“It’s crazy to find a bistro like that here! » This is how Didier Wampas greets us when we join him at La Havane, a bar without pretension or fuss, in the opulent town of Neuilly. A place that is not told, like the rocker, singer of the Wampas, 62 years old, who retraces his life, and especially his songs, in the book Workingman punk released Thursday by Harper Collins. Cool interview.
What made you do this book now?
It was the publishing house that offered it to me. I didn’t really want to do that. I told them if it was song-driven it would be OK. Telling my life story isn’t very interesting. It’s the songs that are important.
However, you have a unique journey…
Yes, it can show people that you can live, make music, being a little offbeat, without completely entering the system. If we can help a few people like that…
How do you view the decade of the 1980s today, during which the group Les Wampas was born?
There was innocence. Before it started to work, before Mano Negra exploded, we were making music naively, without knowing that intermittency existed. We made 1,000 copies of 45s, without a record company, we played in bars, we were happy. We didn’t ask for anything more.
Does doing punk imply not seeking mainstream success or have you thought about it?
We didn’t even think about it. It was unthinkable at the time. We didn’t know it was possible, it’s not a question of choice. It was like that. We played in bars, in squats, there was nothing else, no one was interested. It was perhaps better, in fact. But that’s how it is every time a strong artistic movement is born, whether in London in 1976 or in New York in the 1970s. It was a small number of people who came together in very small places… That’s where it’s good. Once it’s picked up by the record companies, it’s less interesting.
The rock scene of this period in France with Les Wampas, La Souris Déglingué, Les Bérurier Noir, etc. is in the collective unconscious. Don’t we now tend to project a lot of fantasies into it?
There are plenty of fantasies. From time to time, I reread books about this era and it’s a bit romanticized. Everyone is acting a little smart. Which I tried not to do in my book. But I always add a little to embellish. In reality, they were little idiots who drank beer and played rock in bars. In the collective imagination, it becomes something else, but basically, that’s what it was.
These were quite violent years in this environment, with beatings, the risk of having one’s concert tickets extorted before arriving at the venue…
You had your Docs stolen, you went home in socks after concerts…
Have you experienced it?
I was never too much of a victim of that, but yes, the concerts were quite violent. It wasn’t very funny. Those from The Dilapidated Mouse in the Suburbs, you didn’t know when or how you were going to get home afterwards. there were fights all the time. It stopped in the early 1990s. But in the 1980s, there were bands, if you had Dr. Martens with the wrong color laces, it didn’t work… But I’m not nostalgic from that time, I’m really happy to be here today.
Is there a misunderstanding about you that is bothering you?
When people say that I play funny rock, it annoys me. I don’t belong to the comic category. I make slightly absurd, surrealist rock.
Your first musical emotion is “Who will know” by Mike Brant…
I can’t help it, I didn’t have a big brother who listened to rock. So yes, at 10 years old, one day, hearing this song, I felt an emotion. You listen to music, it doesn’t do anything to you, and then one day, there’s one that comes on the radio, and you’re like: “aaaah”.
Did you have to hide your taste for variety?
No, I never hid it. I always said that I loved Claude François, Johnny Hallyday, Once upon a time… For me, music started like that, with the charts on Europe 1. I bought PodiumI cut out song lyrics which I pasted into notebooks. I was really a fan of variety.
Then you started reading “Best” and “Rock & Folk”…
That’s well after…
You say in the book that this was your training, but that you ended up stopping reading these magazines to really be a musician…
Yes, after a while, you tell yourself that it’s good, that you understand. This is what Jean-Jacques Goldman says. He says he became successful the day he stopped reading Rock & Folk. It’s a bit the same for me. One day you have to stop, you understand, rock’n’roll, you know what it is, now you do it. You pick up your guitar and stop comparing yourself to everything that ever existed.
Your book is called “Worker Punk”, is that your identity?
Yes, that’s not intentional. Initially, I worked because I had to. We started groups, we didn’t earn anything at all…
You combined working days and concerts. Did you have dementia or is it unconsciousness?
A bit of both. Today, I wonder how I did it. At the RATP, they didn’t help me. It’s not like athletes, they didn’t give me time to go and rehearse. I worked the three hours like everyone else, I went to rehearsals, I did concerts, I went back to work. I didn’t stop. At the beginning, my colleagues vaguely knew that I had a band but they didn’t come to see me in concert. Afterwards, when you are on TV, everyone knows you exist.
