the very best interview

The Very Best brought out one of the top albums last year with their second release ‘Warm Heart of Africa”. The Very Best consist of Malawi singer Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit duo Johan Karlberg and Etienne Tron mixing traditional Malawi music, African reggae, hip hop, electro, dance and everything in between.
Album of the week caught up with Etienne from the group just before their first Australian tour.



AOTW: Hey Etienne, how are you going?

Etienne: Hey man, how are you going?

AOTW: Good mate. What are you up to at the moment?

Etienne: I’m just at home with my wife and my kid. My kid is sleeping next door and my wife and I had a friend over for dinner tonight, so they are in the kitchen and I’m just sitting on my bed.

AOTW: What time is it there?

Etienne: It’s 11 o’clock at night… And I’m actually super scared because I’m going to the dentist tomorrow for some major surgery.

AOTW: “Major” hey?

Etienne: Yes – it’s a pretty bad sign I think.

AOTW: Well no one likes a dentist.

Etienne: Exactly.

AOTW: I’ll change the topic then. Your album [The Warm Heart Of Africa] has been out for a couple of months now. How are you liking the response?

Etienne: Yeah it’s been really cool. I was actually quite relieved because for a while we only had good news for the record, and at some point I started to feel weird about that because all the records I really like, when there are a lot of good reviews you almost start to think about that as a problem. But recently there’s been a few bad ones which made me feel better.

AOTW: That’s so true. But I suppose it’s better than being the other way around.

Etienne: Yes. Like we are very conscious that Africa is really fashionable at the moment, so we’re conscious of the fact that, on paper, we have an amazing product of new-African-meets-western music because it’s the kind of collaboration everyone wants to hear right now, so we’ve really released it at the right time. But at the same time all this is just words and at the end of the day music is something really abstract and really personal, so I’m really happy about the amazing reactions and reviews and stuff, but it’s going to have to wait the test of time. Doing live shows and seeing people react to your music is very rewarding because that [the response to live shows] doesn’t lie – real human reaction.

AOTW: Seeing some of the footage from your live performances it looks like an amazing show…

Etienne: Yeah man! There’s a great vibe. It’s really like a party basically: everybody dances. It’s funny because even in places where people say to us “guys, be careful. People don’t dance there. It’s an industry party, or it’s a New York party” – you know, whatever the reason, and we’ve found it’s been really cool with every show we’ve done so far. So far so good.

I think it’s got a lot to do with Esau (Mwamwaya). He’s a funny guy. I think he’s a very different pop star than the kind of person you find in the music industry these days. He’s very very different.

AOTW: So with your live shows has it taken a while to get into the swing of things or did you just kick things straight off at the level your now at?

Etienne: No no man, it’s been great – we’ve done like 16 or 20 shows and it’s been good so far. All of them have been really good – a lot of them have been in America and we’ve done clubs, we’ve done festivals, we’ve opened for Diplo, we’ve done a bit of everything you can do and it’s been great.
You know, me and Johan (Karlberg), as DJs, we’re used to the crowd and to being on stage as DJs, and it’s interesting to discover the life of being in a band.

Hold on a sec man?

AOTW: Sure

[We hear rustling, then giggling and French conversation]

Etienne: Yeah sorry! I’m back.

AOTW: So, you mentioned New York before. How have Americans responded to you?

Etienne: Really cool! We all love America. I hear a lot of the time that people in Europe think that they party harder than Americans so they always ask “how was it in America?” And actually I think that there are a lot of good times in America. The only thing that I hate is that everything closes at 2am – right when people are asking for more, and people go crazy after 2am because there’s nowhere to go. But before then it’s amazing!

AOTW: Where we’re originally from in Brisbane [Australia], they brought in a law so that all clubs and bars have a lock out at 3am so after that time you’re either stuck outside or inside a club.

Etienne: That’s a bit better at least.

AOTW: How was the recording process for the album?

Etienne: It was the most easy process we’ve ever had with anybody in music. It was amazing. Sometimes we were writing on the spot and an hour later we would have a song. We never even planned to do a whole album but it just happened naturally. It was only after we did seven or eight songs that we were like “mmm, maybe we’ve got an album there”. We were more than halfway through an album so we were like “let’s do one.” At the time, as producers, we had worked with a lot of people but we never did full albums for anybody and even for us, so this was the first full album that we were completing, and we are very happy and relieved that we didn’t because for a long time we were thinking about what kind of album we’d do for a first album and that’s when we met Esau and things just happened by themselves.

AOTW: Were you always interested in African music or was it not until you’d met Esau that you fully got into it?

Etienne: We’d been into black music – you know like hip hop – from very, very young, maybe from five or eight years old, so the black music thing had always been there. And I think four or five years ago we got a bit bored with the hip hop vibe and we thought that hip hop was not so cool anymore, and the hip hop energy that we loved turned into ghetto music love – from all over the world, and what was evolving in Africa and, in a way, when you’re a real music lover, African music is one of the phases that you are bound to have at some point - like classical music. If you’re a real music lover you listen to classical music at some point. I think Africa is the same. It’s where everything comes from, it’s where the beats, the trance and repetitive music comes from… For me, it’s where techno music comes from. For me the techno music comes much more from Africa than it does from Kraftwerk or German electronic music. For me, the beats come from there – from the start.

AOTW: So are you guys going to see how it goes with The Very Best – do you have plans for the future or is it just a short-term, temporary collaboration?

Etienne: Well we got together almost two years ago now. It took a while to put [the record] out, so we’ve been moving on. We work with a lot of different people. We’re producing the first solo album of a single girl called Marina Gasolina You might be familiar with her. Do you know a band called Bonde do Role.

AOTW: Yeah sure.

Etienne: She used to be the singer in Bonde do Role. We hooked up with her a year a go, so we’re doing her solo album. We’re also working with an African boy, which is a young Nigerian rapper in London. We’re working with MIA. And we’ve also started to work with people and start a bunch of songs for the next Very Best record as well.

AOTW: So you’ve got heaps of awesome stuff happening. You’re also coming to Australia early next year…

Etienne: Yep!

AOTW: Are you excited for that?

Etienne: Very excited. Me and Johan, we toured Australia once three years ago for Good Vibrations festival as DJs, and it was the first time we were doing a tour – the first tour ever for us and it was absolutely amazing. An amazing experience. The first time we’d DJ’d in front of thousands of people, first time we were on tour with people like Kanye West – like musical big guys, and the vibe was amazing. So really looking forward to it.

AOTW: And this time you guys are coming down as Radio Clit and The Very Best?

Etienne: Yeah yep, they’ll be some DJ sets late at night, they’ll be some gigs in the afternoon… It should be really cool. The more the better really. Once we’re out there we’ve got our singles and our records so the more shows we can play the better!

AOTW: We’re really looking forward to seeing the show Etienne.

Etienne: Thanks man!

AOTW: Our last question, what’s your album of the week at the moment – the record that you’ve been listening to or digging most in the last week?

Etienne: you know, I’m getting really, really heavily back into surf music, like Sixties Beach Boys style stuff, Dick Dale, and a lot of that kind of thing. I think originally Tarantino was the guy who got me into that with his films. Except now I’ve just become really obsessed with it and without naming one particular record I’d say the Sixties has really been the stuff I’ve listened to so much lately.

AOTW: Awesome. Well, I think our time’s up. Thanks so much for chatting to us Etienne.

Etienne: Thanks man. We’ll see you in Australia.

So Frenchy, so rad.




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