It was easy to imagine Mark E. Smith would leave us sooner rather than later, I don’t think he ever gave up on his lifestyle habits even after he got ill, but his music is immortal. All these years it defeated the passing of time and trends, and always will.

I have never met Mark E. Smith. I’m only talking here from a music lover perspective. I know he wasn’t liked by some people, especially some of his former band members (he said in one of his latest interviews few months ago that people still crossed the road from him when they met him in the street). He didn’t care of course. I always admired the man because of his constance. He was constant in his music, constant in his anger. There is charm in an artist who’s not gonna adopt the expected social behaviour. The same way old people sometimes do when they don’t give a damn about what you think about them anymore. In a way, Mark E. Smith was old even when he was young. Journalists would be terrified to speak with him, I know I would!

I think nowadays it is terribly important to celebrate an artist who was not politically correct and who did not give people what they want. He was radical in his art and he wasn’t gonna try to please his audience or change to suit a particular trend but: by not giving you what you want he was giving you exactly what you needed, and I think this is the biggest gift he gave as an artist. He was someone who saw things from the sides and we need that more than ever. We need personalities like him to help us bypass the mainstream supremacy of the hashtag #blessed and hashtag #grateful that we have to deal with all the time, the prison of love and sentiment of pop music, he offered an alternative to that. He offered a band for people who felt differently about life. 

A song like ‘Industrial estate’ for example, from The Fall’s first record ‘Live at the witch Trials’ released in 1979, can still feel relevant today. There is something incredibly liberating in hearing someone shout “Yeaaah Yeaaaah Industrial Estaaaate”, which is the power of any good punk tracks: to make you feel less alone. I don’t think Mark E Smith ever did it for humanitarian reasons, it was never done in a 1st degree political way, it was more philosophical and poetic than that, it was a rebellion with a brain and a smirk on your face.

Mark E. Smith was a reference point against which you could always compare yourself to. Mark E. Smith was always gonna be Mark E. Smith an no matter what year you would read him in an interview or see him live, he would still be the same guy - which is a rare and beautiful thing. In fact, it was so attached to his personality that today, in the wake of his passing away, one cannot help but wonder if this quality was lost forever with him. He will be missed. R.I.P.

I’ve been hosting my radio show on Beats 1 for over a year now. I started it for the love of radio and it has become a source of inspiration for my own work and writing.
Every week I get to discover new music but I also get to sit down and speak with artists who I love and who have dedicated their whole lives to music.
My goal when I started the show was to create a platform for artists to share their experiences. Being a musician myself, I quickly made the sad realisation that artists around me didn’t speak with each other enough. My goal for the radio show was partly driven by my own passion for deep conversations, but I also felt in need of a sense of community - to feel part of it and to make other artists feel welcomed in it.
Why artists didn’t share their experiences enough? Were they afraid to learn from each other?
The sad consequence of this (of any) lack of communication is that the same mistakes are more likely to be repeated. I felt that dialogue was necessary to break the chain.
In a sense I hope my radio show to be a source of knowledge for artists as much as for music lovers. The latter would be able to understand better how music is made, and the former would have the opportunity to inform and relate to their other piers, musicians, poets, writers…
I don’t think we can or should avoid making mistakes. Artists are pioneers of their own after all. But the life of an artist is made of doubts and feelings of vulnerability, all artists one day face the same kind of shit. So hearing what different artists (big or small) have to say has always been a huge inspiration for me. I think that’s the only way one can evolve.
Don’t get me wrong, the show isn’t about complaining about the world, quite the opposite, it’s about reminding each other of the power of music, and honouring the life changing opportunity that music is.
Music has this amazing ability to change us. I have fallen in love with it since a very young age. It was the only force that enabled me to believe I could become someone one day. It gave me hope and made me love life better and believe into myself.
I will feel forever grateful to have and to continue to be welcomed and supported by the music community. I have found a new family. Doing my radio show every week is a way for me to ‘give back’, talk about our passions and our struggles, connect with each other, push forward and inspire the new generations.

Hear Episode #64 of START MAKING SENSE this week | On Beats 1 |
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/curator/start-making-sense/id1082539352

I’ve dedicated this week’s episode of my radio show to celebrate the LGBT community. After last week’s tragic event in Orlando I thing it’s important to speak about sexuality, freedom, and the right for everyone to choose for themselves the way they live and love. 

There is a mindset around the globe that says gay people do not have the right to live in peace. This is a topic that I particular take at heart. Not only I have a lot of friends who are LGBT but I am a firm believe in liberties when it comes to love and sexuality.

I’ve been a bisexual since a very young age. I am B in the LGBT. I also know what it feels like to be attracted to someone of the same sex and not being accepted for it. When I was 8 my first love was a neighbour, a blond girl named Ingrid. I visited her many times on my bicycle, to bring her gifts, until her mother asked me to stop and Ingrid was suspiciously not around anymore every time I came by. At school, I would be rejected by groups of girls for being different and too boyish. In retrospect I’m glad things like that happened. It meant I would turn towards the more interesting people with better values, better life stories - and more often than not, better music taste.

The acceptance of my own bisexuality, which I repressed for years, has been extremely freeing for me. It felt like finding myself completely. When asked about it in interviews, I always reply with honesty, because I know people around the world are still threatened in their own life for who they’re attracted to or fall in love with, and maybe they can feel less alone. It makes me terribly sad and angry to think anyone could be stopped on their personal journey to become who they are supposed to become.

One question that has been hammering my mind for the past few days: how do you begin to challenge the ideology that says that one’s natural instinct is shameful? I still don’t have the perfect answer to that. I just know that talking openly about sexuality has never killed anyone, but on the opposite, can save lives. 

