Yann Tiersen at the 02 Academy

Yann Tiersen scored the soundtrack to Amélie nearly 15 years ago but you can walk into any ‘Cafe Rouge’ or fancy French bistro today and in all likelihood it will still be on repeat in there. Is there anybody more rewound for one thing than Tiersen?  It goes without saying that the Amélie soundtrack is not only timeless but also an amazingly beautiful score, no one can listen to it and not have the cockles of their heart well and truly warmed.  

But Tiersen is so much more than just the Amélie guy. He also happens to be an internationally renowned musician, plays a multitude of instruments and has released 6 albums in the last 15 years. In an age where JLS are screamed at in lust by throngs of underage girls it is glaringly apparent that Tiersen is genuinely a truly underrated musician. His latest studio album Dust Lane couldn’t be further from what is expected of him. There is a propensity to assume Tiersen is just a classical musician who has decided on a whim to dabble in a bit of good old rock n roll but it’s just not the case. The new album sees Tiersen embracing his rock roots, with the use of two drum kits and a Korg Wavestation that’s more Arcade fire than the typewriters and accordions of Amélie.

Crack got the opportunity to meet Tiersen before his gig at the o2 Academy as part of his UK tour. Tiersen is the embodiment of a quintessentially French chanteur, although he stresses that he is in fact from Brittany. He is expectedly nonchalant with a bottle of beer in one hand and a pack of Marlborough Reds in the other, the t-shirt that he wears simply states the word “loveless.”

Tiersen’s latest album is a real plethora of sounds; intricate piano melodies, accompanied by sonic electric guitar and euphoric choral singing.  The album is so different to what you would expect of Tiersen and yet so familiar with his classic accordion tunes buried evocatively into the very deepest layer of some songs.

Dust Lane is a real dichotomy between the classical and contemporary, the joyful and heartbreaking. Unlike the Amélie soundtrack which took two weeks to put together Dust Lane took two years; “I like to work quite fast usually, (Dust Lane) was fast as well but there were gaps where I would come back and start again and explored different ways of approaching the same track.”

Two years is not so long to put together an album considering that each instrument on the intricately and densely layered album is individually played and recorded by Tiersen himself. Each album starts with the seed of an idea and a couple of short loops on the guitar and then the song is built from there. “Each track comes without will, just instinct. I like not knowing where I’m going, maybe that is the reason I like music so much; I like to be surprised by the result. I have no idea at the beginning what the album will become.”

Tiersen’s music does seem to have a will of its own and shifting and evolving, this is especially resonant throughout his live shows. Dust Lane is an album that is haunted by the death of Tiersen’s mother during the album’s inception making it inescapably about our human transience. The first track of the album ‘Amy’ is a little like the congregation of an evangelical church but it is definitely, as with the rest of the album, a grower. Tiersen describes his latest album as a representation of life as a journey down a dusty lane that ultimately leads to death. As depressing as this seems Dust Lane encapsulates the inevitable highs and lows of that journey and each song is inherently beautiful and uplifting.

Dust Lane also saw Tiersen’s first collaboration with Ken Thomas, who has produced for the likes of Sigor Ros and M83. “Ken was really open to the music; he understood quickly that it was better not to focus too much on the detail and trying to hear everything but to see the bigger picture.”

The fourth track on the album simply entitled Palestine slowly and repeatedly spells out the word of its title, but Tiersen is by no means political; “I just wrote it because I went there on the previous tour, in Gaza city. It was very impressive and shocking the reality of it, so I decided just to spell the name of the land, it’s not political, because I wanted to avoid any polemics. It’s such a big problem and I don’t have the right to comment.”

Tiersen is laughably modest for a musician who has been described as one of the most revered artists of his generation; he describes his musical upbringing as “not a big deal.” He explains that “from the age of 6 to 12 I learnt the violin and the piano, lots of people do that! I was a teenager in the 80s and in the 90s there was a period of really dry sounds and for me acoustic instruments like the guitar, the violin and the accordion were really new. That’s why at the beginning (during Amélie period) I used those kinds of instruments because they were new. I still use the violin now but with distortion, of course.”

Surprisingly Tiersen feels that his international audience is much more aware of his non-Amélie music, when we broached the subject of Amélie with him and asked whether he thought of it as more of a dead weight he replied “of course I’m fed up with this link because it was a long time ago and...yeah. I didn’t make it just for the soundtrack; it was just a compilation of my first albums. I wrote it in ’95 so when Amélie was released the music was already 6 years old! I like those tracks but, you know, I can’t do it anymore, I don’t want to and I can’t.”

Dusty Road is Tiersen’s first fully English album, for all the charming and romantic effect of French lyrics they are unfortunately seldom understood outside of France. The use of English was clearly just a natural progression for Tiersen; “it just made sense for me, I mean I was born in Brittany so I’m not solely linked to France. French is like a really tough language to use in a song. If you write in French the words take up all the space in a song, it’s really hard to voice something, it’s almost impossible to have a nice melody with French language; it doesn’t work, a bit like Italian. In French it sounds horrible, really commercial; it’s really hard even if the lyrics are good. It’s also better that everyone can understand.”

You do need to listen hard to understand Tiersen’s English through his thick French accent, it’s easy to forget and assume that he is singing in French. The final track of the album sounds deceivingly like a traditional French lullaby, what he actually sings is ‘fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, make me come again.’

Considering how privately Tiersen works to put together his album it is surprising that he plays live with a full band including two drummers a guitarist, keys player, and bassist. “For me playing live is really different. I like to work on my own, as I said I like to be surprised and it can often be a bit stressful to work with someone else but for the gigs I like to have a band”

For all the years of classical training at distinguished French music academies Dust Lane embraces Sonic Youth as much as it does Satie or Chopin and the result is a fantastic amalgamation of unpredictable yet charmingly familiar music blurring the lines between genres. Live Tiersen is slightly introverted but none the less incredible to see and for however fantastic you think the Amélie soundtrack is Dust Lane is on a different level and definitely deserves attention.