LAVVI EBBEL a very original sound. Do you think that he added anything else to Lavvi Ebbel? He was a very good musician and a magical guitarist; he still is.We were very creative but not really good musicians. He put our energy in a very authentic and new sound. What happened after the release of the album Kiss Me Kate? We were supposed to play at theWerchter festival and that would have been the perfect promotion and breakthrough. But a few weeks before the concert, we were cancelled by the festival. Our record company was furious. Why did you record a song in Mexican Spanish called “Telepatia”? Can you please tell us more about this? I had made a trip to Central America and tried to speak Spanish. The lyrics are partly taken from a book I used to study Spanish. What happened that the band split? A lot of reasons but mostly the fact that it seemed impossible to make a career with a Belgian rock band. There was no industry and no rock-media; the radios did not play our music. This explained the reason why all the groups split: TC Matic, Luna Twist… After the split of the band, you were part of La Cosa Nostra, a band a bit more funk.What can you please tell us about this project? The difference with Lavvi Ebbel was that the musicians were really very good but the band never had Lavvi Ebbel’s joyful creativity.And again : La Cosa Nostra started at a very bad moment,when the BelPop wave was over and out. I want to ask you about a couple of things that I think I got from a Kloot Per W’s interview translated with the translator of Google: there was a kind of supergroup called LSP, there you played with him some Lavvi Ebbel songs, right? This led to more collaborations with him according to what I understood. Can you please tell us more of this? There was something similar called the BelPop Basterds,wasn’t it? I played a few times with LSP; Kloot never did.We formed together The BelPop Bastards with a lot of musicians from the early BelPop. I performed some Lavvi Ebbel songs. Apart from working as a journalist, you have worked in the film industry, directing but also acting. Do you think that your time with Lavvi Ebbel has influence your posterior career in other arts? www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be - 10 - Sure. I worked a lot with Kloot Per W as a musician. Lavvi Ebbel even performed a song in my last monologue. You have been in politics and part of the European Parliament. Did your colleagues know that you were a singer? Some Flemish knew but politics are a very different world. A lot of European politicians have a very different and sometimes artistic past but that remains mostly hidden. In 2013, the band came back, thanks to CC De Werf. Did you feel like playing again with the others? How did you feel during the first rehearsals? We had not met for thirty years! But we all felt like playing again.The first rehearsals were pretty complicated after so many years but our performance at De Werf was as good as ever. Kloot PerWwas the substitute for the late Francis Gheys. He is quite famous in Belgium, right? He was with the The Employees, another classic band of the period, right? Kloot does not play with us anymore.There were about 12 different bass-players with the band. They all had their influence. Wir Schaffen Das! was your last single. Why did you choose some ofAngela Merkel’s words as a title? It was just funny to use some soundbites and make it look like the song was about Merkel and a political statement, which it was not. Just playing with words… How did you develop your way of performing? Did you have any artist as a reference? I think I was very much influenced by David Byrne, who I admire a lot. What can you advance of the future of the band? When are we going to have a new album? I think we will record some of the punk songs we unearthed. I would love to performmore, so we will stream songs to tell everybody we are still around! www.facebook.com/LavviEbbel François Zappa © Published by the kind permission of El Garaje de Frank www.elgarajedefrank.es
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