Electric Independence

Teenage Bad Girl up to no good. Photo by Quentin Cherriet Private Lives

e first encountered Teenage Bad Girl in May when we went to Dijon for a party Vitalic had organised for the ravers of his hometown. The event was called Carte Blanche and local hero Vitalic—Pascal Arbez—could book whoever he wanted, within reason, to perform before he headlined, hence the name. He picked a few acts from his label, Citizen, such as Fixmer & McCarthy and Monosurround, as well as Nag Nag Nag’s Jojo de Freq and Birdy Nam Nam, four crowd-pleasing French “turntablists” who rip apart Vitalic’s “La Rock 01” as a finale. Vitalic had heard about this and proposed a live collaboration, though on the night his hefty contribution overpowered Birdy Nam Nam’s scrappy scrat-rat-rat-ching. We should say here that former Nitzer Ebb frontman Douglas McCarthy, still the youngest man in techno, and one of the best-dressed, is a charming raconteur who would be welcome at any dinner party. Earlier in the day we visited the Citizen label offices, a converted garage in the label manager’s house on the outskirts of Dijon. Inside, Fred, who runs Citizen, offered us a glass of wine from a bottle of local Bourgogne white. On the bottle he’d stuck a Teenage Bad Girl label, as if the wine was a special Teenage Bad Girl batch produced by the winemaker to promote the act. He also gave us a bottle to take home. There have been snazzier promotional items in the past, it’s true, but this one actually worked. Ordinarily a record by a group calling themselves Teenage Bad Girl, a name far worse than Arctic Monkeys, would remain unplayed forever. Cocotte turned out to be pretty amazing—an unhinged sci-fi romp zooming between pixellated FM rock, flashy Justice tics, undulating disco and gooey melodies scraped from the bottom of Jean Michel Jarre’s fondue pot. Until a girl puked on our friend’s shoe during their live debut at Fabric last month, that had gripped us too. In the same way Daft Punk are mentors to Justice, you can hear the power and glory of Vitalic in Teenage Bad Girl.

“Something really interesting is happening in France: we are the generation who discovered electronic music with Daft Punk, Cassius, Motorbass, all those 90s guys,” says TBG’s Greg Kazubski. “So we learned about producing music by trying to use the same techniques as them, like warm compression or big effects, and we still use these techniques but now we’re trying to find a new way of using sounds like cutting samples or noisy old synthesisers. We don’t care about the clarity of the final sound: if the sound is noisy, dirty or too aggressive and not very clean, it’s cool.”

Vice: Right, who came up with the name?

Guillaume Manbell: We found a 50s movie called Teenage Bad Girl and liked it.

Greg: We immediately thought the name sounded and looked very cool, so we decided to keep it and didn’t give it any more thought. If our band was called Dirty Electro Guys, for example, you’d know what we sound like and you wouldn’t be interested. With a funny name like Teenage Bad Girl, you don’t know what to expect.

Isn’t there something weird and sleazy about two grown men calling their group Teenage Bad Girl?

Greg: Look, we’re not ugly perverts. We like to provoke people but it’s only for fun. We’d be very embarrassed if someone didn’t get our irony and compared us to really sleazy guys.

Let’s go to the movies: who’s in your top three of bad teenage girls?

Guillaume: Lux in The Virgin Suicides, perfectly bad and naïve at the same time. And the blonde girl who turns on Kevin Spacey and takes the bath of roses in American Beauty is one of my favourite teenage bad girls ever, especially when you discover at the end she’s just a fake.

Greg: And then there’s Lisa, the girl who came from the computer of the two teenage guys in Weird Science. I dreamed of having this software in my bedroom when I was a teenager.

Keeping it French, your attention should be drawn to our pal Jackson & His Computer Band’s startling revision of Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E” which is out nowish on Ed Banger. Jackson’s first release since 2005’s Smash, the labyrinthine rave voyage “Do The J.A.H.C.B” sums up Justice’s career in 12 compelling minutes. Announcing his return, Jackson concertinas key phrases from their album into a bold, baroque and somewhat convoluted statement that you suspect he had to get out of his system.

One of our favourite acid-disco ditties for most of 2007, “Private Life” by Private Lives finally gets a release on Soul Jazz later this month. A fruity union between Ed DMX and Cylob, the arch electro-pop of “Private Life” recalls that early-80s British synth duo Tik & Tok, a pair of haughty mime artists involved in some of the new romantic era’s lesser-known gems such as “Screen Me, I’m Yours”. Find them on YouTube looking stern on kids’ TV shows. Tik & Tok were also part of 80s synth-pop freaks Shock, whose perverse 1984 cover of the Glitterband’s “Angel Face” has been given a mutant disco edit by an unknown hand and is out on the Crème Jak series. In related news, Ed DMX has reactivated his Breakin’ label with two releases by him (DMX Krew’s “Snow Cub” and 101 Force’s “Axid”), while Cylob kicks off his Cylob Industries imprint with a single, “Rock the Trojan Fader”, and an album of seriously skewed braindance, Trojanfaderstyle, both of which are gettable from bleep.com. Says Cylob of his new album: “It’s a relentless barrage of ideas. Beats and melodies fade in and out all the time, and you’re never quite sure what to expect—the element of surprise is really important.” True, and that’s why we love the Syntheme record on Planet Mu. Purportedly produced by an attractive young blonde girl, this frisky acid-pop number is not a million miles away from the style of Global Goon, an older, less attractive geezer. No surprises there, unfortunately.

INTERPLANET TERRY