Brussels Summer Festival: Tuxedo Moon

Tuxedomoon was already playing post-punk when punk was still at its height. Founded in California in 1977, this particular bunch of new-wavers, turned on by the European experimental scene, moved to Brussels in the 1980s. From his base in Athens, frontman Blaine L. Reininger has organised a return to Brussels, where the band will perform at the Brussels Summer Festival.

At their Brussels Summer Festival concert, Blaine L. Reininger and co. will play both old material and tracks from the album Pink Narcissus, released earlier this year. Three years ago, at the request of the L’Étrange Festival in France, they gave a live performance of the soundtrack for James Bidgood’s 1971 cult film of the same name; and now its oppressive, jazz-like music is available to all. “But you don’t need to have seen the film to appreciate the album,” Reininger hastens to reassure music-lovers. “I don’t know if you’ll want to see the film at all if you’re not homosexual. It doesn’t do anything for me. For us, it was a great opportunity to work together once again – and the organisation paid for our aeroplane tickets to Paris, which is a nice bonus when you live scattered just about all over the world.”

Since their reunion in 2000, they have toured regularly, although that’s not always so easy with band members living on various continents. “Sometimes I feel more like a tour operator than a musician,” laughs Reininger, speaking from his Athens home. “After the time we spent in Brussels in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, [bassist] Peter [Principle] went back to New York, Steven [Brown] ended up in Mexico, and I moved to Greece. Apart from our trumpeter, Luc Van Lieshout, who joined later and has stayed in Brussels, I’m the only one out of the old core who still lives in Europe!”

Brussels wasn’t such a strange move for these new-wavers. Right from the start, Tuxedomoon sounded much more European than their colleagues. “When we emerged during the glory days of punk rock, the music industry was pretty anti-intellectual, especially in America. We identified with European artists like David Bowie and Brian Eno, who had listened keenly to German bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk. But Brussels then wasn’t what it is now. Certainly in the 1980s, it was a depressing ghost town. You had to be really tough psychologically to live and work there. Culturally, it was dead. A few studios, like the Daylight, the Square, and the ICP, and small record labels like Play It Again Sam and Les Disques du Crépuscule formed little islands around which we moved.”

Acting career
In 1998, Reininger left Brussels for Athens, where he not only married a Greek actress, but also developed an acting career himself. “Recently, I played a European banker who came to steal Greek money.” [Laughs] On a trip back to Brussels in 2003, he noticed that his former home had made huge progress. Since then, he has returned regularly – last year, for example, to tour with the choreographer Thierry Smits’s company. “And soon we’re going to stay a bit longer in order to work on the soundtrack of a documentary about the film Blue Velvet with the English band Cult With No Name. In the meantime, I’ve become a great fan of the Villo! bikes. I know the city better now than when I lived there. It’s only now I can see how close everything is to everything else.”

For young people who only know Tuxedomoon from Nouvelle Vague’s cover of “In a Manner of Speaking”, their Brussels Summer Festival gig offers an opportunity to get to know them better. “That number was actually written by a former band member, Winston Tong, who got all the credits for it at the time and now pays his rent with the royalties. Good for him… The other song they might know is the electro-punk club classic ‘No Tears’, but that’s at the other extreme. We cover such a broad spectrum because we never wanted to choose. We don’t know any boundaries. If we find something interesting, then we go all the way.”

12/8, 20.30, Kunstberg/Mont des Arts

BRUSSELS SUMMER FESTIVAL • 8 > 17/8, Pass: €15 > 60, Paleizenplein/place des Palais, Kunstberg/Mont des Arts & Magic Mirrors, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.bsf.be