Daniel : Let's start with the question we can't avoid : the reformation!

Loran : It's not really a reformation. We met us again in order to release the DVD and then we felt like playing a live set, an one-hour gig. Nothing was expected, we had have an intense history together, a lot of fun and it was important too, and then, when we found ourselves again for the DVD project, things went on and we just let it happen. It was like an old couple who had split and then meet up again years later. It's also interesting because it's risky for us! It's often said that the Bérus are a myth, and now we're going to have a gig. We will see. We gave us one month to work on the show, we're going to give it our best and after, we'll see.

François : Everything has relied a bit on the fate. We were working on 1986's Trans festival for the DVD, so we met up with the Trans organizers. They were working on the 25 th anniversary of the festival and they asked us to play, we said why not and finally we agreed. The provincial side of the event in Rennes really interested us, there has always been a great atmosphere in Brittany.

Loran : And we had great memories of 1986's Trans festival. A very high moment! We sprayed water everywhere in the place...but we don't anymore.

Daniel/Ben : Let's go back to your past. There's a kind of artistic vagueness about the period before the Bérus. How did it come about?

Loran : We were like a small family of street kids, we were 15/17 years old punks, skins or autonomous guys. People started to organize themselves, to squat some places and to organize the first gigs. All the bands found dates, I used to play in Guernica, there was also Lucrate Milk, which we later played with. In fact, there were not many of us. In the eastern suburb, in Pontault, there was the place La Ferme, it was a gig place for punks and skins, many bands played there like RAS, L'Infanterie Sauvage in 83/84...But the real start was the gig ‘Rock d'ici en France' in L'Olympia in 1978 with Métal Urbain and the whole scene which was before us.

Ben : How did you originally get involved in this movement?

Loran : In 1977, I was very young and a bit scared by the decadent and bourgeois side of punk, you know, the ‘I'm an artist from Art schools and I'm punk' side of this movement. But what I really liked was the whole anarcho-punk wave in 1979/80, they didn't only fuck everything up, they had a constructive attitude as well, they organized gigs, associations, they created labels and fanzines...When I went to London for the first time, in 1979, I got really interested in Crass.I bought their first 7 inch, I found it incredible and more interesting than the artistic, fashioned and financial ways the Pistols had, even if the first time I heard them was a great moment!

François : In fact, the initial Paris punk scene was a mixture of kids living in the streets and middle-class people, like Alain Pacadis, who were people from the Parisian high decadence. With some guys like Mammouth or Fuck, we used to hang around Harry Cover and Music Box, two records'shops at that time. There were also the guys from La Courneuve (popular northern suburb of Paris), they had shaved heads and Teddy Boys crosses, they listenned to rockabilly, but they also went to punk gigs. Even before Farid and his friends. It was very mixed! There were some great bands, Milk Lucrate, we also knew the guys from Swingo (ndb : Porkies) they had a great sound, I really liked the tracks on the Paris Mix compilation. We were supposed to be on this compilation with the Bérus, but they fired us because we weren't good enough! I remember a gig with Swingo in 1981 (while looking at the 5 th issue of UVPR?), the Vandales, a bunch of bikers, came inside. The atmosphere really looked like in the Kebra cartoons!

The first two albums I bought in the Harry Cover shop were the first Skrewdriver and Pistols albums. It was street music without politics! After, with Farid and his friends, fights started due to political labels : ‘hey you, you're wearing a Fred Perry...' There were quickly many fights at La Souris gigs. I played a memorable gig in 1981, with the old Bérus line-up in which I sang, along with Guernica (with Loran playing), Mass, La Souris, Swingo Porkies, and it was just a slaughter, a huge mess! This scene is not born in artistic squats, but in the streets of Luxembourg's district, of Music Box and the Halles, which was then a hole.

Ben : So, when did the first squats, autonomous guys and anarcho-punks appear ?

Loran : I think the first punk gigs in a squat were in Vilin, there was a gig with Swingo in 1981.Before that, the squats were more concerned with autonomy and for them, punks were just stupid beer drinkers...Then, there was Les Cascades, a gig place which was squatted and where the whole English scene came and played. It was this place where the Parisian bands started to get involved...

