The Frenchman is frank about it: “The tracks on my solo album could easily have sat on a La Femme record,” while also treating himself to some sidelong stimuli.
After fifteen years with La Femme, which gave its final concert at the Accor Arena on November 26 last year, a first solo album became necessary for its most flamboyant member, the cofounder and singer Marlon Magnée. But not as an emancipatory gesture:
“The tracks on my solo album could easily have sat on a La Femme record. But it was unfortunately no longer feasible to make another one at the moment” Magnée nonetheless took the opportunity to reconnect with the styles that shaped his youth and constituted La Femme’s influences.
In the crosshairs: Lou Reed, Taxi Girl or the Stray Cats
In this multi-tempo record that blends 1950s rock’n’roll, punk, (almost) cold wave and psychedelic, closing with a majestic instrumental ballad, one thinks as much of 1980s Lou Reed as of Taxi Girl. How to find the balance to make rock in its broadest sense a space of freedom that is both pop and radical?
“I am obsessed with vintage and music dating from before 2000, but I didn’t want to make a revival record that was merely well executed. My aim was to offer a renewed approach, a rock reimagined in the image of Madness or the Stray Cats, capable of modernizing a sonic grammar without freezing it.”
Testified by the love song Plus fort que toi, a rockabilly demonstration on electro synth, or Opération destruction, “a crossing between Motörhead and large sequences of ultra-virulent synths.”
“She’s stronger and even more good than pure white/When you look at her, your eyes roll back in their sockets/It’s true she’s going to hurt you a lot…” : a special nod to La Première, staying close to Marlon Magnée’s feelings. “I don’t like telling something intimate too much. But in this case, I didn’t have a choice.
A solo album not so solo
At times, aligning with the linguistic openness of La Femme’s latest outputs, Teatro lúcido (2022) and Rock Machine (2024), he ventures into English, on People Are Afraid or Do You Miss Me, previously written for an American girlfriend who was pulling away.
“These tracks weren’t written to conquer an international market, but because they sprang spontaneously in English from my guts. And when you stay away from home for a long time, you start thinking or dreaming in the country’s language.”
” Without forgetting his knack for Francophone turns of phrase: “I’ve got far too much courage to pull the trigger” (Devastated).
One time, not twice: Magnée chose to work outside his four walls, La Femme having done without a director since Psycho Tropical Berlin (2013). It was therefore at Ferber studios, with esoteric vibrations, that he joined Renaud Letang, with whom he collaborated throughout the making of Dark Star.
“I identified with Manu Chao, whose first solo album was produced by Renaud. If our musics are very different, we come from the same alternative milieu, we listened to the same things when young and lived through similar experiences,” or how to recall that moving forward alone isn’t always a rupture, but sometimes the logical continuation of a highly singular path.
Dark Star (Disque Pointu/Idol). Out March 6. In concert at Supersonic, Paris, on March 26 and at the Trianon, Paris, on November 14.
