Justice: The Return

Gaspard Augé is dressed entirely in white denim. It seems incongruous, and takes a while to get used to. He is, after all, the hairier, more rock star-looking half of Justice, a duo usually seen in biker jackets and black T-shirts. “Less leather, more pleasure,” he deadpans.

“It’s funny,” adds Xavier de Rosnay, whose Paris home we’re in, “we’ve been confronted about this before. Touring the first album, one day we performed in denim jackets and people were massively complaining, saying, ‘What is this scam? Where are your regular jackets?’ It was disappointing for them picturing us on stage that way.”

“They hadn’t had the full Justice experience,” states Gaspard, dry as sand.

“It must be like seeing AC/DC and Angus Young isn’t wearing his schoolboy shorts and cap,” says Xavier, who has darkly handsome pop star good looks. “We felt the same when we saw Slash and he didn’t have his top hat. He was wearing a tracksuit. It felt like we were getting half the product.”

Gaspard looks his white denim ensemble up and down. “It’s like a snake changing its skin, I guess,” he sighs.

As Gaspard suggests, Justice are returning renewed: a third iteration of the band for a much-anticipated third album. All the focus on clothing is more than idle chatter. Presentation and style have been one of the keys to their success. Early tours, amusingly captured in the 2008 film A Cross The Universe, saw them rewrite the book on how the USA perceived dance music. Looking like a couple of film star Hells Angels, playing in front of wall-to-wall Marshall speaker cabinets and a giant neon cross, they tore the lid off venues coast-to-coast with the caustic electro-disco of their debut album, ‘†’. They made dance music rock ’n’ roll, rendering it so that America could really get stuck in, and becoming a lynchpin of the burgeoning EDM movement. Skrillex would certainly say so.

“Our arrival in America was a statement,” Xavier agrees, albeit tentatively. “It said that this music is not so serious, but it’s powerful – harder than anything you already think is hard music.”

With Justice’s second album, 2011’s ‘Audio, Video, Disco’, they dived into their own prog fantasies, mashing electronic dance music into 1970s rock flavours so that unlikely comparisons to The Who, Queen, and even Iron Maiden flowed their way. It
was the mark of a band determinedly doing their own thing. They still are, as was announced by the slap-bass, strings and catchy chorus of the 2016 single ‘Safe And Sound’, the opening track to their new album, ‘Woman’.

A leap onwards from ‘Audio, Video, Disco’, ‘Woman’ features a choir and an orchestra, as well as Johnny Blake of Zoot Woman, French singer Romuald and regular collaborator Morgan Phalen. It starts with a quintet of tracks that explode joyfully with steroid disco-funk: the galloping Gary Numan-meets-Frankie Goes To Hollywood rush of ‘Alakazam!’; the ridiculously catchy ‘Stop’; the pure disco frolic of ‘Pleasure’. Things then become more wayward, more out-there, from the grand baroque of ‘Heavy Metal’ to the lovely twinkling synths on final cut, ‘Close Call’.

“At end of the first half it becomes more free and adventurous,” explains Gaspard.

“The first half is more pop, the second more free-structured,” Xavier concludes.

We are sitting around a table in Xavier’s Paris apartment, an airy, open-plan affair, all exposed wooden beams and metal girders, containing the studio where the album was made. One corner has hordes of records on the floor – Aphex Twin, Todd Rundgren, the soundtrack to the film The Shining, etc – while the walls have posters that range from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ to Chewbacca to a framed carpet featuring US president John F Kennedy and his brother Robert. A nearby table contains an array of gin decanters and a book by Martha Graham entitled, appropriately enough, Mémoire de la Danse.

Xavier, wearing a blue denim jacket and T-shirt that says ‘Gibson Metal Master’, is drinking tea. He’s also pondering the new album’s title.

“’Woman’ is a very powerful, beautiful word,” he ventures. “If we’re honest with ourselves, much of what we do is mostly to please women or make them proud of us. It’s a tribute to the women in our lives; mothers, daughters, lovers, friends, collaborators.”

And the lyrics on the new album also seem to be moving in that direction...

“We didn’t ever do a proper a love song before,” says Gaspard, “but on this record I guess it’s the underlying theme.”

We talk around the album for a while. As with their last album, Mixmag is the first to hear it outside Justice’s immediate circle, and they’re keen to exchange opinions.

“We’re not obsessed with being only analogue,” Gaspard says. “We have a strong computer music culture. With synths we always process them to the point where they’re totally remote from their original form.”

They are a somewhat enigmatic pair, attentive but very self-aware, funny but sometimes elusive. Gaspard has less English and doesn’t talk as much as Xavier, but when he does, it’s usually to make a definitive statement, rather than Xavier’s more general hypothesising. The best way to capture their dynamic is, perhaps, to eavesdrop on the conversation…

Mixmag: When did you last DJ?

Xavier: We DJ about twice a year and the last time was in a stadium in South Korea. It was great. I had no idea we had such a fanbase there. We don’t make music we like to DJ with and we don’t DJ music we like to make. They’re two different things. There’s finally a couple of tracks we can definitely DJ with on the new album – ‘Alakazam!’, ‘Heavy Metal, ‘Love SOS’ – I’m sure they’d work.

Mixmag: So how have you been spending your time since we last heard from you, which was when the ‘Audio, Video, Disco’ tour ended at the start of 2013?

Xavier: Looking after our children, enjoying life.

Mixmag: Do you have any hobbies? Sports? Gym? Long holidays abroad?

Xavier: No sport, no gym. We just enjoy life. Sport and the gym are not part of our way of enjoying life.

