CityLife

M83 brimming with teen spirit

THE VIGOUR OF YOUTH: M83

“I'VE always been fascinated by teenagers, especially John Hughes movies from the '80s,” announces Anthony Gonzalez.

To be honest, you wouldn’t expect anything less of the producer-cum-star-gazer behind French electro-shoegaze outfit, M83.

His latest album, entitled Saturdays = Youth – a dewey-eyed paean to his adolescence – comes in a CD sleeve with a russet-haired Molly Ringwald lookalike adoring the cover.

While the modish sounds of the '80s have been plundered recently by everyone from Frankmusik (who has even thawed out the decade’s most florid pop writer Paul Morley to write his impenetrable record company biog) to Gruff Rhys, there’s no question that Gonzalez’s love for the likes of the Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno and Kate Bush is genuine, rather than a case of a musician prowling  the streets asking, ‘Oi, anyone know where I can hail a bandwagon?’.

“The eighties definitely feels to me to be the most exciting, creative time there has been for the music industry,” he says, while preparing to support The Killers on a US stadium tour.

“I always set out to do something different with each new album. This is the shiniest record I’ve made, and the music suited the concept. I was born in 1980, so was a bit too young to appreciate the music the first time round. I rediscovered it when I was 14, so it soundtracked my teenage years.

"To achieve an authentic feel, we only wrote with analogue keyboards from the '80s. No computers, except for recording.”

Proustian rush

At 26, it’s fair to say Gonzalez – whose Father Time-eluding looks, frankly, make him seem as if he’s barely out of his teens -  is experiencing something of a Proustian rush (Good God, who let Paul Morley loose at the keyboard – Ed) from listening to Tears For Fears or Simple Minds.

He explains he chooses “to live in the past” because nostalgia is comforting and warm; the future, on the other hand, merely destroys optimism.

“There’s something so beautiful about teenagers, almost a poetry,” he coos, sounding like Death In Venice with a synth.

“There’s an innocence, a sense of hope you’ll never recapture.

"Certainly, my teenage years were the best and most cherished of my life. You’re constantly discovering new things every day: new experiences, new music, new movies, new drugs.

"When you’re a teenager, you’re fearless. You feel like the master of the world, because the  realities of life haven’t kicked in yet. It’s a feeling I wanted to recapture.”

Growing up in Antibes, located in the Côte d'Azur, Gonzalez comes from a long line of professional footballers, and as a keen soccer player, it was expected that he would follow in his father’s bootsteps.

Aged 10 however, he started making music. “I learned to play guitar because of Iron Maiden,” he remembers.

“I was into a lot of heavy metal. After that, I started to listen to a lot of German electronic bands from the '70s and because of that, I started to buy keyboards.

"When I was younger, I was quite shy and didn’t talk to other people a lot. As soon as I started making music, I would express myself through that.”

Gonzalez formed M83 with erstwhile production partner Nicolas Fromageau in 2000, taking their name from the spiral galaxy Messier 83, and creating dark, brooding electronic compositions.

After extensively touring Before The Dawn Heals Us around the US with his band for much of 2005, Gonzalez was teetering on the brink of burn-out, retreating to his home studio to beaver away on what would become the ambient (is there a worse word in the English language?) 2007 release Digital Shades Volume 1 and fifth disc,  Saturdays = Youth, so called because “Saturdays were the most important days for me when I was a teenager.”

Romanovs

Assisted on vocals by Morgan Kibby, singer in  LA band the Romanovs, the challenge for Gonzalez was to condense his ideas into pop songs. “It’s definitely more difficult for me to write pop songs than to write the more ambient stuff or melancholy music.

"It’s like when a film director tries to do a comedy... something that’s hard to do well.”

Whereas potty mouth Parisians The Teenagers turned one’s formative years into a kind of Carry On: Scenesters, Gonzalez opts for a more affectionate portrait, with cinematic tracks such as Graveyard Girl (a tribute to Pretty In Pink) and Kim & Jessie (about two girls “having their first psychedelic experience”) exuding a wide-eyed, cinematic quality.

That his elder brother, emerging film director, Yann Gonzalez, is largely responsible for the lyrics, shouldn’t prove shocking.

Teenagers

What’s more, Gonzalez Jnr is currently composing the music for a short film. “It’s about teenagers,” he laughs. “For a change.”

With Saturdays = Youth having gatecrashed its way into copious critics’ albums of 2008 lists, M83 are now more accepted in the UK and US than their native France.

“It’s partly because all of my influences are either from England or the States,” shrugs Gonzalez. “The French marketplace is difficult for someone like me now. There’s a trend for big French bands to sing in French, and if you sing in English, you tend to get ignored by the radio. Listeners see it as some kind of insult or fake.”

Fortunately, they’ve found allies in not only Brandon Flowers but also the sexual inferno that is Kings of Leon, whom they supported at the M.E.N. Arena at the tail-end of last year.

Jared Followill raved: "They have such amazing sounds. They’re very experimental. This band sounds like they invented the sounds... When I first heard some of their lyrics, I got chill bumps.”

Not to mention the fact they frequently crop up as the incidental music in television programmes.

"Some of them are surreal,” chuckles  Gonzalez. “You watch them and the music doesn’t fit the pictures. They’ll be cars racing around tracks and you wonder, ‘Why did someone think this would work?’”.

He could be talking about Top Gear, which has continually featured M83’s music. Ironic, really: the epitome of teenage angst colliding with a scion of male mid-life crises.

Saturdays = Youth is out now on Mute. M83 play The Deaf Institute tonight (May 7) £8. Call 0161 832 1111. More details at: myspace.com/m83.