Making Music free music mag - June 99 issue - typed by Tompy

Andy Basire meets the under-rated Belgian band with the small d, who are giving the UK one last chance to come to its senses and make them as famous as they deserve...

For a band with more positive column inches in the music press, more acclaim from fellow musicians (REM and Radiohead to name just two), and more devoted affection from their hardcore supporters than any band could ever reasonably expect, dEUS seem curiously downhearted.

"Sure, but we've always had that. It's really frustrating," frowns guitarist and vocalist Craig. "I did an interview recently and I came across as a grumpy old bastard because the guy pointed out we'd received good reviews for the album and I said, 'Yeah, it's good but it's kind of depressing as well...'.

"What I actually meant was, yeah, it's great to get good reviews, but all the good reviews in the world won't pay the bils. The music press can be really infuriating in that respect 'cos there's these bands that make good copy, bands like Kula Shaker, who are constanly getting slagged off, and rightly so, and then they promptly get loads of front covers..." his strong, melifluous Scottish brogue tails off and he sits looking slightly perplexed.

Initiallly at least, Craig Ward does indeed appear to be a bit of a miserable git, but is in fact far from it. He's smart, with a well-honed, lugubrious sense of humour (like there's the story about his dad who, "played bagpipes in the scouts, and he still had a chanter which he'd occasionally dig out, and worry us all by going horribly purple when he played it - we'd be like, 'Dad, really, it's not worth dying for'.)

Thing is, Craig just speaks his mind, regardless of the consequences...

"I recently bought a remastered version of 'Moving Pictures' [by Rush, originally released in 1981], and it's fucking brilliant," he says, eyes ablaze.

I must look a little doubtful, because he laughs and insists.

"No really, it's awesome stuff [big grin]. We toured with Placebo and I kept calling Brian Molko 'Geddy'. [When you think about it, there's a striking resemblance]. He bloody hated it," Craig chuckles.

ICE CREAM

dEUS (they're very attached to that spelling, by the way - that's another thing that frustrates them, when it's not used) were first formed in the early 1980s when ex-bronze medal squash player Tom Barman (vocals and guitar) and Stef Kamil Carlens (bass) began playing a set largely comprised of Velvet Underground and Violent Femmes covers at venues like Muziekdoos (the Music Box) in Antwerp, Belgium. They then enlisted Rudy Trouv (guitar) and Klaas Janzoons (violin and vocals), and their erstwhile van driver Jules De Borgher on drums.

"Tom asked if I would drive them to Spain - he didn't know I could play drums," Jules smiles. "Then the other drummer, who was good but the relationship wasn't so good, left, so I just stepped in."

They began writing and performing their own material, best described as melodic pop songs wrapped in spiky experimental noise. Everything in the garden was not rosy, though, and both Stef and Rudy weren't happy.

"Yeah the relationship with Rudy, Stef and I was very, umm, volatile," Tom agrees, "but there were no losers through it, I think everyone came out of it fine. Although if you'd asked me about it a few years ago I would have not been so positive."

With Danny Mommens drafted in to replace Stef on bass, the hunt for a replacement guitarist began (and ended) with a phone call to Craig, whom Tom had first met through Stef some years earlier.

"I very seriously thought about not doing it," Craig admits, "I wasn't very atrracted to the idea, because I'd already spent a year in a band in Antwerp [Super Almedrado, named after a type of Spanish ice cream], with everything going horribly wrong, so I really didn't know if I wanted to put myself through that again.

"It wasn't until I was actually on the way to an interview for teacher training college that I decided. I clearly remember thinking to myself, 'This chance to join dEUS is here now, if I don't take it someone else will, and teacher training college will still be there next year, or in ten years' time.' So I turned around and walked back home."

INSTANT

The latest fruits of the new new dEUS grouping is the excellent 'The Ideal Crash' album, just out on Island. So is this current line-up more stable?

Tom: "No, not really, it's still..." he pauses shaking his head, before going on: "Concentrating on being in a band is still proving hard for some people." He politely declines to be more specific.

"All the musical differences are still there, that hasn't changed, but even though it's very hard to live in a band like this I'm starting to believe that's what makes it sound so interesting. If we had to fight the way we do and then only come up with some average work. I wouldn't be here, I don't think."

