Editor’s (Extended) Note: It’s taken me way too long to wrap my brain around this interview. Or really, just to get to it. It has been my albatross for the last three months. I don’t think I ever cared so much about an interview – or had such regrets for being such an idiot, asking the wrong, absurd questions and not asking the right ones. Now having gone through it all, finally, I realize I was being a bit tough on myself.
Frankly, getting to talk to the man behind Mcbaise as the first interview I landed for this blog felt at the time like too much too soon. I am trying to channel the artist inside of me with this page, something I felt was squeezed out of me after two decades of writing under deadline pressure.
Then to have the chance talk to somebody as talented as McBess, and I held myself to an even higher standard. I am truly grateful that he granted the interview in the first place.
I over-prepared and worked up anxiety heading into it, putting the finishing touches on my preparation at a London coffee shop right before walking into his store, The Dudes Factory, where his art, clothing and music is sold under the satirical theme of a Heating and Cooling business. They are selling Cool, after all. He was kind as we chatted in a pub a short walk from his store in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood back in late February for about 90 minutes.
Now, the real shame I have is that it took me this long to get this published.
Sorry, Matt, which is how he introduced himself to me.
Mcbaise, the funky and moody psychedelic music project of the illustrator and musician known as McBess, is playing one of the few shows it performs today (May 26) at Paris’ Le Hasard Ludique with Pale Regard, one of the amazing bands that is signed to his record label, Dirty Melody Records. If you happen to be in Paris today, get tickets here.
I really wish I could be there. And one day soon, I hope to catch Mcbaise perform.
Just not today, unfortunately.
There are psychedelic music lovers around the world who know about the genius of the multi-talented London-based artist McBess, aka Matthieu Bessudo, originally from the South of France. I know his music and art would have wider appeal if only more people knew.
As we walked from his shop to the pub, before I had my digital recorder going, he mentioned the label he has previously and almost jokingly given his Mcbaise project: yacht rock.
In my mind, that label doesn’t do this music justice, but if he wants to call it yacht rock, I shouldn’t argue. He is the artist. He can call it whatever he wants.
One thing I know: it fucks.
So sure, yacht rock.
French psychedelic yacht rock.
That sounds better to my ears.
But I started the interview about his art influences. He is an illustrator and cartoonist whose works do appear in many of the music videos for both Mcbaise and the alt-metal band Dead Pirates, in which he plays guitar.
His illustrations read like an adult-rated satirical take on the Looney Tunes.
“A few guys,” he said, in his French-accented English. “An English dude called Kid Acne was big for me at the time.”
Kid Acne is both an artist/illustrator and a hip-hop musician, (www.kidacne.com) so I see the influence there.
He mentioned Canadian comic book artist Dave Cooper and Mark Ryden.
Then he mentioned American cartoonist Max Fleischer, known for Betty Boop. He mentioned Tom and Jerry, Merrie Melodies and Disney as influences, and you will see it in his art, for sure.
There aren’t any illustrations for the music video of Le jardin, a song and video that does illustrate the funky, cool style of Mcbaise, as well as the fun those involved with the project get to have. It’s a great showcase of their creativity, and the song from his second of three LPs, 2017’s Windowsill, is what has drawn a lot of fans to his music. The song currently has more than 4.2 million listens on Spotify (his second most listened to song on the platform). To be fair, I might personally be responsible for an outsize chunk of those listens.
One of the talents that are part of his genius is the poetry in his lyricism.
“Hiding among the daisy trees, half the sun trapped in your shades,
You found the key
Doors will open like they’ve done before,
The moon is out and it’s obscured
Writing fantasies”
I sometimes hear music lovers dismiss the importance of lyrics. My perhaps idiotic question about the existence or not of daisy trees got him talking about his intent with lyricism and a little about that song.
“I use lyrics as kind of like an instrument as well,” he said. “I am French. As the years go by, I (speak) better English than I used to. I also have worse French. It must have felt right at the time. As I said, talking about Tom and Jerry, the daisies, the picket fence, the green grass, all these types of things. This is the type of thing that I try to describe in the song. But the words, I use the words just so the rhythm and the sounding works with the melody, right? So I don’t think there’s such a thing as a daisy tree.”
McBess said the shoot was improvised.
“In post production I switched the green grass to blue,” he said. “It helped give a vibe to the music video. But the same with illustration, I don’t really need to draw up trees or flowers … close to anything that actually exists. So daisy trees sounded good.”
