Phoenix, keeping it in the family: ‘If you have brothers in a group, neither of them can be the lead singer’

Popular wisdom says that to keep friends and family, it is best to avoid working with them. Thomas Mars has decided to ignore this advice. He has been doing both for more than two decades, sometimes at the same time. This month he is on tour with Phoenix, the group he started in the 1990s with his childhood friends. “And we’re also writing the score for Priscilla, the next film by my wife, Sofia Coppola. Yeah, I know they say it shouldn’t be done, but what do I know, it happened naturally. I do this with my friends, so it’s not a job,” he says between laughs from his apartment in New York.

Phoenix, who performed at Bilbao’s BBK Live on Friday July 7, their only concert in Spain this year, are busy people. The rest of the month they will play festivals around Europe. A few days ago they released a collaboration with Beck, Odyssey, in advance of their joint US tour in August. It will be a kind of mobile mini-festival that they have called Summer Odyssey, also featuring Jenny Lewis, Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood and Sir Chloe. You’re running out of family vacation this summer, Thomas. “Yes,” he says. “And I have everyone very worried, but the pandemic prevented us from playing for two years.” Among other things, he says, he likes tours because they allow time to get together with the rest of the group. The four members of Phoenix are typically scattered around the world, with Mars in New York, two in Paris and the fourth in Rome. “It could have been bad, but so far it’s okay. I think at some point we will reunite. Now we’re on tour so we spend a lot of time together.”

Phoenix was born with French touch, the musical movement that emerged in the Paris of the nineties and combined house and disco nostalgia. “We were a part and we weren’t,” recalls Mars. “We were all about the goals of the scene, but we were the youngest, so a lot of times we just watched.” They embodied the pop part of a dance scene in which Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter was the catalyst. Mars mentions another member of that scene who was his mentor as fundamental: Philippe Zdar, a member of the duo Cassius, and a producer ten years his senior. “He was the most versatile. He was everywhere. He was doing hip hop, electronic, house. He heard two of our songs in a demo and he was very generous in betting on us,” he says. “But that whole group made us feel very welcome.”

Thus, those four school friends from the posh Parisian suburb of Versailles became the movement’s mascots, although everything indicated that Phoenix was a project not destined to succeed. “We are very rare. We didn’t meet by answering an ad, we grew up together. This is our first group, not the third or fourth, when in theory you already know something about the business.” In addition to Thomas Mars, this group of friends is made up of bassist Deck D’Arcy and brothers Laurent Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai, guitarists. Their solid relationships are rare in the pop music world, which tends to burn these kinds of ties. “I have several theories. One is that if you have brothers in the group, the important thing is that neither of them sing. If you’re the vocalist, things get complicated,” jokes Mars. It is also complicated if the singer and leader is a handsome and charismatic guy like him, who is also part of the Coppola family. Obviously he has been tempted to fly solo. “There are a lot of things in the music industry that are made to put the spotlight on me, the lead singer. If you do a cover, the photographer will say, ‘Can the singer come closer? The rest go a little back.’ You have to fight those clichés a little bit. Even when you play a late night show in the US, if you have a microphone, you make more money. When we were starting out, we gave everyone microphones so we would all make money.”

Real success came in 2009 with their fourth album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Before publishing that album, after a slow rise, they ended up winning the Grammy for best alternative album. “Wolfgang was a make it or break it moment. When we started Wolfgang, we didn’t have a record company. We didn’t have management, We didn’t have anything. But we were sure we had something good. We released 1901 for free on the Internet. At that time nothing was given for free. If you gave something for free, you asked for an email or something in return. You needed some data from people. But at that time we were like, no, no, release it without asking for anything. And somehow people loved the song. It all started with a gift, which was a great lesson for us because it didn’t start with a marketing plan.”

In September they released their seventh album, Alpha Zulu, which they recorded at the Louvre, something that breaks all records for Frenchness. “Sadly it’s over. It was amazing. We were in the middle of the pandemic and there were no visitors. In the museum there were only the guards and us.” It happened after one of Laurent Brancowitz’s yoga buddies was appointed head of Decorative Arts at the museum and offered the group a residency. “What was nice is that we gave the key to someone else. We started something, we built a studio. Now people make video art, some people make podcasts, but it has a life now. It’s important for us that there is life in the museums because we grew up in Versailles, which is a museum, and there was no life to it.”

Alpha Zulu is marked by death: that of Philippe Zdar, who died in 2019, who over the years had become the fifth Phoenix. Their pop is seemingly as sparkling and happy as ever, but if you look closely, it’s tinged with melancholy. “The climate was so heavy that we just had to sit down and play. We were more like antennas receiving a signal.” The album proves that death can be treated without becoming tragic. “The name comes from a flight I took in Belize. The plane was full and they sat me in the copilot seat. The plane was turbulent, and the pilot was talking to the control tower and saying like, what’s working? What altitude can I go to? Because this is bad. They would answer him with the indicator of the ship: ‘Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu, can you hear me?’ I was looking at everyone screaming and reacting. I had never witnessed how someone reacts to the possibility of their death. I thought I had forgotten, but one day in the studio, improvising, I started singing: ‘Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu’. The others asked me what that was. And then I realized, okay, this is traumatic. It’s coming back.”

Mars has two daughters. The eldest, Romy, 16, uploaded a video to TikTok a few months ago, so perfectly scripted in her parody of nepo babies —the children of celebrities— that it passed as real. Is there another filmmaker in the family, Thomas? “I can’t comment on this, because it already got too much attention,” he says with the face of an annoyed father. “What I will tell you is that a few months ago I was at my goddaughter’s end-of-year show and it was a much better show than anything adults would come up with. There was real talent. So I came away very hopeful for the future.” We’re getting old, right? “Yeah. We’re getting old.”

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