Interview: Klone
These songs are early, unreleased songs from Klone. In my head I was always thinking about coming back to work on them later, as best as possible. They were some of the first acoustic songs of Klone.
In late November 2024 Joe Norman from E&D linked up via Zoom with Guillaume Bernard, guitarist and founding member of the French art-rockers Klone. The interview began with a note of mild terror as your humble interviewer – filling his water bottle from a tap near to his university office – became trapped in the staff kitchen and had to be rescued with mere minutes to go before the call. Unfazed by this potential disaster, Joe and Guillaume spoke about fatherhood, touring, recording, and Klone’s amazing latest album, The Unseen (2024) from Pelagic Records.
E&D: Where are you Zooming from at the moment? Are you at home or on tour?
GB: We have just returned from tour. I’m at home with my first child. She is only three months old, so I’m still getting used to doing everything!
E&D: Congratulations! I saw you play your wonderful acoustic show with Riverside earlier in the year. It seems quite rare that I see bands play fully acoustic sets. What made it so good for me was I felt like you guys took it really seriously. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to do acoustic shows as well as electric shows?
GB: We played an acoustic show a few years ago in 2016 at the Théâtre de la Coupe d’Or de Rochefort, playing with Anneke Van Giersbergen, the ex-singer of The Gathering. She really wanted to do a song with Klone. So we tried to prepare acoustic songs for this show, and it was the first time we did this. It was a really pleasure to discover that we can do our songs like that. It was a really stressful experience but we thought it was really great that people were prepared to listen to these songs in a different way. After this first show, we decided to record Klone’s first unplugged CD. We rearranged all the songs differently than we had before. After this we did a big tour in France, around 40 shows. Day after day you’re playing your songs and you get really comfortable doing this. It’s a real pleasure to play acoustic guitar rather than electric, because it’s better for my ears; and it’s cool because you sit down on a chair and focus on what you’re playing. It’s cool. We also have a metronome, a click with electric. But it’s more free with the acoustic because then the tempo of the songs can move. We can play slower if we like. I really prefer it.
E&D: You can focus on feeling the song, I guess. How much do you have to change and rewrite the songs when playing acoustic?
GB: It depends on the song. Sometimes it’s really easy because you have to play the same riff. But sometimes I have to think about it more and play it differently, trying to make some thing newer. Sometimes it’s easy because when I compose my songs I use my full guitar,; I can go back to the roots of the song. Maybe we have around 20 songs for the set-list we can play.
E&D: How did you come to cover Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’? It is a wonderful version. You really made it your own, a Klone song. How did you come to cover that particular song?
GB: We wanted to make a tribute to Soundgarden. Everyone in Klone is really influenced by Soundgarden, so it was really natural for us. Chris Cornell was one of my favourite singers. We wanted to do a popular song. If even there’s not a lot of rock music on the radio in France, you can still hear that particular song a lot on the big radio stations. When I was young, it was a song I had in my head. We didn’t change a lot on the song because the song is perfect already. Like covering The Beatles, where everything is perfect already. If you try to move some parts, I don’t think it would be good! The only thing we changed really is the voice of our singer; we added some growl on it. My guitar is the same part, although maybe the way I play it is different. I don’t need to change anything there. So it’s cool because when we did this song in the UK, people were singing all the lyrics. It was so cool for us because, when we play it in France, people aren’t as good at understanding the English, so they just sing the chorus.
E&D: Let’s talk about The Unseen. It’s a great album and your tenth. I’d love to hear about some of the writing process and some of the themes you were exploring in that album.
GB: These songs are early, unreleased songs from Klone. In my head I was always thinking about coming back to work on them later, as best as possible. They were some of the first acoustic songs of Klone. When I began to compose these songs, we were playing metal music and the songs didn’t seem to fit. So, the singer and I had originally thought that we would do a side project with these songs. But we prefer to make this type of music today than we did before. These days, I prefer progressive rock music to old-school metal, even if I still like bands like Pantera. There was more correlation with these songs with what I feel today.
E&D: That’s interesting because it works as a selection of songs in their own right. And it certainly feels like a natural part of the evolution of the band. It feels fresh and like you can have written it now. What was it like revisiting those old songs after so many years? It must be exciting.
GB: For me, it was really cool because I didn’t have to work a lot on it. I needed to focus on the arrangements to find the small ideas that connect things between us. It was also exciting because the bass parts are very cool and it was cool to hear them today. The songs sound better today because we have more influences and there is less risk on the ideas we choose. We don’t have to stay “true” to metal [laughs]. Today, we don’t worry about needing approval.
E&D: As much as I love metal, it can certainly be quite restrictive. People expect heavy all the time. You’ve always broken free from stereotypes, using saxophones etc. The sax works wonderfully on the new album, especially on ‘Interlaced’.
GB: We’ve used them for several years now, especially for solos. I prefer to do a small solo, just four notes at a time. I’m not the best guitarist, not a shredder, so the saxophone is a real pleasure for me.
E&D: Yes; shredding is fun, but sometimes a small melody can add more emotional impact with a few notes rather than a hundred. You guys are really good at that. I really like your song, ‘Desire Line’. I love the line, “I am until what I am until I’m gone.” It’s powerful. Can you tell us about that song?
GB: It sounds a bit like a folk song, I think, a traditional French song. I really like this song because there’s a good mood on it. It’s a song for a Sunday, for when the sun is shining outside. It’s a positive song for me. I had the melody in my head for a long time. When I write songs, I’m often walking around and I start to get a melody, and I record it on my phone. I listen maybe once immediately after. I listen to it again later and I think this is something cool that should be a song. I take my guitar and I try to find the way I can play it. Sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes it’s cool. Usually when I have the same memory of it in my head for a while after, that means it makes a good song. My brain is focused on it, and each day I can hear the same melody in my head; so sometimes, when I have to choose between different ideas, my brain selects the good one because I remember it.
E&D: And if you remember it, there’s a good chance other people will remember it too. Is songwriting in Klone a fully collaborative process?
GB: It usually begins with me working on some guitar parts and melodies. When that’s okay, I usually work separately with each musician of mine. I try to spend one or two days with our bassist. Usually I propose what I want him to to do, and he’ll tell me what he thinks about it. If we have to change something, we’ll change it. Sometimes I just try to get the best of him so I say, it’s cool, but maybe I’ll ask him to change some details. Then it’s the same with the other musicians.
E&D: That sounds like a really productive working arrangement – developed over twenty-five years of Klone. And do you have another tour coming up soon?
GB: We hope to come back to tour the UK in May. We’d like to play with the band Teiger, from London. But we don’t know the details yet.
E&D: Great! I’ll look forward to seeing you live again. Was there anything else you wanted to mention? What else is in the pipeline for Klone?
GB: We’re released our new video for ‘After the Sun’ recently, so we hope our fans will check it out!
E&D: I’ll look forward to that too! Thank you very much for speaking to me today.
The Unseen was released on November 8 2024 via Pelagic Records and can be purchased and downloaded HERE ON BANDCAMP.
Main photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