One of his friends in the video pretends to play some sort of bamboo flute.
The instrument behind the sound is actually a Mellotron, he said, mentioning that he plays everything in Mcbaise, at least in the recording studio. Later, he mentioned that Matt Christensen, aka Muthi, played drums on that album.
That moved the conversation to his guitar rig.
“I went through a wide range of guitars throughout my musical career, quote unquote. I have to say weirdly I have settled with Strats, Japanese Strats. I do have an American one as well but for some reason I prefer the Japanese one. They are all different anyways.
“So for Mcbaise, the Strats just give me that kind of … body, the meat and the twang that you would need from going from funky to moody. And this is just a very reliable instrument when you play live. I love to play this through a Twin Reverb, which is a massive amp that I use for whatever music I do.
“I have a bunch of pedals. The one that would make the most sense for the sound is a Vibrato from Chase Bliss. It’s the Warped Vinyl MKII. Not the HD. The white one. That is the one that gives it this old school sound, you know, almost like going through a tape machine.”
I asked him about the psychedelic element that runs throughout the Mcbaise albums and he explained some of the intention he has put there.
“I am always trying to create a vibe,” he said. “There’s two things that I look for when I write music, is chord changes, like a chord progression that makes you feel something. I do love when I hear a band and their chord progression goes somewhere I didn’t expect. You get that feeling, like, oooh, it feels nice. Like, I didn’t expect that, that hint of blue cheese.
“I do like to create contrasts from something that is quite simple to then suddenly going into something a bit more complex. Something with time signatures even though I don’t want to be a prog or fusion band. But that is one of the things that I like.
“And then one of the things, more and more, is having this be a playground for playing groovy bass lines. That has been an ongoing passion that’s been growing for the past few years.”
That brought to mind the song “Ball Pit,” which begins with one of these bass lines. The song is on Mcbaise’s latest LP, 2021’s Tubes.
“I always had kind of like this way of playing bass which is following the roots of the guitar,” he said. “When I started playing synths, and piano, it kind of changed the way I approached the lead guitar or lead synths. … So on ‘Ball Pit,’ for instance, what I came up first was the chord change, which I liked. And then I tried to find an interesting riff for the bass during those chord changes. And then the idea, which you will find interesting, was that it was so weird that if you remove the chords, which is what the intro is, is just the riff without the chords, you don’t know where the fuck this is going unless you have listened to this song once or twice. I wanted that feel of what, huh? And then the chords arrive and it makes sense. It gives you the map for the song.”
The tempo is picked up at the end of the song and something complex seems to be happening. But McBess simplified it all.
“The very dumb idea about playing it fast in the end was that when I wrote the song, I was asking some of my friends, some of my bandmates, what kind of tempo should we play at,” he said. “Play it slow, maybe groovy? Some of my friends were like, yeah, but fast would be fun, right? So I said, fuck it, I am just going to speed it up at the end. I always (write things) in a way that live we might be able to create something. I know that when we play this live the end kind of gives this boost to the audience. They know it is coming, so it gives a bit more energy because it is faster.”
The video, which used 3D animation to transform The Dudes Factory into something like an old school McDonald’s restaurant, would have cost too much to make without help from a friend.
“It could have been (expensive),” he said. “Until six, maybe seven years ago, I was still doing post production for advertising and movies and such. So most of my mates are still in there. When I released the album, I did two music videos. … When a friend of mine saw those, he said can I do a music video for you? We spent maybe 10 months on it. A lot of it is 3D. ... We bought 2,000 (plastic) balls. We rented a bit of equipment and lights for the shoot. … It would have been a fairly expensive music video.”
It’s crazy that one man has so much talent in two different mediums, illustration and music, and he loves to bring that artistic element to his music videos, even those that don’t use 2D or 3D animation.
“It is everything,” he said. “It is one of the two things I love doing. Creating those videos, the live action ones are really fun because you get to work in the moment with friends. And you create an atmosphere that is hard to recreate. And the animated ones, I spend six months by myself doing those. For six months it is bliss. I fucking love this. You get to deep dive and animate and see this thing come to life. I can’t wait to do another one. It is just time permitting. They do pay the bills, but like I have other jobs that I have to do, and it is quite tough to find six months that you can just fuck off to do just this.”
One way he has paid bills is taking on corporate contracts. But he is trying to get away from that as his businesses stand on their own.
