Justice on Computer Malfunctions, Stage Fright and Owing a Debt to Daft Punk
Since proudly planting a tricolor flag with their viral remix of Simian’s “Never Be Alone” in 2003 (aka “We Are Your Friends”), Justice has kept France at the forefront of the dance music world.
The Paris-based duo, consisting of Gaspard Augé, 45, and Xavier de Rosnay, 42, are famous for throwing everything from heavy metal to vintage disco into a techno blender in pursuit of infectious beats.
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After a seven-year hiatus, they released a fourth studio album, Hyperdrama, in April of last year. Its single “Neverender,” featuring vocals by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, won best electronic/dance recording at last month’s Grammys — the third Grammy for the group.
Currently on an epic world tour that saw them headline the Hollywood Bowl last October and which next brings them to Mexico and South America, the band snuck through Los Angeles after a stop at CRSSD fest in San Diego long enough to play a secret DJ set in Hollywood (it featured their own hits plus classics like “Maniac” from Flashdance and George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”) and have De Rosnay chat with The Hollywood Reporter about industry accolades, divine inspirations and those terrifying moments of man vs. machine.
I really love what you do ever since “D.A.N.C.E.” with vocals by a children’s choir. Whose idea was that?
It was ours because we loved the track “Stand on the Word” — this sort of disco track sung by kids. Our previous song was called “Waters of Nazareth,” and it was just noise. For the two years after “Waters of Nazareth,” we didn’t become famous, but we were known for being very aggressive and distorted music. We wanted the first new track after it to be something that was the opposite of this.
So you went for a ’70s Sesame Street vibe.
Exactly. Just to buy ourselves the freedom of being able to do whatever we wanted. We’re thinking, “OK, if we release this one and we don’t alienate everyone with this song, it means we are going to be free forever to do whatever we want.” And it worked. It’s really made us confident that if we make things with honesty and not opportunism or anything, there will always be other people liking it.
Do you prefer to be on the road, or are you more homebodies?
We are 200 percent more home guys. For us, being on stage, even after all this time, is still quite an exercise. I’m not saying it’s painful or anything. It is just not natural for us. We’re not stage people or natural born performers.
I have this vivid memory of seeing you at Coachella in 2007. It was your debut there. I loved it. But the image is of the two of you, hanging over the board and smoking cigarettes.
We don’t try to pretend that we are something else on stage. That’s why we’re not very communicative or we don’t have a mic. We try to focus and make something. We adapted the stage to how comfortable we are on stage, which is not very.
[At least year’s Coachella set], we were so anxious and focused that we barely moved on stage. We were not dancing. We were just trying to remember everything and not to mess it up too much. We’re just very stressed out.
So how much are you doing live in terms of producing the sounds?
We play keyboard parts on the track. Then for the songs that are more sample-based, we receive the raw material from the computer. The session is run by Ableton, a software that has a quasi-monopoly on the live scene. Every track is split into eight “buses” [an an audio channel that allows a multitude of audio signals to pass through it] on our side. And those eight buses we are able to control from the stage
We’re already uncomfortable enough on stage. If you’re there and you don’t have anything to do, you spend the longest hour of your life not knowing what to do with your body. So when we prepared the live show, we were thinking, “OK, what’s the maximum amount of things that we can do?” So we’re never unoccupied on stage, which is the worst feeling.
And you don’t want to interact with the crowd at that point?
No, because I’m too shy. It’s a bit of a dilemma. I think performance in electronic music is still at the embryo state, because the technology is changing all the time. We can do now things that wasn’t possible even three, four years ago. So I guess every band or every performer is trying to find what they can actually do, and every band is going to be different in this.
What’s the biggest technical fuckup you’ve ever had live? Does it happen?
Yeah, it happens all the time. We had one in London two weeks ago. We have two computers. They’re running at the same time and they receive exactly the same information. If one of them crashes, we can swap computers. But both of them crashed at the same time. And I don’t know what are the odds, but it’s probably one in a billion that they crash at the same time. But it was not too embarrassing. We left the stage for a couple of minutes.
I think the most embarrassing one was we played Red Rocks. I think it was in 2012. And the front of house desk that stopped working, which means that on stage we still had music. We could still hear what we’re doing, but nobody else could. And also the stage is almost silent because we have in-ear monitors, because we need to have all the cues and everything. So there was a good two minutes where we’re doing the show as normal but the audience was in quiet, total silence.
Congratulations on your Grammy. This is your third one.
It’s amazing. We’re so happy when we get it.
So the Grammys are a big deal to you?
Yeah, they are. Any form of celebration is a big deal to us, whether it’s public or industry or whatever. But even when we were kids, we knew what the Grammys were. It’s something that goes a bit beyond the music industry. It’s a bit like the Academy Awards. I had a puppet of Michael Jackson with his Grammy outfit, so I knew what it was. And it feels incredible to be celebrated as a French [national] in a ceremony like this. I don’t know if it’s a big deal, but it’s a big deal to us. It means that people decide to celebrate one band or one song, and it feels great.
Your winning song, “Neverender,” was a duet with Tame Impala. Sometimes those pairings lead to new bands, like Fleetwood Mac.
You mean like a super band?
Exactly. Do you think that could ever happen with Justice and Tame Impala?
When we finished working on those two songs, we were definitely thinking that we could do more, but all of us have so much on our plates already. And I’m a bit wary about super bands because the amount of times the super bands were better than the split bands, I think I can count them on maybe two fingers. We had fun making them. It’s cool now everybody’s back doing their own things
And you feature on The Weeknd’s “Wake Me Up.” It’s his new album but also a film soundtrack. Is the song in the movie?
I haven’t seen the movie, but I think there’s a scene in the movie of him performing the song. He called us maybe three years ago to make music. We worked on the orchestral parts, which are the first two minutes of the song. And then we made 10 seconds of music to hint that it could go into something else. And so it ended up in being that big track.
I imagine everyone comes to you for remixes. How do you choose who to do?
We don’t do remixes anymore. It’s more than 10 years that we don’t do remixes. We used to do a lot of them at the beginning because for us, it was like being paid to be able to experiment. And we were thinking, “OK, we can learn to make music and best case scenario, the remix is good and people like it. Worst case, it’s not good and nobody is going to pay attention.”
I guess a lot of people mistake us for electronic dance music band, so they want club remixes. And we don’t do club club music. So what’s the point?
What is your relationship to Daft Punk in terms of how they influenced you? Do you have a personal relationship to them?
On the professional level, and for a lot of French bands, they are the people that made it possible to be French and to be listened to in foreign countries. There was some examples of that before, but there was a door only this size and they made it into a huge gate. To the point that when we started in 2003, we were immediately playing in other countries more than France. To us, it didn’t sound abnormal. They made it something that’s regular without compromising about anything, which is cool. It’s always, even when you have intuitions, when you have examples that it’s possible you are always more comfortable doing things.
And we meet from time to time. They are great guys. Like Thomas [Bangalter] did help us at the very beginning on a couple of things, doing pre-mastering. And because Pedro [Winter], the boss of our label [Ed Banger Records], used to be their manager.
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