These five titles stand out. But there are still twelve that you need to soak up.”17 titles is too many, lNicola Sirkis says in an interview. When people say that this album is unreasonable, it’s because of that. Today, who still has time to listen? This album, either we live with it for two years, or we put it there, we’ll never listen to it.” There is no doubt that the second option will not be chosen.
This fourteenth album has been a long time coming…
Nicola Sirkis: “Usually, there are four to five years between two records. We finish a tour and we start a writing process. Here, it’s seven years. Like everyone else, we lost two years. Or we gained two. Covid had an impact on writing. The fact of having taken so much time made us see things differently. And then, we still did a lot of things during this time. We did two tours at the same time, the stadium tour and the festival tour. And at the same time, we were writing. Writing an album while playing a lot on stage gives much stronger tracks, both in terms of music and lyrics.”
This album has very electro sounds. Was it difficult to transpose it for the stage as you did for the showcase filmed and broadcast Friday night on TMC?
Oli de Sat: “We thought it was going to be complicated but it happened quite naturally. All of a sudden, we realized that, yes, we can still take the songs up a level when we already thought that on record, the production was already pretty cool.”
Nicola Sirkis: “It’s a great pleasure to be able to make this album and play it directly before everyone has it, to see how it sounds live.”
It’s bold to perform it live in front of an audience who don’t know any of the songs!
Nicola Sirkis: “It’s cheeky. It’s a risk, a challenge. It’s everything you shouldn’t do. It’s unreasonable but that’s what’s great. After fourteen albums, you shouldn’t release another album. You have to find other ideas. I thought it was good to have no privilege between the public and the media. Everyone discovers the album at the same time. Because the press didn’t receive it before. Some people are pissed. They said: ‘If it’s like that, we won’t write an article’. Well, it’s not a problem.”
Can Indochina do without articles in the press?
Nicola Sirkis: “The important thing is that people like our album, whether they’re journalists or the public. It’s two and a half years of our work. So, if we say it’s crap, it would hurt. Will people like the album? The doubt is always there, but about the way we play the songs on stage, there is none. We felt that three weeks ago, when we started rehearsing. We rehearse in a big studio near Paris, where there are other artists; everyone stopped when they heard us. They wondered who this group was that goes from reggae to electropop. They couldn’t believe it was us. We felt that something was happening. If we feel that, it means that the compositions are not that bad.”
It’s Indochina as we’ve never heard it before and at the same time, it remains Indochina. Is the DNA still there?
Nicola Sirkis: “Making reggae, for Indochine, is not in the cliché that we have been put in, that of rock. It is a totally strange album compared to that. But the DNA remains. When we started the group, 40 years ago, people told us that if we had our sound we would be recognizable. It’s true that we recognize a Coldplay song no matter what, or a U2 song. We are also recognized, it’s rather classy.”
In the era of Spotify and other platforms where single titles reign supreme, you are also releasing a double CD and triple vinyl. That too is bold and outside the dictates of the music industry…
Nicolas Sirkis: “We work the old way but by making modern rock. Releasing a single track, we did it with ‘Nos fêtements’ and ‘3SEX’. But we want to create and express ourselves. Indeed, it goes against everything that should be done. It’s an anti-TikTok generation album. For the record industry, it’s long and double, while people no longer have time to listen to records today. There are long tracks, choruses that come after two minutes, or even no chorus at all. We really want to make music that we like, so we do what we like. We are lucky that the audience is powerful and large enough to allow us to do what we want. The day we stop selling records, don’t worry, we’ll be thrown away like a mop. That’s the risk, but that’s what’s great. At least we are proud of what we do. that we do.”
How did it feel to play the showcase in front of 300 people after selling out stadiums?
Oli de Sat: “It’s been, I don’t know how long since we played in front of so few people. The last time was in Oslo, in front of 250 people. We were all focused. It was recorded and filmed and we had none of our landmarks, neither stage nor discographic.”
Nicol Sirkis: “It was like a first tour date. We innovate every time. Everything we brought together in this showcase, in terms of images and others, is the prelude to what will happen on the tour. We will return to an arena where we have not played for six years. These will be concerts where lots of things will happen everywhere. But it will not be an overbidding. We will not be able to do bigger than what we did in the stadiums. The Central Tour was, I think, the pinnacle of what we could do in a big stadium.”
At the text level, Babel Babel Isn’t it Indochine’s most committed album, even on a political level, which wasn’t really your trademark?
Nicola Sirkis: “Every time, we’re told that. Out of 13, there was still ‘A French Summer’ and ‘Trump the World’. We observe the world and we suffer it like everyone else. For the past ten years, the world has never been so confronted with the barking of one and the other, the self-persuasion of one and the other, the self-sufficiency saying ‘I’m right, not you’. No one talks to each other anymore, no one understands each other anymore, everyone is right. And then, in fact, we realize that no. For months, in France, we’ve been saying that the Olympic Games were going to be a disaster. In fact, no. Everything went very well. People were happy to see each other again. They were magnificent Olympic Games. All the people who said that made fools of themselves. We are in this filthy cacophony that is unbearable. It’s more of a observation than a political commitment. But it is also an album that has a lot of hope. There are those who have the future behind them and those who want to be on the road to the future. I think we are trying to go towards the future. In this album, I believe that there is this dark side of the factual observation when we wrote the record, but also that of saying that all is not lost. On the contrary, let’s build the future.”
This album was recorded in London, Paris and Brussels, which has become your base camp since 1996. Why Brussels and the ICP studios?
Oli de Sat: “Every time we say to ourselves that we’re going to change. We go to other studios, we try… and we come back to Brussels. There’s the back-line (many instruments and equipment available, Editor’s note). We know that we’re at peace, that no one comes to bother us. We have our habits, we’re very well received. The food is excellent. We recorded with Erwin (Autrique), with whom we had already worked a lot. He knows very well what we want. So, there’s no need to explain. Everything is so well-oiled there that it’s difficult to go elsewhere. And above all, there’s sound.”
Here you are in 2024 with a fourteenth Indochine album. And to think that at the beginning of the group, you were given six months before seeing you disappear. What does that inspire in you?
Nicolas Sirkis: (Laughs) “There you go! Yes, we were barely given 6 months. The name wasn’t going to hold up because it was too connoted. We were a crappy pop group. What can I say? (he rolls his eyes, Editor’s note) The dogs bark, the caravan passes.”
Indochine fans already gathered around the main stage of the Ronquières Festival… more than 5 hours before the band’s arrival
In concert at Palais 12 in April!
It was the boss’s surprise. At the end of the broadcast of the group’s ultra-confidential showcase on Friday night on TMC, Indochine revealed the dates of its new tour. It will begin at the end of January with a stop at Palais 12 in Brussels on April 4 and 5. You’ll have to be on the lookout to get your hands on the precious tickets.
Nicola Sirkis confided in an interview that the concert given on September 3 for 300 privileged people prefigures what will be those of this arena tour. The visuals are grandiose, sometimes psychedelic, sometimes composed of images that seem to be extracted from television news when they are pure creations of artificial intelligence. Others stage an armada of characters in the style of Planet of the Apes playing the trumpet.
Musically, it’s moving. The guitars are omnipresent and blend perfectly with the electro sounds, whether it’s the big bass or the synth lines. We can’t wait to see it in a big way.
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