Interview

As you're reading these lines, you should know that THERION won't do any regular album until they have finished their new project. And this could last a long time. It's time for Christofer to give details about it and the amazing "Les Fleurs du Mal"

SBM: Hi Chris how are you?

Christofer: Oh fine, thank you.

Well we’re here to talk about your amazing new project, “Les Fleurs du Mal”, so can you tell us a little bit more about it? Why and when did it born?

Well we wanted to make a cover album for a couple of years, but not just a regular cover album. I mean, who needs another cover of Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” or “Number of the Beast”. We could end some shows by playing some heavy metal cover for fun but for a cover album you need to do more than that.
Basically I wanted to make a THERION album but songs need to be written by all the artists and I wanted to do a little bit more rare songs and all that stuff. And when I made the list I realize that most of the songs were old French songs. So I had the idea then to it completely in French. So once I’ve decided to do a cover album with only French songs, I had more ideas about making an art project, so that’s how it came about.
And as it’s also the 25 years anniversary of the band, we expected to do something different to celebrate that. I guess most bands are making a boring best of album or re-recording some old crap, or making another live album or whatever. In THERION 25 years of existence we’ve been a band pushing boundaries, introducing new styles of music in metal and making people, not only aware of those music styles, but also making people open minded. And to celebrate that, it could be a good idea to do something like covering girly pop songs.
One of the aims of this art project is to show people that music isn’t that different as they think. You know, a lot of this songs, we didn’t rearranged that so heavily, some songs are pretty much like plug-in the guitar and play them. And lot of people says “Oh it’s beautiful”, yeah but they wouldn’t have seen it in the original, so it’s the interesting thing: it’s the same song.
It’s like if you have the same chocolate but one in a very seductive nice packaging and people do: “Oh seductive chocolate, it’s so nice, the other one looks very cheap like Eastern Soviet Union paper pack. Cheap chocolate this might be very bad.” It’s the same chocolate, but how you pack things is very important.
So now we’re making the exclusive packaging to metal people say “Oh this is cool…with the Baudelaire packaging with “Les Fleurs du Mal” “, with the booklet and everything else. It’s making people more open-minded to it, well they would have strongly rejected the original, and that is interesting. Even though we packed it in an exclusive packaging, there’s obviously quite lot of people reacting negatively to it anyway, simply because they don’t like it.
Some people really have a principle thinking against that, I mean, take a famous song, well some of these are not so famous in France, but a very famous song like “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”, everybody know it. A lot of people could never say they like this song, it doesn’t matter who made the cover, it doesn’t matter how the cover sounds like, if Rammstein would make it or a black metal band would make it, it would completely change the song as you would recognize nothing, they couldn’t like it out of pure principle because it’s a French pop song.
So it’s interesting to show those things as well, metal people usually say “Oh yeah so open-minded”, but everybody’s defending their norms and also with people who like Baudelaire, some people were offended because “Oh you’re taking Baudelaire’s name and you’re making pop songs, it’s just stupid pop songs”. Yeah but stupid people in Baudelaire’s time that have forbidden him for expressing his poems, they was thinking it was a good thing that six of his poems where forbidden, that it was a good thing that he was brought on court and pay a lot of money for it. And the world of metal is exactly the same mentality: people who are defending the norms. People who were against Baudelaire were just defending their norms, and metal people who get offended by covering pop songs, they are just defending their norms, they’re not open minded, they’re close minded, they’re conservatives, just like people who condemned Baudelaire, and this is what I wanted to show. It doesn’t mean you have to like it, but just to respect and understand it.
I found it very interesting especially because metal music itself is a provocation against what is normal, what is going against the norms, especially 80s heavy metal. Heavy metal was freedom, we did what we wanted, we didn’t listened to the commercial stuff, but soon it’ll become conservative, so how can you shock somebody in metal music, there’s nothing left. You can’t use Satan or death metal lyrics, opening graves, having sex with dead bodies and stuff like that, how can you be more shocking after members of band killing each other or burning down churches, there’s nothing left! (Laugh). We’ve come to a dead end when we have to shock, there’s nothing left, except: breaking the norm. This is how we can shock.
(Chris taking a loud voice) “What, you’re covering these old pop songs!!”
This is a different reaction for people who are conservatives in France it will be oldies so (Loud voice) “Why are you covering these old song I listened when I was young?”
In the rest of the world it’s like (Loud voice) “Why are you doing these strange French songs?”. For them this is not oldies, they are strange songs, so what are regular oldies to you is something very exotic for everybody who’s not living in France. It’s also an interesting thing, how people look upon the same thing. For you this is regular old music, but for someone outside France this is something obscure and strange, and I found it very entertaining, very interesting. So it’s a perfect way to celebrate 25 years for me.
And as it’s a personal project I had to release it by myself without a record label, and it’s selling better than Sitra Ahra, better than our latest records, even though I don’t have a record company, I don’t even have a distribution company in any country…

Most of the songs have been written in the 60s. Why have done this choice?

