Album review

Jean-Louis Murat

Fury and bliss

Paris 

29/08/2003 - 

With Lilith, a fiery and poetic double-CD, Jean-Louis Murat is making a brilliant comeback, scarcely eighteen months after Le Moujik et sa femme. Based upon the trio he has created with bass-player Fred Jimenez and drummer Stéphane Reynaud, Lilith is joyful as well as being rock through and through.

It’s always a pleasure to meet Jean-Louis Murat. The Auvergne-born man has many tell-tale signs which are typical of someone from the harsh but beautiful Puy De Dôme mountains : his cutting frankness, his lack of interest in anything superfluous, his penchant for offending rather than being ironic (irony is for lords, for rogues, for Paris)… Right from the start he blurts out : " If I sell 50.000 copies of that, that would already be beautiful: With just one song for Indochine, I earn three times as much cash as with my own records. "

Nontheless, Lilith should go down well. A double-CD which is both incredibly energetic and intensely poetic, Jean-Louis Murat’s new record gathers together several of his qualities which have up until now often been scattered  : his electrifying vigour, his obvious moral and spiritual messages, his taste for happiness, his black outlook, his love of rich images, the arrogance of his approach, the rigour of his writing… You could say Bob Dylan (in the early days of electric guitar) meets Cioran : "C’est l’absence de vie qui nous brise le coeur, ma/L’absence de vraie vie qui nous aura mis dans cet état/C’est nos absences à l’heure qui nous auront mené ici/C’est l’absence de vie qui nous brise le cœur, ma". Sometimes even, he’s a nineties English pop Georges Bataille : "Nous voilà lieutenant/C’est la sortie d’un bal/Brillante de cyprine/Dans son juste milieu/On trouve sa mortelle/Les lèvres distendues/Salive que nos mots/On veut se mettre aux anges".

Murat readily confirms the feeling of spontaneity which the album reveals here and there with its raw songs not unlike several Neil Young albums. "I recorded twenty-three songs in four days with the musicians, finishing at 8pm each evening. Half of them were first takes. I don’t like spending a long time in the studio so I work at home with a metronome, whilst looking for my guitar sounds. In the studio, I give clear, precise indications to the musicians and we work fast. I prefer not to spend too much money in the studio, I spend more on mixing and cutting". And even then, Murat is also a fast worker : he mixes two songs a day, without going overboard on the hours. What about all-nighters in the studio, and crazy hours? "It’s stupid. But studios push for that. You hire a studio for a twenty-four hour slot so everybody thinks they have to stay there for that amount of time. . …" The way studios work in France has really annoyed him for a long time : " In France it’s hard to find a good studio for 1.000 euros per day. The Tindersticks recorded their string section on three songs for the money that in France would have just about covered a demo-tape".

The singer has never refrained from pointing out the failings of the French musical scene – and even, a few years ago, in a controversial article in Le Figaro and continued in Charlie Hebdo, the flaws in the income support system for artists. Today, after a summer which has been devastated, culturally speaking, by the consequences of the Unedic Agreement of June the 26th, he states darkly : "The problem is that people don’t want art any more. Theatre, cinema and music-hall just doesn’t interest anybody any more. They’ll happily go somewhere and pay a fortune for something they saw on TF1, but to go and see guys like me, they just don’t want to spend the money".

Yes, Murat foresees the death of the chanson française "in two or three generations", but that doesn’t stop him from cultivating his art, sharpening his writing skills, or from steadfastly pursuing the rigours of his creative drive, which is both demanding and prolific. Yet he feels that all around him the world is becoming less receptive : "People’s vocabularies have declined. When I use the word wart-hog in a song, I get emails asking me what a wart-hog is. At the end of the day, you can’t even use a vocabulary bigger than two hundred words !"

So he enthusiastically works on "Do it yourself French poetry", convinced that "the pear is rotten, and French society is riddled with inertia, powerlessness and decadence", he goes on, relentlessly, " in this situation there comes a point where the most important thing becomes to be able to find enough strength within oneself to be happy, and to try and radiate happiness around oneself.". In the words of his song: "Alors fini grimaces, on sort de sa mélasse/On sourit/De se voir dans la glace nous met et ça/Agace/Fier d’être en vie". What more can one say ?

Jean-Louis Murat Lilith (2 CD Labels-Virgin)

Bertrand  Dicale

Translation : Caroline  Preller