Fast Five: Victoria+Jean

How did you meet and what’s the story behind your band name?

I used to play with a drummer who knew Jean, and for one concert I was using Jean’s Guitar amplifier.
On the way back from the concert we had to stop over at Jean’s house and give his amp back.
That’s where I met him for the first time he didn’t say a word he just looked at me and smiled, he just couldn’t take his eyes of me and watched me go. I was wondering, who is this guy?

Anyway a week or two went by and the same drummer invited me to go see this new band Called “The Guilty Brothers Experience” that you just had to see!

And so I went to see this band, and there he was playing his guitar, and he was playing it like one of them from the good old days, like a Jimi would, or an Eric Clapton, he was absolutely amazing, I started to film him, and then he saw me in the crowd, and that same beautiful smile smiled at me again, but this time I thought who is he smiling at is there someone behind me, but no It was just for me. I was speechless.

After that I had to return to Paris were I was living at the time, and thought that I’d might never see him again. But he actually got to know that I lived in Paris and he went searching for me everywhere in the city, just to find me!

He had no luck there but he got my email where he wrote me a love letter. I said yes for a meet in Brussels and told him “you’ve got an hour to convince me”, he convinced me and I’ve never left since.

For our Name it’s quite simple really as we’ve been working on this together it seemed natural for us to call ourselves by our names, and to use us like an addition, “plus”, so it became Victoria+Jean.

How would you describe your music?

Well I think those who describe it the best way aren’t us, but the people who listen to us, or journalists, we liked Dark Avant Garde Pop, and since then we use that to describe what we do…
But if we had to put in words, we like doing everything as long as it’s touches us and that we feel the right vibe, because for each song, it can be different, in every sort of style.

What have you been up to so far and what can we expect over the coming months?

Well our album is to be soon released for this Spring, and so there’s a lot of preparation around that, like touring around to represent this album by doing festivals such as SXSW and CMJ (Canadian music week) with a little US tour and then we’d hit France, Germany, Switzerland. and UK

But what we’ve been up to, well we’ve been doing a lot of gigging and touring (the Uk and Canada and France and Belgium) and we just got back from Holland “Eurosonics” Festival, it was really great fun!

We’ve also been trying to wrap up our idea of doing one video per track with different directors.. we’re nearly there and we’re working on three last songs…

It’s been a real hectic year, and it feels like it has just begun!

If you could duet with anybody who would it be and why?

I don’t know, Prince, perhaps? Why, because he’s one of our favorite artists as well as Michael Jackson but he’s no longer here so we chose Prince.

What’s your desert island disc and why would you take this one album?

John Lee Hooker “I’m in the mood” it’s more a song then an album but Pretty much any sort of blues album, it’s the only music we can listen to in repeat 🙂