Category: Music

It’s just past 5pm in West Silvertown, a random-feeling stop on the DLR line in east London’s docklands. It’s not the sexiest time or location, but as my friend and I step inside a nightclub, The Cause, a crowd is singing along to Joe’s outrageously horny 1996 hit All The Things (Your Man Won’t Do). The DJ smoothly transitions into SZA’s Snooze, and the energy in the room shifts – phones shoot up in the air as everyone prepares to belt out the chorus: “I can’t looooose, when I’m with yooooou!”

This is SlowJamsWithA, part of a growing craze where club nights focus not on uptempo pop, house, techno or rap, but instead on slow, sensual R&B that’s usually confined to headphones, or indeed the bedroom. It might seem paradoxical in a club setting, but it’s proving to be a profound and emotional format in Black British nightlife.

For many Black people, mainstream venues in areas such as central London’s Mayfair or Soho have long been exclusionary, with subtly discriminatory or even outright racist door policies. R&B and slow jam events are, by contrast, welcoming and generally Black-run, and feature music that deeply resonates with Black audiences – there are no worries about arbitrary dress codes or being unfairly judged. “It’s just good vibes all around,” says one attender at The Cause as she queues up for food. “You can sing along to all your favourite tracks, and no one’s acting stoosh [stuck up].”

SlowJamsWithA have hosted parties across London and cultivated a devoted, cross-generational following drawn to – at the event I attend – a blend of old-school R&B tracks from artists such as SWV alongside more recent talent from the US and UK, such as Odeal, JayO, Summer Walker, and Giveon.

Their first party was back in 2021, after the success of the Slow Jams with AAA show on No Signal Radio during the pandemic. “We were curious to see if there was an appetite for an actual event,” says one of the founders, Ty Hinds – and sure enough, that opening event was so overwhelmingly well attended, it ended up getting shut down by security.

Now scaled up at The Cause, the DJ makes an announcement that gets a few laughs: “I don’t want to see anyone crying in the club!” R&B slow jams are centred around heartbreak as often as lust – but, equally aware of the latter, the DJ makes a point of reminding everyone to be respectful and honour women’s boundaries.

While I notice a few men approaching women and mingling – and some of the SlowJamsWithA marketing leans into that romantic vibe – that isn’t the dominant mood of the event. Tasha, who has been a longtime listener of the radio show, says it’s more somewhere for friends: “Me and my girls always sing our hearts out.”

R&B & Slow Jams is a similar venture. Created in 2022 by DJ Chuckie Online and podcaster Tazer Black, it lacks a home base but puts on events across the UK, Ireland, Germany and Dubai.

And then there’s London-based Room 187, named after Your Love Is a 187 by Whitehead Bros, which was originally launched as a room in online community Clubhouse in 2021 before hosting its debut event in August of that year. Iconic British R&B artists such as Lemar and Big Brovaz have performed at Room 187, along with American singer Jon B, known for his hit song They Don’t Know, a staple on slow jams playlists. “We wanted to create a space where people could enjoy their favourite tracks and sing along, but not necessarily in a typical party atmosphere,” co-founder Benjamin Bennett explains. “Which is why we introduced the gameshow element.”

I head along to Room 187’s third-anniversary event at Islington Assembly Hall in north London. It is a markedly different experience to SlowJamsWithA: as well as having a gameshow format, it’s strictly R&B and hip-hop from before 2008.

I’m handed a karaoke card with a QR code on arrival, which unlocks a playlist of timeless R&B classics. The temptation is there, but I haven’t had quite enough liquid courage to get up and sing. As I make my way to the bar for a rum punch, DJ Kopeman plays Ja Rule and Ashanti’s iconic Always on Time followed by other nostalgic R&B anthems. Then the host introduces the two teams for the games: UK R&B singer Shae Universe leads one, content creator Leoni Joyce the other.

They have to guess the names of songs that have been chopped and changed, and the entire audience get involved, sighing in disbelief when the contestants can’t guess the song – all part of a joyful, playful atmosphere. The teams then compete in karaoke battles with themes, with audience members also taking part; the host prompts them to pick a song by an artist with braids, and the crowd roar in approval as one team breaks into Mario’s Just a Friend 2002, nailing both the theme and the vibe.

