Intervista Kadavar (Simon “Dragon” Bouteloup)

Hi Simon, how are you doing?

Pretty good, thanks!
There are not many gigs left…I’m alright.

‎”Rough Times” have been out for a bit more than a month now; you’ve started playing a lot of new songs live right away, how is the public reacting to this new music?

I think it’s a good response, we’re playing, I think, five new songs: the first two of the album, you get this big hammer hitting you in the face at the beginning of the concert, so…yeah, I think it’s going good with the new songs.

As you were saying you’ve played five new songs so far, half of the new album, are you planning to play more of them in the future?

There’s one we wanted to play for this tour, it might happen for the last shows.
We have a playlist, we rotate songs every night, so we’ll see, maybe a sixth one…

‎I guess you listen a lot of times an album while you record and produce it, do you still listen to your music after it’s released or you’re sick of it after having had to listen to it so many times?

I think you need a break, yeah, definitely, you need to walk a little bit out of it.
It takes, I don’t know, maybe three-four weeks for me to be able to listen to it again.
It was even worse for Tiger, our drummer, because he mixed it, so he spent really a lot of time on it.

What does the “Rough Times” of the title refer to?

Well, it refers to life in general!

It refers to the climate of the world right now, it’s a notion that everybody can understand, it’s also an open notion, everybody got a rough time at some point, a rough day…

It doesn’t refer specifically to the political situation of today?

Well, it does, it does it as well, but at the same time the album is not fixed on this, it’s a little more abstract in the sense that you’re free of interpret it.
We don’t want to put a gun on someone and say, “You have to see the album that way”.

You just left open for everyone to interpret it.

Yeah, with the songs as well, that’s what interesting art, to have the listeners, or people who are watching a painting, whatever, to interpret it how they want.

Is this “roughness of life” dealt with in many songs, is it some kind of a concept album, or is it just the title-track that deals with this topic?

It wasn’t planned as a concept album, but it’s true that at first we had the artwork, then the title, inspired by that artwork, as a main theme, then the songs trying to circle that thematic.
So it could be called a concept in that sense, but it’s not a concept album like [“Histoire de] Melody Nelson” by [Serge]Gainsbourg.

That thing about the artwork is quite unusual, I think, usually is one of the lasts things a band think of, when working on a new album.

That’s true, I mean, it was a different process in the writing compared to the previous albums, we used it as a starting point.
For “Berlin” we already had songs that we played like a year before, those were the starting point for the album.

Here we had nothing, we had no material, there were maybe some ideas, but not song.
The artwork thing was a way to have a starting point, I guess.

How does the songwriting work for you, do you write when you’re on tour?

You can grab some ideas when you’re on tour and put them on the side, but for this album it really happened during the…we built our studio at the beginning of the year, then right after that we had to record the album, so, really, we only worked there.
It was a fast process, we changed it a little bit in the way that it was more like individual writing, there’s less songs where everybody’s writing, it’s less of a collegial work, there are maybe three or four songs like that, and the rest was like, “Okay, one guy got that idea and brings his song to the studio”.

The music is heavier compared to the previous albums, is this a natural progression or did you harden your sound on purpose to reflect the themes of the lyrics?

I think it’s a natural progression, you know, with the live performances we tend to be on the heavy side and also the influences, the record we listen to, I think it’s a normal evolution for the band.
You need to experiment, so it was a way to push the boundaries we already have.

You have heavier, but you also have softer aspects, it’s more like we try to push the boundaries on both sides, not to stay in the music we already created.

In recent years we’ve seen the rise of what we could call a “New Wave of Old Fashioned Rock” with many bands like yourselves, Blues Pills, Graveyard and many others going back to a Rock that could have easily been released in the 70s.

In your opinion, what’s the reason behind this particular trend?

Because there are people who want to hear this music, I guess.
Why it happened…there was probably a lack of something else, so there was room for this, a new generation, new listeners.

It has been marketed that way, probably.

It was 10 years ago now, 2005, 2006, that people started calling it “retro”, before people would just call it Rock.
It was like, “It’s new, look, Retro Rock” [laughs].

But I guess there was a lack of something, there was a gap to fill.

What are the bands playing this kind of music that you like the most?

We toured with Horisont in 2015, great guys, they’re just an amazing band.
Those guys, the songs, the playing, the friendship, the relationship they have with music…they’re amazing.

Death Valley, who we are playing with on this tour, they also have this thing, you watch them and it’s just “Wow!”.
They take maybe from a different part of the Rock scene, and it’s really interesting.

We’ve talked about your evolution as a band, how this album pushed your boundaries; where do you see yourselves going in the future, do you think the next album will be even heavier?

It’s always tricky to get heavier but, yeah, trying to find a way to get heavier, that’s also a goal.
In different manners, it’s not because you lower your guitar [tuning] or because you push something more that you are heavier.

Yeah, find ways to write heavier songs and also, because we have the opposite side of the spectrum, softer songs, more balance, like we did with this album, push even further the boundaries.
That’s our goal.

So we should expect heavier songs, on one hand, and softer songs, on the other.

Yeah, trying to keep the balance between the two sides, and trying not to do the same record all over again, it’s disrespectful for the fans and for ourselves as musicians, I don’t know if I can call ourselves artists, but as musicians.

Dragon, Lupus and Tiger; you all have nicknames, how so?

It started before I joined the band, I think the old bassist was called Mammut, so it started a little bit from there.
The two other members are both called Christoph, so if you’d scream, “Christoph!” they’d both come [laugh].
It was a mix between this and the thing that the old bassist was being called Mammut.

You use those nicknames also among yourselves?

Not mine, really, but theirs definitely!
I would call them Tiger and Lupus, yeah.
For me no, I usually say, “Just call me Simon”.

As you joined the band after the nicknames thing had already been established, did you have a conversation like,” You’re in the band…how do you want to be called now?”

Yeah, yeah! [laughs]
I didn’t even want a nickname, we talked about it for a while and we ended up choosing Dragon because I’m the guy who smokes the most in the band [laughs] so it was, “Yeah, Dragon, I like it”.

I’ll leave you this final spot if you want to greet our readers.

Hey guys, I hope you enjoy the interview and our last album.
I hope to see you soon at our concert.

Thank you, Simon.

Thank you!

Davide Sciaky