2023-10-22 17:00:11
Bandit Bandit, in Paris, November 15, 2022. BOBBY ALLIN
Rock still breathes and inspires. “The first time I held an electric guitar in my hands, it felt like I was holding a gun. I was 12 years old, my parents had just separated, I felt bad about myself, but thanks to this instrument everything was possible for me”remembers, twenty years later, Hugo Herleman, guitarist of powerful precision and songwriter within the duo Bandit Bandit. “The White Stripes shot me, I was barely 13”, confides, for her part, her desperado accomplice Maëva Nicolas, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter, diving back into the sensations that the pair formed by Jack and Meg White had given her. “While my adolescence was very complicated, this music allowed me to free myself, to exult, to test my limits. »
Ignited at the time of this youthful rebellion, their common vocation for rock creation merged in Montpellier, at the end of the 2010s, magnetized by desires as musical as they were carnal. Don’t they owe their first meeting to the Tinder application? “On my profile, I wrote that I could have been the hidden daughter of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain,” laughs Maëva Nicolas about this imaginary descent with the cult grunge couple. “Obviously, I could only “like””recognizes Hugo Herleman with a smile.
What could only have been a fleeting encounter crystallized into a musical partnership nourished by sulphurous romanticism – more The Kills than The White Stripes –, called Bandit Bandit, in reference to the sexy outlaw duets in films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Born killers or Sailor and Lula. A dark aura that radiates a first album, 11:11released on September 29, where the violence of the riffs is put at the service of French-speaking songs capable of melodic seduction and sensual swirls.
Underground Lyon
Between two dates of a tour which will take them, on November 28, to the Parisian stage of La Maroquinerie, we find the ex-Montpellier residents in Lyon, on a beautiful October morning. Four years now since the group, augmented on record and in concert by bassist Ari Moitier and drummer Anthony Avril, moved to the bohemian district of the slopes of Croix-Rousse. Slender and tattooed, the young people say they enjoy the relaxed provincial way of life here and cultural offerings worthy of a capital.
By settling between Rhône and Saône, the singer and the guitarist became closer to their friends from Last Train, an Alsatian group also based in the capital of Gaul, one of whose musicians, Jean-Noël Scherrer, also managed the production of their concerts. “In Lyon, we found ourselves at the heart of a rock network which allowed us to play in France and Europe”, explains Hugo Herleman, emphasizing the vitality of the national scene. “For five to six years, we have witnessed the advent of a prolific and high-level French rock scene”adds Maëva Nicolas, citing groups like Ottis Cœur, Lysistrata, MNNQNS, Johnny Mafia or Structures.
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