“It’s nostalgic of my journey with music growing up,” says Leoca, who is there celebrating a friend’s birthday. “Hearing music I haven’t heard in years romanticised my night and brought back fond memories. It’s always a great night when you can sing your heart out and dance with your babes.”

These parties have struck a deep chord with many in the Black British community, tapping into the nostalgia for when the genre soundtracked our childhoods. More than just a night out, it’s a return to music that shaped us – and done on our own terms. “These spaces are so important for our community,” Ty Hinds says, “a place where we can feel safe, relax, and enjoy the music we love.”

Born in 1966 in Lower Saxony and brought up in Bedford, Max Richter is an award-winning classical composer. Working across live performance, film, dance, art and fashion, he has released nine solo albums, including 2015’s Sleep, an eight-and-a-half-hour work based on the neuroscience of sleeping; 2020’s Voices, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and In a Landscape, released last month. A new ballet, MaddAddam, a collaboration between Richter and choreographer Wayne McGregor, with Margaret Atwood as a creative consultant, opens at the Royal Opera House on 14 November.

You’ve got a busy autumn ahead. Tell us about In a Landscape first – a more intimate, personal album for you.
It is. It’s an album about polarities, which are all around us in the world, and how we can reconcile them. We live in a time where one of the biggest challenges is that people who have different opinions basically can’t talk to one another any more. This record is a small appeal to try to harmonise these differences, by working with materials that we might think of as in opposition – found sounds and composed music, the human world and the natural world – trying to put these things together in a fruitful relationship.

What extremes do you come across in your day-to-day life?
So much of our media consumption now is driven algorithmically, which is very difficult to avoid. Algorithms are essentially driven by cortisol and dopamine spikes. You know, the more rage, the more clicks. Plus the online space is essentially an advertising space, so this dynamic is everywhere. We’re all surfing on this wave that is mediated by extreme emotions.

How do we resist that?
Everyone needs to develop their own strategies, whether that’s taking time out using systems to mute various apps, or leaving your phone at home, or changing your habits. It’s particularly challenging for parents whose kids have grown up with this environment all around them, where DM-ing one another on a platform is the norm. You’ve just got to encourage the idea that every interaction doesn’t have to be online.

Sleep was your “personal lullaby for a frenetic world – a manifesto for a slower pace of existence”. It’s now the most streamed classical music album of all time. How does streaming sit with you as an artist?
Sleep is 10 years old next year, unbelievably, so we’re going to play some more concerts around it, and doing the concerts is great. As for streaming, the fact that people can explore the musical universe simply by following their affections and curiosity is amazing. As a kid, if I wanted to hear a piece of music I didn’t know, I had to take a risk – make that bus trip, go either to the record library or the shop. Now, of course, it’s just a click. But the economics of streaming are very problematic. It’s put huge pressure on artists in terms of making a living.

You’ve talked before about loving musicians such as techno DJ Jeff Mills and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood working in the classical field. Who else should we listen to?
Sufjan Stevens’s Reflections [from 2023], ballet music written for two pianos, played by Timo Andres and Conor Hanick, is absolutely beautiful. Then again, he’s always been a really interesting artist. [Caribbean-Belgian jazz musician] Nala Sinephro’s new album is great too. She was an artist in residence at our studio a little while ago, so it was brilliant to hear the record she’s made.

You’re also a fan of Chic and played with the Future Sound of London. Are you a secret raver?
I’m a low-key raver! You know, I got into composing music because I love all kinds of music. With Chic, there are so many things about their work that I love. A lot of their songs sound like mantras, full of a rhythmic sort of repetitiveness, which really ties into systems music for me [like the work of Steve Reich and Philip Glass]. It’s also amazingly well played and produced.

I also understand you love Eurovision. Why?
It’s just a perfect evening of craziness, isn’t it? You suspend all notions of genre and taste and it all just kind of… happens. I genuinely love it. It’s multidimensional – you get to experience all sorts of national identities through the music, and ideas of what’s cool in different places, which can be hilarious.