Ben : Before 1981, punk and autonomy were not mixed ?

François : No. I did a demonstration for the memory of a young German girl, Heidi, who was murdered. I spoke about her in a song, which I later wrote for Molodoi. By the way...There were autonomous guys, they had long hair, black leather jackets, cowboy boots, black scarves and a molotov cocktail in their jackets.They were thugs, social cases and they looked it!

Ben : I asked you that because we often tend to associate the beginning of the Bérus with autonomous guys...

François : Yes, that's the first images of the Bérus people have.It's due to the things which happened in the Couronnes and Vilin streets, which were completely squatted. In the Couronnes street, there was the Couronnes Commune, with black flags all the way along, it was a city of workers and squats...

Loran : And you're right with the image of punk in the beginning of the 80's, there were RAF, AD (Action Directe). They were fed up, there was a urgent need to do something and offensive autonomy was all that! And between 1981 and 1983/4, punk was that too! Even in 1985 when we played on a truck in a demonstration against unemployement. Autonomous guys were there too!

Dan : There was an article in Actuel dealing with the scattering of the band who tried to escape the truck...

Loran : It was incredible! There were many people around us, suddenly, cops charged and there was mass commotion, the precession stopped while the front of the precession went on, the autonomous guys got scared and ran and we were left alone! Finally, demonstrators came back when they saw that there were only a dozen cops, but there had been a general wave of panic. In these situations, you understand how a demonstration can sometimes be completely manipulated.

Dan : Was the song ‘Et Hop' recorded during a demonstration?

Loran : No. It was recorded in a studio. We used a megaphone just for the fun. RAS had already done this kind of frenzy stuff on ‘et qu'est ce que tu me taffes là? ' (trans: 'but what are you saying to me ?')

Dan : And you were the cops targets, weren't you?

François : In fact, the whole autonomous underworld was infiltrated. I saw many informers. You could see some new guys coming and after a while, there was chaos. In the Botzaris squat, we faced an attack by some other squatters. At the end I couldn't sleep without an iron bar on my side! I left the day a guy said ‘ let's buy some guns'. It was a really violent time.

Ben : Many things have been said about the violence between fascist skinheads and redskins during your gigs. Did you listen to the Oi! wave?

Loran : Yes and I really enjoyed it! Besides, we consider our ‘Concerto pour détraqués' (trans: ‘Concert for headcases') album as our Oi! album. The first one, ‘Macadam Massacre' is darker; it's about dispair and suicide, about people who weren't all fine. But ‘Concerto pour détraqués' was more in the Oi! style, with our first songs with chorus...The Pan-toto, a well-known crew of punks and skin, sang them. Batskin was disappointed because he couldn't get them back in his own crew! There are many winks at Clockwork Orange on this album, whether it is in the lyrics of ‘Vivre libre ou mourir' (trans: ‘leaving free or dying') or in our general attitude of a bunch of independant guys without any political labels.

Ben :But ‘Concerto pour détraqués' was released in 1985, politics had already crept into the skinhead scene.

Loran : Yes, but for us, Oi! music didn't belong to the fascists, it was a street shout and we didn't want to give the streets to the fascists! I'm still angry with those guys who didn't care about the political takeover. I didn't agree! We should have fought to avoid this infiltration. After that, a skin was always considered to be a fascist and it stuck for a long time before it changed with the actions of the SHARP and other ones. I remember the first time we played in Quebec. There was some threats from the Klan. The LAM (Ligue Antifasciste Mondiale/World Antifascist League) provided the security, and the Canadian SHARP helped us too. They came with a bus, wearing bowlers, gloves with lead and walking sticks, telling us ‘we know there will be fascists, and we're here because we know what the Bérus represents'. Around sixty fascists had indeed come, all dressed in black with Celtic crosses, and the guys from the SHARP and some other ones came out, fought and won!

Dan : How was your show Quebec ?

