We find them rehearsing in the back room of a Strasbourg café where they are preparing to give a concert in a rather intimate atmosphere. Smaller, more unusual places, this is the choice made in the midst of a health crisis by the five members of the Alsatian group Grand March, deprived of the stage, to continue to play and maintain the link with the public.
“The rooms were slow to reopen, we wondered: ‘what to do to find the public? Well, we’re going to work on an acoustic set that we can go and play in our friends’ gardens.’ What we did in Colmar, in Strasbourg, on the right and on the left. That’s how this acoustic set was born, that we continue to play alternately with the electric set when we have the opportunity to play in big rooms“, says Antoine Thepot, keyboard of Grand March.
Twelve years after its creation, the group known for its rather folk-rock universe, undertook a return to the sources of the genre, towards a more classic rock: “From album to album, we arrived at something that today looks a bit like classic rock finally, from the seventies, which we are quite proud of.“, confides Fred Lichtenberger, the drummer of Grand March.
On vocals, Hélène Brauner, communication officer at the Strasbourg University Hospital. But on stage and in her texts, it is another part of herself that is expressed, rather feminist: “In ordinary life, I can seem very discreet, whereas there, there is a way of assuming, of being able to say things and of being in a self-representation which is quite funny because ultimately it’s a little freedom that we take each time we go on stage“.
Grand March – new album Start a War – released on October 22, 2021 – CD and vinyl available on the #14 Records label website, or for download.