BATTANT, April 18th 2009,Underground Festival #2. Cannes, Fr.
(This interview was conducted by Laurent Ciarabelli, edited with the help of Specimen).

After the show, Battant remained very available for Babes in Boyland. They kindly offered us a long and unexpected interview. Really humble, they shared their vision of music with us. They also detailed their artistic choices with a very realistic vision of the actual music scene and especially for the ones coming from London.

Babes in Boyland: We are glad to see that you can speak French, and that Jacques Brel is one of your main influences… What is your relationship with this country ?

Chloe : My father is french, I lived in France in Marseille when I was 14. Musically, we like some really obscure French bands in New-wave. There are amazing things in it like the French compilation “So young but so cold” which crystallizes the essence of French new wave music. Am I droping name ? (laughs).
Tim : Yes, we like these bands. They are rare, some bands have one released one single, yes.

Bib : You’re successful in France, what about the other countries?

Chloe : (Laughs) For the moment, we indeed have a lot of fans in France. Probably becaus we are on the French label “Kill the DJ”. Even if we have more coverage in England, artists coming from a French label are considered as import. We also have a tour manager in Spain. The thing about London is that we are not affiliated to a particular scene. You have to hang out with the right people and we kind of never had done that. I think that’s because people don’t really know who we are because we’re not “out” ! In London, people don’t really know who we are.
Tim : In London, people like English bands. The bands coming from France are considered as a little bit strange.
Joel : They only know that we are a rock band.
Tim : Yeah… No! (Laughs).

Bib : Do you feel comfortable with the hype occurring among the new London Scene ?

Chloe : In London, a band is on the hard top during… I don’t know… Two weeks. After that, bands are forgotten. We can’t just ignore it. There’s a lot of really good bands that kind of get out in a week and then get swept up and forgotten about, you know, and it’s too late “time has come and gone”. It’s quite detrimental to the victims. People don’t actually listen to the music, they just listen to the hype and ignore bands.
Joel : The websites are giving loads of hype. The hype supports this kind of bands.
Chloe : They are made like an amusement park. There is so much rubbish.
Tim : But there are actually very very good bands.

Bib : What process do you follow when you create a song?

Chloe : When we made this album, we worked together. A lot of it was written by Tim and myself. It was either Tim would write tunes and I would write the songs for it or I would write some lyrics and Tim would write the track, and then I think most of the time we are working on the stuff more the three of us.
Tim : The three of us are coming up with ideas, yes.

Bib : You are compared to Siouxsie, Suicide… What are you thinking about these comparisons? Is this boring for you?

Tim : It’s always good to be compared to someone like Siouxsie or Massive Attack, these bands are cool, but at the same time, it’s boring because we hear it all the time.
Chloe : In the late 70’s, early 80’s, it was the first time in pop music that electronics kind of appeared in it and it was brilliant. Well, I mean pop music had been mainstream for like 20 or 30 years or something, right? So it was like the first time, but I think that for like sixty years from now bands are doing like this again.
Tim: On the other hand, I think that any band that has a female vocalist with dark hair is going to be compared to Siouxsie and the Banshees because it’s kind of an obvious thing.

Bib : But you really have some gothic elements in your music…

Chloe : Yeah… yeah, we do. But I don’t know if it was a conscious thing. I think we’ve gone through more gothic periods. We don’t pay much attention to this, even if subconsciously we May have this influence.
Tim : No, no… I’ve never been gothic (laughs) !
Joel : We also have a lot of influence that you wouldn’t obviously hear in our music. A lot of Rock’n’roll bands for example.

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