François : It was a great moment but we went there within a particular context. It was the time for the great dream of independance and we showed people, as Sylvain from Banlieue Rouge told me, that there could be bands in Quebec singing in french that had some good ideas and were able to convey something about independance. In fact, even if we took part in their alternative networks via interviews and people we met, we were more interested in the Indian problems and it was always a problem to dicuss that. There was also a kind of split in their punk movement, between people who were close to the views of the party in power, the PQ (ndlr : Quebec Party), and people who had more libertarian views and rejected any nationalist ideas.

Loran : Still, about the Oi! movement, the first time I came to London, I had a date with a friend who didn't show. As I was alone, I started to talk with some skinheads and they brought me to the Kensington Market. I really felt a particular atmosphere, even in the Oi! scene, everybody was together.

Ben : In your opinion, how did the split in the punk and Oi! scenes happen?

Loran : It began when some skinheads got involved with the far right. With the crew of the Halles (ndlr : The first parisian skinhead crew, at the end of the 70's, see Fabian interview, UPVR? #5), there had already been some provocations but it was a lucridous arguement. Farid had Arabic roots, his best friend was called Couscous Fuhrer. They were our first punks with swastika, like in England!

François : Yes, but even before the split, there were many fights. And many punks had an attitude as fascist as some skinheads. The funny thing is that everybody used to go on a pilgrimage to London in September. Wunderbach dealt with that in their song ‘Paris-Londres'.

Ben : The Bérus gave the image of a band/crew who didn't want to mix with the skinhead scene. Is that true?

François : It wasn't true until the release of ‘Concerto pour détraqués.' There were no big problems, the skinheads crew from Pontault always came to our gigs, it was mixed, they came and saw the Bérus because we were talking about the same stories as theirs. But after, with the politicization between fascists and reds, the things became very tense and we had to choose which side we wanted to be! But we sometimes saw some peole again.

Loran : I don't want to go really farther, but the guy who became secretary-general of the PNFE (ndlr : French néo-nazi party from the 80's/early 90's) often used to come to my house in Torcy. I asked him not to come back as soon as he started to speak about the FN (ndlr : French National Front : « Front Nationnal ») .

Dan : By the way, he had a rethink on it...

Loran : I became vegetarian in 1990. But with the Bérus, when we had gigs, I was the only guy who ate raw meat in huge portions! We had a lot of teasing about it, but I think I had have a problem with eating animals since I was 16 years old… It was something that had always tormented me. That's the reason why I can easily understand this skinhead attitude, the guy who kicks everybody, who follows an idea very far even if it doesn't suit him, and then turns for example in the Krishna stuff. They are people who need to do something in depth before they realize it wasn't the thing they wanted. Our minds don't always work the same ways. Some people need to understand things their own way. Political brainwashing often doesn't achieve the desired result. Far right ideas are so absurd, there's always a moment when a person in this movement will go and rethink it all, and if not, it falls within the psychiatric competence! People get into this kind of radical stuff because they don't feel fine, because they live in an unfair, absurd and fucking system and they want to fight back. But it's not that easy...That's why with the Bérus, we have never claimed to belong to a party, we have always been a way to see life.

François : Well, a fucking system...Let's put it in perspective! We're not living in Rwanda...

Loran : Perhaps, but I got married when I was 18 because my girlfriend had grown in the DASS (ndlr : French department of health and social services) and when I saw what the DASS was, I really wanted to do something to let her go out of it. There are countries with awful living conditions, but there are also awful ones just outside of our own door. A rape is something awful and there are many always every day, and that's just one example among thousands.

François : Back to the division in the punk/Oi! scene, it was a quite weird period. We were talking about Bruno Tolbiac, from the Tolbiac's Toads, just before the interview. Everybody said there was a war between the Bérus and the skins from the XIIIth district (ndlr : a south Paris district - look at our adress- it was Tolbiac's Toads' [one of the first nationalist French skinhead band] district, Tolbiac is the name of a tube station in the district, and toads because of their green flight jacket). In fact, the Tolbiac's bassist had interviewed us in his zine in Montreuil. We used to occasionally have some joints in Nicolas's home with Bruno Tolbiac (ndlr : Tolbiac's Toads singer) and after he left us to make the hool in the PSG's stands.There was no war, even if we both knew we didn't have the same fans. Some of their fans were hanging aroud L'Oeuvre Française (ndlr : extreme right organisation) and were just fools! Pascal, our saxophonist, sometimes played with the band, even though he wasn't a skinhead.

