“On the first album, there was a big difference between the live versions and the studio versions of the songs,” Ambroise Willaume says. “When we recorded the first album we didn’t know anything about playing live – we hadn’t done any concerts – so we discovered all of that on the first tour. At the end of two years after the first tour, the songs had changed so much that people could have come to our concerts and not even recognised the songs. We didn’t want such a gap for the second album so we thought a lot about playing the songs live when we recorded them. It’s a little closer now but still, after spending weeks and weeks playing the songs, you want to change them up so we keep evolving all the time. We’re rehearsing a lot right now with a drum machine and a lot more keyboards, we didn’t expect to be doing that, so that’s a different sound. We’ve been touring for pretty much the last three years but we wanted to change a lot of our live show so we’ve spent a few weeks in the studio rehearsing again.”
The first tour saw Arcache tackling bass lines on his cello and although that seems like a unique approach, Willaume concedes that it was simply too much for Arcache to take on and that the addition of a live drummer and bass player has brought their latest album to life in a much more accurate way. As well as the sound of Revolver changing shape over the past few years, the three-piece needed to find their feet as performers too. “In the beginning, we didn’t have to force ourselves to be very dramatic or anything like that, we had a very weird formula,” he says. “We were playing in very unusual places as just the three of us before we started to play in big clubs and venues. We had just the cello and the guitars so we didn’t even need electricity – playing in friends’ apartments and in gardens – that was the performance, we didn’t have to do much.
“Then we discovered real concerts and bigger crowds and a louder sound, which was very new for us. We were very excited and when I see videos of the first tour, sometimes I’m very ashamed because I jump everywhere and I feel like I’m a child. There is a big gap between the quiet, acoustic, and almost religious atmosphere of our first concerts and now.”
The quality of Revolver’s rich, harmony-driven music was always going to find a home and an appreciative audience but the journey to that point was a long one. With no real networks in Paris, the band found breaking into the live music scene of their city of love a huge hurdle. They’re not quite folk, not quite pop and a far cry from classical yet they are all three of those genres at the same time – theirs is truly a unique sound. Combing the collective influences of Revolver’s members – where classical precision meets pop appeal – the band have found their every growing audience to be as diverse as their music. With years of solid touring behind them, it seems there is now no question about their place within the modern Parisian music scene. “You can find people from any age at our shows now,” he says. “There are people around 50 or 60 who love our music because it reminds them of the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s – Simon & Garfunkel – there are also now a lot of younger people who’ve been listening to us on the radio. Two of us come from a classical background so we also find there are people who mainly listen to classical music and not pop music who really enjoy what we do. It is hard for me to describe our audience but the best way is simply the more you get close to the stage, the younger the audience gets.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
