Phoenix thrilled by MJ’S mixing board
French electro-pop act got an assist from Michael Jackson on new album Bankrupt!
Versailles-born electro-pop quartet Phoenix took the uncommonly generous step of making a whopping 71 extra tracks available for download to fans who purchase the “deluxe” edition of its new album, Bankrupt!, but it might have been worth it to include one additional piece of bonus material in the package.
Apparently, there’s a fantastically entertaining chain of emails between the band and a chap in California who sold them the mixing board used on Michael Jackson’s Thriller just before they made the record sitting in the Phoenix archives that still provokes much laughter within the ranks to this day.
The band liberated the Thriller board from the head of a Christianmusic label who originally wanted $1 million for the historic piece of gear, but eventually let it go for the bargain price of $17,000 — primarily because he was so eccentric that most people who dealt with him concluded he was, as singer Thomas Mars puts it, “a scam artist.”
“I was just rereading the emails and the guy is totally nuts,” laughs guitarist Laurent Brancowitz during a recent day of press in Toronto.
“It was like a drug deal,” recalls Mars. “‘Give me the money. Send me the money right now, right now, right now, right now.’ Seven different fonts in different colours. Sixty exclamation marks.
“He’s a pretty sweet guy. On email he’s insane. We never met him in person, but on the phone he’s a sweet guy . . .
“His email translates the email of a guy who thinks he’s got something amazing but no one wants it. Any guitar that’s played by Eric Clapton for, like, 12 seconds goes up in value and this guy needed money badly so I understand his anger.”
Even if the board had turned out to be a piece of junk, the story was worth the price and the effort for its entertainment value.
But fortunately, says Brancowitz, it turned out to sound “marvellous” and contributed a priceless extra layer of studio smoothness to Phoenix’s fifth album, a solid and immaculately poppy followup to 2009’s North American breakthrough disc, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
Of the 71bonus tracks, meanwhile, Phoenix says they’re more of interest to the superfan interested in probing the involved, experimental studio processes that give birth to their poised and polished albums than the casual fan looking for another instantaneous treasure like Wolfgang’s smash single, “1901.” They are demos — “poetic experiences” and “impressions,” says Brancowitz — rather than completed tracks. “I think they’re interesting if you want to know more,” says Mars. “If you don’t want to know more . . . ” “For sure it’s not for the radio, that I know. But some grandma could like it,” says Brancowitz. “We always try a lot of ideas but usually we keep the first take. So it’s not perfect, but it’s maybe the best idea not perfectly executed. I can hear a lot of bands use just one idea and perfectly execute it, but maybe it’s not the best one. We have tried every possibility and then we execute it poorly.” Replicating the success of “1901” with another inescapable, international smash was not of particular concern to Phoenix while Bankrupt!, although the new album’s lead single, “Entertainment,” is already something of a staple. And in any case, they’ve tucked away a few more than just one hit since 2000’s United, even if this side of the pond wasn’t always paying attention.
“We are used to that because the first album we had a big hit in France and Italy,” says Mars.
“We have been one-hit wonders before, just not on the same song everywhere,” laughs Brancowitz. “But also, we are lucky that that song was one of our best. It’s not based on a misunderstanding, you know?”