Loran : They still had a funny side and no political implication with the far right yet.But you can see how they finished : like William Sheller (ndlr : French variety singer, Tolbiac's Toads made an appearance on one of his album and he was supposed to produce their album wich never came up).

François : It's weird to say that, but there was a kind of respect due to the fact that we had all came from the streets. When we released ‘Concerto pour détraqués', Bruno sent me a personalised photo of the Tolbiac's Toads, on which they are all in a wagon in a station.

Loran : We had been a crew of street kids, we had lived through same things in the streets during the same period, the result was that we had some respect for each other, even if our views were differed, even if we didn't speak to each other. As we were street kids, we are always in danger, so you stick together.

François : After that, we have chosen our own way because we were against violence...

Ben : But you had still a lot of violence in and around your gigs...

François : Yes, but I was against it. After a while, there were too many problems with the different crews, we perharps developped a stance based on self-defence. Each time we were touring, we had to defend ourselves, we became paranoid and slipped up sometimes... But I have always had a problem with the fact that a redskin blew up a guy just because he had a Oi! badge on his jacket. It was always the same story, kicking the good guys and not the bad ones. They knew where they could find the good ones, it was easy... It all went too far. The band was overshadowed by the events.

Loran : That's one of the reasons why we stopped. This violence wasn't our aim! Of course, we didn't want fascist guys in our gigs and it was important that they didn't get in! I couldn't play for a guy stretching out his right arm. We can say whatever we want about Sham, but I saw them in 1988 or 1989 in Quebec, and some fascist guys came in and hassled Pursey.They did the Sieg Hiel salute and immediately Pursey stopped the show, went down the stage and confronted the guys. We showed him we were with him and the guys backed down. I found it really important. We have to side with the people, but not any kind of people of course.

Ben : We have talked about the divisions in the punk/skin scenes.This question is more for François...Why did you come back to the skinhead look with wearing a Fred Perry in your last Bérus gigs, with your next band Molodoi, with the label Division Nada...

François :I have always listened to the music. I bought the first Skrewdriver album, I had one of their badges and I had a hair crop in 1978. I was a 15 years old kid.

Loran :I really enjoyed the first Skrewdriver album as well! It was so great! But we couldn't know what they would become later. They were a punk band even if the guys were skinheads. Now we have seen what they became later...

Ben :So why did you come back to that?

François : For a while, Oi! was a taboo subject in the band. You couldn't listen to Oi! music and if you did, people thought you were nazi. So I listened to my records at home, I listened to La Souris and I went to their first gigs.

Loran : I have never been a skinhead, I'm not so fond of the attitude ‘we are tough guys, and together we have balls!', but the guys I used to hang around with in Pontault at the beginning were skinheads.

Ben : And how did your transition between the two scenes happen?

François : I have never been asked this question. It was around 1988, a period I really don't want to live through again. Too much violence! I liked the energy but not the violent side.

Ben : On the other side, during this period, you did many things, with Division Nada for instance.

François : That was after... and curiously, we had less problems with Molodoi. We occasionally encountered big problems, but we managed to deal with them. I remember a gig in the New Moon with Skarface, we fucked the gig but we took it upon ourselves. For me, the end of the Bérus was like liberation. I was perhaps going in the opposite direction, but it was another state of mind. We didn't judge people, didn't ask them for their ID, everybody lived thier own life...even if we still had an ideal, perhaps a bit too utopian, in the same way Sham, Madness or Angelic Upstarts had, about the unity of the youth. But we didn't have followers that had bad reputations. I spoke with a guy from the RASH a few days ago and he asked me ‘Why fuck off all militants?' It's absurd ! ' (ndlr : about Molodoi's song « A poil les militants »). What he didn't know was that I had written these lyrics for the Bérus.

Ben : What would have happened if you had sung this song with the Bérus ?

François : I don't know! If we had sung ‘Camouflage' with Molodoi, people would have said it was a militant song! It's a question of political labels!

