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Interview: Balthazar, the Belgian melting-pop2011-07-20 15:58:00

What could be more rewarding than being dubbed by his idols? Balthazar, quintet from Belgium, has been taken on tour with dEUS. While their debut album, Applause, is just released in Netherlands, Balthazar was in France on May 25th at La Flèche d'Or. We decided to met the two brains of the group, Maarteen Devoldere and and Jinte Deprez.

Interview by Ariane Gruet
Produced by Anousonne Savanchomkeo

Grandcrew.com: Can you introduce the band and describe how did you meet?
Maarteen Devoldere: Jinte and me were playing music in the streets when we were kids. But we were kind of enemies because you could earn a little bit of money and he was sitting a hundred meters than I and it was always “who’s gonna get the much money”. But then we started to talk each other and we told “hey, why don’t we play together”. That’s the beginning of Balthazar. Then we found the other musicians, which were friends in the conservatory in Gent.

Grandcrew.com: How old were you? What did you play?
Jinte Deprez: We were fifteen, we just had our fist guitars. And we played… cover songs.
Maarteen Devoldere : It was a hard stage in our lives, you know when your fifteen. First dates, purity, a lot of anger has to come out. So you play music in the streets.

Grandcrew.com: Did you play covers too with Balthazar at the beginning?
Jinte Deprez: No actually, I think not. It’s more fun to make your own songs. We both had to write equally lot of songs, for the competition between us. So we had a lot of songs since the beginning.

Grandcrew.com: Do you still have this competition in the band on stage?
Jinte Deprez: Not on stage. It’s only behind the screen. It’s only friendship, fun and good times with Balthazar.

Grandcrew.com: Did you stay just as a duo for a long time?
Maarteen Devoldere: No, we felt like we needed a drummer and a bass player so we immediately searched for them. We found Patricia as well, who play violin. So then we had a girl as well.

Grandcrew.com: Your two first singles, This is a flirt and Bathroom lovin’: Situations, don’t appear on the tracklist of your album, Applause. But do you think right now that those singles are still representing you?
Jinte Deprez: We wrote these singles when we were very young and we was like we had to find what we wanted to do, which genre, which kind of sounds we wanted to use. That was a period we did kind of everything, like the first single is kind of upbeat and electro stuff, and the second is kind of hip hop style. But when we made the album, it became clear that we’ll make something completely different. We don’t play them live anymore as well; it’s just something from the past. It was fun, we were nineteen, now we’re already twenty three, like old people. When you look at a picture from when you were like a kid, it’s a different person. So we didn’t play them anymore, because they didn’t represent them anymore.

Grandcrew.com: You still have a lot of responds on those two singles. Did you feel anxious when you released Applause?
Jinte Deprez: We made the decision that this is what we wanted to be; take it or don’t buy the album. But I mean, when you’re on stage, you have to play the songs you believe in. And those new songs are what we believe in.

Grandcrew.com: Did you know exactly the sound we wanted to have?
Maarteen Devoldere: We recorded for like four years, so we didn’t know that at the beginning, but it became clear to us in the last half year, we really found it and it’s been very fast. We recorded all the songs, again, in this version.
Jinte Deprez: When we started to record the drums, it was like “wahoo, this drums are very cool”. But when we layered it with other instruments, the sound was a bit gone so I just keep all the other parts and it’s really empty. So you can hear like everything in the drum and the bass. It’s a lot of drum and bass stuff and less bombastic layers.

Grandcrew.com: It seems very important to you, the groove and the bass…
Jinte Deprez: Yeah, but we did a lot of genres all those years. We did electro, upbeat, hip hop, singer songwriting and rock stuff… Then we decided to collect it all. So we needed a groove.

Grandcrew.com: Did you produce the entire album by yourself?
Maarteen Devoldere: Yes, it seemed the easiest way to get it on our way.
Jinte Deprez: We knew exactly what we wanted while we were working on. And then we talked to a couple of producers, it was constantly like “maybe we have to do by ourselves”. But we studied it at the conservatory, and we really learnt in the books, it’s all there.

Grandcrew.com: Then, you went to Norway to see…
Jinte Deprez: Yngve. Yeah, that was to mix the album. We recorded the album in our little rooms and we were still like going to school and saw all of our friends. It was a weird situation. So, then, to finish the album and mix it, we really wanted to go out of our lives, go somewhere else with Yngve to mix. So we decided to go there, in Norway. It was in Bergen, it was very nice, with mountains and the sea, lot of snow storms. So the only thing we could do was mixing the album, and sometimes had a party…

Grandcrew.com: Is it your first big tour you’re doing right now?
Maarteen Devoldere: No, we’ve toured with The Joy Formidable a couple of months ago.
Jinte Deprez: We just released our album in Belgium and Netherlands, and I don’t know when it will be released European wide. So now we can do a real tour, but before, we’ve just been to the country, playing one or two gigs. We didn’t do real tours, but we went to Canada, to New York recently, to South Africa, and then this tour with the Joy Formidable, that was all Europe. It’s nice, we went to London. But we still have to start over again I think.

Grandcrew.com: Is it dEUS that invited you to play tonight?
Maarteen Devoldere: Yeah, kind of. Well, they allowed us. Tom Barman, the singer, came to a show, we invited him to a show and he was really enthusiastic. He asked us if we wanted to come on tour with them, we said “ok, cool”. Because we grew up in the 90’s and dEUS was the main rock band from Belgium so they were really heroes. It is kind an honor to know that we can tour with them. It’s really cool.

Grandcrew.com: Do you have some songs in Flemish?
Maarteen Devoldere: No, they’re all in English.
Jinte Deprez: We have a terrible accent in Flemish cause we are from the C.A. Nobody understands us when we talk Flemish, I don’ know why…
Maarteen Devoldere: And we grew up with English music, so I think it’s kind of logic. And you can’t go very far with Dutch music, you have to stay in Belgium or in Netherlands.
Jinte Deprez: It’s weird, when you start as a teenager writing music, it’s like normal that you sing in English. I think it’s also easy because it’s not that direct, you can sing non sense and nobody understands it. Next time, we’ll make a French record.