FIRE!CHATTERTON. Nominated in three categories at the Victoires de la Musique 2022, the Parisian quintet Feu! Chatterton defends his latest album, “Clay Palace”.
Nominated in three categories at the Victoires de la musique 2022, Feu! Chatterton intends to do well and is one of the big favorites of this evening. But who are they? In Fire! Chatterton, music is created by five: Arthur Teboul on vocals, Clément Doumic and Sébastien Wolf on guitar and keyboard and Antoine Wilson on bass. The first three met at Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in the 2000s.
“We are not a clay palace, we are a fortress”, launches Sébastien. And Arthur details: “When we create, it’s true that there is this instinct to be impervious. To try to find a certain honesty in the feeling, we have to be in our bubble. Palace of clay next to a fortress, it’s more humble all the same.”
In Fire! Chatterton, the work is collegiate. “We’ve been making music together for ten years and at each period, we discover reasons why it’s interesting to be in a group, it’s pleasant and it allows us to move forward. It’s like a good cheese. I think that this record, we might not have done it first, there is a form of maturity, even if it’s a bit pompous as a word, but which only exists because we made music together for ten years”, emphasizes Clément. Being a group is “a great strength” for Sébastien, even if Arthur concedes that the work of five can be “heavy and laborious”. But following ten years, “now it’s love that holds us together,” he says.
“Alone we go faster, together we go further”, adds the singer, taking up the adage. For clay palace, Fire! Chatterton sought the help of musician Arnaud Rebotini, a “new ear”, according to Sébastien, who helped them “for the guitars, the drums, the voice”, but also on the “blues and soul” songs.
It’s one of the great hallmarks of Fire songs! Chatterton since his beginnings: poetry, highlighted in Arthur’s texts. “Poetry is not words, it is a way of understanding, of living everyday life. It is not only in the texts. A poem is a breath that allows you to see the world differently. Suddenly, you’ll tell yourself that you can live in the world you live in differently. The first time a poem has this effect on you, it’s an immense emancipatory force, a muted rebellion, a way of saying that it’s up to you to upset the world in which you live by the way you feel it, before you act”, explains the mustachioed leader of the group.
But if this love of poetry has earned them the label of “intellectual group”, Sébastien defends: “When we talk regarding poems, poetry, it’s very French lessons, but it can be with singers, with rappers with what are called punchlines, but in fact it is a verse.” Because if poetry today has been “discredited by making it something of the elite”, for Arthur, “the greatest poets can speak to everyone.” Proof of this is the success of rap today. “Popular poetry today is rap”, underlines Sébastien, evoking for example the title of PNL, The world or nothingwhich has now become a slogan in the current demonstrations.
Speaking of protests, following the release of clay palace, Fire! Chatterton is back on the roads of France following two complicated years. The group will be in concert for a new tour which began on February 2 in Cherbourg and will end on August 30, 2022 in Villars-les-Dombes at festival The Musicals. Arthur Teboul and his band will be in Paris, at the Zénith de La Villette, on April 14th.
Ten years following its birth, Feu! Chatterton opened the doors of its clay palacethe third album by these five Parisians, released on March 12, 2021, three years later The Birdcatcher. A bewitching disc, resolutely more electro than the previous ones, with sounds sometimes à la Daft Punk as on the first notes of Liquid Crystalsplayful on Companions (a text borrowed from Jacques Prévert), melancholic on These iron jewels or totally electric on Full screen… Fire! Chatterton is reinventing itself without losing its unique identity, which mixes poetry with multiple emotions. A “labyrinthine” album, according to Arthur Teboul, the singer and leader of the quintet.
Originally, clay palace was designed for the stage, with a show scheduled for eight evenings at the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris… which was to start on the first day of the March 2020 confinement. that we do in concert, on a larger scale. Because on stage, when we do a concert, we try to suspend the moment from start to finish. So we like the idea of staging, of entering into a time, a language, a parallel world the time of the show. There, we were given the opportunity to do more and we went there, but it fell through”, explains Arthur to Linternaute.com . “This show made sense, because it was the laboratory of the album”, adds Sébastien Wolf, guitarist of Feu! Chatterton.
So the group adapts and decides to take the time. “Usually we always rush. In a normal temporality, without virus, everything is rushed. We, until then, had not been able to release a record by really saying to ourselves ‘it’s over, now we’re releasing it'” , underlines Arthur, reinforced by Sébastien, who adds: “We were late, so we took the pretext (of confinement) to take the time to really finish the disc.” The result ? Thirteen new tracks and as many opportunities to (re)think our society, our relationship with the world around us and to reflect, among other things, on the new technologies that absorb us. A questioning summarized in the single new worldreleased last January.
Before the expected release of this third album, clay palacea single single: New World, released in January 2021. A song once once more full of questions regarding our society and our relationship to others. So what is the new world of fire! Chatterton? “Hugging each other”, slice Sébastien. “It’s a simple world. It’s a new world that would look quite like an old world (…). We wanted to say simple things and we are not known for saying things simply”, adds Arthur. The idea of this new world is inspired by the text of Christian Bobin, The plastering whistle. The latter “says that we should rediscover a form of contemplation towards the world, be sensitive to whatever is happening, rediscover this simplicity of observing the world with poetry. If we look at the world in a totally disinterested way, maybe things will get better”, sums up the singer.
But new world is also made of disappointments. “A new world, we all dreamed of it. But what did we know how to do with our hands (…) Zero, catch the Bluetooth. What did we know how to do with our hands? Almost nothing, almost nothing”, say the lyrics. “The new world, we would like it to be made of attention and sensitivity, summarizes Arthur. Isn’t it our way of living the world that makes us so sad? Here, we have almost everything, but we are sad, we have never been so sad! For me, this pandemic, it forces us to be optimistic and to have hope, it is the only way to fight to change things. “
And to Clément Doumic, on guitar and keyboards, to add a note of hope in the midst of a health crisis which is eating away at human relations: “This epidemic is a strong alarm for humanity, to try to divert the trajectory of a lot of things that are wrong.” At the heart of this health crisis and the album clay palacewe said, social networks.
“Behind their screen, their total screen, people are enjoying themselves.” Six months following the release of his album clay palace, the group Fire! Chatterton puts in images one of the key pieces of the disc: Full screen. A militant and revolutionary clip in which Arthur Teboul, his merry clique and seven dancers, all dressed in work overalls, track down “the great president Sobbing reptile”, as they call him in the lyrics, embodied on screen by the actor Denis Lavant.
A ruthless leader who is no longer “safe in his clay palace”, caught up and deposed by the “toothless”, inevitably echoing the current political situation. And for good reason, Arthur Teboul wrote Full screen during the Yellow Vests crisis… Directed by Pierre Saba-Aris, produced by Pelican Paris and choreographed by the duo A&A, formed by Alexis Ochin and Arnaud Boursain, the video perfectly illustrates the text of this song, resolutely topical.