Words by Francis Jones

It is over eleven years since Versailles duo Air released their seminal debut album, Moon Safari. The record sold in huge numbers and programme makers, advertisers and dinner party hosts alike adopted its songs. Over-exposure would distort perceptions of the band. Some even damned them with the ‘easy listening’ tag. As they release fifth studio album, Love 2, Jean-Benoît Dunckel explains to AU how Air have been sorely misunderstood.

The first impression created by Air’s first full-length album, Moon Safari, has proven stubbornly enduring. That they have been defined by its success is not an entirely bad thing. The album is widely considered a classic after all, an archetype of languid, ever so sensual, European pop. However, whilst many have exiled them to the past, the twosome – Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin – have continued to experiment and push relentlessly forward. There was the voyage-to-the-outer-limits adventuring of 10,000 Hertz Legend (2001), the excursions into film, most notably the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (2000), and an acclaimed collaboration with Charlotte Gainsbourg, for whose album 5:55 (2006) they wrote and played the music.

How dispiriting then for them to find that their new album, Love 2, is being described simply as Moon Safari Mark II, a return to form – the implication being, of course, that everything they’ve done since then has been below par, or somehow uncharacteristic. Jean-Benoît Dunckel is not pleased. Insisting I call him JB, he gives a sigh and wearily admits that he is, “Very disappointed with the media. They just don’t listen. A lot of people are attached to what we have done before, the article is already written in their head and they just listen to the album quickly on their computer. This is what you get when you are an established band. Our past is much stronger than our present. We are judged always by what we have done, rather than what we are doing.”

JB stresses that Air are always searching for the mountainous terrain, looking to scale new and more demanding peaks. If others cannot perceive this, then that’s their problem. “I want to shock people, rather than do something with no sense of belief, that has no hills and is all flat,” he says, in that deliciously piquant accent. An exasperated snort and he continues, firing out short sentences like verbal bullet points. “We want to react against the last one [album]. We want to do something different. We are always searching for new ideas. There is always some tension. We are anxious that we do not simply regenerate ourselves. These feelings and emotions go into the music and transform into sound. That is how it works. We are humans and we are artists and everything we experience goes into the music. We risk failure every time we make an album. We would prefer to do something that is totally misunderstood than to repeat ourselves to get success. We hope, and we know, that our fans want to be surprised, for us to inspire wonder in them. ‘Oh, so there is a new Air album, what is the feeling behind it, what is the idea?’”

To some extent, you can sympathise with the critics who JB slams for merely noting the resemblance between Love 2 and Moon Safari. On first listen, the new record is everything we’ve come to expect from the band whose name is a backronym for Love, Imagination and Dream [Amour, Imagination, Rêve]. The motif of romantic obsession that has studded every one of their records is present; ‘So Light Her Footfall’, for example, finds them infatuated, quite simply, with the way in which a woman walks. In less delicate hands, such levels of yearning could be considered the preserve of the stalker, but in Air’s grasp it is a beautiful study in unrequited love. “I perceive it more as a melancholy,” suggests Dunckel of the mood that Air’s music evokes. “It is that feeling to be happy to be sad. Yes, we are like that. Melancholy is the most shared feeling on earth.”

At the risk of inflaming JB’s ire – and joining the ranks of media types who’ve disappointed him – we have to say that a shared mood is not the only feature that the new album and its predecessors have in common. Yes, there are characteristics that give Love 2 an identity distinct from previous releases, but, often, its sounds have a familiarity to them, sweet, balmy and light, like fresh-spun candyfloss. In these regards, Love 2 is indeed, whisper it, classic Air.

When pushed, Dunckel concedes that there are recurring, common characteristics. However, he cannot help but return to admonishing those who judge them only by their past achievements, or who wilfully misunderstand them. “Sometimes we are misunderstood and especially in the UK. I don’t know what their problem is with prog-rock there, but all I can assure you is that we are not prog-rock. Air is not rock at all. But, you know, we are putting out albums and music and to be misunderstood sometimes is typical. We accept to be criticised. I think that everyone should be criticised. It is good for us and for the story of music in general. Criticism is interesting, but only when it is well done. Not when it comes from someone being disappointed, or from a journalist who didn’t hear what he expected from us. I don’t like it when people’s reactions are based on fashion, when they expect something to fit a particular style and if something doesn’t have it [that style], then their reaction is to disappointed and they are conditioned to criticise.”

Given such sentiments, we cannot help but question whether Air believe that they have any obligation to their fans, whether they believe they should ever give them what they want, or give in to the demands of fashion. Like a true artist, or someone who has been insulated against commercial demands by money and success, JB instantly dismisses any suggestion that Air march to the beat of anyone’s drum but their own. “We have been fashionable, but it was a stroke of luck. We have been chosen, but it is impossible to force that. Now, we follow our own way and maybe, one day, it will be fashionable again.”

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