It's not exactly clear where the problems lie... Both Danny and Klaas prefer not to get involved in the interview (conducted between photo shoots and soundchecks before their recent gig at Bristol's Fleece & Firkin on their modest-scaled but packed-solid UK tour). And Jules, while happy to chat for a while, would obviously prefer to get back to his arcade racing game. But it's clear that at least some of the creative tensions that ignite their remarkable sound initially spark up between Craig and Tom.

Craig: "Tommy does most of it but we all add stuff - he hardly ever comes in with a completed tune. It's always better to have two different energies coming into a song, so Tom will bring in a verse and a chorus and I might add a bridge and a coda, but really we just throw things at each other. We just all write bits, which if they don't work in one context we often take out and put in another song. I think the general level of intelligence in the band is pretty high and we get easily bored unless we work that way."

"On 'Instant Street', 'Sister Dew' and 'Magdalena', big chunks of melodies, verses and bridges are mine," Tom agrees, "with choruses by Craig or Danny. Some of the songs I had almost nothing to do with - 'Let's See Who Goes Down First' was musically almost all Craig and Klaas. Quite often things change quite dramatically from what I first had in mind, but then that's what makes it interesting; it's a fight, but it's worth it, especially with some of the stuff Craig has done.

"On the earlier albums we did much more axtreme stuff, like putting together ballads and sample-driven free jazz. This time we didn't want to throw away that variation, or the freshness of the arrangements, but we did want to make an album that was more homegeneous. Also, in dEUS there's always someone coming up with another melody, and we often end up with eight-minute songs - so this time we tried to squash that down a bit and make the album not too long."

Jules: "We also spent a lot a lot more time on the drums. On the other albums we just put down the drums and bass at the beginning, and that was it, but this time we spent maybe three weeks getting the drums ready. And we did different recordings for each track, like one soft, one medium and one hard, and then sampled ourselves as well. That is why it's so tight, I think."

UNHINGED

'The Ideal Crash' is painstakingly pieced together from damn-near incompatible ends of the musical spectrum - the band's superb grasp of melodrama and pace seamlessly welding together disparate points of reference. Almost every track twists, turns, and mutates into something so completely unlike it's orginal premise, it's almost impossible to grasp after only one listen.

More remarkable still, though, given the above is that it's an immediately accessible album, proving conclusively that inventive and adventurous music need not be 'difficult'. It's entirely possible that the Beatles or REM could have made this album, the only difference being that dEUS still only have a fraction of their copy sales.

"I've come to terms with the fact that it's not going to be an overnight thing with dEUS," Tom says, looking anything but patient. "But I want evolution. The next time we come back to Bristol I would hope we'd be playing somehwere bigger - we do have bigger ambitions than..." He pauses, searching for the right words.

"We have an expression called 'preaching for your own church' in Belgium, which is fine, and a lot of bands don't have a problem with that, but I do. I really want to see it go up there. And I wouldn't want that if I didn't think it was possible. There are so many people that don't get to hear you on the radio and don't know anything about you. OK it might not be millions, but a lot more than we have right now."

The trouble is they seem to have been pigeon-holed, not very accurately, as a 'difficult', left-field indie band, and as such not that easy to market.

Craig: "That's true, but I've always liked artists that are innately tuneful and also have something difficult about them. Like Neil Young, he writes killer melodies but his voice is definitely an acquired taste and his guitar playing is fucking unhinged. The Talking Heads, Television and The Velvet Underground - I've always been turned on by the darker stuff. And if I do have a problem with dEUS it's that it's not dark enough," he grins.

"But I think the climate is good for us at the moment to do what last year was called 'doing a Gomez' and this year 'a Mercury Rev', just through quality and perseverance, rather than any big hit singles. It seems critical acclaim can be turned into commercial reward.

"Already the sales on this one have been outrageous - it's sold 75,000 in Europe, which is fucking brilliant," he enthuses. "our A&R guy did say to us that if we just kept on persevering we may well see the effect of all the near misses from the last album this time around, and maybe he's right."

Are the band themselves happy with the new album?

