Extract of Interview in Les autres mondes webzine, 2006, France

Interviewer: Asphodel for Les autres mondes webzine: www.lesautresmondes.info

Can you tell us how you started? How did you know that music would be your faith in life?

If I see “Truth” coming towards me, I hurry in the opposite direction.

Let’s talk about Apple Pentacle… Could you tell us what this album is about?

Apple Pentacle celebrates Persephone’s return … Her consort The Green Man links to The Apple Tree Man (whose) pentacle was on the shield of Sir Gawain, who battled the Green Knight. The apple was buried as a gift to the dead.

If I tell you that you have created a new analysis of fairy tales, mixing the pure visions everybody have to a more ‘fatidic’ vision of this world, what would you say…?

I’d say you were being too generous! There are earlier pioneers, like Dunsany (forerunner of Tolkien)… If we look back to the Latin Fatae (Fate) – origin of the French Fey / Fay – or to Greek sirens, Celtic banshee, Arabic Djinn … it’s clear that fatalistic enchantment was never far.

Let’s play a pretty game… I gave you some names, and you’ll tell me what that evokes you, and what link between your work and the character/person you can make:

– Dante Alighieri? Mark and I love Divina Commedia. In ‘Canto IV’ (on Alexandria) we evoked Limbo… We returned to it in ‘Dante O’ Dore’ (alluding to paintings by Gustav Doré) for Love Sessions 1. Later, Dante’s Inferno resurfaced for ‘The Throng on the Pier’ (on Alabaster), with The Iliad of Homer.

– Brian Froud? At his wildest, he reminds me of Arthur Rackham. We have his volumes at home.

– Sabine Adélaïde? Sabine, visual artist… our relationship is symbiotic. Over the years I’ve gained some insight into her creative world, staying in her home… her art is idiosyncratic…

– Olivier Ledroit? Oh yes, his pictures are elegant, bewitching.

– Dante Gabriele Rossetti? For years I was drawn to the pre-Raphaelites for their chivalry and grace. Yet I’ve begun to question their idealism… we still have organic bodies…

– Richard Doyle? His watercolour Under the Dock Leaves… dense foliage, wispy forms (is) in a book on Victorian Fairy Painting a friend gave me (with) paintings by Huskisson, Fuseli, Paton, Dulac, Fitzgerald, Danby, Simmons, Scott, Maybank, Canziani and others.

Could you tell us more about what Louisa John Krol’s library (also video library) looks like?

Cavafy, Rilke, Baudelaire, Milton, Dickinson, Blake, Yeats, Pessoa, Calvino, Balzac, Flaubert, Laclos, Kafka, Holderlin and more. We have all Shakespeare’s plays and many by classical playwrights such as Euripides, also The Odyssey and Iliad of Homer, Aeneid of Virgil, medieval romances … audio-books … As far as DVDs go: The X-Files … murder-mysteries, sci-fi, comedy and Shooting the Past on BBC about the struggle of eccentric outsiders to save a unique collection of photography.

You are compared to Kate Bush, in a different dimension. More “faery”, more “fantastic” (in the literary meaning). What do you think about this comparison?

I welcome it [and admire] Francesca Nicoli (Ataraxia), Shannon Wright (ex-Crowsdell), Azam Ali (Vas), Evi Stergiou (Daemonia Nymphe), Catarina Raposo (Dwelling), Mandy Bernhardt (Stoa) and Choe St Liphard (Collection D’Arnell Andrea).

What do you think about the place of women in the music? Is there a female musician that touched you so much these last weeks?

I fell in love with two albums recently: Lullaby to Liquid Pig and On the Way Down From the Moon Palace by Lisa Germano.