28 year old multi-tasker Mickael Mottet is playing the Printemps de Bourges festival not once but twice, with The John Venture and also as Angil + The Hidden Tracks. Music Towers catches him minutes before his second performance.
Mickael describes his oldest project first; Angil + The Hidden Tracks. “Angil is the name I’ve been using for 13ish years but The Hidden Tracks is a moving collective,” he says. “I finally managed to gather all these people together last summer for two weeks to record the album ‘Oulipo Saliva’. It would be difficult to gather everyone for a concert- if only in terms of the money it would cost! It would be like hell for a tour manager,” he laughs. The band is scattered all over France (and Brighton) and consists of record shop owners, students, music teachers and even a police helicopter pilot. Tonight’s pared-down ensemble is Pauline Dupuy on double bass, Jean-Christophe Moore on trombone and violin, Xavier Pradel on drums and Mickael on vocals and guitar. Together they come across as a brilliant, mainly acoustic set-up with the intelligence and intensity of performance that Radiohead fans appreciate. The songs are intricately structured and their English lyrics are handled playfully by Mottet who is a translator and teacher as well.
His latest enterprise is very different; a collaboration with electronica band B R OAD WAY. The John Venture is a big success live, particularly with the younger fashionable festival-goers but the act’s new rock roll image belies its serious goals. “There are two bands at the foundation of The John Venture or joint venture,” Mickael explains. “B R OAD WAY I heard first two years ago. I thought they sounded marvellous. I realised they were also from St Etienne and I knew some of them. They knew my project, too, and were big fans. We met and two weeks after, we played an Angil gig on the first floor of a venue while B R OAD WAY were remixing live everything we played on the ground floor. It worked really well. So we decided to play on the same floor next.