It was Louise Attaque who convinced you to sign with their label, Atmosphères, in the early 2000s. We don’t necessarily imagine Les Wampas as friends with this group…
Well yeah, but they liked us and I liked them too. The first time I saw them in concert, I said to myself that there was something extra compared to other groups – there were plenty of them at the time with a bit of accordion/French song (Les Têtes steep, La Rue Kétanou…). They had something stronger, more special. They weren’t making a copy of anything. We became friends very quickly. They insisted on the record company (Atmosphères) to sign us. It was a small label, they were just lucky enough to release Louise Attaque and sell three million records. Before we went through bigger ones, we went to RCA for example. But anyway, I don’t care about that. I’d rather make a big label lose money than a small one. When you make Universal lose money, it’s pretty funny (The Wampas are proof that God exists was published in 2009 by Barclay, which belongs to the major Universal).
In 2003, you released the single “Manu Chao”, which became a hit…
A small tube, yes.
Was it unexpected?
Oh well yes, yes, that yes. What’s weird is when you go shopping at the supermarket and you hear the song. There, I can say that it did something to me. Considering the music we make, I didn’t think it could happen. Especially since it’s not sought after or anything, there’s never a moment where we try to make commercial music. It’s an accident.
On the album that followed, “Rock’n’roll Part 9”, there is the song “Chirac en prison”. Was it an unconscious desire to sabotage you to make you unbroadcastable on the radio?
It was a deliberate desire. After Manu ChaoI said to myself: “We’re going to have access to the media, what should I do? Do I continue to make my songs to sell records or do I do something? » Might as well do something. Even if it’s just once, I would have done something, in this case, take advantage of the access to the media to sing Chirac in prison and make a little mess.
Have you ever thought about pursuing a more commercial path?
Oh well no, it doesn’t work when you think like that. There are plenty of bands that think like that, but it doesn’t work anyway. On our album there was the song Rimini. The radios told us that if there had not been Chirac in prison on the same disc, they would have played it. So, they didn’t pass it. But I prefer that, not to play into the game of a system that I don’t necessarily adhere to.
During this decade, you got angry with a lot of people, including Nicola Sirkis…
I don’t talk to him much anymore but we weren’t angry.
You sang “Partenaire Particular”, a song he hates, as the opening act for Indochine, telling the audience that it was his favorite song…
Yes, he took it badly. We saw each other again afterwards. Now, we don’t talk much anymore, but hey… We don’t have the same visions of music. He is a control freak. He wants to become huge. But so much the better that there is a French group that fills stadiums with cheap tickets. It proves that we can do it, that we can sell tickets for 50 euros. And that proves that those who sell them for 150 earn a hundred euros more per place. That’s something I don’t understand, people who are already billionaires and are selling super expensive tickets.
You also had trouble with Kyo and in particular the singer Benoît Poher…
We were nominated for the Victoires de la Musique, I didn’t like the atmosphere, I lost my temper and said “The Wampas hate Kyo and rotten variety” but I didn’t even know what they were were doing. It snowballed and took on disproportionate proportions.
In 2007, you participated in the French selection for Eurovision. Would you have been amused to be chosen to participate?
Yeah, especially since the song I wrote was called You have to vote for us and Eurovision fell the week after Sarkozy’s election, so I could have sang “You shouldn’t vote for him” in front of the whole of Europe. that would have been funny. “You shouldn’t have voted for him, now we’re in deep shit”… I regret that. Otherwise, no. It was the Fatal Picards who went there, they arrived second to last, I think. They played the game.
You now live in Sète. What is your life like?
It’s happiness. The south as in Pagnol, it still exists there. The city center is a big village, everyone knows each other.
And there’s a lot of rock that resonates?
I listen to a lot of classical music but also rock. I try to discover things that I like.
You also make music as a family…
Yes, I’m in a band with my wife and my sons Sugar & Tiger. There’s an album coming out in February, I think. Playing with your children, sharing that with them, it’s great. When kids are 25, they no longer go on vacation with their parents normally. There, we’re going to a concert and it’s great. We play in small places, I love it. The more it goes, the more I like it. Big festivals piss me off.
If you had to keep only one memory from your career, what would it be?
The day I got my first 45 rpm. Before I was nothing, I was in the suburbs all alone, I had no friends, I listened to records in my room. Afterwards, I met a friend at high school. There were two of us, already, it was happiness. Then we met two other guys, we said we were going to form a band together and two years later we released our 45 rpm. The magazine Best said he was good. It was happiness. I was on my commuter train going home, the record in hand. And I said to myself, “My life is successful.” It was the great moment of my life. I was so happy. That day, I could have stopped.
Source: www.20minutes.fr