Dan : We talked about Quebec before. Have you played in other countries?

Loran : Not a lot. We used to work and we played only during our weekends. We couldn't go really far away. We had always considered the band to be a small band. We were surprised by the scale it had at the end. Moreover, we had French lyrics and it was important for us to be in contact with people, so we thought it wouldn't interest foreigners. We played in Swiss, in Belgium, in Dublin, Ireland and we had also two gigs in Amsterdam's squats. But I think the Bérus'echo came after the split of the band. In 1995/96, I played in the Koppi squat in Berlin with my band Tromatism and the day before our gig, they played in front of 400 people the Bérus live at the Olympia! They were really surprised because for them, French punk was only a dull and underground scene.

Dan : And what about your experience with Kortatu ?

Loran : We invited them for our gig in the Zenith. Koratu in Spain was the same kind of thing as us in France. They created the first independent labels and they united people. In a Kortatu's gig, you had kids, older people, everybody together, many people in the public had Basque beret and shouted ‘ETA Militara'. Insubordination is a word, which unites the Basque people. I love to play in the Basque country, there are many squatted houses, a lot of intelligent self-management in the youth and it's not the government that imposes its own social workers and instructors. And this is in every village! I saw some places with everybody shouting ‘ETA Militara'! It was so incredible!

François : I won't go there! (Everybody laughs)

Ben : You spoke about labels created during this period. Many people who took part to this movement think that almost nothing has remained...

François : The scene is now totally different. We started with a live cassette, then we had records, we issued later the albums in cassettes, and finally came the time for the CDs at the end of the band. There were many records'shops. The whole thing has changed a lot.

Loran : And we can say that there wasn't a real alternative scene. There were a few bands, which had claims, and the public was behind them, saying ‘The Bérus are here, they take care of everything'. As soon as the band was over, they said ‘It's over now, alternative rock is dead!' But we weren't an alternative band; we wanted to be in a movement... So if the things crashed down this way, it was because there weren't so many things supporting it... In fact, the alternative rock was just a springboard for many bands. What did they do after? They signed for the majors! In the past, it was easy to organize a gig, you rend a small place, made 50 photocopies and there weren't any legal problems. But now, bands are intermittent (ndlr : a French working status...) and you must pay them 1500 euros.A small association can't organize a gig in these conditions. Squats fought against this system in the 90's, that was where we played with Tromatism.

François : Bondage Record did not realize the thing too.

Ben : You both seem to agree with the fact that the bands which had signed for majors killed the scene. But you, François, you signed 5 years after for Sony, a major!

François : It was a democratic decision made by a show of hands and I was in the minority. We had all wondered if it was the best choice for the band. The first time the guy from Sony came to us was after the gig in the New Moon (ndlr : at this concert the JNR, Batskin's Parisien nazis skinheads organisation, came, sieg heiled during the the whole gig and beat everybody up). We thought this gig had jinxed us! At the same time, our own label Division Nada didn't agree with New Rose's attitude because they wanted us to sign some contracts instead of letting us be our own producers. It was a system we had created in order to avoid the same mistakes we had done with Bondage. I informed our public in the Division Nada bulletin and in the ‘La voix des Molodoi' (‘The voice of Molodoi') bulletin, and we got fired from New Rose! We had no label anymore, we were screwed...so we asked ourselves ‘Why not Sony?' (Laughs) Sony issued three albums and finally fired us. It confirmed what I thought about Majors.

Dan : And what about your experience in Tromatism?

Loran : What I didn't like with the Bérus in the end was we only played big gigs. It was not the same thing to play for 1000 people in every town. I really loved rediscovering the underground scene. In the last 14 years, I have never read any articles about myself in the official press. It's funny, because we're going to come back today for the Trans festival, the whole press is here and when I speak, it's very important for them. But I'm the same! That's the proof that if a real press existed, it would also go and see what happened in the underground scenes...

