At the Trans Musicales de Rennes, the burlesque pop of Ziyad Al-Samman launches the 46th edition

With his pop infused with funk and new wave, the young English dandy opened the festival founded in 1979 this Wednesday, which for the occasion found the historic Salle de la Cité, the beating heart of the city. We were there.

AWith a ring in his ear, a drooping mustache and an impeccable suit, the Englishman Ziyad Al-Samman takes a break for the photographer in front of the Salle de la Cité in Rennes. It’s been twelve years since the Trans Musicales, whose slogan “new since 1979” sums up both the history and an appetite for all music, had deserted this room, which was for a long time the epicenter of rock culture in Brittany: when, in 2012, they invited Paul Thomas Saunders, moving folk- singer arrived from Leicester (England), and Lou Doillon, French actress singing in the language of Shakespeare her first album, Places, produced by local native Étienne Daho, who also passed through this scene. “And you’re telling me that Björk sang her first album in this room in 1993? I was born four years later,” laughs the composer-singer-songwriter with the false air of Franck Zappa.

By what mystery did the musician, born in central England, having spent his early childhood in Jordan, his father’s country of origin, before returning to live in London at the age of 13, found himself signing his first EP of five tracks, Pleasure complex, among the French Yotanka? It was his publisher Peermusic, an American music publishing giant, who connected him with the independent label based in Angers (Maine-et-Loire) which notably oversees the careers of folk troubadours Lo’jo and dub-rockers Zenzile . “I’m only just starting out, but it looks like things are starting to take off: in a fortnight I have a date at the Moth Club, a two-hundred-seat venue in Hackney, north-east London . » From his parents “owners of five restaurants focused on Mediterranean cuisine”, Ziyad Al-Samman has inherited a certain sense of celebration…

As a tribute to Arabic music

Moreover, when he went into exile at 18 in Liverpool, “a great city, much more welcoming than London”, to study for three years at the Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), a performing arts school opened in 1996 by ex-Beatles Paul McCartney, he mainly went partying. “I still had the chance to meet Sir Paul four times and make him listen to my first songs, which do not appear on my EP. He advised me to pay attention to the internal mechanics of each of them. By insisting on the fact that a song is like a house: it must have a framework, in short, a structure. My favorite author is Prince. But I also really like the American punk-dance group LCD Soundsystem, of which I’m going to cover a song this evening. »

What did we see this Wednesday, December 4, under the Art Deco vault of the Cité? Even if he presents his single Oh Habibi (” My love ” in the language of Oum Kalthoum) as a tribute to Arabic music, and more particularly to the Egyptian singer Amr Diab, Ziyad Al-Samman is above all, as he defines himself, a « poppy boy ». Accompanied by a good bassist with the false air of a young Jean-Jacques Burnel (The Stranglers) and a drummer often pressing the bass drum pedal to mark a disco tempo, he is a entertainer uninhibited, playfully multiplying the swaying of his hips. He navigates between his claimed influences, Prince and LCD Soundsystem, from which he covers with ease I Can Change, syears never seem to copy them too much. It is rather from Pulp and its eccentric singer Jarvis Cocker, from whom he borrows the tremolos at the end of sentences, that Ziyad Al-Samman most often reminds us.

Damn, we forgot to ask him if Pleasure complex, the title of his EP, was a nod to the album The Pleasure Principle (1979), by English synthetic pop pioneer Gary Numan. Because, almost subliminally, in its synths blowing hot and cold, we also perceive this influence… It’s too early to know if Ziyad Al-Samman’s burlesque pop, which would require more writing, will be a hit. In any case, with such a juggernaut, the Trans musicales, who will notably welcome Yannis & The Yaw, the new group of Yannis Philippakis (heard in Foals), in an afrobeat vein in homage to drummer Tony Allen (1940-2020), will are open in a pleasant way…