What’s your favourite Eurovision song of all time?
[Abba’s] Waterloo, obviously. It’s a towering masterpiece. Recently, I’m more struck by the staging, like the man playing the grand piano on fire [in the Austrian entry in 2015], plus the guy in that ginormous hamster wheel [in Ukraine’s 2014 entry, Tick-Tock] was a bit of a classic.

What’s it like working with Margaret Atwood?
She was fairly hands-off because we were working with a text that had already existed [her 2013 novel of the same name], but we did have breakfast together, where she told us lots of things about how it was going to be. After that, she basically left Wayne and me alone. We were passing ideas back and forth the whole time – what about this? And what about that? Sometimes it lands very fast, sometimes it takes a bit of time. It’s like ping pong.

Can music have a political impact?
It depends on what we mean by politics. Or let me put it this way: I think music can sort of shift our state of mind, to take us into another mental space separate from the world of the day-to-day. It also gives us evidence about how someone else felt – what it felt like to be them – which is one of the most important things in the social and political sphere. Experiencing somebody else’s perspective, and what feelings might be behind that, is really valuable.

• MaddAddam is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2, 14-30 November

Born in Barry, south Wales, in 1906, Grace Williams was part of the same generation of British composers as Imogen Holst, Elizabeth Maconchy and Elisabeth Lutyens. She studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Vaughan Williams and later in Vienna with the Schoenberg pupil Egon Wellesz, and, as this vividly played collection of orchestral pieces from John Andrews and the BBC Philharmonic illustrates very well, those very different influences continued to coexist in Williams’ music. The disc includes what has become the most frequently performed of her works, the Sea Sketches for strings, five miniatures completed in 1944 in which the string writing recalls early Tippett and Britten. Castell Caernarfon is a prelude and processional composed for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, but it’s the strikingly dramatic four Ballads, from 1968, and especially the 1939 Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon, based on an episode from the Mabinogion, and in which Sibelius seems to be added to her personal stylistic mix, that show Williams at her most distinctive.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify

The street of the Casa Sur hotel in Buenos Aires, where the One Direction star Liam Payne fell to his death, was quiet on Thursday morning. The curtains were mostly drawn, with an occasional guest peering down at the reporters below. On the tree outside, posters of a younger Payne were taped along with messages of gratitude and sorrow; underneath, candle wax melted on to the pavement.

“Liam. I’m missing half of me. Thank you for all of the sunshine, your smile, blazing every day,” read one message. “Thank you for all the music. You will always be in my heart,” read another.

Magalí Dalmau, 25, arrived early to say her goodbyes. “I am in shock, I can’t believe it. I have been awake crying all night, listening to their saddest songs, Moments, Spaces,” she said. “I had to delete social media because I could not read the news any longer. Today I came to say goodbye.”

Hotel guests say they heard banging and shouting for hours before Payne fell to his death on Wednesday.

Doug Jones, from Texas, was staying in the room opposite Payne’s. He spent Wednesday working at his desk, wondering about the noise from outside.

“I thought they were doing construction, there was so much banging, doors slamming, most of the day. It was loud, bizarre,” said Doug Jones. “Later I heard the sirens, thinking perhaps there was a fire somewhere. And then I heard a very loud scream.”

Payne, 31, fell to his death from a third-floor balcony into an internal courtyard. Police pronounced Payne dead at scene, saying he had suffered a “very serious injury” to the base of the skull. “There was no possibility of resuscitation,” said Alberto Crescenti, head of Buenos Aires emergency services.

On Wednesday evening, fans had gathered outside as forensic science investigators and dozens of police arrived at the scene. The supporters stood, for most of the evening, in silence until the body was removed in a fire truck. At this point, they began to clap, with some crying out in distress.

Jael Catalá, 21, lives in an apartment opposite the hotel. She watched the scene unfold from her balcony. “His fans stayed outside all night, past midnight, singing for him, lighting candles. I’m not a fan personally, but it was very emotional,” she said. “They felt so much.”

“It’s really, really shocking. We never expected this. We were so happy he was here in Argentina,” said Lucía López, 23, who left her work early to visit the scene and lay flowers. “I’ve had this poster of Liam since 2012, it used to be on my wall when I was a girl, now I am bringing it here.”

