Ed Banger hot shots Justice played their first live show in Ireland on December 1st, and what a spectacular performance it was. Before the gig, Xavier de Rosnay (that’s the one sans beard) sat down for a chat with Miss Marcos from Neon Love and revealed his worries about how the show would go. Enjoy!

Ed Banger hot shots Justice played their first live show in Ireland on December 1st, and what a spectacular performance it was. Before the gig, Xavier de Rosnay (that’s the one sans beard) sat down for a chat with Miss Marcos from Neon Love and revealed his worries about how the show would go. Enjoy!

MM: Tell us how you started out DJing.

X de R: DJing was the last thing we learned how to do. We started to produce music and if you make electronic music and if people like it promoters think, ‘OK the record sounds cool, he’s got to be a good DJ’, which is wrong. So we were asked to DJ at parties and we were terrible DJs because we never did it before, so for the first six months we played at really catastrophic parties so we said we would stop because it sounded really bad.

So we had a break from DJing, where we were like, we’re gonna let the real DJs do it because we are really bad. Then we released We Are Your Friends on Gigolo and it was part of the contract that we had to play promo parties for the record in Germany for Gigolo, so we started to DJ again.

And so we played the first party alongside DJ hell for Gigolo records, and we are big fans of DJ Hell, so it was a lot of pressure on us, he was in the booth with us and we started to DJ and we were like ‘shit, he’s looking at us this is going to be a nightmare’. So we started to DJ and tried the best we could to get the party started, the party was crazy and Hell was dancing with us in the booth and playing air guitar, which is quite unusual for him, it was back in 2003 I think and we finished the set with that track by Rage Against The Machine, Killing in the Name.

It was just crazy and he was asking us ‘Guys what’s that shit? It’s crazy, I love it!’ He didn’t even know Rage Against The Machine, which was crazy. And that was the party where we started to like DJing again and we learned to like it and we learned how to do it because the party was crazy and it was an absolute pleasure to spin records you like and see people go crazy for it.

MM: Is it true that when you started out you didn’t feel accepted or understood in Paris and you preferred playing abroad?

X de R: Definitely and it’s because of two reasons, with Paris four years ago it used to be really snobby. The crowd was mainly made up of 35-year-old people who had a ‘Been there done that’ attitude. And when we got signed to Ed Banger records - which is the label of Pedro Winter - it was the start of the label but in Paris it was very hyped, it was a trend setting label and because we were Pedro Winter’s new band we were only a fashion band.

So people who were coming to our parties, it was always the same people at every party and they were only coming so they could say, ‘ah it was really bad’, so at one point we stopped playing Paris and we were playing where people didn’t know about hype or Pedro or anything. But one year ago in Paris the clubbers and the crowds changed and it became younger, all like 16, 17 year olds in the clubs and they were people just coming to clubs to party, just to have a good time. And it began again to be fun to play in Paris, but for two years it was a nightmare there.

MM: It’s been two years since your first Irish gig in Galway, can you remember that night?

X de R: It was ok, as far as I remember it was an outdoor party yeah, it was fun. It was really fun.

MM: How do you see Justice – as a dance duo or a rock band?

X de R: I think we are what we try to do is an international disco, it’s true that visually especially when we perform live shows, what we have onstage looks like a rock band set-up but apart from the visual set-up we don’t consider Justice as a rock band. We don’t consider ourselves to be a dance band either because the music we make is not always dancey or dancefloor music. If I had to choose one word to describe Justice it’s just pop. We have less than one per cent of rock music in our music and we don’t try to blend rock and dance.

MM: With your heavier stuff like Waters of Nazareth there’s elements of heavy metal in your sound because it’s just so heavy, it’s very different to other dance music.

X de R: I know but when we did Waters of Nazareth we tried to make a disco song, because if you forget about the percussion it has really simple bass patterns. Because of the percussion and the image that track can sound like a heavy metal song. I think the difference between what you think you are making and how people are taking it is what makes music interesting. We try to make a disco song and if people see it as a heavy metal track we are ok with it but originally it wasn’t our concern to make something that sounded like rock music.

MM: The Phoenix Park show is your biggest headline show in Ireland so far, how do you feel about that?

X de R: I don’t know because it will be the first time we’re gonna perform live in Ireland and the live shows are a bit different to our DJ shows. It’ll be the two of us with machines and stuff, but the thing is what we do in live shows is a bit less dancey than what we DJ, we just play our own tracks so I guess it’s a bit harder to get people into it. And a big part of the live show is just to get people into it and make them dance.

MM: Well most people have the album now so they should know the songs.

X de R: Ah I hope God will listen to you and that will be true. But it’s always really hard for us to predict with the live show if it’s gonna be good or what but we hope it’s gonna be fun.

MM: You’re playing with The Teenagers in Dublin, do you know them?

X de R: Yeah we know them, they’re from Paris, they recently moved to London but they are good friends of ours. It’s a bit like what I said before, what we like with them is that they have really simple ideas music wise and lyrics wise and again it works and people like it. Either you like the music or not but I think they’re smart guys.

