Equipe de Foot is a French Rock duo made up of two singer-songwriters who record pop songs and play them much louder live in concert.

Since their formation in 2015, Alex and Mike have played hundreds of gigs, from the sweaty basements of their hometown of Bordeaux to the stages of nationally renowned festivals and European venues. Over the years they have become part of the exciting new wave of French rock, right beside bands like Lysitrata or Johnny Mafia.

For new album ‘Geranium’, the duo chose to work with producer and sound engineer (and fellow Beatles fan) Johannes Buff (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, The Drones, Dalek and at Shorebreaker studio in Tarnos, France. A meaningful choice in technical and artistic terms, Johannes was able to blend the wall of guitars-sound that is associated with Equipe de Foot as well as reaching the emotional heart at the centre of each song. The result is a glorious blend of powerful ballads and lo-fi anthems that never loses the charming, homemade vibe of their beloved demos. Every song has a unique twist, be it a pitched loop on a chorus or an autotuned solo trumpet at the end of a sad piano song. ‘Geranium’ shifts constantly, with Alex and Mike regularly switching places to sing or play the organs, the piano or whatever instrument they’re obsessed with at the moment (usually a flute).

“We have two different sides (live and studio)”

You guys like to play a lot of shows, so you must have been very affected by the pandemic?

Michaël: Yes I guess that like every rock band, we have two different sides (live and studio), and with the pandemic we lost half of these sides. We had a lot of gigs planned for our second album that have been cancelled, so we focused more on the “studio” side of the band, which is an aspect we also love. So that sucked, but in a way it was also nice for us to have more time to make an album we’re really proud of.

I guess you took some additional time to work on your new album, ‘Geranium’?

Alex: Actually we had already begun to write songs for our 3rd album when the pandemic started. We had like six songs but I think that we kept only one of these songs on the album. The thing with the lockdowns was that we weren’t able to see each other very often because at this time, we were living 500 km away from each other. A lot of songs from ‘Geranium’ have been written at home, alone. Then, thanks to the marvelous Internet, we were able to work together on them. As we didn’t know if we would tour again one day, we decided to make an album without even thinking about the two of us playing these new songs live. If we needed strings, two drums or five guitars on a song we would go for it. The idea was to make the greatest album we could do without considering that we are a duo.

<a href="https://equipedefoot.bandcamp.com/album/geranium-2">Geranium by ÉQUIPE DE FOOT</a>

Where did you record it and how was it to work with Johannes Buff (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, The Drones …)?

Michaël: We recorded in different places in the span of two years (mainly our bedrooms), and for this album we wanted to find the right person to enhance our demos. But the final touch was added at studio Shorebreaker, a really awesome studio near the beach, in Tarnos, in the south of France.

Johannes and us were really on the same page and he understood really quickly what we wanted to do with this album. We spent two weeks with him at shorebreaker, but most of the time we watched him making a great album out of what we had previously done. Sometimes he’d ask us to play twenty seconds of guitar or to re-record the drums of a chorus, and at the end of every day we got to listen to one of our two songs, and that was really cool. We loved those two weeks, and we loved working with Johannes, he’s an amazing producer and a really cool human being, cheers to him!

“Each song has its own history”

Every song has a unique twist, be it a pitched loop on a chorus or an autotuned solo trumpet at the end of a sad piano song. Do you have a similar approach when working on the songs each time or does that differ?

Alex: Each song has its own history but most of the time, when it comes to writing a song, we basically record drums and guitars of what we think will be a verse and a chorus. Then we come back home and listen to it over and over. We get obsessed with how to turn the music we recorded into a song. As I said, we’re not living in the same city of France but we exchange dozens of texts a day: “I’ve got an idea for that song’s chorus”, “How about making a loop with that guitar riff?”, “Maybe we could play these notes with a trumpet”. We love to do songs that way. Sometimes it takes one day to make a song. Sometimes the magic doesn’t happen: one song we strongly thought would be a highlight of the album was called ‘Letters Upside Down’. We made like seven versions of this song, we tried a lot of things to make it sound great but we never were satisfied with it.

Would you say you were trying to address a certain concept behind ‘Geranium’?

Michaël: We never really make “concept albums” but every album has its own “mood” that matches our own at the time. For ‘Geranium’, at the time of writing the lyrics we were in two different places, both physically (because of the pandemic, Alex was stuck in Paris, and I was stuck in the country near Bordeaux) and in our lives (because I was about to become the father of an amazing little boy). That’s why I think the album has two distinct sides, one of them being my view of the world from the country, with my pregnant girlfriend, and the other one being Alex’s view from his flat in Paris. It’s clearly not a concept, but I guess we can say that the context, which helped introspective thoughts to come out, really impacted what would become ‘Geranium’.

I haven’t seen you live yet, but I’m guessing you’re giving your best when it comes to gigs?

Michaël: We’re clearly giving our best to make a good live transcript of the songs, as this is only the two of us on stage, when the songs were written to be played by a lot more people. I think it’s safe to say that our live performances are a lot more rock n roll than our records, especially with this one.

What are some future plans for you now?

Michaël: I’m in Germany right now, and I plan on eating a sausage later today, or maybe tomorrow, or both. And for the band, I don’t know, I’d say gigs and records, until the world burns (which might not leave us too many time to write records)

Alex: We’re working on the tour, trying to play as much as possible in the Fall and Winter (France, UK, Switzerland, Germany). The more we play, the happier we are! And as ‘Geranium’ was released a few weeks ago, we’re back on making new songs!

How would you compare your latest album with the previous two? Do you feel it’s your most mature work?

Michaël: I really don’t see it as our most mature album, but I think this is the first time we were able to make the album we wanted to make. I love ‘Chantal’ and ‘Marilou’, but I think that we could have gone a little deeper in the “pop” aspect of the songs, and we mainly focused on making the heaviest sound we could do, and I think that today we both agree that this is not what we want to achieve.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favorite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Michaël: I think I’ll go with the most unoriginal answer of all time: The Beatles ‘White Album’. I think this record will never get old, and will forever be an inspiration source for musicians. In terms of recent albums, I really loved ‘A Hero’s Death’ and ‘Skinty Fia’ by Fontaines D.C.. And we’re both really into French rap, and I guess ‘V’ by Vald would be the one recent album I’d recommend!

Alex: The Beatles of course! “Blur” and ’13’ by Blur, ‘Surgery’ by The Warlocks. Recently I was on my Spotify account looking for a song by American band Froth and I discovered that they had released an album called ‘Outside (Briefly)’ in 2017 that I had never heard about. Since then, I’ve been listening to the songs ‘Petals’, ‘Briefly’ and ‘Show a Flower a Candle and It Will Grow’ over and over. When I like a song I need to listen to it fifty times.

Both of us: Thanks a lot for the interview!

Klemen Breznikar

Headline photo: Lily Bineau

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