Amélie composer Yann Tiersen: ‘I loved Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine’

Yann Tiersen is in his home on Ushant, a small island off the westernmost point of France, when we talk. The Breton musician and composer has been prepping for his mini-tour of Ireland by engaging in non-musician-like practices that include checking oil and water levels, ensuring batteries are fully charged, testing bilge pumps, placing anti-slip mats on tables, and inspecting hydraulic lines, safety rails and mast fittings.

Tiersen, you see, isn’t going on a road trip: he is sailing to Ireland (as well as to the Isle of Man, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, Orkney, Liverpool, the Isles of Scilly and the Faroe Islands). As you read this, the acclaimed composer has already traversed the southern Irish coast, docking alongside a jetty or two, and playing intimate shows in Connolly’s of Leap and St Luke’s Church in Cork city. The tour (subtitled “an enigmatic sailing adventure”) is intended as a political statement on the ecological impact of large-scale touring.

“After lockdown we started touring again with a series of US shows,” he says. “Being on a bus travelling from city to city, with the engine running all day long and the generator on all night long, felt completely wrong to me. What you might say is normal touring is something that requires a lot of money. You need to hire a tour bus, to play in venues of a certain size that you hope will be full of people in order to pay for the hire of the bus, and so on – it’s such a vicious circle.

[ 'There isn't a musical culture in France' ]

“I had previously toured Norway by bicycle and realised that everything is simpler when you remove certain things from the mechanics of getting from one place to another. That’s where visiting the Celtic countries by boat comes in. It’s touring in a simpler way, where many things become possible. With the boat I spend less money on hotels, because when on tour it’s my home. It’s also more sustainable and, for me, at least, much more enjoyable.”

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It is one of several aspects of his life that Tiersen has rethought over the past five years. He has always been a somewhat contradictory success story: a musician who doesn’t like being described as a soundtrack composer even though he won a César for his music for Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film; and a musician who says he doesn’t really have a classical background even though he started playing piano at four and violin at six, and trained at musical academies in Nantes, Rennes and Boulogne. Like his genre-hopping music, it seems Tiersen is a blend of benign contradictions with an assuredly intriguing backstory.

Is it true that when he was 13 he broke his violin, bought an electric guitar and formed a rock band? “That was a teenage crisis kind of thing – but, yes. I was fed up with classical music, the technicalities. At the time my mother was very proud of me playing the violin, and whenever we had a guest at our house I would be called upon to play it. I so much wanted to say ‘f*** off’, but I always played. No wonder I broke my violin. My real music school was when I started making music in the late 1980s, in a punk band.”

It helped that as a teenager in Rennes, the city’s annual three-day Rencontres Trans Musicales festival opened his ears to acts such as Nirvana, Television, Suicide, The Cramps and Einstürzende Neubauten. He also loved The Stooges and Joy Division, he says, “but it wasn’t just punk rock; there were also local bands, and lots of electro-clash music. I also loved Sonic Youth and the Irish band My Bloody Valentine.”

Tiersen’s thirst for different music could barely be appeased. Guided by what he termed “a musical anarchic vision”, he embraced a broad range of instrumentation, to include everything from piano accordion, strings and vibraphone to toy piano, bouzouki and a wealth of keyboards. When he’s particularly adventurous, you might hear him play a bicycle wheel, a typewriter, pots and pans, and a car bonnet.

His creativity evolved initially, he explains, from working with electronic music and samples. “At first it was guitar and then electronic stuff, and through that I discovered Steve Reich and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.” He doesn’t work within any of the usual boundaries, he adds, because he loves an infinitely wide range of music. “I listen to so much that I knew I never wanted to be stuck in one place, musically speaking. And that means it’s all about a gradual evolvement from punk to electronic to acoustic music to postrock and back to electronic again. It’s continuous exploration, of course, but it’s never a chore.”

He has stopped playing large venues, he says, because “smaller shows are much better – you can meet people who pay their money to see you; you can talk to them at the bar after the gig. This tour by sailing is about how to engage with that aspect of touring again, which is why I have downscaled things.”

Then it’s time to say goodbye – life jackets need to be checked, and a logbook requires updating. “There is nothing I love as much as sailing. Speaking of which, I hope the Irish weather is good for us!”

Yann Tiersen plays Whelan’s, Dublin, on Saturday, June 24th, and the Belfast Empire on Thursday, June 29th. Kerber Complete: Modular Synthesis, Solo Piano, Remixes is due to be released on Friday, September 15th, by Mute Records