Mixmag: Well, you both look very healthy. As rock stars, shouldn’t you be a little more worn by drink, drugs and the rest?

Xavier: We’ve always been healthy, but it’s not like we’re becoming Sting or Moby. We’ve always understood the difference between life when touring in a band and real life. We’ve never mixed up the two, never thought we’re the actual guys that go on stage and do those things.

Mixmag: Are you political animals?

Xavier: No, especially not as a band. We have a few rules and one of them is to never talk about politics.

Mixmag: So if we wanted to know your thoughts on Brexit would that count as a political question?

Xavier: Definitely.

Mixmag: How do you feel about the tempo of dance music slowing in the last decade or so?

Xavier: I never go to clubs.

Gaspard: My guess is that it’s just that the drugs have changed.

Xavier: It’s reminiscent of nu-metal and rap metal, the most powerful music you can possibly make. It’s the same tempo but polyrhythmic so you never know if it’s very fast or very slow. All these tracks in the new electronic scene also have one element that’s very fast, which makes them powerful.

Justice are pondering what their earliest memories are...

“Listening to the first Suicide album when I was six,” jokes Xavier (at 34, he wasn’t born when it came out in 1977). “OK, really it was dreaming of black butterflies because I used to have a butterfly mobile over my baby-bed.”

“Mine is that I went to a flea market with my mother,” recalls Gaspard, who’s 37. “At one stall, out of the blue, a vendor gave me a crucifix.”

This is apt, given the band’s longstanding predilection for giant crosses. Raised in the Parisian suburbs, they met in 2002, although they claim to have had parallel childhoods – “not bullied or bullies. Discreet” – and left school with good results.

“All through the year we’d be in the lower ranks, then when we needed to pass an exam, we both finished first in everything,” says Xavier. “We worked when we needed to but the rest of the time we chilled out. Just like now [laughs].”

They were at the very beginning of careers in graphic design, hobbying in iffy bands (Xavier as a guitarist/bassist, Gaspard as a drummer) when, as everyone knows, they entered a remix competition for the song ‘Never Be Alone’ by the British band Simian. Their version didn’t win, but was signed by Pedro ‘Busy P’ Winter, and better known as ‘We Are Your Friends’, it became one of the biggest crossover club tracks ever, and launched both Justice and Ed Banger on the world.

Mixmag: So, Pet Shop Boys or Depeche Mode?

Xavier: Neither of them. We know one or two songs of each band but right now I’m unable to think of one or sing it.

Gaspard: I’d go for Depeche Mode.

Mixmag: Last time we spoke, five years ago, you said you didn’t listen to contemporary music. Is that still true?

Xavier: We’re not hermetic. Maybe we said that because that period was not as rich in new music. Making the last album we were listening to Led Zeppelin and ELO, but the dynamic then was different. That album was more like a small encyclopaedia of music we wanted to inject into our own music, but on this new record everything is spontaneous. Right now there are new things we like. I’m listening a lot to Miguel’s ‘The Valley’ which sounds like Nine Inch Nails. It has a grunge 90s sensibility.

Mixmag: Scarlett Johansson or 1960s Brigitte Bardot?

Xavier: Scarlett Johansson, definitely.

Gaspard: I have a lot of respect for Brigitte Bardot because she didn’t indulge in facial surgery or this awful dream of eternal youth. It’s kind of cool she just aged the way she did.

Xavier: Every woman and every man should age that way. Our music is the same. It sounds like us as we made it. We’re not trying to make youth music and it would be ridiculous if we tried to be the new club sensation.

Gaspard: We’re not running after what’s fresh, new and hip. You’re always too late if you do that.

Mixmag: You mentioned ELO earlier. We saw Jeff Lynne’s ELO play Glastonbury. He had the charisma of a lettuce.

Xavier: That’s always been the case, but, at the same time, the guy’s really good. We watched a documentary about him recently and we really want to hang out with him. OK, he’s not Mick Jagger, he’s this studio wizard, but you can’t ask him to be both.

Gaspard: The thing is, we love the way he writes songs.

Xavier: He’s funny and witty when you hear him talking. He’s not so much a performer, he’s a producer, he’s the archetype, and there are not many that good – even today. His new album ‘Alone In The Universe’ shows that he can still do it.

Mixmag: Have you ever been in awe of anyone you’ve been introduced to?

Both: Rick Rubin was great!

Xavier: In 2008 we were in Los Angeles. We used to know Diplo’s manager and he told us, “Rick Rubin would like to meet you,” so we went round his house. It’s not that we were star-struck, more that we were impressed. Of course, when you know everything he’s made, it’s hard not to be. He was so up-to-date and curious. It felt like we were talking to a guy from our generation.

Rubin went on to mix Justice’s single ‘On ’n’ On’ in 2012 (the ‘Ruined by Rick Rubin’ mix). Meanwhile, Justice themselves were initially no slouches in the remix department. Following the success of their Simian remake they were in huge demand, remixing artists such as N.E.R.D, Britney Spears, Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, Justin Timberlake – even U2.

If the remixes hinted at their talent, their 2007 debut single ‘D.A.N.C.E’ and album ‘†’ made it clear Justice were ripping up the rulebook, reinventing dance music as something noisy and ebullient. Their live show was also a phenomenon and took them all over the world. By 2012, in the wake of their second album, they were in the position to headline America’s premier music festival, Coachella. Along the way, they’ve fired out two live albums, one to accompany the A Cross The Universe ‘documentary’ in 2008, and Access All Arenas in 2013.