– Forever Pavot – In Session for RFI, Paris – February 14, 2023 – Radio France =
To Paris tonight for a session by Forever Pavot, recorded at RFI on February 14, 2023 for La Pop Fantasmagorique.
For a little background, we consulted the Parisian Born Bad Records bio on Forever Pavot:
The pop world is divided into two categories. On the one hand, groups that create new things out of old ones. We know them, we have the names. Yawn, yawn. On the other, those who create old things with old ones, left behind by the wars they have not lived, in search of times they have not known and consoles on eBay in the hope of sounding like Velvet Underground. Just as pathetic as the first, the whole thing coupled with an obsession for imitation which gives their future a taste of an old biscuit dipped in formalin.
“Fashion is what goes out of fashion”, used to say Cocteau. Although he died without having been able to listen to the first Forever Pavot’s album, we must grant the poet the gift of prophecy: the classical opposition between past and future is completely stupid. On these grounds, Forever Pavot has done honourably. Create new things with old ones, or rather make something beautiful with the old, it is the ambition of “Rhapsode”, record where Ennio Morricone, Francis Lai and other film music composers from the 60’s find at last the singer they were missing.
But beware, under the cobblestones of these 68’s composers, no plagiarism. In the same way that old stone is a long term investment, one is tempted to describe Emile Sornin, Forever Pavot’s leader, as a maker of things solid, expert in both messing around and demolishing walls. His got his trainingwithin a first group – defunct Arun Tazieff – where the desire to be the conductor is already being felt. Emile is already developing techniques dear to François de Roubaix: dreaming his songs, fiddling them solo track by track to eventually produce them in his closest buddies studio, the Aquaserge from Toulouse. The result is worth all these sleepless nights: where others merely copy the past, Emile stacks up sound, rehabilitates the harpsichord in this narrow world that has become pop music. He composes arranged pieces (Electric Mami) that give the impression of hearing Strawberry Fields Forever sung by Zombies. After an initial 45 rpm, “Christophe Columb”, which he produced in the spring of 2013, and which was”distributed free with chocolates” and then repressed by Frantic City, the story of Forever Pavot begins to take shape around a new group. Then will come two EPs (the first with the English from Sound of Salvation in January 2014, the second in April in Requiem for a Twister), all released in such limited numbers that already the word CULT writes itself in large letters on this long-haired Emile’s forehead.
Okay, maybe that confused you a bit – just hit the Play button and dive in – good stuff:
