Girls In Hawaii climb the Everest

(© Olivier Donnet)

Three years ago, Girls In Hawaii drummer Denis Wielemans died in a terrible car crash. The group went through a deep trough after that, but has now made its way back to the top of the hill – of a mountain, even – with its third album. “Everest, that is so vast, it’s beyond our comprehension. Like death.”

My little brother was high-spirited and fond of a laugh; he infected the group with his drive and energy...” It is an emotional moment as frontman Antoine Wielemans talks about his brother, who lost his life on the inner ring road of Brussels in the spring of 2010. At that moment Girls In Hawaii was a top band, one of the few French-speaking Belgian bands that had made it big in Flanders too. Five years after their last album, however, their fans have not forgotten them. In fact their slow-moving, melancholy pop – somewhere between Sigur Rós and dEUS – actually seems to be more successful than ever: their emotional show at Pukkelpop drew a large crowd, and their gigs at the Ancienne Belgique and the Cirque Royal sold out in no time. Recently, the Girls were the first Belgian band ever to play the Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavik and they will be appearing soon at the Olympia in Paris. In the musical all-rounder Boris Gronemberger (Castus, V.O.), moreover, the group has found a new drummer. “Boris is great,” says second frontman Lio Vancauwenberghe. “A good musician, but also a nice guy. That was important. We didn’t want to replace Denis with just anybody.”

How difficult was it to start making music again?
Antoine Wielemans: Very difficult. After working intensively on an album, we always need to stand back, anyway, before falling in love with music again. After 2008’s Plan Your Escape, Lio went to Iceland with his girlfriend to do some writing. I travelled on a cargo ship to the US from Amsterdam. A three-week trip, intended to empty my head, but after a few days I got seasick and the Polish crew was very cold and gloomy. I felt very isolated and anxious; when I reached my destination, I couldn’t speak a word. And then my brother died in an accident... [Pauses] The group imploded. For a year and a half, we were a wreck. We had to think for a long time about whether we would ever be able to enjoy making music again.
Brussels is a city that gives you energy, with lots of people and lots going on, but I wanted peace. I spent a year living deep in the Ardennes, in order to filter my thoughts. I walked a lot, worked in the vegetable garden, and read. A simple life: that did me good. I started the day with a few hours of music. I had Denis’s drum kit there and I had built a little studio. Songs took shape slowly there and I began to feel like making music again.

The sleeve of Everest is a painting, Mer grosse by the Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier. What did you see in that?
Wielemans: We spent months looking for a suitable picture, desperately even. At one stage we just wanted a white sleeve, but then we came across that painting and that summed up everything. You can see so many things in it: there is something at once dramatic and powerful about it. It is a sea, but also a mountain; it has something stormy, threatening about it, but it is beautiful at the same time. De Cordier’s own personal story struck a chord with us too. He is a bit of a loner; he has no phone or Internet. We wrote him a letter asking if we could use his painting for Everest and he agreed immediately. He has been painting monumental seascapes for ten years now, really fascinating stuff.

You guys have a thing about the immensity of nature too. On your EP Misses there’s a mountain, on Everest there’s the sea.
Lio Vancauwenberghe: The sleeve of Plan Your Escape, a deer in a wood, was very direct and tangible. This time we wanted something more grandiose and less fathomable. And then that word Everest with it: that conjures up something vast, but that you can’t grasp either. Like death.

One of the songs is called “Mallory’s Heights”. George Mallory?
Wielemans: I’m quite a fan of Jiro Taniguchi’s manga strips. In The Summit of the Gods he tells the story of George Mallory, who disappeared early in the 20^th century in his rush to the summit of the Everest. His disappearance is one of the great legends of mountain-climbing. That fired our imaginations: he died while pursuing his passion. Some 75 years later, an expedition found his body at 8,100 metres. Had he been the first to reach the top? No one will ever know.
“Mallory’s Heights” is the first song we worked on after Denis’s accident. I wanted to write a song about death, about loss, but it turned out to be too soon. After that, we didn’t make music any more for a year.

Songs such as “Misses”, “We Are the Living”, and “Not Dead” are pervaded by parting and death, but musically they are grand and epic rather than morose and dark – with grandiose synths, for example.
Vancauwenberghe: We grew up in the Eighties, synths mean something special to us. They don’t just add to the colour of the album, they also breathe air into it.
Wielemans: The context of the album is sad and serious, but the music couldn’t sound that way: that wouldn’t have fitted with Denis’s personality.

Up to now, you guys have always been compared to Grandaddy. Have you now found more of your musical selves?
Wielemans: When Girls In Hawaii started, Lio and I used to cobble up our own songs in our bedrooms and then later we would put them together on an album. Those were two different worlds. Now we’ve become much more of a group, I think. And thanks to Luuk Cox, our producer, we were able to translate that live energy that we have to the studio. Luuk made us sound a bit more uncompromising too. Previously, we had a tendency to do songs that were timid, with lots of small sounds. If there was something we weren’t sure about, we just covered it up with more layers. Luuk threw all that ballast overboard.

Do you see music differently now, after that turbulent period?
Wielemans: Amid all the pressure about making music, promotion, and touring, the fun sometimes faded into the background. Now we have realised once more that music is our friend and our refuge, that what we do is fun. Denis could always fend off all those worries with his joie de vivre. I think we all carry a piece of him in us now. That’s the way it was at this year’s Pukkelpop too. There was no stress, it was pure enjoyment. After ten years, that’s quite an achievement.

Girls In Hawaii • 21/11, 20.00, SOLD OUT!, Koninklijk Circus/Cirque Royal, Onderrichtsstraat 81 rue de l’Enseignement, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-218.20.15, www.cirque-royal.org & 22/11, 20.00, SOLD OUT!, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be & [PIAS] For Life (+ Texas & Daan): 18/12, 19.00, €30, [PIAS], rue Veeweydestraat 90, Brussel/Bruxelles, tickets: http://www.sherpa.be/enUS/Ticketing/Step1.aspx?Guid=c766f897-9ee2-4d27-9044-dead5a929f97