Berenice Desmond, 23, a member of the Argentina One Direction fanclub, said that supporters plan to continue arriving throughout the day. “They will continue building the altar with flowers, candles and letters,” she said.

Payne had been visiting Argentina to support Niall Horan, his former bandmate from One Direction. He was seen at Horan’s concert on 2 October at the Movistar Arena dancing and singing along with the crowd.

Hotel staff at the Casa Sur, in the cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Palermo Hollywood, made two calls to emergency services in the moments before Payne died.

In one of the calls, the transcript of which has been released, the receptionist said they had a guest who had taken “too many drugs and alcohol” and warned that the guest’s life “may be in danger” as the room had a balcony.

Payne reportedly fell from the balcony after the officers arrived.

Photos purporting to show Payne’s room in disarray were published in local news, believed to have been taken by hotel employees, sparking a backlash over journalistic ethics.

Born in Wolverhampton, England in 1993, Payne was just 16 when he became part of One Direction, a boyband formed on the British reality show The X Factor in 2010, along with Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik. It became one of the biggest boybands of all time, selling more than 70m records worldwide, before going on an indefinite hiatus in 2016.

Payne had previously opened up about struggles with his mental health, saying that during the height of the band’s fame he began using alcohol and an epilepsy drug as a mood stabiliser to counter the “erratic highs and lows” he was experiencing.

Payne’s family issued a statement on Thursday, saying: “We are heartbroken. Liam will forever live in our hearts and we’ll remember him for his kind, funny and brave soul.”

Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are some of the most self-consciously monumental in the classical canon. It can be hard to imagine – let alone hear – those murmuring openings and vast, brassy climaxes without the precision and power of a modern symphony orchestra. But to mark the composer’s 200th birthday, the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment continued its unhurried foray into the late-Romantic repertory with Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony.

If “historically informed performance” suggests holier-than-thou small-scale, think again: this one featured eight brass players, with six double-basses as the formidable engine of a hefty string section. The big tunes surged. In the relatively intimate acoustic of the QEH, the breakthrough chorales verged on deafening. There was little information about the instruments themselves – simply “closer to those that would have been used in Bruckner’s day” – but such quibbles fade to meaningless in the face of results this thrilling.

The strings (presumably playing on gut) were mellow and translucent, vibrato used sparingly. Richness of tone – and this was a seriously deluxe, velveteen richness – emerged from exquisite bow control. Woodwind solos were characterful in the extreme: laser-like in focus, the flute almost hollow in its woodiness, double reeds raw and acidic, all precision-sculpted. The brass injected periodic blooms of luminosity but remained deeply connected to the rest of the orchestral tissue, never dominating even in the finale’s deeply carved apotheosis.

On the podium, negotiating the numerous structural challenges of this symphony, was Adam Fischer. Sometimes he leaned back like a man waiting for a bus; sometimes he looked as if he was dancing with a light sabre in a phone box; sometimes he wielded his baton like a meat-cleaver. He switched gears from spacious to frantic more or less instantaneously, driving the orchestra like a custom-built sports car through the twists, halts and repetitive eddies of Bruckner’s score. Every pizzicato phrase had its own shape, every silence-pocked passage a sense of macro-structure. The long, generous melody of the second movement relaxed like a collective exhalation. But Fischer came into his own handling Bruckner’s obsessive repetitions: pushing through circles of fifths and fugal mechanics, constantly in search of the bigger picture.

East African industrial metal, head-popping techno, walloping bassline, filthy jungle, improvised minimalism and experimental pop. With DJ sets, gigs, art installations and exhibitions stretched across Sheffield and Rotherham, this year’s No Bounds festival feels, and sounds, weightier than ever.

It begins in Sheffield Cathedral, where 10-piece Emergence Collective stir things to life with a beautifully subtle yet hypnotic performance of stripped back instrumental minimalism. Tara Clerkin Trio offer up an incredibly sparse, slightly woozy, yet quietly groove-locked set, with both acts thoughtfully leaning into the vast space, allowing silences and pauses to ring out.

