(This is a full transcription of an interview I did for the Harvard Crimson with Jacques lu Cont, aka Les Rythmes Digitales, back in 1999. Lord knows what became of him.)
The Harvard Crimson: So we must be the first paper to interview you that shares a name with your hair colour.
Jacques lu Cont: What, red? (laughs)
THC: So what was it like working with Nik Kershaw? I’m sure he’s one of your idols.
JLC: Yeah. It’s funny, because comparing Nik Kershaw and Shannon, the two couldn’t be more different, and now that is both musically and in the actual relationship with working. With Shannon, it was all her car was booked, we got together in the studio and worked in the studio and recorded in the studio. It was all very official, and that – she’s a beautiful woman, she was really nice, and we got on really well, but that was definitely how the relationship was. As compared with Nik Kershaw: now Nik Kershaw, I just went over to his house, he invited me in, he’s got a beautiful house, made me a cup of tea, I sat down and had dinner with him and his kids. And then he was like, “so, should we go in the studio then?” And then I went into his studio, we messed around, we had a laugh, we joked about haircuts he used to have and haircuts that I’ve got now, we just sort of got on it and did the song [], and it was really cool like that. So the two really couldn’t have been more different, but I think that is reflected in their musical style too. I was looking for two opposite ends of the spectrum. I didn’t want two Shannons on a record, and I didn’t want two Nik Kershaws on the record. I wanted someone who represented British ’80s pop, and I wanted someone who represented American ’80s pop. More than that, ’80s American electro too, because Shannon was not just part of the scene, but the queen of that, really.
THC: Did Nik Kershaw think you were taking the piss at first?
JLC: Yeah, I guess that’s fair enough, because you’ve got Nik Kershaw sitting in his house, he’s been busy writing songs for the Hollies and Cliff Richard, and people like that and all of a sudden, he’s got this guy coming up to him and saying “hi, I’m signed to Wall of Sound [Les Rythmes Digitales’ British record label], and I want to do a song with you.” You know, you’re going to think he’s taking the piss, and the same with Shannon, she’s like “Why? Why does this young guy want to come and do a track with me, what’s his intention?” But it was the same with both of them, I sat down and I said, “Look, it’s not a joke, I’m not taking the piss, I’m doing this for serious musical reasons, I think you’re a brilliant singer and I want to do a song with you.” And once you get that out of the way, it cuts the barriers down a bit, and it’s just like, “cool, let’s get on and do it.” But yeah, I guess there was initial apprehension from both of them.
THC: Now you’re trying to bring your sound to America, which is not as into dance music as Britain is, for example, so what do you think the hardest part is?
JLC: This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about carefully, and I’ve tried to take all the parts that I hate about British dance music and iron them out. There’s two things I hate about British dance music. First of all, it’s faceless. It’s by and large a bunch of guys who want to make music and make records but don’t want people to see their face. Nobody except sad funny-looking little gits anyway. But they don’t want people to see their face, it’s all about being faceless and cool and underground and that really just doesn’t have a lot of relevance to me, I don’t really feel like that. I mean, my interests lie in pop music, my interests lie in people looking and seeing what I look like on stage and that kind of thing. So that’s one thing I hate about the British music scene. Now, to combat that, I’ve dyed my hair red and put a picture of myself on my album cover, so it’s pretty obvious where I’m headed with that.
And the second thing I hate was with British live dance music shows, they’re all shit. They’re still equating to a guy standing on stage with a mixing disk and a keyboard, pressing a few buttons and twiddling a few knobs, and smoking a cigarette and waving his hand in the air. That isn’t really a show, you may as well put the CD on loud. So to me a live performance should be just that, it should be a performance. You should be able to see people getting up on stage, slinging on an instrument [mimes guitar slinging] and playing it. That’s all part of an occasion, part of an event. That was another thing I think was being lost as well. So I guess those are the two main areas where I’ve tried to be as un-British as possible.
THC: That brings me to the next question. I’ve noticed you have a whole live band. How have you adapted from working in a studio to working with a band?
JLC: Well, I could have either tried to recreate the album live, note for note, which would probably not have been worthwhile because there’s always going to be fundamental little differences here and there and once again there’s no point, you may as well just have the CD on loud. So the live show is a reinterpretation of the album, with a few surprises thrown in, a few alternative versions of songs and basically turning everything on its head so that when you come and see the show you get something different from the album. My whole motivation for everything, for all the decisions I make for what to do in life, completely come from me thinking “what would I want if I bought this record?” And if I’d bought my album and I’d gone to see it live, I would want some surprises, I would want to be entertained for a start, and I would want to hear alternative versions and slightly remixed versions, yet still be able to know the songs. And so I’ve done it exactly like that. The two people who play with me, Jim and Jo, it took a long time to find. Jim was actually a deputy drummer for me, I had another drummer before him but Jim turned out to be better, so he stayed in. And Jo used to do my makeup for a lot of photo sessions and stuff. I found out she played guitar as well, I thought she looked great, and she knew where I was coming from, so I asked her to be in the band. And that’s really where it came about. It took a long time to get it right. It took a lot of rehearsal and touring to get it to a level that I was happy with. But I’m happy with it now, and I think it comes across when we’re on stage.
THC: That’s good, I’m looking forward to it. So… you’ve got a French name, your band’s got a French name, and you’re on the same American label as Air and Cassius. So… what’s going on?
JLC: Well, my parents are English.
THC: Yeah, I’ve read the press material.
