November 2001: POESIE NOIRE

“Love is colder than death” was the album that made me buy a guitar. The year was 1989 and I had been into electronic music all my life. Poesie Noire was a purely electronic band up until this very album and when they suddenly changed their style it made me realise a couple of things about music. Such as -there are no boundaries of making music…it´s not really the instruments that sets the mood but the songwriting….and you don´t have to sing very well to express what you feel. So I did not only buy an electric guitar, I started to sing as well. After a while (through various sources such as media and friends) I understood that my potential would have to be in the songwriting….

Jo Casters -the man behind Poesie Noire- was never a singer. But it didn´t matter that much. His bands music spoke to me. After a couple of electronic albums -“Tales of Doom” and “Tetra” of which I really liked the latter – he put Poesie Noire on the map with the beautiful, melancholic, cleanly produced “Love is colder than death”. If you´ve never heard this band I´d really suggest you to start by bying this album.

After this PN, probably inspired by the british wave of Stone Roses and Soup Dragons but still pretty electric, made another album -“Marianne”. I am not sure about this but I´ll tell you something; Jo Casters once mentioned he was somewhat disappointed with the sales of “Marianne”, he said that it had only sold around 300 copies in Sweden. Well, this album was a super-hit in my hometown of Tranås. Me and some friends that love PN told our local recordstores to order loads of copies. And they did. And they sold probably like 50 copies of it.

Local bands started to cover tracks of the album. Everyone that was into music in Tranås back then knew of songs like the title track, “Toulouse” and “I´ve lost a friend”. After a while I realised that this was probably a unique situation. A belgian alternative band, not known to so many people, was the talk of the town -probably one of the most popular bands 1990/91- in a small city in Sweden.

For us in The April Tears Poesie Noire was the first band that introduced how to crossover styles in music but to keep the same feel. Of course the impact of Primal Screams “Screamadelica” (91)introduced something that would change everything. But for me and a bunch more Poesie Noire opened up a door we didn´t know about a couple of years earlier.

I remember that the english paper NME used to have people writing down “the 10 records that changed my life”. “Love is colder than death” would certainly be one of them for me.

/Andreas

(Jag försökte hitta en video med Poesie Noire att klippa in här för att förstärka intrycket av deras betydelse, men gode gud..Vill ni behålla en god tanke strunta i att kolla upp deras videos. Det är för tidigt på morgonen för mig att se sånt som får A Split Second att framstå som ett band med pejl…)

9 OTHER RECORDS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE:

NEW ORDER “Blue Monday” The first record I owned. I got it when I was nine, and It was a 12″ maxi single. I played it at 33rpm speed for a couple of years. When I found out that this big, slow beated record with a singer singing in the deepest voice I´ve ever heard was supposed to be played at 45single speed it took me yet another two years to get used to listen to it.

CABARET VOLTAIRE “Microphonies” This was my second record and probably the reason to why I thought there was nothing wrong with playing “Blue Monday” on 33rpm.

KRAFTWERK “Radio Activity” Also one of the first records I owned. Given to me by my cousins and it really introduced me to loads of interesting music such as Kim Wilde, Spandau Ballet, Classic Nouveaux, DAF and Duran Duran.

DEPECHE MODE “Some Great Reward” I don´t know how many times a day back in 1984 I would listen to this album. The sampler was something new and I think that this record still represents what the most inventive, cool guys could ever sample and add to fantastic songs. I know DM had a sampler on “Construction Time again”(83) but it didn´t really sound like this to me, but of course I didn´t listen too much on “Construction Time Again” until after I´d heard “Some Great Reward”

IGGY POP “Lust for life” While my cousins sent me tapes of electronic music, my aunt´s husband kept playing me all those rock and roll records. He´d been playing me stuff like Iggy, Bowie and Stones for years when I re-discovered this album in the mid eighties as a youing teenager.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO Of course this was one of the records that started the whole alternative scene. I didn´t feel comfortable listening to “Venus in furs” at afterparties in the end of the eighties -everybody played it for some reason I´ve never figured- but as soon as I heard “Sunday Morning” I started to understand what it was all about.

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN “Darklands” Together with “Love is Colder…” this album changed it all for me in the end of the eighties. The sound of the fuzzing guitar and the stiff drum machine just knocked me out. Also the song “April Skies” on this album inspired our groupname.

LEONARD COHEN “Songs from a room” I can´t really remember how I discovered Cohen, but it was Sara that introduced this album to me sometime around 1990. She didn´t really like it back then so she gave it to me. I can´t put down just in a few words what Leonard Cohen has meant for me. But I can say this much -in 1993 I was so into Cohen I travelled to Greece just to see the house he´d lived and written much of his music in, including tracks of this album.