The beard has grown, a few white hairs dot it and the features are a little drawn. But on stage, Mathias Malzieu and his troupe of Dionysus maintain the same enthusiasm.
The French rock group celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024 with a new tour across France and the release of “L’Extraordinarium”, an album which covers their main titles with duets shared with artists like -M-, Mademoiselle K , Emily Loizeau, Aldebert, Keren Ann or Olivia Ruiz.
“We didn’t want to release a best-of for fun. There are unreleased songs, guests, remastered songs. It’s a new creation”Mathias Malzieu told us when we met him at the Var book festival in November.
We took the opportunity to ask the almost fifty-year-old Montpellier how he analyzed these three decades. “30 years ago, I went to film school, I just wanted to form a rock band and write poems. I didn’t see myself at 30, nor at 20, nor at 10”.
The singer and guitarist recalls that he “you have to stay humble in the face of success, it doesn’t mean much”before telling us how everything exploded for his group with the song “Song for Jedi”.
The crazy story of “Song for Jedi”
“At the start, we recorded it in a very calm way for our model, on the piano. But I didn’t like it. The day before going to the studio, I said to the others “it doesn’t work at all, it’s too soft, when I play it in my room it explodes.”
Within the group, the debate opens. The bassist of the time balks, “he cared about his double bass line and if we changed the tempo, he couldn’t play it anymore.”explains Malzieu.
Too bad, they will do without him. At the end of the night, before flying to the legendary studios of the American Steve Albini, the musicians get back behind their instruments.
“We start the song, I let go of the chord and Babeth [violon et voix] launches “When I was a child, I was a Jedi” which we know on the definitive version and I sing the chorus. We leave like that, but I tell Mike Michael Ponton guitarist and arranger]: “It’s missing an intro, a riff”. I had a backing thing and suddenly he throws in what we have at the beginning of the song, like it was a hip-hop sample.” The next day, Dionysus records this version.
And the story doesn’t end there. “We put it at number 15 on the CD, because we didn’t think it could make a single. But when we started playing it live, we felt something was happening”. However, the group will face an administrative problem…
“In the original version, not the one we redid with -M-, I ended on folk guitar by repeating the chorus. But we had a second more in English than in French. The song was not then in the quotas to be a single and play on the radio. So, we sent a bad version to the CSA where we cut the ending. Once validated, we sent the good version back to the radios.”
“When we set foot on stage, we don’t cheat”
A little trick which also marks the beginnings of a real love story with the public.
“Many have been following us for a long time, there is a real bond and a form of trust. We don’t make fun of people, we question ourselves, we look for something extra. The public may not like it certain periods of the group or songs, but when we set foot on stage we don’t cheat. We’re not there to promote but to live in the present moment.”
This will still be the case from February with the first concerts of the tour, before hitting the road to festivals during the summer, which will stop on July 18 at Mas des Escaravatiers in Puget-sur-Argens. Like when they were twenty.
2024-01-03 00:25:42
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