Popular wisdom has it that to keep friends and family, it’s better not to work with them. Thomas Mars (Versailles, 46 years old) chose to ignore this advice. He has been doing both for more than two decades. And sometimes, like now, at the same time. This month he’s touring with Phoenix, the group he formed with his childhood friends in the 1990s. “And we’re also writing the soundtrack for Priscilla, my wife Sofia Coppola’s next film. Yes, I know they say it shouldn’t be done, but what do I know, it came naturally. I guess it’s not hard for me because I don’t really consider it a job,” he says, laughing, from his New York apartment.
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Phoenix, who will perform at BBK Live in Bilbao on Friday (July 7), their only concert in Spain this year, are busy people. For the rest of the month they will be hosting festivals across Europe. A few days ago they released a collaboration with Beck, Odyssey, ahead of their tour of the US together in August. It will be a kind of mobile mini-festival that they call Summer Odyssey and that will also feature Jenny Lewis, Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood or Sir Chloe. You don’t have any more family vacations this summer, Thomas. “Yes,” he says. “And I’m all very worried, but the pandemic stopped us from playing for two years and that’s a small revenge.” Among other things, he says, he likes tours because they offer the time to mingle with the rest to meet the group. The four components of Phoenix live around the world. He in New York, two in Paris and the fourth in Rome. “It’s good for us that way.” It could have gone wrong, but for now we’ve made it. We only arrange the recording dates. We spend a lot of time together on tour. I assume that at some point we will all live in the same place again.
Phoenix at the We Love Green Festival. Frankie & Nikki
Phoenix was born with the French touch, that musical movement between house and disco nostalgia that emerged in Paris in the 1990s. “We were a part and we weren’t,” Mars recalls. “We moved with them. But we were the youngest, so we often just watched.” They embodied the pop part of a dance scene that was catalyzed by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. Mars mentions another member of this scene who was his mentor as fundamental: Philippe Zdar, member of the Cassius duo and producer ten years her senior. “He was the most versatile. It was everywhere. He did hip-hop, electronic, house… He heard two of our songs on a demo and was very generous by betting on us,” he says. “But the whole group made us feel very welcome.”
So these four school friends from the very posh Parisian suburb of Versailles became the mascots of the movement, so to speak. Although everything indicated that Phoenix was a project that was not doomed to success. “We are very rare. We didn’t meet through an ad, we grew up together. This is our first group, not the third or fourth if you already know something about the business in theory.” Besides Thomas Mars, this circle of friends consists of bassist Deck D’Arcy and brothers Laurent Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai, guitars. It’s a solid relationship in pop, something very rare in a world that tends to shatter such bonds. “I have several theories. First, when you have brothers in the group, it’s important that none of them sing. When you’re the singer, it gets complicated,” jokes Mars. It also gets complicated when the singer and leader is a handsome and charismatic guy like him who is also part of the Coppola family. Obviously you were tempted to fly alone. “A lot of things are done in the music industry to make me the center of attention as a singer. If you do a cover, the photographer will say, “Can the singer come closer?” The rest backtrack a little. You have to fight a bit against these clichés. Even if you play a late night show in the US, you’ll make more money if you have a microphone. When we started we teased everyone. Sometimes it was exhausting.”
They achieved real success in 2009 with their fourth album “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix”. Before they released this album, which after slow development eventually won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album, whatever that means, they were in trouble. “Wolfgang…was the best. The moment of “now or never”. When we started recording it we didn’t have a record company, we didn’t have a manager, we didn’t have anything. But we were sure it was good. We published 1901 for free on the internet. Nothing was free back then. If you gave something for free, you asked for an email or something in return. They needed some data from humans. But at that moment we decided that we wouldn’t do it that way. Completely free! And people loved the song. It all started with a gift. That was a big lesson for us because it was something that didn’t start with a marketing plan.”
In September they released their seventh album, Alpha Zulu, which they recorded in the Louvre, breaking all French records. “Don’t remind me, it’s over, we returned the keys. It was wonderful. We were in the middle of the pandemic and there were no visitors. It was just the attendants and us in the museum.” Apparently, this is all because one of Laurent Brancowitz’s yoga friends was eventually appointed head of the decorative arts department at the museum and offered them a residency. “We were the first. We leave a perfectly furnished study there for the next ones. You can do installations, podcasts and whatever. It is important to us that there is life in museums. After all, we grew up in Versailles, a large open-air museum where there is no life.”
Frankie and Nikki
Alpha Zulu faces death. That of Philippe Zdar, who died in 2019 and had become the fifth phoenix over the years. His pop seems as sparkling and happy as ever, but if you look closely, it has a touch of melancholy. “We’ve come through a period of losses. I feel like an antenna on this record, you know? As if the music reached me.” The album proves that death can be treated without becoming tragic. “The name comes from a flight I took in Belize. The plane was full and they put me in the passenger seat with headphones on. Suddenly everything started to move and I heard the dialogue between the pilot and flight controller. He told them we were in trouble and they couldn’t hear him very well and they replied on the ship’s display ‘Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu, can you hear me?’ Looking aft he saw the frightened passengers. I had never seen anyone react to the possibility of their death. I thought I forgot but one day in the studio I started improvising and singing “Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu”. The others asked me what that was. Obviously this flight traumatized me more than I thought.
Mars has two daughters. The eldest, 16-year-old Romy, uploaded a hilarious video to TikTok a few months ago, written so perfectly it looked real in her parody of nepo babies, the children of celebrities. Is there another filmmaker in the family, Thomas? “I won’t comment on it, it’s gotten too much attention already,” he says, with the face of a father to be messed with. “What I can tell you is that a few months ago I went to my goddaughter’s prom show and it was a much better show than any I’ve seen recently. There was real talent. So I’m full of hope for the future.” We’re getting older, aren’t we? “Place. We’re getting older.”
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