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 ALASDAIR DUNCAN catches up with ETIENNE TRON of multi-national pop group THE VERY BEST, to discuss the making of their debut album and their lack of, er, ‘planification’.
After a chance meeting in a junk shop in London’s Clapton, Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya teamed up with underground electronic duo Radioclit to form an all-new band, The Very Best. Radioclit were Etienne Tron and Johan Karlberg, from France and Sweden respectively – at the time, they were looking for a percussionist to work on some of their tracks, but in Mwamwaya, they found a vocalist so captivating that he would take their music in a new direction entirely.
“At that time, Johann and I were just making beats without a precise idea of what we were trying to do,” Tron tells me. “We ended up with all this music, and every time we played something new to Esau, he jumped on it and ended up making it into a song. He did that with pretty much all the music we gave him at the time.” The original idea was for Karlberg and Tron to produce a solo album for Mwamwaya, but fate took the trio in a different direction.
“To be really honest, towards the end of the process, we realised that, even though we’d been telling our managers and our girlfriends and families about Esau for the better part of a year, they were never able to remember or pronounce his name,” Tron says, somewhat sheepishly. “After a while, we decided, okay, let’s be a band. Also, none of it was that much planned. We never planned to make a band, or do an album – all of it just happened. It was fun, and there was not a lot of, er, planification behind it.”
The Very Best’s debut album, The Warm Heart Of Africa, includes high-profile guest appearances from M.I.A and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, but the bulk of it is woven together from a patchwork of samples so intricate that the end result sounds for all practical purposes like live music. Many of these samples are so small and have been worked and altered so much, Tron explains, that people outside the band will never figure out where they came from. “Sampling doesn’t necessarily mean taking a whole phrase of music, as many people might think,” he says. “When you sample one hit or one snare drum and build a musical phrase out of it, then it becomes a composition.”
Although The Very Best is taking up a lot of their time lately, Tron and Karlberg are still keeping busy as Radioclit. The duo are working on tracks for rappers African Boy and K’Naan, and producing a solo album for Marina Gasolina of Bonde Do Role. “That one’s very different from anything she or we have done before,” Tron explains. “It has a very ‘60s rock sound to it, rockabilly, surf, garage kind of rock. It’s a bit like a Tarantino soundtrack with a little more synth.”
THE VERY BEST play alongside Wild Beasts, Black Lips, NASA and more at St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival (Alexandria St, Fortitude Valley) on Friday Jan 29. Warm heart of Africa is out now through Shock. Check out www.myspace.com/theverybestmyspace
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