The idea of Urban Gipsy came together when my first band, Odex Protocole, started doing their final pre-production. I was watching it all happening and realized I wasn't into it anymore. I was proud of the work we did with the band, it was my school, but one day you have to leave school.
Odex was so much of a democratic decision, where I was just a singer that composed the songs, but not really played the songs, I couldn't let out the sounds I had in my head to go along with the compositions. So I had to do something on my own. Besides that, I had so much to say and so many stories to tell.
At that time, I was spending lots of time hanging out with different musicians and different people. Really lots of them... just hanging out. With one of them, Claude, I did two sessions that we called
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“the Kitchen sessions”, where I wrote a lot of blues songs... and “aired out” a lot of stuff which in the end got me confident enough to start my own project.
Substitute originated there, and together with four other songs I called up Thierry, Patrick, Fred and Eric to go for a couple of rehearsals and start recording the songs at our friend Maximin’s mobile studio, in the Novanoïs in Brussels.
Having learned from Odex, where I felt like we totally missed the point with the first record; trying to do all these acrobatic arrangements and sound exactly the same as we sounded live, I understood that a recording could be simple as well.
We were shocked with the results. In a positive sense, I mean. From the original idea of making a demo of a few songs, we just continued and made the whole record. |
