Sebastien Tellier

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Sebastien Tellier will be playing Sunday on the Main Stage

Soft-core TV broadcasts and 10 year-old boys can make for a volatile combination. One such pre-teen, late-night screening marks the naissance of French pop composer, Sebastien Tellier’s, third album, Sexuality.

“In France, 20 years ago there was a new TV channel, Canal +,” says the bearded Parisian, “It was the first TV channel to broadcast pornographic movies. I was maybe 10, and it was very special; now it’s hard to find some movies that have so great an emotional effect like your first pornographic movie. It was” he concludes, “a very big trip.”

Tellier’s abiding memory and chief inspiration, is not of grim, low-grade close-ups, but rather Italian-style scenes of deep sexual and emotional intimacy. “I wanted to make erotic music,” Sebastien explains, “to use a pure subject to make a very personal album. I wanted to make erotic music with an Italian sensibility; like an erotic movie from Italy. Not porno; that was important for me.”

Hence Sexuality: an 11 track, delightfully synthetic mediation on love making.

This latest disc is the culmination of years spent forging ahead, at pop’s outer reaches. Tellier’s talent’s first came to light in 1999, when his recordings came to the attention of Air’s Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel. Their professional friendship blossomed and Tellier went onto tour with the band the following year.

His first LP, L'incroyable Vérité [The Incredible Truth] (2001), was a fantastical pop album, which careered from lo-fi electronica to bizarre cabaret tunes. Its sleeve featured Tellier in full evening dress on the front, while the back of jacket had a shot of him cavorting in some playboy’s pool. He instructed listeners to only listen to the album by candle light and won a tight band of adherents, who fell for his lush, humorous compositions. Standout track, Fantino, was chosen by Sofia Coppola for the Lost in Translation soundtrack.

Sebastien followed this with Politics (2005), which, like Sexuality, took single term as both its title and theme. The disc dealt with ways of power and governance, in as much as it discussed the relative merits of genocide versus ketchup, as well as the tennis-playing opportunities presented by the Berlin Wall. Politic’s most prominent song was La Ritournelle, a sublime, string-led tune, which featured Nigerian drummer, Tony Allen, some eighteen months before he joined Damon Albarn for The Good The Bad and The Queen. La Ritournelle’s international success transformed Sebastien’s life professionally, sexually and domestically. “Many things have changed since La Ritournelle,” he says with a laugh, “now I’m living in a new apartment, I have a new girlfriend and a really beautiful sofa.”

Since its release he has recorded an acoustic album of his more popular songs, Sessions (2006), which topped the French iTunes chart; this was repackaged for the British market as Universe (2006), to include both highlights from the French CD, as well as compositions from his score to the film Narco.

His growing popularity has also won him some well-known fans. Once the smart, artsy kid from the 17th Arrondissement could count only one hip musical connection: his father played with nihilist French prog rockers, Magma. Now the Tellier fanbase includes Marc Jacobs, Philip Glass and Karl Lagerfeld. He has also befriended Daft Punk; Sexuality is produced by the duo’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

www.sebastientellier.com features a shot of the two of them on its welcome page: Sebastien is seated before a piano, while Guy-Man stands behind in his robot outfit, resting a reassuring, metallic, hand on the former’s shoulder. “That represents the ambience of the album,” says M. Tellier, “Me, I’m very classic and Guy-Man is very robot, and the mix of these two ideas is very cool.”

Tellier and Homem-Christo live near each other in Paris and, given the modest size of the city’s music scene, it was almost inevitable that the two would meet. “The Parisian world of music is very small,” says Tellier, “so, if you are in the same kind of place in your mind, you’ll meet the guys who are thinking in the same way.” Sebastien wanted to work with Guy-Man because, primarily, he was fan. “I admired his work,” he explains, “Both what he did with his own label Crydamore, and what he did with Daft Punk too. All this stuff for me, he was like a star; I was so happy to touch this star.”

Although both Sebastien and Guy-Man admire classic American songwriters like The Beach Boys and Gene Clark, the Daft Punk’s influence on Sexuality was primarily synthetic. “It’s more electronic than before,” Tellier says, “because Guy-Man produced electronic stuff; I don’t want to make rock with Guy-Man. I want the real talent of Guy Man, and his real talent comes from his electronic side.” Indeed, Sexuality is Sebastien’s first fully-electronic album. This is not so great a leap as it may at first seem. “I was always fine with electronic music,” he says, “I liked Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, and the very beginning of techno. It’s not a recent love.”

However, Sebastien’s live show is due to change. Once he clowned about on stage, playing songs on a piano, sticking cigarettes up his nose and emptying whisky bottles over his head. Though his new live set-up will be no less peculiar, it will require a few more microchips. He describes the ideal live incarnation for Sexuality thus: “I imagine the musicians less like a real musician and more like two guys from Kraftwerk. Not two robots, but maybe two guys without expressions. They are behind a radar screen on the bridge of a battle ship. I will be in the big chair. I’ll also put some erotic stuff on stage, to fit the ambience of sexuality.”

Of course; battle ship, a captain’s hat and some strippers! Although Sexuality could well herald mainstream success, Tellier is still resolutely plugging away in pop music’s avant-garde, to great effect.

For further information please contact Heather Findlay at Sainted PR on 0208 962 5700 / heather@saintedpr.com

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