MM: Are you going to bring the crucifix to Dublin?

X de R: Yeah, for sure. The crucifix is the third member of Justice, if we forget him or if he misses his plane it’s really hard for us.

MM: What does the crucifix mean to you and why did you start using it onstage?

X de R: It means some obvious and some less obvious stuff. But it’s not an idea that comes up as brainstorming or what, it’s just part of our story, it didn’t come up one day and say ‘Hi I’m the crucifix can I be a part of your band’. It’s a bit like the mouth and the tongue with the Rolling Stones, it’s just part of our band and I don’t remember how or when it came up, it was just there.

MM: You recently toured in Australian and New Zealand, how was that and what were the crowds like?

X de R: It was really cool, but we had a lot of technical issues with every gig we played, for us it was very stressful, but the people were really good and we had a lot of fun apart from that.

MM: Your two biggest chart hits are very different to your other work like Phantom or Waters of Nazareth. Does it bother you that most of your mainstream fans would only know you for one side of your style, or do you think your lighter work suits the charts and the heavier stuff suits the club audience?

X de R: I see what you mean, for sure, most of the people just know these two tracks. But I think the good thing is that they will come to the show expecting more tracks like this and these two tracks are a big like a ticket to enter into another music world. So they’re gonna come to listen to D.A.N.C.E, and unfortunately with D.A.N.C.E, we don’t play it as the version people know because it is impossible to play live like that so we play a simpler version. But we hope people get into some different music and maybe some music they are not used to listening to.

And I think it’s the same thing when people are buying the album because they like D.A.N.C.E or We Are Your Friends, and then they hear Waters of Nazareth or Phantom or Stress, I think some will hate this and say, ‘Shit I want my money back’, but if one out of 10 people says ‘Hey I wasn’t expecting this but it’s cool’ and they listen to more music like this then I think it’s cool and it’s a good thing.

MM: We Are Your Friends was first released in 2003 as Never Be Alone and it took until last year for it to become a hit, why do you think it took so long to get big?

X de R: I think it’s just because people in record companies are just so slow to react, and since we made it back in 2003, it featured a sample of a band signed to Virgin Records, and when we wrote it we said to Virgin, ‘maybe you can release that song as a single’, and they said ‘I dunno, I dunno’ and then they waited three years but I think then it was already too late. We gave them that song and said to them do whatever you want with the song, for us it was an old song, it was part of the past and we were done with it. But I think they were just too slow to react. I think it was just record company stuff.

MM: Were you surprised at how big it became? Especially in Ireland it’s absolutely huge.

X de R: Yes because it was like the seventh song we ever did in our lives, it was when we first started to make music and make music with machines, and it was made with nothing. I think it’s a good lesson for us because when you think about electronic music, most people think first about production skills and stuff like that, it has to sound really good, good bass and good compression. This record was made without compression, the production was really weak but the idea was so simple it works.

So now when we try to start producing we try to find a simple idea first because nobody cares about production, nobody cares about production skills apart from producers, what talks to people is really simple emotion or really simple messages. And I think this one has a really simple emotion, like it makes you feel good and happy, and really simple message in the lyrics. I think that’s what matters in music.

MM: There are some comparisons between Justice and Daft Punk – you’re both managed by Pedro Winter, both French, you appeal to a rock audience and a dance audience and you can produce very mainstream hits. Do you think that Justice are natural successors to Daft Punk’s throne?

X de R: No, no. The thing is that we don’t want to be the successors to Daft Punk, they’re not old guys and they’re still making good music and good concerts. We don’t want to be their sons or their successors. What we try to do with Justice is to be a new band, we are the new Justice and I think what you said about comparisons sounds fair but the thing is for them it would be annoying to be compared to new bands because that makes them feel old, and I think they don’t want to be the fathers of new bands. They just want to make their thing, and the same for us, we absolutely don’t want to be the new Daft Punk. I think they’re good at their thing and we are good at ours and we both try to live our lives.

MM: What artists do you admire or aspire to?

X de R: We love a lot of people, like if I have to make a top three of producers, I would say number one Rick Rubin, number two Chic and number three Paul McCartney.

MM: I love your remix of Klaxons, As Above So Below-

X de R: Aw you are the only one with us, that’s cool.

MM: I love it, it’s fantastic. When I play it in clubs in Dublin a lot of people seem to like it too.

X de R: Aw cool, well thank you for being the first one to play it.

MM: Do you have any other remix work coming up?

X de R: We don’t make remixes anymore, just for friends. We promised to two bands to make remixes for them, two bands that are friends of ours, so we’re gonna make them but I don’t know when, but apart from that we don’t do remixes anymore.

MM: This is something I always debate with other DJs, so I just wanted to get your opinion, which do you think is better for live DJing – CD or vinyl?

X de R: I don’t know which is better but we prefer to play with CDs as there’s more possibilities with them, you can pitch them up and do ridiculous speeds and do different mixing. For people with limited skills like us it’s better. We used to always use records but one weekend we lost our records three times and we were like ‘shit, we’re gonna use CDs from now on’. And then we found that we preferred to play with CDs anyway.