Simply because I love these songs, and I don’t like the modern ones. I can’t think about any modern artist in France… Well I like some stuff of AIR, they did a few good songs. But this 60s area has a special sound and I really like it, and modern people sometimes say bullshit when they speak together, they say “Why have you covered a lot of yeah-yeah songs?”…
We covered ONE yeah-yeah song, the Claire Dixon’s song.
The yeah-yeah was a music style developed out of American girly chewing gum pop being exported in France, and they started to translate the lyrics into French and they started singing “yeah yeah yeah”, so they called it yeah-yeah music. And then after a while it started to be French composers writing their own songs and then something happened, it turned quickly into “French chansons”, and everything became French songs with unique sound, and I like a lot of these yeah-yeah things they did but the most interesting thing was when the yeah-yeah thing was over and started to developed into something else, when it started to become more baroque pop.
Some of the songs I like, as “Poupée de cire, Pourpée de son”, that a really advanced composition, not like these old yeah-yeah, basically rockabilly with some French lyrics.
Just because some of these artists were mostly known for yeah-yeah, it has nothing to see with what we’ve covered. Marie Laforêt, she was a yeah-yeah artist, but “La Maritza” is not a yeah-yeah song. Leonie, she started also doing something similar to yeah-yeah but it didn’t go anywhere. And anything we’ve covered is more like psychedelic rock pop.
Actually it has influenced me in some THERION compositions; if you know where to look you can actually hear some of the influences. So I just wanted to cover songs that I like.

Usually for a THERION album, you compose all the songs. But for “Les Fleurs du Mal”, you rearranged existing special songs. As you worked a very different way, did you enjoy this experiment?

Of course yes. This is a 25 years anniversary project we’re doing, it’s not a THERION album, it’s an album recorded by THERION but it’s not a THERION album. The whole approach, from the very beginning was very different. It’s like, when you wish for a present for having fun on this 25 years you think “Oh I wish to record a lot of strange songs”. I’m doing this from a very egoistic way, because it’s something I’d like to do for myself but at the same time when the idea of an art project was going out of this, I thought it can be so much more than doing this for myself. You know… to provoke, to get reactions, so people open their minds more, to get people having reactions on things, especially because it’s an interesting time, me and THERION as well, because the music we do right now is becoming out of fashion.
It’s like heavy metal that was so big in the 80s and kicked in the 90s by grunge or death or trash metal. It was tougher for heavy metal bands in the 90s, and now the same thing is happening for symphonic metal, we have 15 years of symphonic fans, which is a very long time. Normally you have 5 to 10 years, most, and now this music is becoming out of fashion, then I think it’s a great thing if you can make something spectacular to get people to talk about you because over wise you become one of these Status Quo kind of band: “Oh great you release you 24th album, another boogie album”. Sure people will like it, they will buy it and say “Oh yeah another album”.
But I’ve always had higher ambitions; I want to challenge people, always add something new to the history of music, I just don’t want to make another album. It’s a very good timing to do this right now, it was not planned to happen this way, but it’s a very fantastic timing anyway.

And what was the reaction of the members of THERION who have participated to this project?