Later, in the pounding darkness of Hope Works – the festival’s main hub in a former gun barrel factory in deepest industrial Sheffield – subtlety and restraint are of less interest to Kenyan techno-metaller Lord Spikeheart, whose set is an assault of guttural screams and pulverising beats, before Sheffield’s own grime MC Coco puts on a masterclass of dizzying flow.

The range of daytime activities is impressive, from projected artwork responding in real time to the River Don, to sonic experiments with lucid dreaming and musical archive explorations spanning pirate radio and the miners’ strikes. Back at Hope Works in the evening, re:ni delivers a slick yet ever-shifting set of bass-heavy club hitters before Batu riotously runs the gamut from searing techno to R&B at a volume so intense you have to check your organs are still intact once it’s over.

Now in its seventh edition, No Bounds already had the party element of the festival locked down, and it remains a buzzy, buoyant and characterful place to let rip until the sun comes up. But it feels like a festival that’s swiftly evolving: its ability to factor the physical environment into its programming – from DIY venues to African-Caribbean community centres via castles, cathedrals, chapels and galleries – combined with its mushrooming arts offerings and increasingly genre-fluid lineup results in its most varied and expansive offering to date.

Glyndebourne’s autumn season – no longer a touring one, following Arts Council England cuts – opens with a revival by Laura Attridge of Tom Cairns’s 2014 production of La Traviata, a beautiful piece of theatre that serves Verdi’s tragedy uncommonly well. Mindful that the work itself was groundbreaking in its realism, Cairns mostly strives for theatrical naturalism, and the avoidance of grand histrionic gestures that smack of anything conventionally operatic. There’s little to distract from social observation and psychological insight.

Hildegard Bechtler’s designs give us a series of sparsely furnished rooms, minimalist yet smart. Costumes – jackets, ties and tuxes for the men, pencil skirts for the women – suggest the early 1960s. The erotic divertissement at Flora’s soiree feels better integrated than when I last saw it, and indeed the subsequent scene, in which Matteo Desole’s Alfredo publicly humiliates Elisa Verzier’s Violetta, generates extraordinary tension without once seeming melodramatic. The peculiarly symbolist ending, however, when sets and lighting gradually become abstract as Violetta’s life draws to its close, still strikes an awkwardly jarring note.

It’s for the most part beautifully sung by its new cast, with the added luxury of three native Italian speakers in the leading roles, though Desole, warm in tone but taking time to settle on opening night, overdoes the wide-eyed gawkiness in act one, where his acting feels fractionally too large in scale compared with what surrounds him. Verzier, on the other hand, is a really lovely Violetta. The voice, extremely beautiful albeit not large, suggests both emotional strength and physical fragility. She has the requisite agility for act one, but wisely avoids showily interpolated high notes. Later on, there are moments of deep, restrained intensity as well as some exquisite soft singing. Dite Alla Giovine, done with a rapt, introverted pianissimo and an immaculate sense of line, is breathtaking.

In the big act two confrontations, meanwhile, she is matched, in the other great performance of the night, by Christian Federici’s Germont. Handsome of voice and presence, he sings with unforced lyricism and exemplary dynamic control. Di Provenza, given in this instance in full, can so often seem anticlimactic after everything that has gone before, but here we really sit up and listen. He’s a good actor, too, giving us a finely considered – and unusually sympathetic – portrait of a man confronting the disastrous consequences of his own inflexible morality.

The conductor, meanwhile, is Adam Hickox. Like Desole, he took a while to settle in act one, where speeds were extreme and Un Di Felice felt unduly slow. Thereafter, however, he builds the tension with a measured inexorability that gets under your skin. The Glyndebourne Sinfonia’s playing is excellent, and there’s first rate choral singing, too.

Chris Martin clearly feels a responsibility to use his bully pulpit to spread positivity. Nothing wrong with that. One of the reasons Coldplay are the biggest ticket-shifters in rock history is that Martin is an amazing frontman, both for his witty, engaging personality and his heartfelt delivery. Yet only the latter ever makes it on to Coldplay’s albums. There is no wit on Moon Music. He completely erases that part of himself. All that remains is empty, cloying optimism and too much ingratiating tosh about the stars and the sky and spheres and moons and rainbows and clouds and heaven. It’s the Magic FM shipping forecast.

