Twenty-five years after the release of his first album with 2.7 million sales, that of the indestructible hit I bring you with wind, Louis Attaque decided to celebrate it with panache. For the occasion, the Parisian group will play six times in the same day at the Elysée Montmartre on April 26 and release the album in question on Friday April 15 in collector’s version, with a bound booklet of 28 pages containing lyrics, drawings, archives , photos and memories as well as a live version recorded in Rennes in 1997 and at La Route du Rock in 1998.
At the Elysée Montmartre, the shows at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. will be performed in public. Places for these free concerts have sold out on registration. For those who cannot come, the 7 p.m. concert will be broadcast live. “A good cardio test“, laughs the singer and guitarist Gaëtan Roussel. “We want to say thank you to the people who have allowed us to live this adventure for 25 years, and when we celebrate our birthday, we invite people“, he adds.
The cover of Louise Attaque’s first album released on April 22, 1997 is decorated with the face of a little girl with big eyes drawn in broad strokes by bassist Robin Feix. As for the name Louise Attaque, it is a convoluted reference to an adored American group, Violent Femmes.
“HAS from the name came the idea that Louise is a character who represents us, we wanted the music to be embodied but not by us on the cover“, says Robin Feix.
The concept is pushed very far. “Louise had a very practical side, it was she who wrote directly to the owners of venues and bars where we wanted to play, in the style of a seven-year-old girl“, he confides. “Louise asked them, for example, in her letter if her friends could come and play with her that day.“.
“French rock band looking for violinist, good level, references Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Violent Femmes, contact Robin“: it is thanks to this unique announcement made on a small piece of paper in a rehearsal studio that the violinist Arnaud Samuel joined the group.
“It’s a chance that we fell on Arnaud“, emphasizes Gaëtan Roussel. “The first time he rehearsed with us, he started playing on Loves and Parisian nights and he finds his place, we weren’t looking for a soloist but a counter-melody“, describes the singer, who savors the”alchemy“Born on this day.
Louise Attaque swallows the scenes before releasing her first album. “We wanted to play live very quickly, saying to ourselves we will go to the public and they will come to us, we wanted to do a maximum of concerts even in small places at the beginning“, underlines Arnaud Samuel. While no song has been released, I bring you with wind hooks the audience.
“In the bars, we played it three or four times a night, we used it to set the mood, we saw that it went straight, people went home knowing the words“, recalls Robin Feix. “This song was our passport to the party we were going to do next“.
Louise Attaque clashes in the 1990s with a rock spirit in an acoustic packaging. “A very bare style, quite rough in the delivery of the songs“, synthesizes Gaëtan Roussel. Marc Thonon, then at the head of the Atmospheric label, has the intelligence not to want to coat their music with effects. He accepts their request to be produced by Gordon Gano, leader of the Violent Femmes.
“He was the perfect producer, he used our flaws to make it look like us, Gordon understood that we just had to help us be ourselves“, greets Gaëtan Roussel. Jackpot, the disc has become a classic, that of a generation (and even of a few others).