POCKET SYMPHONY TRACK-BY-TRACK

Space Maker

Nicolas: We wanted to have this idea of the album literally as a pocket symphony so you imagine you’re going into the opera and the lights go down and then this starts. It’s not the greatest song on the album, but it’s the best one to start with.
Jean-Benoit: This was a joke title from pace maker. Hilarious, huh?

Once Upon A Time

Nicolas: It’s a story of boys meet girl. A fairy tale. Jean-Benoit is singing. I don’t like my voice, really.
Jean-Benoit: We like the fairy tales.

One Hell Of A Party

Nicolas: Well, you’d have to talk to Jarvis about the lyrics. It’s the kind of song where we really wanted to experiment with the instruments. And I played the piano exactly the way that Sakamoto would play on it.
Jean-Benoit: This is the sort of party where you are older and drunk and you are looking at the mess and wondering what happened. So we wanted the track to be very empty, skeletal and dark.

Napalm Love

Nicolas: It’s about the words you use to talk about love. If you list all the words that are used to talk about love they are often horrible, like falling in love, burning for someone, like it’s really destructive.

Mayfair Song

Nicolas: It’s a song we wrote here (Mayfair Studios) while Nigel was mixing. So we set up a little studio in the other room, we were recording. When we did Premiers Symptomes we used to do a bassline, get a vibe and that was it. We forgot how to do that and we wanted to get back to that simplicity. Nigel told us: “Do what you’re good at”.
Jean-Benoit: We made this track very quickly, it only took one day.

Left Bank

Nicolas: This is a song I wrote in a hotel room after a lovely weekend with a girl. And then Monday morning she left without saying a word and I wrote it on my guitar, very simple. Crazy women French girls!
Jean-Benoit: Nicolas and I are always talking about this non-existent girl that we want to meet, that we’d like to have in our bed, the one who left, recently. In our minds we say to her, “come back I love you, I’ve been a naughty boy”. This is our obsession right now.

Photograph

Nicolas: Very cinematic music. When we started with Premiers Symptomes we really liked Blaxploitation soundtrack music; that groove, suspenseful music and we wanted to go back to this. We’ve come back to this grooving thing that we had lost.
Jean-Benoit: The original title of this was Message For A Rock Star and the idea was this: ok you are a rock star and God is also a fan of yours and he wants to have your autograph. You are such a rock star that even God wants you.

Mer Du Japon

Nicolas: Haiku music. J’ai perdu la raison dans la mer du Japon. I lost my mind in the sea of Japan. Just one simple line.
Jean-Benoit: When you go to Los Angeles or Japan there is something special in the air, and we wanted to capture this special Pacific touch. It’s almost like a perfume. It sounds a little bit like a French band Taxi Girl, Mirwais’ first band. We were big fans of this band and there is a similar feel in the production.

Lost Message

Nicolas: It’s so Satie and so French. It sounds so different.
Jean-Benoit: In my mind I see a sort of fresh modern Emmanuelle soundtrack. It’s really erotic.

Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping

Nicolas: This is the Neil Hannon collaboration. I love this song so much. We wrote this for Charlotte.

Redhead Girl

Nicolas: This is my muse. Except she’s not a redhead. It’s very conceptual.
Jean-Benoit: It’s about Perfume, the book by Patrick Suskind, it’s about the clichés that redheads have a special smell. It’s like a legend.

Night Sight

Nicolas: This is my favourite track on the album. It’s very conceptual, because you have this Rhodes with four notes and a synth with seven notes and they have these circular patterns that occasionally merge. It’s a massage for the mind!
Jean-Benoit: We wanted to do a sort of modern track with an irregular pattern on the keyboard. It’s totally improvised. It sounds like a slow chemical reaction, like oxidisation