The tosh is bearable where Coldplay’s golden melodic touch survives – We Pray and Good Feelings are particularly pleasurable. But, as on Music of the Spheres (2021), Max Martin’s anaemic production saps the weaker tracks: oodles of generic playlist pop that, apart from the piano ballads, reduce the band’s excellent players to decorative accessories. Hopefully, for their planned final two albums, Coldplay can conjure more trippy bangers such as 2015’s Adventure of a Lifetime or Hymn for the Weekend. And turn up the wit.

Winter means something different in the north – and I don’t mean Buxton, the furthest up the country that English Touring Opera is taking its main autumn productions. The folktale on which Rimsky-Korsakov based his 1882 opera came from a place where dark, freezing seasons would end suddenly and violently – the same Russia Stravinsky was talking about when he described “the whole earth cracking” each springtime. So The Snowmaiden doesn’t play out quite like the fairytales we’re used to. Perhaps if it did, the opera would be a bit more familiar outside Russia.

Snow Princess, as she’s called in Alasdair Middleton’s flowing translation, is the daughter of bickering Spring Beauty and Grandfather Frost, and her story has the community’s salvation from eternal winter hinging upon her learning to love. Or rather, to put out a bit. There are two men in the picture: village boy Lel, sung by a mezzo-soprano, who is famous for his beguiling songs but constantly bothers girls for kisses; and macho Mizgir, who wants more than a kiss and whose forceful attempts to get it eventually find Snow Princess acquiescing, leading her icy heart physically to melt away.

It’s an uncomfortable story, more transactional than romantic. Olivia Fuchs’s production navigates it cannily, stressing the coming-of-age elements but reflecting on stage the folktale feel that permeates the music. Eleanor Bull’s set nods at pagan symbolism, with everything taking place under a huge circle that might be frost, sunrays, fire or grass. Snow Princess herself is on a pedestal, literally – all the main action takes place on a small central platform – but it traps rather than elevates her. Ffion Edwards, toting a huge book of fairytales and dressed like a schoolgirl headed to first communion, sings the role beautifully in an aptly crystalline soprano.

There is lovely singing too from Hannah Sandison as elegant Spring Beauty and Katherine McIndoe as spirited Kupava. Edmund Danon is suave and snarling as Mizgir. Joseph Doody brings clean lines and clear high notes to the Tsar. And apparently cross-dressing balls were a regular event at the 18th-century Imperial Russian court, so maybe that’s why he spends the whole opera wearing the hell out of a strapless corseted ballgown. Best of all, Kitty Whately as Lel lives up to her character’s reputation, shaping her time-stopping numbers beautifully.

ETO once again distinguishes itself by its ambition – but its resources are nothing like what Rimsky had in mind. Conducted by Hannah Quinn, the orchestra plays a new arrangement by Patrick Bailey for just 18 musicians; the chorus numbers only eight. Think of Rimsky’s big symphonic works and it sounds a little bare, yet what is lost in depth is partly made up in character, with star turns for solo clarinet and cello especially. It is better to hear the music this way than not at all.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see Hubert Blanc-Francard, better known as Boombass, during the Paralympics closing ceremony. It promised “an odyssey through French electronic music” and Blanc-Francard was behind some of the country’s most celebrated dance records of the last 30 years, as a key figure in the scene that became known as French touch. The surprise was that he billed himself as Cassius, which was the name of the duo he formed in 1996 with Philippe Zdar, but that he had very firmly announced was over after Zdar fell to his death from a Paris building in 2019, two days before Cassius were due to release their fifth album Dreems.

He and Zdar had been best friends for 40 years and, after Zdar’s death, Blanc-Francard said: “If you even said the name Cassius, it was like someone stuck a knife in my body. I couldn’t even listen to a note of the music.” Cassius only released five albums, because the two prioritised their friendship over their career: if things became strained, they’d take a break rather than fall out. “I had my kids, my friend and the music, the three most important things in my life,” says Blanc-Francard. “I lost my friend and I lost the music, so I fell into a big depression.”

