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Mademoiselle K
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| Rages and break-ups, failures and crashing deceptions, all to the sound of throaty, rocking vocals that know how to turn sensual: Mademoiselle K is as adept at the well-aimed slap as the gentle caress. Twenty-five years old, with 12 tracks in the can, plenty of live work under her belt and looking like a Pretenders-era Chrissie Hynde-style rocker—all black hair, sultry looks, leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots.
She’s Paris born and a natural frontperson who’s learnt how to quell her doubts with feedback and heartfelt lyrics. “The moment you work out that you can make a living as a musician you just go for it, you don’t worry about the future, about the uncertainty of it all,” she says, sitting on the terrace of a central Paris café. You’d imagine her with cigarette in mouth and beer in hand—nope! Mademoiselle K doesn’t smoke, drinks herbal tea and has a weakness for chocolate: “It’s not really very rock'n'roll” —she couldn’t care less.
horse rider, and why not? Aged just four she caught a glimpse of a guitarist in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and that was it: music was to be her path. At five her mother signed her up for early-learning music classes. She wanted to play the piano, as did most of the other kids, but “pianos cost too much and we didn’t have enough room, so I started on the recorder instead!” Three years later came her first guitar and her first stage appearance, thanks to some cardboard boxes knocked together during a visit to her grandparents in Poland: “My cousins and I used crepe paper as scenery, the house was thatched and our show starred Goldorak the robot.” Her musical education then took a classical turn with conservatory, music theory, scales and the rest, but most importantly at her school in the 13th arrondissement she met Annick Chartreux, a music teacher who was to become her mentor. “With Annick I discovered that there was no such thing as different types of music, there was simply the music—no barriers between genres—and that’s helped me to keep a really open mind; back then I studied for my general culture exam by listening to as many CDs as I could: jazz, baroque, medieval, classical… everything. I had also started to play live, something I’d been dying to do for ages, but I wasn’t yet singing, I was basically a guitarist. I was already writing lyrics, but I didn’t think about setting them to music.”
She won a prize for classical guitar, spent time learning from her inspirations (Nina Simone, BB King, Janis Joplin, Mahler, Ravel, Radiohead), started hanging out in the music shops in the Pigalle area, and discovered the electric guitar thanks to “a friend who won one in a competition on Ouï FM.” After she’d finished secondary school,Mademoiselle K signed up for musicology, started to set her words to music for the first time and, inevitably, began to sing too. At this time she was trying to qualify as a teacher and, still singing, she failed her qualifying exam. This proved to be the key for her. “It was then that I wrote Ca Sent l’Eté and had my hair cut!" This was no sudden turnaround, no knee-jerk reaction to her exam failure, it was in fact the logical next step down a path she was already travelling. She started meeting musicians, splitting up and finding others, playing for €50 a night “but usually for free,” taking singing lessons and buying her very first electric guitar, a Fender Telecaster. The stacks of demos and lyrics grew steadily. For her it was rock, nothing but: “I need the energy it gives you, which shakes you up; and I need to work in a group.” Initially uncertain about the combination of French language and rock music, her doubts were set aside after seeing -M- perform live: “When I was an adolescent he was the first artist to convince me that it could be OK to do rock, but in French.
With her group now settled and the studio installed, the 13-day recording session yielded its share of happy accidents, revealing improvisations and unexpected combinations. The end of August is the time to discover an album that fits like a glove and hits between the eyes; Mademoiselle K: unbridled energy and guitar-riff-driven femininity never at rest—ever. |
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| Ca Me Vexe |
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| Ca Sent L'Eté |
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Pascale Kerneur
