The Young Gods

“We are all 60something - but if we have the energy to do things, let’s go. To keep this motivation after 40 years, it’s like, ‘Envoyé, go for it and fuck off!”

Four decades ago, The Young Gods reconfigured rock music using the new technology of sampling in a manner no one else had thought to. In a rock and pop world dominated by Anglo-American orthodoxies, they proposed something huge and avant European in origin. Whereas others lazily recycled samples of old James Brown and Led Zeppelin riffs, in a spirit of enfeebled postmodernism, as if to suggest there was nothing new under the sun, The Young Gods created a new, elemental energy using the dead matter of the rock and classical music they sampled as fossil fuels - they rediscovered fire, a fire that raged through their first two albums - The Young Gods and L’Eau rouge / Red Water. The formula was simple - drums, voice, samples - but what they wrought was revolutionary, post-postmodern.