NORMA LOY

In reality, the first name chosen for the band was Myrna Loy, after a silent-film actress. Following a meeting with Alan Vega (of the band Suicide), he advised us to use Norma Loy instead, in reference to Norma Jean Baker — Marilyn Monroe's real name. Afterwards, people often asked us the meaning of the name. That is when we realised it was an anagram of "nom royal", and we let that interpretation live on. It has to be said that the French do love a play on words!

We were indeed very interested in punk — we even threw ourselves into it. But beyond the guitars, we were strongly drawn to synthesizers, particularly through the early work of Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide and Métal Urbain. What we liked was the mixture of punk energy and the synthetic side: cold and violent at the same time. At the very beginning we were a real punk band, under the name Métal Radiant, with guitar, vocals and a drum machine. Then we brought in the synthesizers, and the guitar gradually disappeared behind the electronic layers. The emerging industrial music influenced us a great deal as well.

Chelsea discovered Butō in Paris in 1986, at a performance by Carlotta Ikeda that left a deep mark on him. He then took classes with Sumako Koseki (who appears on the cover of "Sacrifice" with his partner at the time, Lydie). It was in that period that he also met Ab-elle. Together they founded a company called Fovea. Fovea was the troupe that performed on stage with us. We were, incidentally, the first to mix rock concerts with this Japanese dance, which fitted perfectly with the dark, haunted spirit of the band. Hélène, for her part, came in a little later, for a few concerts. At present we no longer use Butō on stage.

First of all, it should be said that Dijon is not our home town. Our home town is Troyes, a little further north in France, in the Aube. You cannot really say the local geography of Dijon influenced anything at all. It simply happens that the musicians (apart from Chelsea) who took part in the early days of the Norma Loy adventure all lived in that city. There is no particular influence tied to the city itself. There were a few local bands we worked with or spent time with, but without there ever being a genuine "Dijon wave". As for Chelsea, he was living in Paris at the time, and he still lives there.

I think you probably mean another track, one from the band's second maxi (Psychic Altercation). You are most likely referring to "1964 Shadows". As for "Heaven", that came out on the band's first album (T-Vision) but much later, in 1987, and it is a cover of a David Lynch track from Eraserhead. As for the ultimate source of that deep, physical melancholy, I think it actually applies to just about every track the band has done — it is our trademark: "wild and meditative".

In 2005, the label Infrastition offered us a whole series of reissues of our back catalogue, particularly the album Sacrifice, to which we added a live album. Following those reissues, we were offered a concert at the Dark Omen festival. We agreed — we felt ready to go back on stage, with the desire to pick things up where we had left them. So we put together a new line-up.

For us, music and image have always been intimately linked. So it was completely natural to invest time and energy in clips and concert recordings. The DVD included in "Message from the Dead" presents a recording of a concert (with visual inserts made in parallel) recorded at the Athénéum in Dijon — I think it was in 1987. Laurent shot practically all of the band's live recordings as well as our videos, with the exception of the very last one, "Je me rappelle", a cover of a track by Suicide (Alan Vega's band) mixed with references to the writer Georges Perec and to our own history.

First of all, it should be said that we take relatively little interest in new cold wave productions, French or otherwise, with rare exceptions. As for this obsession with reproducing that sound, I sincerely think the machines are not enough to resurrect the excitement and the aura of that period. You can pick up exactly the same instruments without managing to recover the spirit. That is the essential point: the spirit of those years was completely soaked into the compositions of the time. Most people who use the same equipment today, wanting to recreate the eighties without having lived through them, end up doing something else, or come across as parody. The original magic is not there.

In truth, we have never really asked ourselves the question. It is the strength of friendship, and an almost telepathic understanding. Generally we arrive at practically the same conclusions; we think of the same thing at almost the same moment. It is very natural for us — there is no particular effort involved.

The answer is partly in the question. It is above all a state of mind tied to French culture and its references. It is no doubt a version of romanticism combined with more philosophical currents, with psychology or with art history. It is a very intellectual and very French approach.

In reality it all depends on the line-up and the period. For example, on the album Baphomet, which we recorded essentially as a duo (Chelsea and I), there was no bass player. So most of the bass lines were created synthetically. For other tracks, when a bass player is present, anything is possible: it really depends on what best suits the atmosphere of the piece. There have been different periods in the band's history. In the beginning we were a line-up with a lot of musicians. From "Un/Real" onwards we picked things up in a rather different form, based above all on home-studio work. Music software frees us from the constraint of having to manage musicians day to day for the creative work. For the stage, it is obviously different. The tracks also depend on the equipment originally used, but we like to give them several forms, some of them very synthetic. The primary characteristic of our sound is not based on the bass, but rather on the keyboards.

We do not yet know exactly how we will handle the set — it will depend on the audience and on the spirit of the moment. All we can say is that the line-up for this concert will be very different from the previous ones. Recently we have been touring more as a trio or a duo. This time it will be an expanded line-up with guitar, bass and drums. So we will be able to play older, more rock-oriented tracks again. There will be no Butō dance. Butō is today a spirit that drives us rather than a physical representation on stage. It requires logistics that are too heavy for travelling — we can no longer afford to travel twelve people. On the other hand, as we have since the beginning, there will be a large visual component based on projections at the back of the stage. These days they are no longer slides: we use VJ software, which is much more practical and brings animation to the images.

That was not the case for all French bands, far from it. For the most part, many sang in English in order to export themselves and give the band an international dimension. As far as Chelsea is concerned, writing lyrics in French is a far more complex exercise, because it immediately calls up the tradition of chanson française or variété; English allows a distance and is much more malleable. Did it cost us dearly in terms of radio programming? No doubt. Paradoxically, we had a nice succès d'estime with our French cover of "L'Homme à la moto" (an Édith Piaf track, originally written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller). On our most recent productions we have in fact started reintroducing French lyrics. We saw that it worked very well. We simply had to get past a kind of personal block, but French does work rather well on certain tracks in the end, even if it does not suit our whole repertoire.

It should be pointed out, though, that with Métal Radiant, our punk band before Norma Loy, we sang in French. Our shift to English was no doubt down to the fact that we listened to an enormous amount of Anglo-Saxon music; there was a strong identification with that culture. On top of that, there was always a kind of reticence about using French in this musical style.

Beyond the purely visual elements, it is not only an art of slowness and the grotesque, nor merely an aesthetic dance; it is deeply based on the circulation of energy between the ground and the sky. There is an extremely shamanic and animist side to Butō, as well as an art of provocation that we feel intensely. It corresponds entirely to the thinking we want to develop about the position of the spirit within the material world.

Indeed, we had — and still have — the impression of describing a future that has now become our reality. In the same way, authors like William S. Burroughs anticipated this whole dynamic of control and the concept of a "viral world". The same goes for Philip K. Dick, of course, who predicted almost all of today's excesses. Today, total surveillance and virtual communication shape and organise our world at the expense of real relationships. We knew it was coming, but it may have arrived even faster and more radically than we imagined.

The line-up has indeed changed over time. However, the two cornerstones remain Chelsea and myself: we have written all the tracks since the beginning and we maintain that singular identity — even if the musicians who take part unquestionably bring their own mark and personal style. There is always that central idea of preserving a common artistic direction, which we guarantee together.

We were very surprised by the scale and the quality of the work done on this book, written by Sylvain Nicolino; it is a monumental project. We supplied a huge amount of visual material, much of it previously unpublished. As we place crucial importance on the image, we have very rich archives, and I think that greatly influenced the final form of the book, which contains an enormous number of illustrations. The author conducted multiple interviews over several years of work. In fact the book is not based on exclusive interviews with Chelsea — he also questioned Usher extensively and even-handedly, as well as other people who passed through the band: musicians, producers, performers, event organisers. We did not intervene at all on the text content. There are passages we do not necessarily agree with, but that is the author's point of view. It remains a considerable piece of work nonetheless. It is a curious feeling to see such a book devoted to your own history. That said, it has not changed the way we understand our path: we have always been deeply convinced of the rightness of the direction we were taking.

There is an error in the way that anecdote is framed. On the album Sacrifice there is indeed our cover of Édith Piaf's "L'Homme à la moto". But it was never recorded in the metro! What did happen, at that time, is that the Paris metro network had installed monitors on the platforms broadcasting clips and information. And the clip that ran regularly there was not "L'Homme à la moto" but the one for "Power of Spirit". Every time I took the metro I saw myself on the screens, which was quite a peculiar experience. There was never a video for "L'Homme à la moto", even though the track got a lot of radio play. As for cinema, it is central to our references. Apart from silent film, cinema always uses sound, but for us it is the visual aesthetic that comes first. I think spontaneously of Luis Buñuel, of David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and of course of David Lynch. Their worlds are extremely close to our own artistic preoccupations.