“I do a bit of corporate jobs here and there only for brands that I enjoy or for people who have a lot of money to just throw out of the window,” he said, laughing. “The way that I have always been doing my thing is that every time I had a big job for a big corporate client, I usually just re-funnel that money to things that I like doing. That is why we have been able to run the label for so long and do recording at the label. The label runs by itself. We’re reaching a point where there is less and less of a need to do this, right. So I am doing less and less corporate jobs, and hopefully in the future I won’t do any. But sometimes it is good to bring a bit of frustration to your life, right? You want to remember what it is to actually work. Cause if all you do is what you love, then you lose yourself.”
For that matter, he said that type of work is currently about 5 percent of his workload, which it turns out, is just the right amount.
“It is just the right amount of frustration,” he said. “It’s like holding a shit in. It is funny for five minutes, but for an hour, it is not funny.”
I asked how he ended up in London, where he’s been for the last 17 years since finishing art school. It’s easy to see as an outsider why he wound up in the eclectic Shoreditch neighborhood.
“Well, I come from the South of France,” he said. “It’s dead. It’s beautiful. I have a great time there, but there is nothing to do for young people. And also watching movies as a kid, I’ve always known that the stuff that happens inside movies don’t happen in the South of France. After I went to school and studied 3D, I wanted to stay in Europe and be close to family. Paris is full of fucking Parisians and I can’t fucking handle it.”
London welcomed him with open arms, he said, while describing Paris as austere.
“The choice was quite easy,” he said. “And most of my (art school) mates came here, probably for the same reason. They are still here. … We didn’t have our families here, but we became our own family. Some of them play in the band.”
He mentioned Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” when pressed on the line between funky and melancholy that is an undercurrent of Mcbaise.
“Very, very fucking sad song,” he said. “But the groove in undeniable.”
He mentioned the likes of Earth, Wind and Fire.
“But I think some minor chords changing here and there creates a lot more tension than just fucking majoring out throughout the three-minute song,” he said. “So I don’t know. I never do something that is just sad. It is kind of melancholy, riding that fence. Riding the line is always the key anyways.”
The Mcbaise project, which he also jokingly labeled during this interview as “soft cock rock,” was him trying to develop a more chill sound than the heavier stoner rock of the Dead Pirates.
He credited Connan Mockasin and Mac DeMarco as major influences of the Mcbaise sound.
He noted he went down this path before DeMarco became a big deal.
Seabass, his first album under Mcbaise, was released in 2014. I reviewed it recently, diving into it only a few days after conducting this interview as I was visiting the South of France. It was the perfect soundtrack and the yacht rock label did at least make more sense to me.
“I was doing a lot of rock and roll because of my teenage years and the moment where you need to find an identity,” he said. “I was not so much into rap. I was more into the rock and roll kids. And this becomes your DNA. Or maybe your identity but not necessarily your DNA. If I go back and listen to what I was listening to as a kid, I was massively into Jamiroquai. I still am. Michael Jackson, lots of pop and funky kind of stuff.”
But he got to a point where he said, “OK, fuck that, you don’t have to do just rock and roll. I don’t have to just buy Gibson SGs. I am going to buy a chorus pedal and try to do these types of things.”
McBess takes any medium he operates in seriously, and it shows.
“The music is not accessory to the illustration,” he said. “The music is its own thing. I hate hobbies. … Also, I hate accessories. I am going to do something proper. I am not going to do some shit like ambient music just because I love the gear. … I wanted to do the type of stuff that gave me shivers when I listen to it. These projects take all of my time because it’s what makes me vibrant. This is the thing that I want to do.”
The Mcbaise albums blend a lot of what is good from many different genres, really.
“I listen to a lot of different things,” he said. “I do listen to jazz and fusion. I think the only thing that they all have is influence. If you don’t compartmentalize them too much, like if you like the texture of some of the jazz songs but you prefer the bass line from funk. … I feel unrestricted to pick and choose or let the influences bleed into each other.”
He didn’t want to let the chill grooves that he’s explored with Mcbaise be forced into Dead Pirates, and that brought back a conversation we had before the tape was running regarding King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the prolific Australian psychedelic band that put out five albums last year for the second time in their short career that has produced 23 albums thus far. I had mentioned that my three-week trip to Europe was at least driven by my plans to see six of their shows in Europe (I’ll also be following them throughout their U.S. Residency Tour in June).
