ITW Longueur d'Ondes été 2025

ONE RUSTY BAND

THIRST FOR FREEDOM

INTERVIEW: ARNO JAFFRÉ - PHOTO: JIMMY METTIER

White Stripes, Black Keys, Black Diamond Heavy in the US, Dirty Deep, The Blue Butter Pot and The Inspector Cluzo in France neo blues-rock in the post-garage format has become a discipline practiced by countless bands adopting a roots approach that almost always bathes in distortion. To the point where it’s become difficult to stand out among such a cohort. Yet that’s exactly what ONE RUSTY BAND achieves. Their third album, freshly released, was recorded live-in-the-room in their home studio in Brittany. Interview with an explosive duo.

Your third album came out last June and the least we can say is that it has been unanimously received. That must be comforting for you after so much effort?

Greg: We’re super happy it’s out because it’s the culmination of almost two years of work, from writing to production, in our home studio! It feels good to release it and see that people enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Léa: It’s indeed very comforting. It’s also great to say that it no longer belongs to us and that anyone can make it their own. Creation is a lot about turning inward. So it’s nice to step out of that and share. For us, an album is above all a business card for hitting the road, doing concerts and making encounters!

Line After Line means “line after line”, can you tell us a bit more?

Greg: It’s a metaphor for several things. First the white lines on the road. Indeed, over these past three years, we’ve been lucky to tour a lot and hence spend quite a lot of time in the van watching those lines roll by the window. It’s also all those lines of words, those lyrics, in notebooks and on loose sheets that, little by little, become songs.

Léa: This notion also represents all the cable mess we roll out show after show. There are two of us on stage but we’ve got more cables, to plug in our gear, than a five-piece band! We often feel tangled in them. In short, “line after line” means “mile after mile”, “song after song”, “stage set-up after stage set-up”, “gig after gig”… The tour, basically! No drug story in this title even though some have thought so! For us it’s more road, a bag of chips and rock’n’roll!

I heard riffs “borrowed” from Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), Brian Setzer (The Stray Cats), John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival) or Paul Personne. Are these musicians part of your references?

Greg: Indeed, I was bottle-fed from a very young age on these musicians my parents used to listen to. Then I discovered others through their vinyl collection like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple…

Léa: We’re also pretty inspired by more contemporary musicians like Seasick Steve, The White Stripes, Jack White or The Record Company. We listen to lots of French bands including Dirty Deep, The Blue Butter Pot, Last Train, The Bloyet Brothers, MADAM, The Dynamite Shakers… On the road, to soothe our ears, we lean more soul, from the 1960s to today. We also love garage rock and psych-rock, two styles that influence us a lot.

Your collaboration sparks… and it yields a track like “I Wanna Kill You”. You should argue more often when we see the result, no?

Léa: Hummm… No! It’s too awful a feeling when we argue! Even though I love that song! Precisely, it’s great because now we no longer fight, we sing it out, we dance a little rock, move the knees, elbows, head and boom… the crisis is passed!

You have almost single-handedly awakened the blues-rock scene in France. But where does your love for the blues in general stem from?

Greg: My father played drums in amateur blues-rock bands and my earliest musical memories, as a kid, are of seeing and hearing them play, full blast, in rehearsals or concerts… I too wanted to make big sound like them! I wanted to do rock. It was much later that I discovered that the roots of rock were blues: Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson through Skip James or Muddy Waters. Through their music, they tell their era and their experience as African-Americans in a very harsh slavery and post-slavery period. The first electrified blues and the beginnings of rock’n’roll were a revelation to me (rock being ultimately just spiced-up and accelerated blues). I discovered part of United States history. It is from there that much of modern music flows.

"All alarms are activated and our governments don’t care, they cover their ears."

Making so much noise as a duo isn’t given to everyone. How do you work daily to be so performant?

Léa: We eat and sleep a lot! But above all, we rehearse a lot because this project demands a lot physically and we need to be in shape if we want to play properly.

Greg: For the sensation and that big four-piece band sound, I created a special chain with my guitar pedals.

Léa: Caution – geek moment!

Greg: It gives the impression that there’s a bass and the guitar is routed through 2 amps for a stereo and wall-of-sound effect. I’m a big geek thanks to my sound-technician background, all this thrills me a lot! But as mentioned above it does indeed make for a whole lot of cables!

The current situation of culture in our country is rather alarming. How do you live it on the road?

Léa: Unfortunately, the situation isn’t only about culture. All alarms are activated and our governments don’t care, they cover their ears. On our little scale, on the road, we’ve mostly seen the meteorological damages: fires, floods, a stage swept away by a mudslide… On the cultural side, it’s certain that budget cuts will impact associations’ ability to organise events. Culture is often the first to be cut, supposedly less important, less vital. Whereas when everything goes to nuts, it’s essential to have spaces where people meet, exchange, share, see things that pull you out of your everyday and the world. Fortunately—and we’ll never thank them enough—there are people, volunteers, cultural stakeholders, programmers, local actors who don’t give up and continue to make and create many beautiful projects. Thanks to them!