What is this so-called "Belgium wave", if is there any one?

It doesn't exist! There's noy a Belgium Wave. It's just a couple of friends...we are all of the same age, more or less. It's not like a scene, we don't hang out...with Deus we are more friends than with other bands, because we've known each other before the music, and I'm also a huge fan. I used to know the author of a TV program, that I directed, and I used to promote them a lot. I was never jealous for something. There's no tension, nothing like in England, the Oasis/Blur thing, nothing like that.

I've found on the net a belgium artists' archive with almost 300 names in it!

There's a lot more new bands that sound like Deus, and it begins to be bands that sound like us, but the most of them sound truly different. There's a lot of different people, and different syles, which is cool, and the most important thing is that they're all flemish, which is only five millions people. It's something to be proud of.

Do they sing all in english, or in flemish too?

There's some bands who sing in their native language too, but for us...we never thought about singing in flemish. If we were doing it, we were going to do it in english, 'cause it sounds better. It's more interesting for me to write in english, 'cause it's not my first language. It's cool to learn it.

Anyway, it would have been really difficult to be understood outside Belgium, if you were singing in flemish.

Yeah, also. And the other thing is that I'm not at ease singing in Deutch. I did some Jacques Brel covers in French, which is interesting.

Has your first album been a hit, in your country?

Yeah. Loads of good reviews, and everybody was very enthusiastic about it, but we weren't happy with it, because it was too much rock. In this second one there are Djs also, we have a lot of dance stuff, a lot of jazz...everything. We are really huge music lovers.

Djs? So why did you write a song called Too Many Djs? Moreover, I know that you father was a radio Dee Jay, so why do you hate djs?

'Cause I think there are too many dee jays; it's also about us. Everytime I go out I see a deejay who has the power to play stuff that people should dance to...last couple of years I heard a lot of bad dee jays. It's also cynical to ourselves, beacause in Belgium and Holland we are deejaying a lot. I'm talking about club dee jays, radio deejays are something different.

Have you been influenced by the music played in your house when you were children?

Oh, yeah. I grow up with all the promo copies...my dad got all the records...

What kind of music it was?

Everything! My dad was a Steely Dan fan, and Small Faces...

In fact there is a relevant mod side in your music, and in the way Soulwax look.

We're also Beatles fans, and also huge Led Zeppelin fans. But you'll see it when we play live, we use to mix a lot of things.

The suits that you dressed for the Conversation Intercom video fit completely the modernist style.

We're gonna dress them tonight. I really like the style, but probably next time we'll be doing something different. I love the mod attitude, but I don't wanna be fanatic about it. There's a lot of mod people who look all like Paul Weller. I'm a huge Weller fan, but I listen to other stuff too. We're huge mod fans, but we're also huge german electronic music fans, and I'm a huge Beastie Boys fan too!

You recorded both the albums in America, in L.A. Why?

For the fist album Chris Goss, the producer, said 'it will be better for us", 'cause we hadn't any experience in the studio; he was so in love with our music that he said 'come over, it's ok'

He also produced Kyuss. Were you in love with grunge music?

I've never been a Nirvana fan; I only love some songs, but I'm always been really a fan of Soundgarden.

Well, your first album's been compared to that kind of music, but now you sound completely different!

It was the first time we went into the studio, and we didn't have any experience, we were really like four young guys saying 'Yeah, the studio! California! WOW!' and we couldn't play really well, so we tried to do what we can. Even on the first album you heard it, we tried to have samples, but we hadn't enough experience to do it.

What happened then?

"We recorded again in Los Angeles, and mixed the second album in New York, with Dave Sardy. He used to be the singer for Barkmarket, and he also produced - he was the engeneering of sounds too - Chocolate Bars, from Southpark...lots of heavy stuff, but also weird stuff; he's a good friend of Mark Ribot. He's a really cool guy, and he heard what we'd did in our little home studio, in our hometown, and he heard the demos, and he called and said 'I really love what you guys are doing it, I wanna do this!'

In the booklet you've enclosed graphics from 7" covers. Are you 'vinyl junkies'?

They are all original ones, but we changed the names of the record companies; they're all Decca, Capitol, Chess and we made it all Play it Again Sam

Your lyrics are about really simple things: love, relationships, communications...why did you choose to print them?

Only because so many people kept asking us to do so.

You 've talked before about german electronic music, and I know that you collaborated with the legendary Einsturzende Neubauten. What about it?

The weird thing is that I've never been a fan, neither a Nick Cave fan! I think their music isn't always...that impressive. I met Mark Chung, out of Neubauten - he worked for a record company, sometimes, and he's a really nice guy - he said 'I really love the things you and David do, the remixes you make, so maybe I should ask, because we're gonna make a remix album for Einsturzende Neubauten, so if you guys wanna do a song, you could do it'. And immediately I said 'I wanna do the Stella Maris song', which I thought was the best song I've heard from Neubauten, really soft, with violins...we did it, and they loved it.

And what about Tracy Bonham singing in My Cruel Joke?

For the tour of the first album she saw us playing, so she called up asking 'would you guys wanna tour with me?', and we said 'no problem'! We became really good friends, and she fell in love with our ex-drummer - now we have a new one - so she stayed with us, and at the end they got married, and now they live in New York. She's a really good friend of us.

Do you think that working for the television has been helpful to you, to understand how to move inside the music business?

No, but I've learnt to understand how industry records works, and it's not nice; it's all about money, with nothing to do with music. It helped me not to be naive, that's the only thing. The most important thing is that we still have fan. We don't wanna be like rock'n'roll stars, there's no ego things, there's no leader. We'll probably end to earn some money, but it's not my primary objective. From the moment we don't have the feelings to express ourselves and to have fun it will be over, for me it will be over, 'cause I won't be able to write good music, music that people relate to.

Thanks to The Wispering Garden