Revolver know what they like. They like the harmonies of the Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel, and the lyrical elegance and simplicity of Elliott Smith. They like the cello. They like Radiohead’s “15 Step”, specifically the fact that it was written in 5/4 time – ‘it’s quite free, that time-signature,’ they say. They like Henry Purcell, 17th century British Baroque composer and visionary, and John Dowland, the 16th century songwriter whose melancholy songs would, four centuries later, influence Benjamin Britten – another Revolver touchstone.

Revolver know who they are. They are three early twenty-something Parisians. Frenchmen with an abiding love and understanding of some of classical music’s greatest ever Englishmen. They are classically trained musicians who, like Radiohead, know how to turn rock inside out. Revolver are a French band named after a Beatles album singing in English. And with their debut record, Music For A While, produced by Julien Delfaud, they’ve created a beguiling, beautiful, hypnotic and proudly other slice of chamber-pop.

Are you ready to be heartbroken? And then, heart-mended?

Ambroise Willaume (lead vocals, guitar, piano), Christophe Musset (vocals, guitar) and Jérémie Arcache (cello, vocals) formed Revolver in late 2006. Willaume and Arcache met when they were six years old, at the Maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Paris, the renowned music school for choristers and aspiring classical musicians. ‘But when I was eight my parents wanted me to leave,’ recalls Willaume. ‘They didn’t want me to be a musician. I had to forget that I had been doing music almost professionally since I was six.’

But Arcache stayed, and began to play cello and piano. It was a cloistered world of classical music – so much so that by the time he reached 18 he had no knowledge of rock and pop. He was a maestro musician with no sense of modern music. Or so he thought.

Meanwhile, Willaume and Musset met in high school aged 15 and 16. Musset taught Willaume how to play guitar. They began playing music together. ‘It was a good acoustic sound but we were just a bit of a rock band,’ recalls Willaume. For these imaginative, coolly clever young musicians being ‘a bit of a rock band’ was far from being good enough.

Then Willaume happened to see his old friend Arcache performing at Notre Dame. ‘He was improvising a Haydn concerto for cello. He was playing like Jimi Hendrix. But it was really, really weird: he didn’t know Jimi Hendrix. He didn’t even know the Beatles or the Stones by name!’ Willaume and Musset, keen to involve Arcache in their musical plans, gave him a list of essential albums to listen to: Sgt Pepper, the Velvet Underground, Elliott Smith’s Either/Or, the works of Bob Dylan.

‘And when Jérémie started to play with us it became evident that the three of us had something special together,’ remembers Musset. ‘The sound was amazing. We were just like, wow, that’s what we want to do: no speakers, no bass, no drums, no mics. Just three voices, two guitars, one cello.’

In early 2007 the trio, named Revolver after a poster of the iconic album that hung in Willaume’s bedroom, began gigging around Paris: small shows in friends’ apartments, in front of 20, 30 people. As Willaume describes it, playing in these intimate
environments was like music ‘in the olden days, chamber music – pop de chambre.’




By the summer of that year, EMI had contacted the young band via their myspace. They were quickly signed, and released a critically acclaimed EP, Pop De Chambre, in France and the US. ‘It was training for our album,’ notes Musset.

The first song Willaume and Musset wrote together was “Get Around Town”. It’s a ‘simple song’ with a primal rock’n’roll rhythm and an insistent guitar riff recalling the early Sixties Brit Beat boom. The quickest song they wrote was “Balulalow”, composed in two hours one afternoon: early on this ever-ambitious band decided they wanted to write a new song for every gig they had. It began with some ‘Beatles chords’ and with an idea to write a song reflective of the title’s origins. They also wanted to fully explore the possibilities of the three-part harmonies that mean so much to Revolver.
‘Balulalow means a lullaby in old Scots,’ says Willaume. ‘And Balulalow is a short piece of music by Benjamin Britten, part of his Ceremony of Carols. At Notre-Dame Jérémie and I sang them – they are small pieces of music for two or three voices, little children’s voices. So our song is called that in tribute to Britten.’

‘As we have a classical background, we wanted to put a little of this in the songs we were composing. We always loved singing harmonies together. When Christophe and I started singing together we found the sensation really great. We have a sort of spontaneous fascination for the harmonies. When we were singing Purcell or Monteverdi, it felt like we could be singing the pop music of the Beatles or the Beach Boys.
Another key song is “You Drove Me Home”, Musset’s sunny-day-in-Normandy take on Bob Dylan’s Sara (from Desire). In response Willaume wrote “Back To You” (‘we just have this competition between the two of us to write songs. We don’t want to be last!’), a song that grows from sparse acoustic guitar and piano to a subtle burst of orchestral pop.

‘I found it interesting to write in 5/4 time. It’s quite free, more than 6/4 or 3/4. At that time – summer 2008 – I was really impressed by Radiohead’s “15 Step”. It’s a 5/4 song. I wanted to do my own 5/4 song. I really find it interesting to put some kind of intellectual elements in pop music. Not to make it too heavy to digest. Just to have some fun with the composition.’

Music For A While was recorded in Paris’s Studio Pigalle. Producer Julien Delfaud (Phoenix, Herman Dune), helped Revolver focus but also widen their ideas. He suggested they add strings to the Sixties spy-jazz vibes of “Do You Have A Gun?”. The studio environment also helped the band pull together their fantastically eclectic and century-skipping ideas. “Luke, Mike And John” may be a song about some American friends Musset met, who travelled down the Mississippi, and it may recall the sunshine harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel. But its simple, folk-like melody also offered a way back through the history of melody.

‘Purcell was a big influence on us,’ says Willaume. ‘He wrote simple songs, three minutes long. Same with John Dowland. He was writing songs for the lute, which is the ancestor to the guitar. So when he wrote songs he really wrote songs in the pop way – a really strong melody and a simple lute line. And these Baroque composers wrote about love. So, in many ways, they have a big influence on us.’
Indeed, the name of Revolver’s glorious debut album is a tribute to Purcell : Music For A While is the title of one of his most famous pieces of music.
‘It is,’ says Musset, ‘a very humble title for a pop album: music for a little while …’

Revolver should know they have nothing to be humble about. Using their far-flung but also close-to-home musical influences they have crafted an album of (literally) timeless brilliance. They are maestros of baroque indie-pop, and their achievements are all the more remarkable because they don’t write or sing in their native tongue.
‘We’re French but we‘re singing in English,’ says Willaume. ‘We’re not completely bilingual, so we try to do the best we can. Singing in English seemed very natural to us because we only have English music references – even in classical music. That’s it. And for harmonies, English is a good language. It’s not so easy in French…’

Revolver shouldn’t worry. Their songs speak the international language of melody and wonder.