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You have toured the USA, London and the UK, how and why being on stage is important for you ? ?
You can play previously recorded pieces of music and make them magical in different ways. It helps your musicianship and confidence. Quite often our songs are recorded with various overdubs, and playing live everything happens at once, so there’s a lot more communication between musicians, and with the audience, which can be inspirational. Apart from that it’s obviously a privilege to be able to travel to different parts of the world.
Two of our reviewers saw you live at your recent gig in London (Upstars at the garage) : it seems that your music sounds more 'rockish', with drums more present on stage. Is it something you will also develop on records ?
We had no control over how we sounded at that gig, the sound engineer was terrible! Our live sound is normally quite jazzy, not at all rock. The guitar sometimes has a bit more bite than on record, but I absolutely hate big kick drum sounds, and those kind of rock cliches. But when you get a bad sound engineer, and you’re borrowing someone else’s drum kit, what can you do? You just have to smile and play, hoping there are no French people with long memories in the room!
At this gig, you played just before the Trembling Blue Stars, does the Field Mice and all the Sarah/Twee pop movement mean something for you ? ?
Not really. All those people are very nice, but to me it really represents underachievement
Your music is often described as "fragile", "tragic" or "sweet"... Personally, how can you describe it ?
Soft but swift.
How do you make songs ? Is there a special "recipe" for doing them ?
A spanish guitar, a dictaphone and quiet
Do you evaluate the Clientele's success now ?
We have an easy life nowadays. We’re playing in Europe as well as the USA this year, so we get to travel, which is a reward in itself. We sold enough records in the UK last year to buy new instruments and for making a film. So things are OK, it will be interesting to see what another year brings.
What's your opinion about British current music ?
Generally the music scene is really dull here because it’s so full of arrogance and laziness. It’s horribly unhealthy for real music or ideas. The world of the NME is boring, they’re just lackeys for the major labels : I’m so sick of seeing crap bands hyped to death all of the time. It frustrates and depresses me as a British musician, so I’ll just beg everyone not to see us as part of that scene ? we want to distance ourselves from it as far as possible. Most bands I really love come from abroad like Sea and Cake, Migala, Plush
What will be the ideal future for the Clientele ?
A rich label to release our records, a lot of festivals this summer, an exciting new LP.
by Etienne