Find freedom in who you are. 

Jehnny

‘Start Making Sense’ Find the Episode about LGBT community: itunes.apple.com/fr/curator/start-making-sense-jehnny/id1082539352

When I moved to London in my early twenties, me and Johnny Hostile had a real obsession with the band Suicide. Being a duo onstage ourselves, the inspiration was obvious, but it was more than that. The simplicity of the music and the investment into the live performances played a very large part into our imagination as artists and our first steps onstage. Other musicians would impose their mark on us equally, Johnny Cash and June Carter, The Cramps, The Kills… People whose lives and commitment to music (and to each other) felt exactly like something we were experiencing ourselves. We felt we belonged to the same family tree, each of us a different branch. But Suicide was at the root of it all. 

Last summer, in 2015, the Barbican organised a ‘A Punk Mass’ in honour of the NYC band Suicide. The evening was to comprise of new solo work from both Martin Rev and Alan Vega, classic Suicide material, as well as ‘collaborations with famous fans’. 

I turned up at the Barbican in the afternoon because I had been invited to take part in a very unusual choir which was opening the evening. We rehearsed the different vocal variations, which were all improvised, in a small room at the Barbican. The conductor was a very strange man and although I was with my friends from Bo Ningen, I remember wanting to run away the minute we started practising. I didn’t want to leave my friends behind though, so I stuck to the task for the rest of the night.

Before the show started, I met with Henry Rollins backstage. We had been talking on emails before but had never met properly. We had a very nice conversation about Jazz and his friendship with Alan and Martin. He said he was going to perform ‘Ghost Rider’ with them later on. The backstage area started to get crowded. I was hanging out with my friends from Bo Ningen and met Bobby Gillespie, who was there to perform ‘Dream Baby Dream’. 

Alan Vega and Martin Rev performed their solo stuff separately. The crowd loved it but you could sense they were getting eager to hear the classics. At some point, Suicide’s manager came to me and said “do you want to perform ‘Dream Baby Dream’ with Bobby later on?” At first I didn’t know what to say. “Does Bobby want me to do that?” I asked. It felt weird to tag along without asking him first. Also, what do Alan and Martin think? Before I could get a proper answer from the manager, he was already walking away. I asked several people around me for their thoughts but I soon got the impression that no one really knew what was going on. “Believe me, I don’t even know when I’m supposed to go on!” said Henry with a tone of excitement and surprise in his voice.

Bobby came back after a while and we talked about the idea to sing ‘Dream Baby Dream’ together. He responded with a “fuck-yeah-come-with-me-let’s-do-it” attitude which felt convincing at the time. I said I would follow him and see what happens. I was right behind him as he walked to the side of stage. At this point, people were standing on their seats at the front row, clapping along and screaming. There was a palpable feeling of wildness and chaos in the air, the like of which I had never felt before. It was so peculiar, a weird sensation of uncertainty when entering the hall. Like time standing still at this awkward edge between disgust and longing that left you wondering if everything had just stopped or was just about to begin. We stood at the side of the stage for a few minutes next to the crowd who were all standing up now. Henry was finishing ‘Ghost rider’ onstage with Martin and Alan. I felt so nervous. I grabbed Bobby’s arm and said “I can’t do this, you go alone”. “No way” he said “You’re coming with me”, and he rushed to the stage. “Damn, fuck!” I murmured and followed.

At this point Alan Vega had left the stage. He had simply followed Henry when Henry stepped out after his song. Later, I’d be told that he didn’t want to finish the show, and they had to push him back onstage. Martin Rev was playing the intro of ‘Dream Baby Dream’ on his organ, turning his back on me and Bobby. It was all a blur at this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. I kept close to Bobby, waiting for him to start. He lunged like a rock star on his first line: ‘Dream baby dream, dream baby dream, dream baby dream…’ literally reaching for the people on the front row. He had such confidence that it came as a chock at first. I thought “Oh wow. Ok. let’s go with that!” I joined him and we sung together for a few minutes, then stopped. Alan had reappeared onstage, probably pushed by his wife and Henry. We looked at him, waiting for him to sing the song, but he wouldn’t. Martin was still playing and he kept turning back to shout “Alan! Alan! Alan!” to not much effect. After what seemed an eternity, Alan finally raised the microphone up to his mouth and mumbled the words with an incomprehensible soft voice, then stopped again and kept staring at us. Bobby did a couple more lunges and touched a few more hands on the front row singing “Dream Baby Dream” to fill the gap, but Alan’s silence was persistent and his stare was starting to freak me out. “Does he want us to get the fuck off his stage?” I thought. The whole thing felt like a beast with too many heads.

That’s when I heard a voice I hadn’t heard before coming out of the speakers. It sounded like someone in the crowd (a child?) had grabbed a microphone and started singing along, completely arrhythmically and out of tune. I looked everywhere in front of me but couldn’t see anyone with a microphone. I looked behind me and there was a very young boy with dark hair onstage staring at me with a grin holding a microphone with his both hands and singing ‘Dream Baby Dream…’ He wasn’t actually singing, but more ‘talking’ the words. What I didn’t know then was that this boy was Alan Vega’s son. The crowd didn’t seem disturbed at all by the surrealism of the scene (I know I was!) Some people were still standing on their seats and singing along. Alan, who had walked back to his big chair onstage, didn’t show any intention of singing anymore. I felt it was time to leave the stage for good. 

Before the end of the song me and Bobby walked down the stairs to the backstage area, probably looking bemused. Bobby turned to me: “Well, at least we did it.” he said “we’re the only people on this planet who can say they have performed with Suicide - except for Henry Rollins.” I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way before.