Hello everybody, my name is Nico and this is 'What's in My Bag?'
I went to the classical section, and I took this Glenn Gould
This is one of my favorite artists
Actually, he's a classical artist, but he has the charisma of a rockstar y'know
as charismatic as people like David Bowie
If you are playing a concert every second or third night for a month
this seems in a way a reasonably normal way to live at the time.
It's only when one gets away from that one realizes
what a crazy artificial existence it is.
He did something new with some old stuff
to find a new way to play Bach
It's a great example for us, I always do that
I always try to make something new from old stuff y'know
Also I did my first solo record about Bach, called 'Contrepoint'
so he was my main inspiration
and on this album, I think my favorite...
piece that he plays is 'The Partitas #6'
and this is one of my favorite moments of his career.
It's not boring at all. People think classical music can be boring or not interesting or not sexy, but
this is all the opposite. After that you really want to
dig into Bach and Glenn Gould's work as well
I took Elton John, he was just in front of me
It reminds me of a time, when, to make a career
you need one thing and that's to write a good song, y'know? That's the key.
And even nowadays, most of the successful records have great songs on them.
In this era, it's like he could wake up in the morning and write a song in five minutes.
Actually that's what he was doing.
He was staying in this studio in France, called 'Chateau D'Hierouville'
because for tax reasons, a lot of English artists came to France to record in the seventies
The Bee Gees recorded their Saturday Night Fever
That's where they recorded all the Bowie trilogy.
The so-called 'Berlin trilogy' actually was recorded at this castle in France
and they have amazing rooms
and they still have the piano, I think, where all of this has been recorded
and I visited the studio one year ago
and they still have the reverb of the staircase, where they used to record vocals
and he was sleeping there with Bernie
and all the band, they were having lunch, dinner, and breakfast together
and they were just working all the time.
He was playing the song, Bernie was writing the lyrics and the band was learning the song.
It seems very simple to make records at the time
but only for one reason: because all of them were very talented people
When you are talented, you can go fast.
You don't need to hide your inefficiency
behind long studio hours, y'know?
I got this Portishead live album
Never wanted to buy any live album before, for me live was live
and records were records, y'know
This one makes me change my opinion
I love music with soundtracks y'know
and when Portishead 'Dummy' was released
suddenly music inspired by soundtracks became popular
and so it opened a door for me.
So I said to myself, wow, I could make a record maybe too.
And that's when I started to work on 'Moon Safari,' because
for the first time this band made me discover that
the soundtrack influence could be part of the pop culture
It was really a big source of inspiration for me, this band.
And then I got Zappa
because right now
I am enjoying my life in LA and I'm renting a house in Laurel Canyon
I keep thinking about him because he was kind of the king of Laurel Canyon, y'know.
and all this generation of artists who stayed there
Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills & Nash and all this era.
It was very fascinating for France, y'know.
They were all supposed to be hippies, but they all seem so...
so dictatorship style, y'know
in terms of the art
and they would just keep arguing, but they made great records
'Apostrophe' is one of my favorite Zappa albums
I always thought that when you're too good, you cannot make a great record
because you need to be bad, so you need to use your imagination to
find other solutions, y'know.
So he's one of the rare examples
where he's so good, technically, but he still makes good records
Like people like Herbie Hancock or
all this kind of jazz works style
In my style of music, I think you have to be
not so good. All the good musicians I know, they don't make good records.
I think that the key to success: to be bad.
This album is so important, the first electronic pop album.
It's like folk music but with electronic sounds
before Kraftwerk, before everything.
When I heard this record for the first time it blew my mind
and the sounds, for the time, with the few equipment they had
that's why I think limitation...it's not that they're bad
but they had so few means, y'know?
so they had to trick them to push the limits, y'know.
And then, yeah, one of my heroes, Burt Bacharach
This is the kind of style that fits me, that's really
the kind of career I would've loved to make
but I was not in L.A., I was not in Hollywood, I was born in Versailles and
I don't think I am such a good songwriter as he is.
But if I had a dream to be... to have a career
it would be this kind of career, or these kinds of songs.
I think what he writes is most of the time perfect
Some of my favorite songs of all time are in here
Like 'The Look of Love' or 'I Don't Know What To Do with Myself'
Is it ok?
That's great.
Because I'm not a comedian
No no no...
In America everybody is a comedian
like, even when they ask for some milk in a restaurant, they do it like in a movie.