Techno With Experience, March 14th, 1996

Patrick Codenys: "Artist is the lowest"

Everyone who's old enough to remember things like Seaside, Joy Division, Coyote and The Lost Dakotas, Pukkelpop on the soccer-field of Leopoldsburg and Fabiola-magazine, surely remembers the starting-days of Front 242. Although the band did something completely different than everything that was common at the time, their music was, to make it easier, called New Wave. Front did something completely different, 'Electronic Body Music' they called it. It was avant-garde techno. The high-tech instruments they used, you'll now find, equipped with a few more lights, in toy-shops.
But Front was more than being a pioneer. In comparison to most bands from the genre that passed them in Ben Johnson-style, Front 242 had a stage-act. The stage-part of the band (with Front there were actually the same amount of people behind the stage busy pressing buttons than on stage) dressed in military camouflage suits, collectively put on welding glasses and storming onto the stage as Liverpool in their best days. And suddenly the use of Emulators, Korgs and Casios was hip and bits and bytes were cool in music land. Front 242 were seen as The Godfathers, but were written off a few years later. The military outfit disappeared and they put Front 242 high on the lists of Pukkelpop and Lollapalooza in a way of saying goodbye. Recently, a final tribute appeared, techno-kings like The Prodigy, Underworld and The Orb mixed a few Front classics and they called it 'Mutage.Mixage'. Thank you and goodbye!

Now, and even a few years ago, we could have been making big bucks by moving to America and keeping busy there with productions. Or by offering our experience to big record companies there. But firstly I'm quite attached to Belgium and secondly, that's not our intention at all. Maybe that will change when I'm fifty, but at the moment I'm still feeling very young and I'm still super-interested in the new musical developments. In other words, Front is not over, there only appeared a big number of strong equally-minded colleagues.

I recently read that Raymond van het Groenewoud, not exactly a comparable genre...

(interrupts) Ho, but I've been in the same genre as Raymond. I've played soccer against him. I don't remember who won.

Ok, Raymond said that while he was getting older, his enthusiasm for playing 'hard rock guitar' lessened. Do you see an equal evolution with yourself?

Absolutely not. The older I'm getting, the larger my hunger for kicks grows. What I do, is my reason to live. I'm going to clubs and concerts more than ever. I want to stay an urban bastard forever. A bastard, because it's necessary. The music world stays a jungle. I have to fight more than ever for my own vision. The experience I have, is like baggage. Baggage full of experience you have to drag around. And the more baggage, the tougher it gets to fight for what you're worth.

I would say, the more baggage, the more clothes to put on.

Yeah, and the tougher it gets to decide what to wear. When we started, we had five different instruments we could work with for our kind of music. And one type of computer. Nowadays, because of the enormous possibilities of sampling, all rules have disappeared. The overview is gone and the music gets more in the background.

I call that a waste of time. You used to search like crazy for that one piece of sound, now you push a button and you have it.

It's getting more difficult to explore the limits. There is so much. We know from experience we don't have to try to search for certain limits. New bands still try that. Sometimes with surprising results, but often without results. What especially gets lost by that evolution, is the stage-act. And that's one of our strong points. You notice that bands that pay attention to it, get success. Take a look at The Prodigy.

What I find strange: if Patrick Codenys goes shopping, nobody would react. Tom Barman (of dEUS) would be overwhelmed by fans.

We used to go shopping much easier in the old days (laughs). In the beginning, we were still wearing our military outfits and those welding-glasses on stage. If Mick Jagger, for example, goes out, he puts on sleazy clothes and wears his sunglasses. We just had to take off our glasses and nobody recognized us.
I don't want to be an artist anyway. I make music, but I'm not an artist. In the music-business, the artist is the lowest. First you have the international presidents, then the national, the promo-people, the people who bring you coffee... and below that you have the artist. Believe me, I know. The moment when I feel like an artist, that's the end of my musical career.

Jurgen Beckers

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