roman Housse de racket Alesia (Kitsuné) 2011 Listen

After that first album you toured a lot, including in Great Britain. What did you learn from the experience?
Victor: There are so many excellent groups over there, and band members can be as young as 17. There’s no room for bad groups in the UK, which gave us a challenge and an opportunity to learn. In concerts and festivals we found ourselves programmed alongside Metronomy, Late of the Pier and Does it Offend You, Yeah? That gave us a chance to see what kind of musical bag we were being put into. In France, sometimes we’ve been programmed to play with chanson artists, which was as confusing for the audience as it was for us.
We played in a British sixth-form college that was not particularly rich, and the kids worked on our track, Synthétiseur. In their music lessons they had drums and ProTools software. In our college in Chaville we were only given recorders. The musical culture is very different there.

What kind of situation were you in when you created the second album?
Pierre: The track Aquarium was only demoed four months after the release of Forty Love. We quickly started playing it on stage. Then, after a concert date in Toulouse we shut ourselves up for a few days in a house in the countryside. It was the day after Michael Jackson’s death, on 25 June 2009. A certain kind of pop died along with him and, on our own in the house, we also turned a page. Turzi had lent us a Farfisa organ and we used it on all the tracks on the new album. We only had our stage instruments and three keyboards with us.
We wanted to put the power of our live sound across on the album, which tended to surprise people. We put the album together quickly, which explains why its sound is more consistent than the first one.

How did you meet Philippe Zdar and what was his role?
Victor: We didn’t know him personally. We had badgered him on the phone to get him involved in the process quicker. He came along, probably to say no. We played him three numbers and he ended up accepting.
Pierre: He was like a third member of the band in our studio for six months. Then we worked in his studio for another six months. He brought a very personal mix and sound to our music, giving it density and making it reverberate. He pushed us to take things deeper, and we really found our own sound.

Housse de Racket on MySpace

You’ve started to sing in English...
Victor: Yes, the album’s half in English and half in French, sometimes even in the same song. It started with the track Chateau, a French word that’s known all round the world. Philippe Zdar encouraged us to sing in French a bit more. There are quite a few French tracks that we weren’t going to translate, like Les hommes et les femmes, and even Latin, like Chorus and Aquarium.
Pierre: We were fascinated by the French new wave back in the eighties – bands like TGV and Taxi Girl, and Sébastien Tellier – and by the way that they sing these repetitive words that make you look for more meaning. We’ve invented our own mythology to a certain extent, with a homesick relationship to France, as if we’ve moved away from it. Ariane and TGV conjure up an outdated modernity. We talk about France a lot in this album, including man and his environment, sometimes with a futuristic or apocalyptic tone.

Housse de Racket Alesia (Kitsuné/Coopérative Music) 2011
Concerts from 7 to 10 September in Germany, 23 September at Clermont-Ferrand, 24 September in Angers and 1 October at the Marsatac Festival.

Traduction: Anne-Marie Harper