“Our ethics are worthy but they cut us off from our ties”

With your new album, “Babel Babel”, you are once again sailing against the “trend”…

Nicola Sirkis: This album is described as strange for the music, which goes from rock to symphonic, to reggae, to electropop, etc. But the strange side is also because we go against everything that is done today. That is to say that effectively, if we listened to the record industry, we would not make a double album, no long title. And we do the opposite of that…

And to do this, there must be a good deal of self-confidence, in the fact that the public will follow…

Nicola: I don’t know if it’s confidence because I’m in permanent doubt… it’s more like nerve! That’s what formed the DNA of Indochine: unconsciousness. I was neither a musician nor a singer. I went there, I wrote lyrics because I didn’t know how to play an instrument, because I was told “you’re the one who writes them”. And that’s it… Afterwards, I worked, worked some more, and now, it looks good.

And Indochine has a 40-year career, and has remained very popular without fitting into the mold of the record industry…

Nicola: There is this poll that hurts many of our colleagues, on the French people’s favorite artists. You have Goldman first, who is a retired artist, but who was the most discreet. You have us in two and Cabrel in three, I think. And Stromae too. Whatever happens, they are the most discreet artists, who don’t exaggerate, who respect the public. That says a lot! And then, there are all the other artists who make a big deal out of it, who want to create buzz, create “clickbait”…

This album is also different because it seems more engaged on the geopolitical terrain than the previous ones. Like this song “Sanna on the cross”, which is a tribute to the former Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, who was thrown to the wolves when she was in power. Is she a symbol for you?

Nicola: She is a young Prime Minister, in Finland, on the border with Russia. The Finns are not funny. I went there once and it is very conservative, very Viking. Sanna was elected and she is one of the few who fought for Ukraine, even though it was inflated. She laughed once at a party, which she has the right to do, and then, you have all the conservatives who fell on her saying that she had taken drugs, etc. Maybe she becomes a symbol yes. In any case, I am very touched by this woman. I symbolized her as Mary on the cross and I say that the human race is useless.

This conservatism, which is very present today and which you have always criticized, does it worry you more?

Nicola: Today, he is given more freedom of expression. The song “Beauty and the Beast” from the album, that’s it, someone like Kissinger. I lived with Kissinger throughout my youth, where people said he was the man of peace. But he did some dirty tricks. I find that democracies today, when we see what happened before the Second World War, do not defend themselves enough from these populists, from these inveterate lies. And on the other hand, this is also what happened in Paris at the Olympic Games. That is to say that for years, we have heard people who say that it will not work, the embittered say that it is scandalous, that it will be an absolute tragedy, that France is rotten, etc. And they all got a slap in the face, because it went very well. It means that we’re a bit fed up with this constant barking of reactionaries, of people who are never happy and who yell about everything. We can’t listen to that anymore. These people have the future behind them and we have the future in front of us. That’s kind of what we mean. Afterwards, it’s not scary because Trump, for example, is more ridiculous than anything else.

We mentioned Sanna, but there are also the conditions of Iranian women, of a young woman harassed in the street that you evoke in this album which is very feminine (on “Le chant des cygnes” and “Girlfriend”). As if Indochine was the voice of women…

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