The video no longer exists but, if it did, you could click play right around now and find yourself transported to the living room of a provincial French home. You’d hear the first few notes of the song straight away, and they would probably remind you of a jaunty alarm clock. Soon, though, the music would become impossible to hear over the screaming. In that brightly lit house, you’d see teenager after teenager enthusiastically bopping around and drunkenly singing. “SO SENTIMENTAL, NOT SENTIMENTAL NO” are the words you would technically be able to hear but, realistically, you wouldn’t. These are French kids, and they’re singing in yaourt (“yoghurt”), the Gallic slang for braying along to foreign lyrics you only vaguely know phonetically. Around 20 seconds later, the video would end, as the person holding the digital camera simply had to go dance around with her friends.
Around a decade later, in the late 2010s, she would delete most of the media she’d posted to her Facebook account over the years, and so it would be lost forever. I remember it well, though. It was 2009 – July, maybe August – and we’d just finished our Baccalaureat. Some knew they’d be staying in Nantes for university; others would be moving to Paris. I was still waiting to hear back from British universities, but dearly hoped I was about to cross the Channel and start a new life in London. We were children and we weren’t. That summer, we decided that we had no idea who or what we were, and that was fine. Mostly, we just got drunk every night. We’d go to bed at dawn, all piled up on various couches and cushions, wake up in the middle of the afternoon, have a coffee, some pasta, head to the supermarket, buy some booze, then start again.
I watched that video often as I got older, because I remembered so little from those months. It was nice to know it all actually happened. We really did spend a little while suspended in the air, stuck in that moment after you jump up a trampoline but before you hit the fabric again. It was also nice to hear that song, Phoenix’s ‘Lisztomania’, because it helped tie my life together. In some ways, it still does.
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was released in May 2009, as we were all cramming for our exams. It’s the album that changed everything for the French quartet. They’d been a band for nearly 15 years by that point, having got together in Versailles in the mid-90s. ‘If I Ever Feel Better’, their first successful single, came out in 2001; ‘Everything Is Everything’ did quite well in 2004, as did It’s Never Been Like That two years later.
There are probably a myriad of ways in which you could describe their music but, really, it’s indie pop. It has guitars and a bass and some decent enough drumming but, really, none of it is likely to ever challenge. They’re fun and slick and easy to love, though equally as easy to forget, like brief summer flings you snog, eat ice cream with, then forget all about.
The weird thing is that ‘1901’, ‘Lisztomania’ and ‘Lasso’, the three main singles from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix , aren’t entirely different. There isn’t much to make you think, there; nothing that really catches your ear, and feels dissonant and compelling at the same time. It really wasn’t the sort of album I should have fallen for at the time either.
Back in 2009, I was at school but, mostly, I was a zealous and unbearable music blogger. I had a little website and we’d interview bands like These New Puritans, Fuck Buttons and Mogwai. My dormant Last.Fm account tells me I was, that year, mo…
