For a child of the crass, bloated 1980s, 38-year-old Marc Collin is the epitome of charm. Maybe he's just an average Frenchman, but it's not every day that a thickly accented music producer phones me while en vacances on the island of Corsica, so I'll go with the glamorous picture in my head, thanks. When not ensconced in living the European good life, Collin is busy creating fantasy through music. His love affair with New Wave bands began as a schoolboy in Versailles, an obsession that he's turned into an international success. It's the last thing that Nouvelle Vague's mastermind producer had in mind. "We were just expecting to sell maybe, I don't know, ten thousand, twenty thousand, something like this, to interest the people who were into this culture, and that's all. People, they really like it! And it's like, most everywhere in the world. So it's a very good surprise."
Nouvelle Vague (all apologies to ABBA tribute act Bjorn Again) are perhaps the most credible cover band you'll ever hear. A product of Collin's inspired imagination, their two albums spotlight tunes from giants (U2), footnotes (Heaven 17) and downright obscurities (Scottish act The Wake) of the 1980s underground, stripped of all period details and reworked into oft-unrecognizable bossa nova and Carribbean-influenced numbers. "I tried to imagine what could happen if this song had been recorded in the 1940s or '50s...so it's a kind of game," Collin explains. Bande A Part, their latest release, continues the experiment in the same spirit of their original self-titled work, this time tackling tunes as diverse as Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" and Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself," and turning Yazoo's club banger "Don't Go" into a lush, magical torch song. The collective, which employs six vocalists on the new album, is defined by its musical sophistication and the strength of its material. Although he could easily push the Nouvelle Vague experience as a high-concept gimmick, Collin is insistent upon celebrating the decade's body of work as respectable, rather than mere fodder for nostalgia. "We always just remember the fashion, the politics, the energy (of the '80s)," he explains, "but finally there were also sometimes very beautiful songs, and I wanted to prove that."
Putting the project together was a revelation for Collin as well as his collaborators, many of whom had, incredibly, never heard many of the original songs before recording them. This naivete wasn't an intentional part of Collin's plan. "It just happened," he says. "When we asked the Brazilian singer (Eloisia) and after, Camille, to sing 'Love Will Tear Us Apart,' or 'Just Can't Get Enough,' or 'Guns of Brixton,' we just realized that they didn't know at all this kind of songs. It's not their culture. They are young, like, 25, you know." With the exception of his original childhood cassettes, Collin often didn't even own copies of the tunes his band ended up recording, resulting in discoveries all around. He recalls, "When I listen to all these bands when I was young, I didn't know exactly what they said. For me the interesting thing...was the energy, the production, the sound, the voice, but not really the lyrics. I really discovered again these songs with the lyrics." His young protegees focused on the words as well, "because they took ideas for interpretation" from them. As far as Collin is concerned, his singers' unfamiliarity with the material turned out to be a bonus. "We discovered that it was a very good thing, because they were totally free" to create their vocals free of any prior associations.
As Collin tells it, it sounds as though creating the actual tracks was a breeze. "It's very easy! You ask the guy to come, ask a friend to play the guitar, I give him the chord, and I say, okay, let's go, let's play it like a pop way...and for me it happened. You can say, oh yeah, it's very good to hear this songs like this. As long as we get the right idea I think it's very simple to do it." The essence of the tunes - "the chords, the melody and the lyrics" were his main focus, laying a solid foundation on which to point them in a new direction. The end result has created a demand to hear the material live. "It's a kind of cabaret show sometimes. The girls, they wear beautiful dresses, and we try to act like an entertainer, and it's something very warm, and very live, and always a kind of freedom on certain songs." It's a formula which has proved popular around the world, so much that touring for the first album took the band to over 20 countries. "What was a big surprise," says Collin, "is to realize that almost everywhere in the world, there were people who have listened to New Wave or post-punk music. It's happened in different generations...in Mexico, for example, it's young people who are listening to The Cure or New Order. In Bangkok you will find people who will know all the stuff."
In the same way that their band name is descriptive in multiple ways (the term means "new wave" in French and "bossa nova" in Portuguese), titling their new album Bande A Part is a chance for Nouvelle Vague to make another statement of purpose. Like the Godard film of the same name, this is art marked by the urge to stand out from its peers. According to Collin, though, the French meaning of the phrase is more finely tuned than the literal suggestion of "someone just alone and not with all the people. And it's true that Nouvelle Vague is a strange concept, because it's not really...you can say rock and roll, or indie pop, or electronic, or jazz, or even lounge...it's difficult to really try to have a name on what we are doing, so we are kind of, you know, we are not into a movement." Hey, whatever they are, we just can't get enough.
Nouvelle Vague burn up the Variety Playhouse on Thursday, September 21. The Submarines, reviewed elsewhere on this site, get things started.