JLC: Right, so you know I was born in France, I was conceived by parents before they were married. They wanted to be married before I was born and went to France, where I was born prematurely. That’s why my French connection exists. My real name is Stewart, but my parents used to call me Jacques as a little pet name ’cos it reminded them of their little kid from France. I’ve always been fascinated with pop music because the image is as important as the music. There’s always a story behind a good pop act, and so there had to be a story behind what I do, and there had to be a story to tell. So that’s why I took this fact that I was born in France, picked a French name, because every other f**king band in the world picks an English name. It’s good to stick your neck out and have a name that’s just a little bit hard to pronounce, but makes a little bit cooler for that and looks good on paper. So that’s why I picked the name, and that’s why I played on it. I never really lied about it, I just exaggerated a lot of it to make the story more like the kind of story I’d want to hear about a pop band.
THC: Sounds good, but in school, did you go by Jacques or Stewart?
JLC: Early on in school everyone called me Stewart, and then when they heard my parents called me Jacques when they around at my house, they started calling me Jacques but it was almost like a piss-take.
THC: Yeah, I was about to ask you whether going by “Jacques” in an English school [was inviting trouble].
JLC: It’s a funny mix now, some people call me Jacques, some people call me Stewart. I prefer Jacques., as Matt [nearby] calls me. I prefer Jacques, because it’s more to do with the band and stuff like that, and then I go home and my mom calls me Stewart. It separates the two for me.
THC: If you could work with anyone from the ’80s, excluding the people you’ve worked with already, who would you work with?
JLC: I should say that as much as there’s many people I’ve worked with in the ’80s, I’m not going to do it again, because I don’t want it to become a novelty. I don’t want it to become a trademark LRD thing. So I’m not going to make another ’80s-sounding album, the next album will be quite a lot different. The people who I’d like to work from the ’80s, I’ve tried to work with them on this record, but for a number of reasons they couldn’t do it. I tried to work with Phil Oakey, but he was recording a new Human League album; I tried to work with Grace Jones, but she wanted 30,000 pounds, so we couldn’t do that. Those were the two main people. I thought about working with Joyce Sims instead of Shannon, but she lives in Alabama, and it’s a little bit harder to get hold of her. Those were the main people I was thinking of, and those would’ve been my top five. As it was, I got to work with two of them, which is great, and the tracks turned out to be great.
THC: If you’ve heard, Boston clubs close at 2 o’clock.
JLC: I don’t know, some places in London close at 2, that’s like the usual curfew. There are a lot of places like Ministry of Sound that close at 8 and 9, but in London 2 is quite a common time, so we’re used to it. It’s funny, when we go to places like Spain, clubs don’t open till 1, and we’re on stage at 5, it’s crazy.
THC: Yeah, it’s been a big issue in the city, whether to extend it to 4 o’clock.
JLC: Oh really? The thing is, for me, playing live, that’s actually not a problem, because the Les Rythmes Digitales live show is better then. It’s not like we’re playing nose-bleeding hammering techno, which always sounds better at 6 in the morning. Because it’s a show, it’s halfway between going to a club and watching a DJ and going to a band like Primus [playing next door]. There’s a similar kind of energy between what you get from a rock show and what we do, and therefore the time frame, before 2, suits me fine. So Boston’s good for me.
THC: Where are you off to next?
JLC: We’re going to New York, we’re playing Twilo, in New York. It’s the first live show they’ve ever had at the club.
THC: That’s a big name, Twilo.
JLC: Yeah, it should be good but there’s a lot of logistics to sort out. For a start, their stage is only 10 foot by 10 foot, and as you’ve already seen we’ve got more than enough gear to fill that.
THC: About the music snobbery thing: do you think behind every DJ’s rack there’s a huge pile of ’80s records that they never bring out?
JLC: Yeah. That’s not really because they’ve discovered the ’80s, but because the age group of DJs in general, a lot of them are people who grew up in the ’80s, so they’re going to have fondness for those records and going to have records from those days. So I’m sure they all have them, but because it’s perceived as being uncool to have these records you’ll never see them in their box, and if you go to their house they’ll be collecting dust in the corner somewhere. But I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a fondness for the ’80s. It’s that thing that pissed me off with England, it’s all to do with being on a street level, with being cool, with what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. There’s often a lot said about my anti-fashion statements, anti-cool and things like that; the funny thing about that is, by just sticking to what I’ve always thought from the start, wearing what I want to wear, playing the music I wanted to play, people like Donatella Versace asked us to play on the catwalk show, I’m in Harper’s Bazaar this month.
So the funny thing is, just by sticking to my guns and doing what I do and thinking what I’ve always thought, the worm turned, people started turning around and saying “Oh, that’s cool.”
THC: Which is good for you.
JLC: Yeah, which is fine, but I think that’s quite a strong lesson in just sticking by your guns and doing what you do and believing what you believe in.
THC: Your parents are classical musicians. So what was the first pop album you bought that brought on this epiphany?
JLC: The first pop album I bought I think was Actually, by the Pet Shop Boys.
THC: Great album.
JLC: For a long time, my parents were frowning on [pop music] so much that I was going to the library and listening to Rio, by Duran Duran or Dare, by the Human League, or things like that. I was going to the library and checking stuff out ’cos my parents didn’t like me listening to it. My parents thought pop music was the devil’s music.
THC: What do they think now?
JLC: Oh, they hate it. [Makes a dismissive gesture.] They like the fact that I travel. They like the fact that they’ve seen me doing this but musically it’s still not quite what they’d want.
THC: They’d rather you were playing concert halls?
JLC: Yeah. I mean, we get on great, we always will do but it would be nicer to know that I have their support.