Their latest album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix deserves to be piped from the heavens. Laura Snapes meets Phoenix’s Christian Mazzalai

“It’s part of our French culture, to make artists suffer and then you accept them, and then you help them, you know!” jokes Christian Mazzalai about the amount of time it’s taken the French press to welcome Phoenix with open arms. Along with Deck D’Arcy and Thomas Mars, and later on his brother, Laurent Brancowitz, he’s been a member of the Versailles quartet since their early 90s school days, but it’s only been with the release of their almost universally acclaimed fourth album this year, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, that their native critics have bestowed upon them the rightfully deserved amount of praise.

From the French perspective, it’s almost possible to understand the distaste at Phoenix’s musical collaboration horizontale. Long the butt of many jokes, French pop music’s goat could have been saved by the band’s 2000 debut, United – had they not eschewed their mother tongue to sing in English, thus losing the République’s famed support for native musicians and falling foul of the Tourbon law, a quota which stipulates that 40% of music played on the radio must be in French.
“We are like strangers,” says Mazzalai. “The law was good at the beginning because it helped electronic music and French hip hop, but afterwards it was digested by mainstream crappy music, so now it’s not a good law. I think that law doesn’t help us.”

“When we did our first album it was very new, we were the first to sing in English and our music was very shocking. But now the new generation of journalists are with us and since two albums, we are getting bigger and bigger. It’s cool because in the 60s, all the French bands were singing in French, but they were doing covers of American music. Now we are doing the opposite, we are singing in English, but we are talking about French culture, about Napoleon and New York and things, and France has accepted us.”

They’d have been foolish not to. Produced by Philippe Zdar, one half of Cassius, WAP is an alluringly slick distillation of their previous three albums – although the lyrics are occasionally melancholy, the ballads have been swept aside for eight life-affirmingly upbeat and nigh-on perfect pop songs, and ‘Love Like A Sunset’, a curious two-part incandescent krautrock interlude in homage to Can and driving through the dark tunnels that lead to Paris.

Later on tonight at Bristol’s O2 Academy, their long-term friendship manifests itself in an intuitive performance, but one where any visible traces of camaraderie are set aside to allow the audience’s unceasing joy to come to the fore. Christian and his brother Laurent start the instrumental number alone, weaving guitar strobes before Deck joins in with a pulverizing bassline, and all the while singer Thomas lays supine between them all, resting his head on a pulsing monitor. On record it serves as a division between the album’s two geographic halves, the notion of which couldn’t be more romantically French if it tried.

After deciding not to renew their contract with EMI following the release of their third album, It’s Never Been Like That, the band relocated to New York to try and work Truffaut-style from a “crazy, expensive” hotel room, before uprooting to a boat on the Seine within sight of the Eiffel Tower, then an 18th century French painter’s country house, and Zdar’s Montmartre studio. This indulgently artistic way of working was in stark contrast to the recording of It’s Never Been Like That in a disused former East German power station.

“In Germany we went there with no songs, nothing, and very short limits of time. We just had two guitars, a bass and a drum. This one, we had no limits of time or instruments, no boundaries – both are very interesting ways [of working].”

“With this album we’ve done things we could not have been doing with a major label, for example we spent all of the budget on creation! Our record company wouldn’t have allowed us to work that way, but we didn’t care because now we own our own record company. So we like the idea, we think it’s very romantic to spend all the money on stupid things!”

Named Loyauté for obvious reasons, their newly founded label’s first action following the completion of the album was to give away ‘Lisztomania’ for free from their website – fans didn’t even have to exchange their email addresses for a high quality download, which fast became the most blogged track in the world according to blog aggregator Hype Machine. Whilst conquering America as the first French band to perform on Saturday Night Live and selling out two nights at Central Park, it was surely an added pressure to have to control a label at the same time?

“To be alone? No, it has been easier. Even though we are now collaborating with indie labels, we can still do all our crazy ideas that we have, like to give a song for free but without any things in exchange, which is very stupid for a big major company!

“But at the end, we realised it helped us a lot because the song – we didn’t want it to be a single, but it spread all around the world. It’s crazy, and this is beautiful because it’s controlled by music lovers, by blogs, you know? It’s the best, it’s a chaotic moment in the music industry, but we love it – there is less money, but there is more freedom, satisfaction. If I want to give a song to the world, in one hour all the fans could have access to it. And I won’t have to ask anyone, and this is beautiful.”