W SPORTING
He got out of it, unscathed and undeterred. That video was inspired by his previous attempt at hijacking a sporting event, only on a slightly smaller scale. For the track ‘Hello’, featuring Canadian electro-pop band Dragonette, he took on Bob Sinclar at tennis in front of a capacity crowd during downtime at the Roland Garros in Paris, even snagging himself cameos from world No.1 Novak Djokovic, Sweden’s Mathilde Johansson and Frenchman Gael Monfils. Both clips are part of a series of films called Smash, also the name of his 2011 album, guerilla-ish productions to accompa- ny his music. Solveig, a hopeless cinema head (he took his surname as homage to the French actress Solveig Donmartin — his real surname is Pican- det), has gradually become almost as renowned for making an effort on his videos as he has for his music.
hen Martin Solveig found himself in front of 60,000 howling fans at the Stade de France during half-time in a match between France and Croatia, it was, suf- fice to say, one of the
more peculiar moments in his dance music career. He wore what has now become his trademark headband, knee-high socks, full soccer kit, danced like a nerd with a troupe of hot cheerleaders and dived, skidding across the turf before encouraging the crowd to hold up placards in a vast Mexican wave spelling out the name of his track. You can’t fault his ambition. His antics were for the benefit of the video for his single, ‘Ready 2 Go’. “In the adrenaline of the moment, I didn’t feel the stress,” he says. “I just went for it. I didn’t think too much, and then sometimes when I see the image again, I think ‘Wow!’.” In fact, the stunt almost got him arrested. French police hauled him back to France while he was out of the country on tour over a matter of some missing insurance. “The paperwork was already pretty serious to get the authorization with the French Football Federation,” he says. “The Stade de France is a very protected place, and we forgot papers for the dancers to give them authorization. I had to go to the police station three times. It was so hardcore. Really very, very bad. We did the whole thing with a team of four people, usually that kind of thing would require a whole legal department.”
ROCKING MUSIC
Essential Solveig moments
“Over the last four or five years, I’ve spent maybe as much of my creative time to work on videos as music,” he says. With his production team, includ- ing Gregory Darsa (aka producer DJ Gregory), who plays Solveig’s manager Lafaille — a kind of French ’70s movie actor persona in the vein of Jean Rochefort — he’s been able to pursue these burgeoning ambitions. The results are great fun and genuinely very likeable. His latest, a re-recording of his track ‘The Night Out’, finds him at Paris’s legendary Studio Ferber, spiritual home to the likes of Serge Gainsbourg and, as ever, with Lafaille in tow on cowbell detail. Solveig sings — he was a soprano choirboy as a youngster — accompanied by a full orchestra, with nods to both Daft Punk and the large-scale orchestral disco productions of Salsoul.
RAMPED UP It’s fair to say that things have ramped up some- what for Solveig over the past two or so years. He’s come a long way from the likes of ‘Heart Of Africa’, the Underground Resistance-esque deep houser that landed in 2000 as part of his debut set ‘Sur La Terre’, or ‘Edony (Clap Your Hands)’, his offering for Bob Sinclar’s Africanism project. These days, his productions are chart-bound, less po-faced and considerably more endearing than the likes of, say, the Swedish House Mafia, but doubtless often grouped in that same pop-dance pigeonhole. “It’s definitely pop,” he says of this sea change. “It’s made for a mainstream audience, with open arms for anyone who wants to embrace it. But I’ve been making music for 15 years. I started making house music because that was where I was born musically. But very soon, I dreamt of making music that would be closer to pop than anything else. I just had to learn my way through that. I look back and I can intellectualise it, but really I just took one step after the other and didn’t think too much. I started there, and I arrived where I am now.” It’s safe to say he’s no longer chasing underground approval, then. “One thing you can’t be after 15 years in music is the cool cat,” he says. “The ‘hype’ concept and the ‘cool’ concept rarely goes with the idea of longevity. Very often super-cool means super-new. So in time, you have to figure out how to remain relevant without being cool, because you can’t be cool. This is maybe what I’ve done without really thinking about it.”
ME AND MADONNA So if he’s in the business of gradual reinvention, his most recent project could scarcely be more apt — the trifling matter of producing a solid chunk of Madonna’s recent album ‘MDNA’, including two of the singles. This is, presumably, the holy grail for a producer who has thrown himself inexorably towards pop music for over a decade.
‘HEART OF AFRICA’ Featuring a slap bass that makes your thumbs tingle, this sparse groove is heavy with brass solos and funked-up guitars.
‘EDONY (CLAP YOUR HANDS)’ Essentially, this is almost a drum track on its own, interspersed with a smattering of poetry and Middle Eastern percussion. Sounds rubbish, is ace.
‘HEARTBEAT’ Throbbing, deep vocal business from Solveig that builds to a simmering crescendo. Seek out the ‘Africanism main vox mix’.
‘READY 2 GO’ Anthemic, stadium pop-dance with vocals from Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke. You can try to resist it, but it’s best just to give in.
‘THE NIGHT OUT’ Solveig behind the microphone seems to suit him very well, but check out the version recorded at Studio Ferber on YouTube. Super.
“The first guy who called, I thought it was all a joke by my Australian agent, who is accustomed to do that kind of thing,” he says. “But then we figured it out, and that it was the real thing. It all hap- pened very, very fast. She had listened to my work, and was liking the idea that I was a dance music producer with experience in mixing vocals. She liked some of my past work, so I then sent some stuff I’d prepared to her. She liked that too, and that was the starting point.”
Madonna has been known to chew up and spit out producers in the past, but Solveig’s work impressed her enough to invite his own band on tour with her for some 20 dates across Europe, and even open her first date in Tel Aviv. “She has much to teach from her life and her career,” he says, gushing a bit but quite forgiv- ably. “I know it will be a highlight of a lifetime, for sure. It’s crazy. It’s even crazier when you’re in the concert, and you watch the show and you hear ‘Vogue’ and ‘Like A Virgin’ and then all of a sudden you have one of your songs come on. It’s like, ‘SHIT!’ So crazy. I can’t even realise the totality of the thing. It’s too much.” Doors open once you start working with Madonna. People suddenly start answering your calls all the more readily. So as you’d expect, his next projects are all a bit hush-hush. “I’ve recently had quite a few calls, so from September on, I’ll be back in the studio,” he says, and we get the feeling that’s all we’re going to get. Either way, after 15 years hard graft, he deserves whatever’s coming to him.
www.djmag.com 021
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