Oh everybody played and enjoyed it. There were different opinions at the beginning: drummer and bass player didn’t like it. But the drummer, once the album was finished, was kind of “Yeah… it’s not that bad you know”; He was just septic before. The bass player he kind of didn’t like it after we did it but in the middle of the tour we was like “Yeah the songs we’ve been playing live were very good for me, they are really good songs, I’ll listen more to the record…”
There are still some songs he don’t like that much but he changed his mind, that’s pretty cool. I know of course that Snowy didn’t like, but you have to understand Snowy, he’s not like other people. He loves the originals; he loves beside me this “yeah-yeah old baroque pop” chanson. But he was disappointed that we didn’t change the songs more, I wanted to do them sometimes quite closer to the original, to show that music is not that different. That’s a part of the art project, but he wanted to change them radically, change the key and I liked it with some songs like “Mon amour, mon ami”, I was bringing down the tempo to 30%, it’s a song I had to change a lot to make it fit with THERION and this is what he wanted to do on the whole record, to make everything completely different.
I think he was a bit disappointed by that and then here’s another fact: he can’t really sing in French and when he feels “Oh this is so cold to me” he react by “Oh shit! I don’t want to do this!”. But we love him, but it’s the way he is, and he also didn’t like our future plans anyway, he didn’t feel comfortable with the rock opera we’re gonna do later, it thought he would be lost in all this classical stuff. When he had the whole road map of THERION he started with “Oh this is not my road, it could by awesome but… I don’t mind doing this, it’s shit”. It’s just his way of speaking.
When we’ll do a regular album after the rock opera, if he’s not very occupied or something else, I’m sure he would be happy to work with us again. We’re very happy with what we’ve done together, and now we know he express himself, for good and for bad, he’s like 12 years old, he has a great innocent approach to music like 12 years old, so he could create a lot of new and interesting things. But at the same time he is not patient, like 12 years old, and he jokes about it himself saying “I’m 12 years old and I listen to Kiss!”. So he is really aware of that, so when you work with him in the studio you have to work in a complete different way.
As he‘s not patient he was shouting “Ooohhh this doesn’t work!!! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!!”.
And he would say things in the studio you wouldn’t accept from anybody else but because of knowing him it’s like “Oh we don’t care”.

That’s fun!
Well you talk about the rock opera, I’ll ask you things later… On the record, Thomas and Lory worked with Audrey Dujardin as vocal coaching. How have you come to work with her?

Because we really wanted someone that was perfectly in French so we could have had some precious explanations. Somebody who’s good at French would say “Oh you must say…” NO!
Sorry but we wanted someone 100% native English speaker and 100% French speaker, so there will be no communication mistakes, it would be completely clear.
And it’s also good to have somebody that we know, someone who could keep the secret, shut up about it, that’s very important, so we just knew the perfect person for doing this.

Someone I know use to say that an artist has to provoke, to break the norms, exactly what you said. And as the album got great reviews and fans really enjoyed it, do you think that you have won a fight against these norms? What does it represent for you?

It’s not just provoke, anybody can provoke. You can go in the subway and… I don’t know, you can pee in a bottle and put all the pee on yourself and say “Oh I’m provoking! This is active art”. Everybody can provoke, can say something rude or say something stupid he got in the newspaper, the trick is to do something with high quality and style and still provoke, like Baudelaire, because he has fantastic language but still he had a content that was offending for some people with their values background. I think that’s interesting: not just be vulgar like these “Pussy Riot”, and I hate that, and I think it’s good that they got jailed… Two years it’s a little bit hard for their kind, but they were just vulgar tasteless idiots, playing hooligans and using it for their own political purpose. They didn’t did a band, they didn’t even do concert, they never made a record, they just made music when they made their offensive actions, and that’s an example of being just a vulgar idiot, anybody can do that. All those feminists’ idiots who were taking a chainsaw to put down the cross of a monument, that’s hooligans, that’s not better than being a skinhead, according to me it’s the same level of artistry. There’s no art about it, it’s just vulgar.
But when Baudelaire did, some people understood, but a lot of people didn’t understand that he was challenging the norms, but he was creating fantastic art at the same time, and this is the trick to do. And some people can, some people can’t, and I hope I managed to achieve that, but with THERION also I always want to open eyes of people and to read that some fans discovered the original thanks to this. This will be like Christmas Eve to me, to see some people who normally would be “Oh what!? Some girly pop from the 60s? I’m a metahead!!!” and see “Oh yeah I’d like to hear the originals because of this” and “Oh I liked a lot of them!”. That is very impressive. And think about what THERION have done during 25 years: opera was something ridiculous before we established it, for metal people it was like “grandmother music”, it was old ladies who listened to opera. “Who fucking listen to that! We’re metal people”. Now opera is cool, it’s part of the metal establishment. A song like “The Wonderous World of Punt” that has great folk music at the end, like mandolin that’s fucking cool! And Middle Eastern music thought we did some fucking kebab music: “Who need that?”. And we brought that into metal stuff and we’re not the first ones, Celtic Frost developed on “Into the Pandemonium” both with opera and Middle Eastern, and even in this time it was considered strange. And we’ve brought it into music in a way but it’s not natural if you have some “No, we’re a band from Middle Eastern Music influence”, there’s something strange about that, like Orphaned Land of whatever it’s just normal.
When we made heavy metal into death metal in 1993, people said it was a very strange thing, there’s no future in that, heavy metal is great, death metal is great but you shouldn’t brought that, it’s like having ketchup on ice cream somebody told me, ketchup is good on French fries but not on the ice cream… So we were always finding some different combinations that were very unlikely and saying “Hey it’s great, should test it”. It’s something very probable and these 25 years we’ve been opening the eyes for a lot of people for great combinations and different music styles. And I think that with “Les Fleurs du Mal” we’re really pushing it to the edge, we take something born in France and people would have rejected mostly like “France? Oh God, seriously!!” and we made a great album out of it.
I don’t expect anybody to like it, but the interesting thing is that people don’t understand it and this is the thing that bothers me a little bit.
I had this discussion with a death metal fan that came to one of the show in France, Rennes. He was like “Why are you doing this French singing??!!” we had a long discussion, and at the end it was very interesting and then we agreed that still he didn’t like the record at all but now he understood it. That’s a great victory. It’s good to have somebody with opinion totally negative, just thinking this is shit and in the end he realized “Ok this is not in my taste, I don’t like it and I will never like it” and that’s ok. But he understood the idea.
And think about Baudelaire, somebody who never gave him a chance as poetry just said “No, no this is vulgar; it’s blasphemy and disgusting with women loving each other”. No! They didn’t understand the poetry and never gave him a chance, even though he was good in using French language, they just dismissed the cause “Oh I don’t like those topics”.
And this is the thing I disrespect. Don’t fucking open your mouth if you don’t what you talk about. Taste and you can respect but don’t piss on things you don’t understand.

