Boussoles elles & eux Crossed swords An iconoclastic actress, a garage band and a master of psychedelic rock: Emmanuelle Seigner, The Limiñanas and Anton Newcombe create some truly devilish stuff. The group L’Épée (The Sword), formed been looking for, in vain, for years; in says enthusiastically. “A sword is used two years ago, gelled quickly with other words, people who are on the same both to bestow a title and to cut off an urgency befitting rock music and wavelength, who have the same heads, and these are uncompromising, was fine-tuned in just a few days. At the references as me. It didn’t take us long totrenchant songs. I love being part of time, Emmanuelle Seigner had very get to know each other; things clicked a group, not just the solo singer. It nearly given up music to focus on her immediately between us.” corresponds more to my culture, and acting career. A debut album with the One week after a first phone call, SeignerI also like the summer camp vibe. We Parisian duo Ultra Orange, in 2007, had was at Lionel and Marie Limiñana’s and decided virtually overnight to go on tour partially fulfilled the deepest aspirationsbehind a microphone for a first test run, together, not stop with the album.” of this wild child raised in a wealthy which ended up as the title track on the A fifth element joined the electric crew: neighborhood who was totally smitten album released by The Limiñanas in Bertrand Belin, who wrote three texts with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Yet she was 2018, Shadow People. “I really put a lot and added his booming voice to a duo dissatisfied with two other albums she of pressure on myself,” says Lionel, titled “On dansait avec elle.” “I conceived released, both a bit too conventional— “because I knew Emmanuelle as an the album like an Italian-style anthology despite a duet with Iggy: she couldn’t actress; I especially loved Polanski’s film,” explains Lionel. “Each song is a play the pop star stuck in the narrow Frantic. I didn’t know what she was short story, with Emmanuelle as the vision of the sixties that the art directorsexpecting from me, I just knew what she main character.” Hence the cinematic envisaged for her. didn’t want—something bland. That feel to the album, which combines the “They wanted me to do covers à la Bardot, worked for me, because I don’t know velvety languor of a sixties garage band, that wasn’t at all me,” she explains, how to do that.” contrasting timbres and instrumental surrounded by the people with whom What started out as a solo album with clash of Ennio Morricone, a bit of yé-yé she finally found a new spark—The “shadow people” accompanying Seigner twisted by Newcombe’s devilish Limiñanas, a supersonic couple from took a different turn when Newcombe distortions and the urban abrasiveness Cabestany (Pyrénées-Orientales) and showed up. An old friend of the duo of The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Anton Newcombe, an American who from Perpignan, he added a psychedelic Furs,” which infuses the overall sound. relocated to Berlin and leader of note to the songs, then had a strange As the unforgettable star of Roman The Brian Jonestown Massacre. “When dream in which he “saw” the group that Polanski’s Venus in Fur, Seigner has I heard The Limiñanas for the first time, the four would create, as well as a name: found in this music the pure rock sound I knew that this was exactly what I’d L’Épée. “It’s a brilliant name,” Seigner she’s always dreamed of. Anton Newcombe, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie et Lionel Limiñana. 52