Mirwais returns in a book on the history of the rock group Taxi-Girl

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Tuesday April 30, 2024: the founding member of the rock group Taxi-Girl, author and composer, Mirwais. He has just published the first part of an autobiography, “Taxi-Girl 1978-1981” with Éditions Séguier.

Mirwais is the founding member of the group Taxi-Girl, born at the end of the 1970s. He is also an artist, a composer and a musician who has been able to offer new sounds, particularly those of electronic music. We also think of his role as producer of albums that have become legendary and cult like Music (2000) and American Life (2003) which relaunched Madonna’s career.

Today, he offers us a summary of himself and what defines him with a work entitled Taxi-Girl 1978-1981 (at Séguier) or the behind-the-scenes story of the first four years of this group considered as an artistic object by many major artists.

franceinfo: As the photo on the cover shows, Laurent Sinclair, Daniel Darc, Stéphane Erard, Pierre Wolfsohn and Mirwais were arrogant, proud, indomitable. You write in your preamble: “We had everything to ourselves and yet we missed everything“. What do you mean ?

Mirwais: We lacked the desire to succeed. If you enter this type of profession and you don’t have the desire to succeed, we miss everything, that’s it in fact.

It’s surprising because you’re talking about the first four years. Those which remain the most in memory with the creation of the group and the chaos which followed the death of Pierre Wolfsohn, your drummer who succumbed to a heroin overdose at the time of your hit Look for the boy. This book is the first part of a trilogy. Drugs were essential. She recurs regularly in this work. Ultimately, this group is also a photo of an era.

Exactly. And there is also the social and political aspect underlying it. I talk about the Afghan war because I am half Afghan on my father’s side and I lived there. And in fact, at that moment, we changed the world. When was released, in 1981, Model, our first single with Taxi-Girl, there was the war in Afghanistan. I became a political refugee at the time, I couldn’t do otherwise. Then Reagan came along. Today, many people say: “Yes, there is the world before“the digital world. There was the same type of shift, which was more political. This pre-Reagan, pre-war in Afghanistan period was very interesting.

Do you put into context all these conflicts and this desire that you had, from the age of 12, to found a group precisely because you needed to get out of that?

Actually, my story is not very common. I lived in Afghanistan, I was born in Switzerland. My mother was Italian. My father worked for the government and he was assigned to a mission and in the end, we didn’t go back to Afghanistan. So much the better anyway. But there were only four of us in our immediate family, so we had to find a family. It wasn’t enough.

“We had problems like all families. It’s not Cosette’s story either, but I had to find something and the guitar arrived, then the music.”

I would like us to actually talk about Look for the boy. What does this song mean to you?

It was a bit like the end of the group because unfortunately, we replaced our bassist. In reality, it’s me who plays the bass part on this track and that was a very big mistake. There was hysterization of the situation. For example, with the Rolling Stones, Keith Richard sometimes played bass on songs, that was no reason to fire Bill Wyman, but we did it. The others couldn’t stand Stéphane, the bassist, who otherwise did very well. He’s an astrophysicist and I often say, he’s the only successful one out of all of us.

In any case, this song is part of you. It is essential. You talk about queer lyrics.

In fact, it was the first queer title since afterwards, on Seppuku, Daniel, who was very sexually ambivalent and who came out around the age of 30, ended up signing Viviane Vog. We can say that it’s the first hit because there have always been queer titles, even before us, but here, it was in France. It’s modern pop and with the passage into the 1980s. So we inspired a lot of people.

Doesn’t writing this book finally allow you to relieve a little of the sadness that you have kept inside you for a very long time?

Anger. First, a depression that we turned against ourselves and that we brought out in musical form. Then, in the second part, it became pure depression because we got screwed.

“Taxi-Girl was a depression.”

So of course, everyone has been fooled once or twice in their life with money, but there was something very interesting, which is that we turned our anger against ourselves under form of depression. On the back cover it says: “We didn’t let ourselves go“Yes, we didn’t let ourselves get carried away politically, socially or emotionally, but in terms of money… Being dispossessed was an unhealthy process for us. I’m talking about dispossession.

Through your writing and especially through Taxi-Girl, we realize that you are very rock. Rock is life?

Yes. I think it ages well. In each new generation, we find the spirit of rock and this, in all new trends.