Dhe autumn wind lets the leaves float through Alte Schönhauser Straße like empty plastic bags. The Berlin sun brightens our spirits for perhaps the last time this year.
My friend Inga Humpe, pop legend, and I, we’re sitting at a table outside with big sunglasses, the red and white checkered tablecloth, it’s blowing.
I tell Inga that Phoenix are playing in Berlin this weekend. Inga’s forever young face shines behind large black Prada sunglasses. “I love Phoenix,” she says to me like no one has ever said “I love Phoenix” to me before.
The waitress serves the antipasti plate and says that unfortunately the bread is gone.
“If they have no bread, they should eat cake,” Marie Antoinette never said, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau did. “Do you have brioche?” I ask the waitress, she shakes her head.
Since the band was founded in 1996, the French Phoenix, singer Thomas Mars, Hellmut Karasek’s nephew and Sofia Coppola’s partner, and his comrades-in-arms, the guitarists and brothers Christian Mazzalai and Laurent Brancowitz, together with the bassist Deck D’Arcy, let us eat cake . Each album, as well as their current “Alpha Zulu”, is a stream of sweet dough waiting to be heated and then cooled again.
Their music between Simon & Garfunkel guitars and Daft Punk synthesizers. Muted electric undistorted muted Nile Rodgers chic guitars stopped, often staccato.
If their music was an outfit: yellow peaked cap, mustache, moccasins, pinstripe suit pants, shirt with sleeves rolled up. Phoenix are like a favorite terrycloth duvet with monchichis printed on them that you’ll want to pull over your head to disappear into.
Phoenix, left to right: Deck d’Arcy, Laurent Brancowitz, Christian Mazzalai and Thomas Mars
Credit: AFP/ANGELA WEISS
The wind on Schönhauser Strasse is getting stronger. I tell Inga that I also love Phoenix, her music, but above all her as a guy, so manly unmanly. Free from any masculine demeanor and demeanor. As playful as Pavement, only with ready-made pieces and more elegantly grown-up.
Inga is euphoric and replies that they are really great men.
Men like the Pet Shop Boys, men like Sting’s song Fragile I guess.
Lockdown im Louvre
On their new album, Phoenix are like a Phoenix cover band that’s even better than the original. So better than themselves. Actually, they do what they always do. Keyboards, guitars, beautiful melodies and everything light. The singing of Thomas Mars, sung casually, then spoken, promised, mumbled, his forever young voice, tender but never fragile. Some syllables stretched out like chewing gum, others abstractly chopped off.
The cake they bake, a tiramisu of Jean Michel Jarre and Tony Banks-esque keyboard layers backed by electronic drums. Phoenix leaves things as they are without wanting to intervene. Without dominating, they dominate in their refusal to dominate. An unspoken, deep touching of the soul without defining things concretely.
To see on the cover: Sandro Botticelli’s slightly modified picture “Madonna col bambino e otto angeli” from the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, where you can see Mary with Child and a choir of angels. Maria and Child was replaced on the cover with a bright sky-colored e-book. Parts of the new work were recorded in an empty wing of the Louvre during lockdown.
My highlight of the record the song “Winter Solstice”, winter solstice. “La Boom” 2022, only phoenixized. A song bed of keyboard upholstery and soft vocals, Thomas Mars sings “It’s hard to remain”, between happiness and strokes of fate. A song like a Greenlandic sled dog running through the snow to sleep in front of the fireplace in the evening.
The sun is gone now, the wind has died down. I took off my sunglasses and look at Inga. “You’re just the best,” I tell her. Inga smiles and orders a tiramisu with two forks from the waitress.
„Alpha Zulu“ was released on November 4, 2022. Phoenix are currently on a European tour.