Tom: "I'm in phase two at the moment: phase one is being infatuated by it; phase two means I'm not listening to it; and phase three means you come back and listen again. But yeah, I'm really proud of it. I think David Bottril - who's worked a lot with Peter Gabriel down at Real World, and on Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn's first record - gave the album a very good sound.

"We had a long time to work on this one - we started demoing in January and finished the songs in November. Of course the downside of that is halfway through you start really flipping and wondering if the songs are any good or not, and doubting everything. So we really needed a producer to say OK, that's it, it's finished now. I think as a reaction to this album the next one will be done really quickly."

CLEAN

Can they still each remember their frist tentative steps into making music?

"My brother got a guitar before I did, " Craig recalls," and when I asked for one my mum said, 'We're not having any more electric guitars in this house'. So I got this wee shite classical nylon thing which cost me £34. Then I got this completely anonymous Japanese electric which cost 100 quid - in fact I remember on the price label it said PH £99, but I've no idea what PH meant. In fact I'd completely forgotten that until now...

"I use a Vox ST25 nowadays with a weird little 75 watt Dean Markley combo, whcih they stopped making 'cos nobody really seemed interested, but it's a nice clean sound. I'm jealous of guitarists who can use that big responsive sensitive guitar sound where you hit it hard and it breaks up a bit, but I can't do it so I really need to have a very straight, clean sound and then use my feet for all the dynamics." (Craig's pedals include a Q-Tron and a Rat).

"I was 19 when I got my first kit, and it was a gold Swing Star kit." Jules laughs. "It was really crap, but it was cheap. I was actually playing bass in my first band and the drummer couldn't play at all so I took over. I always knew I would be a drummer.

"Now I have a Sonor Designer kit, I chose because you can decide what size drums you want. I really wanted a large, 24in bass drum. I also use a d-drum set-up for live, which I use to trigger some different sounds. We also use some sampled rhythm loops live."

Tom admits: "I was never a real music lover like Craig. When I was growing up, I would just put the radio on and whatever was on was fine. I was much more into sports. I only got a guitar when I was 17. The first song I learned was 'For The Turnstiles' [Neil Young], on a very cheap classical guitar, then I got another cheap folk-style guitar which I smashed one night during an argument with Stef - it was a kind of symbolic gesture 'cos he was really pissing me off." (Nowadays Tom's more likely to be seen with a Martin acoustic, a Strat or a Telecaster).

Not content to be in Belgium's premier rock outfit, Tom also participates in at least two other, more studio-based, projects.

"It's the complete opposite of what I do with dEUS, which is go into the studio with absolutely nothing. One is with this guy called Kevin Schmit. Though having said that, sometimes it will crossover - 'One Advice, Space' came out of the studio thing and kind of got dEUS-ised up a bit. I have a small home studio set-up based around an Akai MPC sampler with a little drum sequencer, a Mackie 16-track mixer and an eight-track digital Tascam, with a few keyboards and guitars."

Tom even gets to sing in Flemish sometimes...

"I have another project called Gorke with a guy called Luke De Voss, and it's fun, but it's not for dEUS. I'd like to do more French or Spanish with dEUS though."

BROKEN

The live show at London's Garage the following night (during which Tom will huskily insist after a particularly throat-shredding "Sister Dew", "My voice has broken" - unaware of the testicle-related faux pas) is sensational. They run together clonky Tom Waits-style weirdness like "Let's See Who Goes Down First" against perhaps their poppiest moment "Little Arithmetics".

It shouldn't work, but it does, paving the way for one of the new album's stand-out tracks, "Instant Street", with it's gentle string laden, lilting, alt-country style opening that ever so gradually evolves into a huge goosebump-inducing, wondrous racket, and brings everyone not already standing leaping to their feet, roaring with approval for this masterfully-paced adrenaline rush of noise.

It seems bizarre they're still shoe-horned into the UK's small club circuit. In places like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Holland dEUS play to 2000-3000 people, and even in France and Germany they regularly attract 700-plus - so you wonder why they bother with Britain at all....

Tom purses his lips and ponders for a moment. "Who knows, maybe if nothing happens this time around, we won't be any more."

And that would be a crying shame.