Then, one day, he overheard their 2006 single Toop Toop playing in a Normandy supermarket and felt, “it was like Philippe saying hello to me. It was the beginning of the sun coming back.” He started dreaming about Zdar. “We were in my kitchen in Paris and he was dressed like 30 years ago – we were in the same room but never spoke. I had four or five dreams like this and then the last dream, he shook my hand. For me, it was like: ‘OK, go, my friend – do what you want to do.’ My mind needed time to be clean, to be at peace, and when he shook my hand, I was at peace. It was beautiful.”

Blanc-Francard and Zdar first met as teenagers while working as assistants in a Paris studio: they were introduced by Blanc-Francard’s father, a famed producer. Their break came with French rapper MC Solaar’s debut album: Blanc-Francard scored a handful of co-writing credits and Zdar worked on the mixing, despite the fact that both were, as Black-Francard puts it, “still learning”. Among the album’s fans was James Lavelle, who asked the pair if they could produce some tracks for his fledgling label Mo’ Wax. The result was La Funk Mob’s Tribulations Extra Sensorielles, an attempt, Blanc-Francard says, “to have the EPMD, Pete Rock [hip-hop] sound but with no voice and slow, because I was smoking like a crazy man”. The album became an early trip-hop classic.

After its release, Blanc-Francard moved to New York, erroneously convinced he could make it as a hip-hop producer. When he returned, he discovered that Zdar had made a house album under the name Motorbass, and that the underground dance scene in Paris was exploding.

A gush of incredible records suddenly started appearing from France – by Daft Punk, Air, Étienne de Crécy’s Super Discount, Dimitri from Paris and then Cassius. Their debut single Foxxy came about when Blanc-Francard played Zdar some samples he’d made from a Willie Hutch soundtrack and Zdar convinced him to speed them up to house tempo. “A few people like Laurent Garnier had opened doors,” says Blanc-Francard. “He was the first French DJ to play the Haçienda, so that said, ‘Wow, it’s possible.’ In a year, 10 or 20 projects arrived. There were new record shops in Paris with 23-year-old sellers talking about house and techno, not an old man selling you Rolling Stones records. Thomas and Guy-Man [of Daft Punk], they’re geniuses, and that helped a lot: it was the first time we could meet French guys at the level of anybody else in music. It was like we had the same capacity – not the genius, but the possibility to be in the competition.”

He says he loves the name French touch – “it’s like UK garage, it feels like you’re part of a family” – even though the disco-sampling filtered house it became shorthand for only really applied to a fraction of Cassius’s output. Their breakthrough debut album 1999 was audibly more influenced by 80s electro, while the intense, chaotic Au Rêve seems to presage maximalist the Paris dance label Ed Banger, which launched Justice and others.

Their biggest track of all, 2011’s I <3 U So, was initially commissioned by Coca-Cola, which was launching a rival to Red Bull, but it was rejected because its somnambulant mood didn’t fit with an energy drink. “We didn’t want to do the advert anyway – the drink tasted horrible. But when it came out, it was like a rebirth for us. At the time we were from the first French touch generation. Ed Banger was exploding and we were the old men from the 2000s, but we received so much love from the new generation.” It was subsequently sampled on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Why I Love You.

Cassius had a habit of attracting big names – Madonna performed Into the Groove live as a mashup with Toop Toop, and their later albums were studded with guest appearances from Pharrell Williams, Ryan Tedder, Mike D and Cat Power among others. It’s a big legacy to continue, and Blanc-Francard says he hasn’t actually started making new Cassius music yet. He feels he needs collaborators, because that’s the way Cassius always worked. While Zdar pursued a hugely successful career as a producer – for Phoenix, Franz Ferdinand and Hot Chip – Blanc-Francard tended to work quietly at home on music. “I always needed Philippe to say, ‘We have to do music now.’ I was making music at home every day, but he was the hurry man and I was the slow man.”

Whatever happens, the Paralympics were quite a way to make a comeback – “80,000 people in the Stade de France, 8 million watching on television” – but he says his appearance was really aimed at one viewer, who wasn’t there in person. “Really, I was saying, ‘OK, Philippe, look at this: we are back.’ I still feel we are two, you know? I don’t come back into this story alone, even though I am alone: there’s a brother there. I’ve read this a lot: when you lose someone really close, that person is still inside you. And the music is still here. It will always be here.”