(© Titus Simoens)
“Guess we’ve been rats / Just long enough / Nothing but chewing / On those strings of love”: the last five years have been pretty intense for Balthazar. Against a background of growing international success, they shed their skin at Les Nuits.
Promo day at the record company. More coffee and croissants are brought. Maarten Devoldere and Jinte Deprez flop down on their seats. The two front men have had a busy few weeks, running around from Hamburg to Paris for chats about their new album. Europe – and especially France – is really taking to the Ghent band. But they are starting their new tour in England. In Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar in Brighton, of all places. “A venue that holds 3,000,” claims Deprez with a wink. “The stadiums have the weirdest names in the UK,” says Devoldere with a laugh.
England is still a tough nut to crack, also for Balthazar. In London, it’s going great; elsewhere, it’s hard work, so they are starting off in small, out-of-the-way venues. But Thin Walls, their third album, should be the perfect crowbar for further widening the breach, the two frontmen reckon. “Rats was a subtle album, with sophisticated arrangements,” explains Deprez. “The French are crazy about that. But in England they like things to be a bit more straightforward. Straight to the point, with no difficult detours via big metaphors.”
A new album, a new tour. Are you guys going to pile up the kilometres again?
Jinte Deprez: Yep. A disaster for our ecological footprint! [Laughs]
Maarten Devoldere: Bah, DJs are even worse: they spend all their time flying around the world.
Les Nuits: Balthazar
Being on the road for so long, that’s got to take its toll.
Deprez: At first, we saw those tours as school trips. You’re on top of the world. By now, what was amazing has become routine. That’s OK. As time goes by, you find ways to create structure and to kill time. Now, when you come home, it’s a holiday.
Devoldere: After a while, there’s more chaos and rock ’n’ roll at home than on tour. [Laughs] It’s a travelling circus, but it also becomes a system.
Deprez: Thin Walls emerged from the realisation that we were spending more time on the road than at home. We used to think we needed isolation to write, that we couldn’t be creative on the road. But if we want to turn out an album every few years, our productivity has to increase. So during one of our last tours we forced ourselves to write a song every day. You get up, sit down at the piano, you fiddle about, and away you go. You get into a particular creative groove, from which an idea for a song can emerge at any moment.
Devoldere: Those songs weren’t all equally good, but it did give us the single “Leipzig”. That was a breakthrough, an indication that it could be done that way.
So you started writing in a different way.
Deprez: Yeah. We wrote really quickly and a huge amount. In the run-up to the album, we turned out 273 demos. There was a huge amount of crap in there, but the intuitive stuff was worthwhile.
Devoldere: All the songs that made it onto the album, we came up with in five minutes. Things were completely different on Rats: back then, we worked in a much more considered way. Thin Walls was written from the gut.
Deprez: On tour, your brain starts working differently. It is as if you were in a submarine the whole time.
Devoldere: Your head is never completely clear: you’re living on a high. You drink more and you sleep less; everything is fleeting.
Deprez: You do also write as a reaction to the previous album, of course. We are playing to bigger crowds now. Rats was really too fragile for that.
And yet, last year you had a triumph with it on the main stage at Pukkelpop.
Deprez: That was our last show in Belgium for a long time, so we had to make it something special. In a club, you can do what you want, but on the main stage you have to build in 20 per cent entertainment factor. Hence the confetti and the golden costumes. Actually, we wanted to set the big letters of the band’s name, which were dangling behind us, on fire, but they wouldn’t let us. [Laughs]
Your album is called Thin Walls. That could be a commentary on society today.
Deprez: That title is actually very personal. For us, it’s the perfect metaphor for the chaos in which the songs took shape. You don’t have much privacy on a tour bus. It’s a real mental switch to feel at ease with a laptop in a corner while the world around you keeps on turning. The walls on tour are literally thin too, even in hotels. We felt all the time that we were in the middle of everything.
Devoldere: We also did some writing in an old convent in Ghent, with long corridors and those little rooms where the nuns used to live. The walls were so thin there that we could hear each other working. If one of us knocked on the other’s door with the message, “I’ve come up with something”, the other would say, “I know.”
Deprez: At first, we saw those tours as school trips. You’re on top of the world. By now, what was amazing has become routine. That’s OK. As time goes by, you find ways to create structure and to kill time. Now, when you come home, it’s a holiday.
Devoldere: After a while, there’s more chaos and rock ’n’ roll at home than on tour. [Laughs] It’s a travelling circus, but it also becomes a system.
