Your approach to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is radically different. What’s your history with that record?
This is first and foremost a creation commissioned by the Printemps de Bourges. I accepted it precisely because I missed out on David Bowie, in the sense that he did not shape my musical education. As a teenager, I was interested in the 1980s, not so much in what came before. Which gives me the necessary distance to approach this legendary record, which I’ve never seen as sacred. And I’m not afraid of David Bowie fans lying in wait! Fifty years is a long time when speaking about a rock record. I’m approaching Ziggy’s character through his psychology, getting as close to him as possible, but through the prism of today’s issues. That’s my way in. What interests me about a song like “Five Years”, which opens the album, is to play with the idea of that duration while we know there are elections in four years’ time, and all this while facing the challenge of climate change. I turned to Afrofuturism, to African science fiction. It’s an essential choice for me. And while David Bowie was a pioneer of genderfuck, in an occidental-centric framework—which is his story—speaking about Africans always means talking about hunger, or about fatal crossings of the Mediterranean Sea. Whereas I want to show strong beings, at the forefront of something. It’s good for the mind! In my version of Ziggy Stardust, I go to Niger, where my father originally came from.
By transforming this icon of glam rock into a non-binary African alien, aren’t you doing what David Bowie, the famous chameleon, used to do?
I’m not singing the songs in French, but I’ve changed the arrangements and rhythm, focusing on a piano-and-voice foundation. There will be three of us on stage: Jean-Sylvain Le Gouic on synthesizers and bass, Yovan Girard on violin, while I provide vocals and percussion. My reinterpretation of Ziggy Stardust has no guitar solo, like on “Moonage Daydream”, which I’ll be singing with Oko Ebombo—while another song will be performed with singer Imany. The idea is to experiment and to take those songs towards new territories, by focusing on danceable and atmospheric moments. Covering songs only makes sense if it involves innovation, following my own desires for metamorphosis, sometimes exaggeratedly so, letting myself be carried by the breath of an artist who was a true chameleon indeed.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet and translated into English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach