Naïve New Beaters are a Parisian pop group who have been causing a bit of a stir in their homeland and beyond with their take on pop. Mixing electronic, rap, pop and indie rock influences into a tuneful confection, they come on like the insane cousin of Weezer and Run DMC. They have been busily earning a reputation for high-energy live shows, and are going to be bringing their party machine to the UK in December. The band also stand out through their flamboyant and extravagant visual style, which is demonstrated to great effect in the must-see video for their single 'Live Good'.

Currently on tour all over Europe promoting their debut album entitled Wallace, vocalist David Boring was kind enough to answer a few questions for us.

Tell us a little about how the band got together; were you all friends before starting the band?

We were in high school together but weren’t really friends. David (the American singer) really had weird clothes. We actually became friends during a great canoe kayak summer camp, after classes Martin was playing guitar on the beach and getting all the girls, we decided to stick with him and continue the experience in town…it had a bit less success. We quickly became the Naive New Beaters and did our first real concert a month later.

Your debut album was released in May this year and you have been touring extensively in support of it. How have you been finding life on the road?

Right, we’ve been fighting for WALLACE in really cool festivals this summer (Benicassim, Sziget, Great Escape, Dot to Dot, Meg…) …It’s harrassing, we get to sleep all day in the van, eat free food, play, meet nice people and all that.

Your music incorporates a lot of different influences and styles, was that your deliberate intention when starting the band or did it just work out that way?

We all have different influences. Martin is more on the rock and let’s say on the hard rock side, Eurobelix has grown up with tough life, French Rap and Electro music and David watched way too much MTV and listened to pop and old school hip-hop. As we had different musical backgrounds and still wanted to be friends, we had to do stuff we all like. That’s why our music is a sort of Pop-rap with mixed swinging feelings from California, or something like that

The album has a big sound, combining live instruments and digital generated sounds. How does your writing process work?

We work with big computers, super calculators, creating tracks and nice songs for us.

For the recording of the album, we came in studio with our home made tracks and started working on this basis, so step by step we upgraded every parts like we do at home but also kept a lot of first takes we had. The mix we did with Nick Terry (Klaxons, Libertines) also had its touch, he drives an orange car and creates his own machines but he’s nice.

The videos for Bang Bang and Live Good are both pretty memorable, tell us a little about how they came about.

We did the vid with friends of ours called Megaforce and produced it ourselves with a high budget of 458 Euros. It was the same thing for our previous video BANG BANG, also done with them. The Bang Bang video was tough for the singer who gets smashed in the head by all sorts of objects but it was nice experience for the rest of the band who happily participated. As it was auto-produced, we had time, the shooting lasted 3 weeks. For the next video we had troubles getting David to act in it. But once he knew he was going to fly, he was on…

Debut album ‘Wallace’ is out now on Cinq7 Records

Naïve New Beaters play at Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, Sun 6th Dec

http://www.myspace.com/naivenewbeaters
http://www.naivenewbeaters.com/

Photo credit: Julot Bandit