I felt it. I felt it as I arrived, that the email I’d sent to their manager had been barely glanced over. Coming down the stairs of the Petit Campus with Jason Collett, I asked him where his guitar was. “Um, uh, why, will I need it?” I knew it. Did he know why we were there? “An interview, right?” Nope. We explained the Take Away Shows to him. He had received our email, but had glanced over it in about two seconds, thinking that it was about another interview to be packed in before the concert. He went upstairs to get his guitar, telling us that he wasn’t use to playing in the street like this, but that it’d be fun.
We walked around some touristy restaurants for a while, quickly realising that while Canadians are on a whole much friendlier than Parisians, when they’re sitting on a patio and a musician asks them if they want to hear a song, the answer is universal: niet.
Happily it would have taken more than that to stop us; happily Zeus, Jason’s touring partners on this “Bonfire Ball Tour” were perched on the fire escape, smoking cigarettes and tweaking their guitar strings, ready to lend a hand even before we had introduced ourselves. As a bonus, an improvised “Twist and Shout” with a passerby.
Zeus was also unaware that we had come to film them, had also skimmed the email. But seeing their enthusiasm, we had no doubts about the outcome of the session. We were right.
What was great about them was that they never stopped playing. Never. Their musical bond, and their creative mechanism: if you write a song, you sing it. So let’s explore the possibilities. And, really, we had been bluffed. We didn’t know Zeus before we filmed them, but today, after hearing them play on a fire escape, in the street, around a fountain, and later that night on stage, we are still wondering why this band isn’t filling concert halls the world over.
Translated by Tara Dominguez
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