“I love those guys, but I am completely overwhelmed with what the fuck they are doing because of this as well,” he said. “I pick up an album and it’s like death metal and the next one is like pop. OK. … Listen, they are so prolific … which, hear me out, I don’t like this. Because even if you are that good that you can tour as much as they tour and then spend the rest of your free time writing five fucking albums, the attention to detail cannot be there. I can’t follow as a fan as well because I am a massive fan. But it’s like so hard to keep up with it.
“The fact that they change styles all of the time. It’s like OK. It’s not because you are good at everything that you have to do everything as well. I feel a little bit like the pot calling the kettle black. … They do their thing. They are a massive success. They don’t need my input. But as a fan, I would prefer an album every two years with some cool ass music videos.
“They are fucking geniuses. They are that good, you know. But for the mortals like myself, just sit on them and raise them one after the other. Because then I would have been able to buy all of the vinyls. I feel like if I don’t have the notification on for King Gizzard, I am going to miss every fucking drop anyway.”
I’ll just say that I consider King Gizz to be front loaded with at least four creative geniuses on the level of McBess, who happens to work at a different pace and probably standard. As I mentioned, he is nowhere near as known. But there is something to the idea of letting things go and moving on. I say this as someone truly obsessed with both bands, and I am sure I am not the only one. And I still can’t believe one band could put out the five albums that King Gizz produced last year.
But this piece is about the creative genius of McBess.
He does draw inspiration in both his music and illustrations from nature.
He confirmed the music video for the song “Contesso,” was shot in the Swiss Alps.
Next to a mountain cliff.
“I was a bit scared,” he said of that shoot. “I have vertigo as well so I tried to not to get too close to the edge. It was a cliff. … We didn’t drink for that one. I think that was a safer bet.”
He loves snowboarding and mentioned teaching his son to ski last winter.
But he doesn’t get into nature much while in London.
“In the South (of France) there is always a bit of swimming going on, like going into the (Mediterranean) Sea,” he said. “I come from Cannes which is closer to Italy. You have a very luxurious flora with the sea. A lot of mountains. Nothing is flat. It is quite mesmerizing, and you have the palm trees because it is quite summery. This is a big reference for me because it always brings me back to childhood memories. Umbrella trees. I miss them a bit here. I am more of a city type of person. I like to go there sometimes. You recharge a bit and then you come back to the city.”
I wondered about what influenced his brand of satire and he mentioned his father.
“Nothing was really serious with him, kind of like dead-pan humor,” he said. “I grew up to be a worse version of this. So I don’t really draw this from anywhere. I just don’t take things too serious. When I think too much of something, I just go ‘fuck it’ anyways. So there is a bit of destruction and humor in the same place. There is a bit of nihilism and funny fart jokes at the same time.”
He’s not sure he lives by any type of rule when it comes to satire, other than one thing.
“It has to make me laugh,” he said. “I do moody shit and then sometimes there is a joke in there. I don’t want to do stuff that caters to everybody. … I just like to make things that make me laugh which is usually violent humor, not necessarily crass or vulgar.”
Mcbaise doesn’t perform live very often, but McBess said live performance is a key part of the band’s expression.
“I love it,” he said. “It does require a bit of energy and work. We don’t do it that often. Before Covid we were maybe doing three performances a year or once a year or a pace like that, which I kind of like. I don’t want to become jaded. Most of the guys in the band have proper jobs. But if it was a recurring thing where we had to sleep in shitty hotels eating shitty food, we would not do it.”
There is improvisation that occurs in his live performances.
“We always leave room in the song for improvisation, solos but when we rehearse we try to create some bridges between songs or ad libbing,” he said. “There is nothing more boring than going to see a band where the band plays exactly the album so perfectly. I had that with a band that I loved at the time. I went to see them live, and I was like, this is so perfect and so boring.”
About instrumentals, which are featured on all three Mcbaise albums, he said, “I like to put the emphasis on the instrument. I am not necessarily a big fan of songs where the voice is the center of attention. I just think it is an instrument like any other. I like to write songs without any guitar or any synth. Why not do away with the voice sometimes as well, right?”
Yes, he is working on another Mcbaise album, but at least at the time of this interview, it was not close to completion. He had hoped to release a single around Christmas or early next year.
He has not performed in the U.S. but would like to one day. With him and all of his band mates busy with young kids, it may be a while before they will have the freedom to do so, he said.
“Once those kids are slightly older and we can leave them with grandparents I will try to fuck off to the U.S., for sure,” he said.
We should all be so lucky. So, yeah, in the meantime, gotta get to Europe to catch Mcbaise.
Man, I wish I was in Paris today.