by LORRAINE CARPENT

Combining the loose spirit of garage, the sleazy wit of Gainsbourg and the smooth edge of modern gear, Franco-Deutsch duo Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring have perfected their playful, raucous pop over seven years, culminating in their latest, tellingly titled album Musique Automatique. The Mirror spoke to Stereo Total’s Cactus about singing in six languages, the return of The Invisible Record and Germany’s new wave.

Mirror: Tell me about the Genius Dilletante [sic] movement.

Françoise Cactus: So, as I came to Berlin in the ’80s, this movement was founded by a band called Die Tödliche Doris. It was a new way of combining art and music. At the Genius Dilletante festival in Berlin in ’82, Einstürzende Neubauten came with some machines —“BBBRRR!”—digging holes in the walls and everybody was doing crazy stuff. The old hippies were really upset and thought, “Oh God, that’s harder than punk rock!” The feeling was, you only need a good, original idea, then you go on stage and you do it. A bunch of groups we are born this way, even me, I just met two friends, we did two rehearsals and then we were on stage. We were called Lolitas. At the beginning, it was completely garage, but in the end we got too good. I really loved it when we couldn’t play.

M: How did you wind up performing The Invisible Record?

FC: Die Tödliche Doris were invited to do the performance, but they don’t exist anymore—one of them is dead now—so they invited us instead. I’m still friends with [DTD’s] Wolfgang Müller, he is a great artist but he doesn’t make so much music anymore. Sometimes he sings songs about elfs, these little furry people that are hiding under stools or somewhere like this, you know? Anyway, his band put out, in ’84, a record, and in ’86 another record, and when you play them together, the songs are composed in a way that you hear really crazy stuff. We did it like this—we had two stages in the same room, I was playing the record from ’84 and Brezel the ’86 record on his little stage, and when you were standing in the middle you could hear “the invisible record.” But we were not playing cover versions, it was our own interpretations, because this record is hard to hear now. It’s really experimental, noisy and ugly, so we did it a little bit more our way.

M: Since your songs are multilingual, I suppose many people don’t understand you most of the time. Do you take that into account as a lyricist?

FC: Yes, I choose the words mostly because of their sound, I’m not doing complicated, intellectual stuff. When I write lyrics that nobody understands, it sucks in a way, but there’s your fantasy. I didn’t have English at school so, when I was listening to English or American music when I was a teenager, I was singing along but it was not English, it was a fantasy language. But my dream is to have one song in each language, that would be beautiful. :

With Mr. Quintron & Miss Pussycat and the Parka 3
at Lion d’Or on Thursday, Nov. 28, 9pm, $16

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