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CERRONE
Dance Hysteria
Paris
27/11/2002 -
Ensconced in the Parisian offices of his label Malligator - where the corridors are lined with rows of his gold discs – Jean-Marc Cerrone kicks off our interview chatting about his superstar friendships with the likes of Michael Jackson and Elton John. Although Cerrone is sometimes dismissed as a music-maker from the "old school", the new generation of electro stars in France have recognised him as a pioneering influence – and his work is regularly sampled in their own compositions! Years before anyone came up with the "French Touch", Cerrone was already exporting his disco beats beyond national frontiers, clocking up sales of 8 million for Give Me Love, for instance. And his new album, Hysteria (recorded with a helping hand from his son, DJ Grégory) proves the disco king is still capable of mixing up some wickedly infectious "body music"!
RFI/Musique: Does the title of your new album have anything to do with the collective hysteria you're hoping to provoke on the dancefloor?!
Cerrone: Hysteria is a concept album like all the albums I've done in the past. It's in the same spirit as the first four or five albums I put out. And yes, the title was inspired by the sort of hysterical state music can put you in when you're in a night club.
For me, Hysteria is the logical progression of what's been happening over the past couple of years – and by that I mean the number of my samples which have ended up on other people's records! I've been sampled on a huge number of international hits. I can think of at least 15 off the top of my head, and they include everyone from Lionel Ritchie and Paul McCartney to French acts like Bob Sinclar, Modjo and Daft Punk. These samples all happen to have been taken from one precise period in my career!
You make no bones about the fact that you have some very prestigious names in your address book. Hysteria might well have been expected to include guest appearances by a host of celebrity music stars…
Well, to be honest, I didn't want to turn round and do exactly what I'd done a hundred times before, you know, take two or three elements of Earth Wind & Fire or Yes. I mean, everyone's done that – and some of them have done it brilliantly well, like Quincy Jones, for instance. But on the whole I find those kind of albums are the least lively and exciting, despite their impressive list of guest credits!
Personally, I'd have preferred to get a whole bunch of young talents on board. But that didn't turn out to be so easy… In fact, it turned out to be such a headache that we didn't do it at all! Our working methods were just too radically different for us to embark on any serious kind of collaboration. If I'd wanted to work with the cutting-edge talents of today I'd have had to write a track, then give it to them so that they could take it away and remix it and then they'd have had to send it back to me!... And I simply didn't want to work like that. For me, the idea of working together doesn't mean each of you shutting yourself away in a corner and doing your own thing! I wouldn't say there's a generation conflict or anything, but there's a radically different approach which at the end of the day makes us incompatible.
So you prefer sticking to the "old school" approach?!
Well, I don't know about that. What I do know is, when a rhythm's ready and me and my team decide it's time to add some strings on top of it, we go ahead and do it ourselves. We're not going to wait until the next day so we can bring forty albums into the studio and mess around sampling strings from a Barry White classic or anything!… Actually, I wouldn't even know how to go about doing that and frankly I'm not even interested.
OK, so I accept that that way of working can be a creative process too. But boy! what a waste of time sampling an extract from someone else's album rather than playing it yourself! But then that's the thing, isn't it? These guys don't know how to play it themselves, do they? They're DJs! (Laughs). Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're not talented or anything. It's just a different approach.
For some people the name Cerrone is automatically associated with disco and kitsch – while others might dismiss you as "has been"!
Well, personally I've never heard anyone say I was "has been"… The comments I've heard are more that I'm provocative or even "underground"… Back in '76, '78, when I first emerged on the music scene, I didn't wait for Saturday Night Fever, I Will Survive and Born to Be Alive to come along before doing my thing. By the time disco fever took off on the mainstream I'd moved on!
It was when the record companies realised the full extent of the disco phenomenon and the public enthusiasm for it that they started churning out pop songs with a disco beat. And that had a very short shelf life, it very quickly became "has been"! But I think the reason I'm still here after all these years – and the reason others aren't, or if they are it's only thanks to their old hits! – is that the public were intelligent enough to tell the difference between the two. I'm sure of it, in fact! That might be my old megalomaniac side speaking – but let's face it, you have to be a bit megalomaniac to get anywhere in this profession!
Was the fact that you saw disco influences re-emerging on the current scene one of the motivating factors behind your decision to do an album like Hysteria?
I'm not trying to fight for any special place on the music scene, you know… After all these years in the music business and generating as many record sales as I have, I don't need to do this to earn more cash or pat myself on the back and say I've added another album to my collection! If I haven't got to the point in my career where I can turn round and put out an album for my own pleasure, without worrying about marketing issues and wondering whether it's going to sell or not, then it hasn't been worth it! What's my reward, my little luxury at the end of the day? For me, it's being able to do an album like this. But I'm not being completely self-indulgent here, I obviously hope Hysteria appeals to the greatest number of people possible…
Talking of rewards, is it gratifying to see that you've become a source of inspiration for the young generation?
Yes, absolutely! They often dip into my work and 'borrow' a certain rhythm or a certain sound… And what could be more flattering than that? That at the end of the day someone likes your work so much they sample it in their own? I think it's great! What I don't find so great is when I find five samples looped into one, you know, and you have someone like Sir Paul McCartney ringing you up, saying "OK, what about going 50-50 on this?" And then he sticks his vocals over the top and comes up with Goodnight Tonight, one of the biggest hits he ever had with Wings…
You have to remember back in '75, '76, everyone was pointing the finger at me and asking, "What the hell does he think he's doing with his tracks lasting 16 minutes? They just revolve around a big drum sound and a bass gimmick?" Everyone else was doing these really short 3 and a half minute pieces with real melodies, you know. And just because I was doing something different they treated me like I'd got it all wrong… People actually called me "the log-chopper", you know, because it was like boom! boom! boom! But these days everyone's a log-chopper and I end up sampled by one of the Beatles… All I can say is, it looks like things have finally come full circle!
Do you have any plans to perform your album live in the near future?
Yes. I'm planning to do a gig in Paris at the start of next year. It'll be at the Olympia on January 31st. I'm planning to do a show with a very special 'concept' - and by that I mean we're gonna have the place jumping from 10 at night to 6 the following morning! We're going to turn the Olympia into a giant nightclub. It'll be just like the good old days at Le Palace or Studio 54!
We're going to present Hysteria with real musicians like Nile Rogers, but we'll also have a bunch of top-class DJs on board like Bob Sinclar, David Guetta and Groove Armada… We're going to mix the two worlds up together! I'd like to get a bit of a circus ambience going too, with people flying through the air and all that crazy stuff like you used to have back in the good old days. You know, give a real sense to the meaning of the word Hysteria… The concert's not going to be called Cerrone at the Olympia, it's going to be The Olympia by Cerrone! For one night I'm going to turn the Olympia into the biggest disco in town!
So for those who thought disco was over and Cerrone was dead and buried, Hysteria is like a dose of disco Viagra?!
(Cerrone bursts out laughing). I'd love people to call me that! Man, I'd love it if people came up to me in the street and said, "Wow! You're my Viagra!" That would be true praise to my ears!
Cerrone Hysteria (Barclay/Universal 2002)
Loïc Bussières
Translation : Julie Street
13/07/2001 -
