Exploding Head

It all started with the audience and the love they gave to us. Each night during the Silence Yourself tour, we’d witness something was happening. The shows were getting warmer, people around the world were opening their hearts to us. It had a profound effect on us (the four of us individually but also as a band), and we wanted to find a way to respond to that.

First there was Fuckers, a song written for the people, in direct response to the way our shows were evolving during the Silence Yourself tour. It was our way to give back. We wanted to write a song that would be useful to people, that they could take home after the shows. It was a way for us to honour the love they gave to us. The words ‘don’t let the fuckers get you down’ were given to me by a friend who had written them for me as a note in order to help me in a difficult time. I thought that was a simple and easy way to communicate and I wanted to use these words in a song, so I could communicate with the audience in the same simple and easy way.

The expression of Love when you are onstage is one of the most amazing and intense feelings one can experience in life. People are kinder in venues than they are in the streets, they are open and generous, they are ready to feel alive. Somehow one finds in the passion of the crowds what every human is looking to experience : the assurance to be alive and the freedom to love and be loved. To me personally, I can definitely say that audiences around the world cured me from most of my terrors.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the figure of the looser, the one who has missed his vocation, has failed in life. It was my biggest phobia, to become bitter. I must have picked up on feelings of resentment in adults around me. Since then, the idea of missing out on my life terrified me. Music represented a chance for an escape, a chance to become that person I imagined myself to be. I grew up in a small city in France wanting to eat the world. I never wanted a normal life. Everytime I told myself maybe I should settle down, I always ended up saying yes to some sort of crazy project or life-choices that would contradict the whole concept of settling down. I never fantasised about a family, a husband, nor money… I guess it just didn’t click that way for me.

I remember one day my dad handing me a piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few words: “Impose your luck, hold on tight to your good fortune, move towards your risk, when they see you, they’ll get used to it!” I was maybe 12 or 13. These words (by the French poet René Char) struck me like lightning, they spoke to my young soul. Later, they resurfaced during the writing of ‘Adore Life’.

The new album is infused by all these ideas of inspiration, freedom and the poetry of life. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about it, because the message is quite delicate. What it means to be alive? When I look back I realise that it was the intention all along: to make a positive record, a record that makes you feel vulnerable and strong at the same time, where each breath feels like the last one. The feeling of urgency, the drama and vulnerability, the feeling of immortality (‘live forever!’), they’re all in there, they’re all necessary. They’re all offered as a gift to whoever need them, to take their own freedom and enjoy it, maybe now even more than ever.