ONE RUSTY BAND DOESN'T INTEND TO RUST ANY TIME SOON!
Between sharp blues-rock, tap dancing, acrobatics..The duo embraces an identity unlike any other.
What’s rusty today at ONE RUSTY BAND? The question at least brings a smile to its two members, Grégory Garghentini and Léa Barbier. It might even seem rather absurd, given how smoothly everything now runs in their somewhat crazy idea, born ten years ago, of starting a project that might have been laughed at and then dropped: mixing a craving for throbbing guitars and a little “one man band” background for him, her taking on tap dancing, yet that in turn reflected,in a way, a penchant for risk, inherited from a circus experience and a thoroughly travelled South America.
Rust at ONE RUSTY BAND is found in… Greg’s hair colour, and incidentally in a guitar made even before the band existed, crafted from an electric radiator that had been discarded in a trash bin.
“This nickname, given to me by chance, fitted well because it carried, through it and the initial project, a nod to all the bluesmen I like, who sound a bit gritty, with gravelly voices like Muddy Waters,” says the former sound engineer who, when he is not eating asphalt on Europe’s roads with Léa, loves nothing more than spending hours at his mixing console to add a little more presence to the ONE RUSTY BAND sound. “Léa began tap dancing and we quickly performed in the streets — the best school to know if what you do makes sense and grabs attention.” And since, in Léa’s own words, the band runs “on gaffer tape and cable-ties,” meaning how DIY remains the rule here, there’s no reason to change the name. Nor any reason to change the intentions whose outcome shows more clearly than ever on a third album, Line After Line, and especially in live day-to-day where musicality and sense of spectacle allow the duo to perform in all sorts of different contexts. “We find it silly to go to the other end of France and drive ten hours for an isolated gig,” explains she who finally decided to also sing on this third album. Hence the idea of staying longer on site, like setting up workshops or making guitars from cigar boxes. But beyond that, which is just one example, what we offer allows us to perform on a music festival stage as well as in a street-arts festival animation, and that’s something we care about a lot. It sums up who we are.”
Xavier Bonnet
