Paris (AFP)

It's been 30 years since Philippe Djian has written French lyrics by Stephan Eicher, as on the new Swiss album "Homeless Songs" released this Friday. A complicity with his "high" and "low" they tell the AFP in a new cross interview.

In a luxury hotel in Paris, the interpreter of "Lunch in peace", 59, composes the number of the novelist, 70 years old, who is at home in the Basque Country and puts the phone on the table, open speaker. The discussion can start between the two men, friends since a TV show common in the late 80s, who give themselves "my darling" before bickering gently on the respective importance of the text or music.

Philippe Djian: "Thirty years? Do not say it, people will believe that we are in a hospice of old people. Let's say rather a few years ..."

Stephan Eicher: "I do not think there's anyone else I've worked with for 30 years, with Philippe, we've survived a lot of things, and for this new album some songs have been around for a while. , without having found a place on an album that a record company or a radio could ask for.I gathered this collection of songs a little lost, maybe lame. (...) There are songs that take of time, like + Riviere +, on the album Carcassonne, which had taken five years, and then others that write faster ... + Lunch in peace +, it took me four minutes!

Philippe Djian: "What is strange for me when an album comes out is that as Stephan does not throw anything, I end up with a patchwork, I do not remember when I wrote this or that song ..."

Stephan Eicher: "On my piano, I have a binder with 40 or 50 texts not yet finished ..."

Philippe Djian: "What I know much better than the albums that we could go out together, these are the stuff he sends me, all alone on the guitar, when he begins to put a first melody on a text I think there's only me and two or three people who hear this piece like that, raw and I must say that this pleasure, it is never exceeded by the one related to the album . "

- "The public must finish it" -

Stephan Eicher: "The dream for me is that, at a certain point, the song becomes independent of me and Philippe, the audience has to finish it, I remember once playing at the Paleo Festival ( in Switzerland, Ed.), Philippe was invited to the public and I tried to watch him to see his reaction on "Highs and lows" when 30,000 people were back "I even had what I did NOT want!".

Philippe Djian: "When a whole crowd takes this, next to you, I can guarantee you that the hairs of the arms bristle, not because we say that what I wrote is great, but because it is incredible that they appropriate words that now belong to them ".

Stephan Eicher: "Many people ask me: I have a text, you do not want to sing it ... With pleasure ... But I find it much more interesting to keep our story.What becomes almost a single person: Philippe Eicher or Stephan Djian! The proof is the song + Prisonnière + (on his new album, ed.) It took 30 years to warm up to reach this text which is for me a wonder. 30 years worth, I hope it's not the end of the road? "

Philippe Djian: "Me neither, I really feel that the more you go, the more you enlarge a universe + Prisoner + is a good example Stephan opens me on new texts, new ways of expressing myself. I could not have written for another singer, it happened that I came across a guy who knows how to write songs, who does the scene in an incredible way, I could not get better! "

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