It was also a great experience as a musician to expiriance some hard situations. We lived in our horse-box for 5 years with our sound system, we played in many squats, sometimes we opened them and played in the dust. The thing is that, I can live with the sale of the Bérus records as I still get royalties. It's important for me that this money is used in the same way as people supported the band. The mistake made by many well-known artists, who manage to earn enough money, is to try to stay on the top. On the contrary, I think it's the right moment they should choose to come back to the underground scene and do wathever they want! The 8 hour-a-day worker can't afford it. I saw many great and incredible bands in the squats. It's important for me to use a part of this money in another band. With Tromatism, we always lost money because we played for free. People gave whatever they wanted.

Dan : Do you know how many albums you sell?

François : We still sell 50000 albums a year...

Ben : Loran, you talked about the Basque insubordination. You told me that today French bands were not angry enough. Do you think it hasn't changed, because there were many bands which played shit in the 80's too!?

Loran : Indeed but there were also many fantastic bands! Camera Silens for instance, even if their followers were often fighting... Their first demo was huge and so intense! They were real thugs.

Ben : Did you play with them?

Loran : Of course! There were many fights between our fans and theirs. We had some arguments sometimes with them because they went often too far! But they were an incredible band. I saw their roadie recently at a Tromatism gig. He used to be a thug and you couldn't speak about politics with him in those days. He was violent, wasn't very friendly. This kind of guy often stepped to the far right and it sucked, but some of them had intelligent friends around them and they went on a good way. The guys from Angelic Upstarts were in the skinhead scene because for them this scene didn't belong to the fascists. That's important. I saw many guys who weren't fine at all, ready to go that way...In fact, it depended on who you were hanging out with. You could become easily a fascist because your friends, who had given you food and a roof when you were in and out, were nazis. It was that simple! If there had been a more powerful movement in the streets, it wouldn't have happened! That's why we liked stands and infoshops in our gigs.

Dan : There's a huge evolution in the Bérus lyrics : the dark side of your beginning and the protest side of the songs ‘Et Hop' or ‘Descendons dans la rue'(Reclaim the streets)...

François : That's true and it represented what we were in these periods. In 1986, I was in the street with an helmet and an iron bar!

Loran : We played in the Tolbiac university. We went there with a crew of autonomous guys, we said ‘we're going to play', we got our instruments and played! You can't find that anymore, that wild and pirate side in today's rock!

Dan : How did your gig in the tube come about?

Loran : We wanted to have some fun and we announced we were going to play in the tube, but we didn't announce where!

François : It wasn't a gig, we played like people used to do in the tube. It was funny because we had our masks on and people were scared and left.

Loran : At the time, there were only two of us, there was nobody around and we liked it. The Bérus weren't a crew yet. We wanted to do a bit of tough and wild, moving street action. When you looked at our gigs between 1983 and 1984, there was a difference. People moved near us but they were hesitant.

Dan : How did your theatrical side appear?

Loran : Step by step, meeting after meeting...

François : The first disguise was a joke. We wanted to play in Palikao, but they weren't interested in traditional rock bands. We needed something more, so I took a case with a few accessories. It allowed us to play there, people liked and so we kept it. After, there was also an a bit of a disguise war, we had masks...and bands like Washington Dead Cats did it, they also threw leeks and vegetables in the public. Ludwig did it too. But it was nice and fun!

Loran : There was a gap between the situation punk were living and this ‘confetti' side in our gigs! Between 1983 and 1989, it wasn't always the ‘confetti' time! We started when we were 18 and split when we were 25. Each album represents a different period.

François : If the band had started today, we would perhaps have been a small hip-hop band. We were a bunch of slum guys at the beginning, with Helno, Bol, Gaston...We played for white kids but it bothered me that there were no black, no Chinese... sometimes some Arab kids, but that was all! We tried to educate, to talk about Chile, Vietnamese refugees, but it wasn't easy to deal with these subjects in front of punks who often didn't care! The song ‘Salut à toi' is about that. Musically, we came from the punk background that had influanced us. Even if we tried to break some barriers, we realized finally that we just went round in circles.

Loran : Yes, we were a crew from the punk movement and everything was based around punk after...

François : It depends on the context and the culture you're living in...

Loran : We could have been in an other context, in an other country, and we would have done something else.