Deprez: Thin Walls emerged from the realisation that we were spending more time on the road than at home. We used to think we needed isolation to write, that we couldn’t be creative on the road. But if we want to turn out an album every few years, our productivity has to increase. So during one of our last tours we forced ourselves to write a song every day. You get up, sit down at the piano, you fiddle about, and away you go. You get into a particular creative groove, from which an idea for a song can emerge at any moment.
Devoldere: Those songs weren’t all equally good, but it did give us the single “Leipzig”. That was a breakthrough, an indication that it could be done that way.
So you started writing in a different way.
Deprez: Yeah. We wrote really quickly and a huge amount. In the run-up to the album, we turned out 273 demos. There was a huge amount of crap in there, but the intuitive stuff was worthwhile.
Devoldere: All the songs that made it onto the album, we came up with in five minutes. Things were completely different on Rats: back then, we worked in a much more considered way. Thin Walls was written from the gut.
Deprez: On tour, your brain starts working differently. It is as if you were in a submarine the whole time.
Devoldere: Your head is never completely clear: you’re living on a high. You drink more and you sleep less; everything is fleeting.
Deprez: You do also write as a reaction to the previous album, of course. We are playing to bigger crowds now. Rats was really too fragile for that.
And yet, last year you had a triumph with it on the main stage at Pukkelpop.
Deprez: That was our last show in Belgium for a long time, so we had to make it something special. In a club, you can do what you want, but on the main stage you have to build in 20 per cent entertainment factor. Hence the confetti and the golden costumes. Actually, we wanted to set the big letters of the band’s name, which were dangling behind us, on fire, but they wouldn’t let us. [Laughs]
Your album is called Thin Walls. That could be a commentary on society today.
Deprez: That title is actually very personal. For us, it’s the perfect metaphor for the chaos in which the songs took shape. You don’t have much privacy on a tour bus. It’s a real mental switch to feel at ease with a laptop in a corner while the world around you keeps on turning. The walls on tour are literally thin too, even in hotels. We felt all the time that we were in the middle of everything.
Devoldere: We also did some writing in an old convent in Ghent, with long corridors and those little rooms where the nuns used to live. The walls were so thin there that we could hear each other working. If one of us knocked on the other’s door with the message, “I’ve come up with something”, the other would say, “I know.”
The euphoric “Then What” is a particularly fine single. Do people sometimes comment on your drawling singing style, Maarten?
Devoldere: People find it strange, whereas for us, it’s a natural way to tell a story. To my mind, Freddie Mercury, for example, overdoes it in his way of communicating. What we do is pretty close to the way we talk, to reality I guess. I find that more valuable.
Your reality has always been about love or the lack of it. But “Last Call” also reveals an outlook on the world.
Deprez: Those lyrics were thrown together in three minutes. It’s not entirely clear what it’s about, but that’s fine – it preserves the mystery. There is nothing exciting about complete knowledge.
Devoldere: You wait, you search...until you realise: nobody knows anything. But you are no longer crushed by the pointlessness. Because you know: if you had all the answers, you wouldn’t look any more. Then things would be really pointless.
Deprez: I guess we have got older and wiser, but we have also regained our naivety. It is cool to say you were inspired by a profound book or an artistic film, but I can get just as much meaning out of a visit to the supermarket with Taylor Swift as musical wallpaper. That’s what we are celebrating on this album, the excitement of small, superficial things. Some of the songs, moreover, are just two chords: so simple, but you really do feel something. To me, that’s the most you can achieve as a songwriter.
Balthazar
14/5, 19.00, Koninklijk Circus/Cirque Royal, www.botanique.be
Devoldere: People find it strange, whereas for us, it’s a natural way to tell a story. To my mind, Freddie Mercury, for example, overdoes it in his way of communicating. What we do is pretty close to the way we talk, to reality I guess. I find that more valuable.
Your reality has always been about love or the lack of it. But “Last Call” also reveals an outlook on the world.
Deprez: Those lyrics were thrown together in three minutes. It’s not entirely clear what it’s about, but that’s fine – it preserves the mystery. There is nothing exciting about complete knowledge.
Devoldere: You wait, you search...until you realise: nobody knows anything. But you are no longer crushed by the pointlessness. Because you know: if you had all the answers, you wouldn’t look any more. Then things would be really pointless.
Deprez: I guess we have got older and wiser, but we have also regained our naivety. It is cool to say you were inspired by a profound book or an artistic film, but I can get just as much meaning out of a visit to the supermarket with Taylor Swift as musical wallpaper. That’s what we are celebrating on this album, the excitement of small, superficial things. Some of the songs, moreover, are just two chords: so simple, but you really do feel something. To me, that’s the most you can achieve as a songwriter.
Balthazar
14/5, 19.00, Koninklijk Circus/Cirque Royal, www.botanique.be
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