That is what we have always tried to do. Through our productions and on our label CPM, we released records, but also photo box sets, books and videos. On stage we integrated dance, work on lighting, projections. This approach comes directly out of the Warholian ideal and the early performances of the Velvet Underground. We are also very influenced by psychedelic music and light shows. This concept of total art is very much tied to the end of the sixties, a time when people sought to break down the barriers between disciplines. You find it in experimental theatre too. Today, in contemporary dance, projections and text readings are used enormously; creation is no longer limited to music alone. That has been our dynamic from the start: even before playing music, we were writing books and producing graphic magazines. For us, all of it proceeds from the same approach. An idea can just as easily take the form of an image, a piece of music or a text. The medium does not matter.

We have always said there was no real connection between the bands to federate a global scene where everyone helped each other out — and we regret it. Certain cities, like Rennes, managed to build a strong local network where the cold wave players actively collaborated. For us it did not happen that way. We did try to federate something at one point with bands like Complot Bronswick or Résistance, notably at a joint concert, but it quickly came down to a few one-off actions. They were mostly friendly encounters: members of Complot came and played on our records, and Chelsea sang on one of their albums, but it went no further. Even recently we have tried to recreate a shared dynamic, but it remains complicated. In the end, everyone follows their own path.

These themes turned out to be totally prophetic. Today, more than ever, we subscribe to them completely. They are fully at work in our daily lives and remain at the heart of our artistic approach.

What unites us unshakeably is our friendship and our deep complicity. Many musicians have passed through this band over the years; I think they all took something positive from it — in any case nobody complained. For our part, we continue to maintain and proudly carry our vision.

There are a lot of errors in circulation. Setting aside the countless appearances on compilations and side projects, the official Norma Loy discography runs as follows:

1983 — Our very first production. A 12" maxi (4 tracks) released on New Wave Records, with no official title, but which everyone calls One.

1984 — The second maxi, Psychic Altercation, produced on our own label, CPM.

1986 — Release of our very first album, Rewind/T.Vision, on the Divine label.

1988 — A change of record company. We join Eurobond, who release the album Sacrifice (and take the opportunity to reissue our earlier records).

Immediately after, still on Eurobond: the album "Rebirth", from which we still play a great many tracks live today.

1991 — Another label change, for the album "Attitudes". It marks a real break with the traditional cold wave sound of our beginnings, because we were starting to tire of repeating the formula found on Sacrifice. Attitudes is a much more rock record, even if it also contains electronic tracks.

After that we paused. We devoted ourselves to other projects — Usher's solo productions and work with other line-ups amount to a prolific discography in themselves.

2009 — Norma Loy reappears with the album "Unreal" on the Infrastition label.

2016 — Release of the album "Baphomet" on Unknown Pleasures Records.

2023 — Our most recent album to date, "Ouroboros", released on the Manic Depression label.

To that should be added a compilation of unreleased material issued as a box set on VOD (Vinyl-on-Demand) including a DVD, as well as several official videos and DVDs mixing concert footage and clips.

We had two main parallel line-ups. First a project called Dyna, decidedly more techno / electro, but which came to nothing. Then a ghost line-up more or less close to Norma Loy called PEEP HOLE. Although the entity did not last under that name, we ended up taking almost all of the tracks composed for PEEP HOLE and folding them into the following Norma Loy albums.

It is an absolute rule: we really do not like our collaborators' or musicians' real family names being spread around. If we have always concealed or protected them behind pseudonyms, it is not so we can display them everywhere today. The world of Norma Loy rests on that share of shadow and mystery.

Credit where credit is due: the major, historic contribution of Butō on stage in the eighties and nineties is owed to the group Fovea, driven by Lydie and Abel. They are the ones who played a very important part in building that scenic and conceptual space. Hélène, who is sometimes mentioned, arrived much later in the band's history and for a smaller number of concerts.

Absolutely not. Apart from Complot Bronswick, with whom we had real bridges, we never played with Baroque Bordello or with Tanit. Those bands were very far removed from our artistic and aesthetic preoccupations. If we were to feel close to other line-ups from that period, it would be bands like Clair Obscur or Die Form. But certainly not Baroque Bordello.