Low Culture Essay: Marie Le Conte on Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

When Marie Le Conte moved from Nantes to London she rejected her French identity, along with a teenage infatuation with Phoenix' fourth album. Years later, she reflects on how the "youth and hope and enthusiasm bottled inside ten neat and clean little songs" actually allows her to have a conversation with her past self about life, love and becoming.

The video no longer exists but, if it did, you could click play right around now and find yourself transported to the living room of a provincial French home. You'd hear the first few notes of the song straight away, and they would probably remind you of a jaunty alarm clock. Soon, though, the music would become impossible to hear over the screaming. In that brightly lit house, you'd see teenager after teenager enthusiastically bopping around and drunkenly singing. "SO SENTIMENTAL, NOT SENTIMENTAL NO" are the words you would technically be able to hear but, realistically, you wouldn't. These are French kids, and they're singing in yaourt ("yoghurt"), the Gallic slang for braying along to foreign lyrics you only vaguely know phonetically. Around 20 seconds later, the video would end, as the person holding the digital camera simply had to go dance around with her friends. 

Around a decade later, in the late 2010s, she would delete most of the media she'd posted to her Facebook account over the years, and so it would be lost forever. I remember it well, though. It was 2009 – July, maybe August – and we'd just finished our Baccalaureat. Some knew they'd be staying in Nantes for university; others would be moving to Paris. I was still waiting to hear back from British universities, but dearly hoped I was about to cross the Channel and start a new life in London. We were children and we weren't. That summer, we decided that we had no idea who or what we were, and that was fine. Mostly, we just got drunk every night. We'd go to bed at dawn, all piled up on various couches and cushions, wake up in the middle of the afternoon, have a coffee, some pasta, head to the supermarket, buy some booze, then start again. 

I watched that video often as I got older, because I remembered so little from those months. It was nice to know it all actually happened. We really did spend a little while suspended in the air, stuck in that moment after you jump up a trampoline but before you hit the fabric again. It was also nice to hear that song, Phoenix's ‘Lisztomania’, because it helped tie my life together. In some ways, it still does.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was released in May 2009, as we were all cramming for our exams. It's the album that changed everything for the French quartet. They'd been a band for nearly 15 years by that point, having got together in Versailles in the mid-90s. ‘If I Ever Feel Better’, their first successful single, came out in 2001; ‘Everything Is Everything’ did quite well in 2004, as did It's Never Been Like That two years later.