Punks Radio 911 have answered a couple of questions for us!
Band picture: credit to the owner Hello Radio 911, thanks for your time. How are you doing in such a crazy time? Gilles: Hey! We’ll be remembering the beginning of 2020 for a while! We released our first EP « Etats d’âme – Etat d’armes » around the end of January. The release tour should have begun in April for about a dozen dates, that are now all cancelled… To stay 3 months without any rehearsals, any concert or without seeing each other has been a real challenge for every each one of us? Let’s just hope the worst is behind us! You've dropped a few months ago your new EP, titled “États d'âme / État d'armes”. Where did you find your main inspiration for this release? Romain: I think we didn’t have to look for inspiration because it imposed itself on us. This new recording still reflects an omnipresent emergency which surrounds us and which we have to face daily. This EP offers our reflections on subjects that are personal to us and on more political subjects. You know, sometimes I tell myself that I’m powerless over injustices and social or ecological tragedies. The only way I've found to remedy this is to make it into songs. This is mainly what inspired this release. This world is not going well. And it is not new. We must continue to cry out for not that evil becomes the norm. Finally, maybe our first inspiration is hope. How long have you worked on it? Romain: We really felt the need and the desire to release a new recording with the current line-up. Since 2016, we hadn't produced anything new and after various changes in the band, we really wanted to redefine our style. Once the songs were ready, everything happened very very quickly, maybe even too much. We had planned the release party before we even finished recording the EP. We had to record, mix and master everything in less than two months. The proof: we received our pressed CDs the day before the release. :-D You've also revealed a music video for the song “La Chute”. How was the shooting experience? Gilles: In one word - “freezing”! We shot the music video in one day at the end of December with a temperature close to 0 degree. We chose to do it inside the SANITARIUM, which is an old and abandoned hospital. Because of the shortness of the days during that time of the year, we had to rush ourselves to have every shot in just a day. At the end of it, we did a good job and we had fun doing it. It’s the first music video made by the band. It was directed with the help of Terrence, a friend of Romain. You're only singing in French. Why did you make this choice and can we one day expect a new song in English? Romain: Never! :-D We write and sing our lyrics in our native language for the simple reason that we want to affect people who are close to us. In Belgium as in France, many bands sing in English, but few people in the audience understand what they say. This is paradoxical because the very identity of punk is to convey messages and ideas. This is why we’ll continue to sing in French in Radio 911. If we ever become famous internationally, we'll talk about it again! :-D Can you share your other upcoming projects for the end of the year and 2021? Gilles: Let’s try to be optimistic, the Covid-19 crisis and the confinement gave Romain a lot of time to work on new songs. We have been working on those for a month now (since we could start rehearsing again). Our first 2 private shows since February will finally happen on the 24th and 25th of July! We are very excited and it’s going to be quite the show! We will be locking ourselves up inside the cultural center of Beauraing (the village I’m from) around mid-august. We will be working on a whole new set of songs for the upcoming shows. It will partly be made of new songs that we plan to put on an LP. We want to record the LP during the year of 2021. Finally, and depending what’s ahead of us with the crisis, we will be touring in France on the first week of November 2020. Fingers are crossed here, and we can’t wait to be there. It will be the first tour for the band and it certainly won’t be the last! Thank you so much for the interest you show for our band! Thanks for your time.
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