Yeah I understand it… On the shows you’ve made in France during “Flowers of Evil Tour”, why haven’t you played more songs of the album?

During this tour we’ve played maybe ten songs that nobody heard before, so it was a way of introducing the art project to people. And this is not a THERION album, it’s an album performed by THERION so it was a 25 years anniversary tour and we did the 25 years project at the same time and of course we played a few songs but the task is to play what people want to hear, and I think we had a good balance: play a few songs with different character.

Well, back to the rock opera project you told about. We know that you won’t do any regular THERION album before it, so can you tell us more about this?

Oh well, there’s not so much to tell actually because we have 40 minutes of classical music that I wrote in the past for a regular opera. And we had the decision to do it in a metal way right now and next autumn we’ll start working on it, see what team we’ll have and all that. We have all the work ahead of us, we have to do everything, choreography, costumes, dialogues, and we’ve never done that before so it could take a long time. That’s why we don’t want to say “Oh in two years it’s going to come out” and then we gonna have to do a lot of interviews explaining why we haven’t done it in time so I’d rather say “Look we know it’s going to take a lot of time, so we’ll finish the art project, we’ll take a break and then we will do this rock opera and we’ll see how much time it’ll take”.
Whenever we’ll finish, we’ll take a break again and make a regular album. It could be 5 years or it could be 10 years.

As you said, you’ve always added new stuff to your music. You started as a death metal band, then you turned to symphonic metal, and now you’re working on a rock opera. Are there any territories you’d like to explore musically?

Well if I have the idea of explore it… I’m very spontaneous; I never plan what to do. This is the first time we have a road map like “Ok let’s finish it first and then we’ll do this rock opera”. There’s nothing I didn’t explore that I wanted to explore which was not already of the planning. But who knows, maybe there will be something else after the rock opera that I would explore…

Yeah maybe some film scores or stuff like that?

Oh I did that, I did music for a film. It was less or more an art film but it was showed in the cinema two times in small towns. It was fun doing that, and it would be fun to do it for a bigger film too, but it’s very hard to get into that you know, because it’s a lot of money and people who already have a foot in there don’t let anybody else enter, everybody knows each other. So if you’re not the son of someone in there it’s very difficult to get your foot in this industry.

Ok…
Well I guess we’re reaching the end now. I’d like to personally thank you for the time you’ve given, thank you for 25 years of THERION, thank you for all; I wish you good luck for your rock opera project, wish you the best and I hope to see you soon.
And I leave you the final words, if you want to say something for the French fans?

Stay open minded and thanks for listening!

Ok thank you Chris! Bye!

Thank you! Bye!