"Each song has its own theater"

"I went to England to find my soul." So say the lyrics of a song on Crystal Fighters' debut album Star of Love, yet the truth is quite the opposite. The London band's creation myth began with the discovery of an opera written by Bakal, the Basque grandfather of band member Laure Stockley. The work not only gave the band its name, but was also the inspiration for its music, which is based on "the unfathomable mystery of the universe, the turbulent journey toward being at peace with death, the triumph of love and the omnipotence of the sun."

The result is a dreamy mix of musical styles, drawing from London electronica, Basque folk music and tropical rhythms, to name a few, and a live show that does justice to the band's operatic origins. EL PAÍS spoke to lead vocalist Sebastian Pringle ahead of their concerts in Spain this weekend.

Question. Will the opera that guided you to Basque culture continue to influence the band, or is it merely a jumping-off point?

Answer. It definitely was a jumping-off point and we could continue to reenact certain bits, but we feel we've already treated many of the subjects that [Bakal] dealt with in our songs. And we don't want to be making musical theater or opera or anything like that. We still want to be making songs.

Q. Did the opera include music or just words?

A. He wasn't a musician. It was more a description of the types of instruments he would use in this kind of crude, opera-like form. There are suggestions of music ranging from traditional music to some modern stuff that he saw around him in the early 1980s when he was writing some of this work.

Q. So once the opera led you to Basque music and culture, what did you find there that drew you in so strongly?

A. I'd always been interested in European music and even opera. I worked on an opera in Italy when I was 17 for a couple of months in the summer, doing the set, cleaning the toilets, general assistance... watching the opera take form. So when this came along it was already by the nature of it kind of interesting because it came from that area of the world. But it was this music that we didn't know so much about, and a culture that I'd been interested in from a distance but never really looked into, and the more we looked into it the more interesting the instruments seemed ? how differently they worked from those of other Romance-language countries.

Q. You use the txalaparta [horizontal wooden beams beaten with mallets by two or more people], the tabor [a rope-tuned snare drum] and the txistu [a Basque pipe whistle] on this album. How did you learn how to play these instruments?

A. We went over to the Basque Country to meet some people and listen to them playing in the streets. The txalaparta was mainly self-taught, by watching videos and reading descriptions. With the txistu, Gilbert already knew how to play the recorder and it's a three-hole pipe so he picked it up on his own. And beyond that we've worked with musicians, getting them to come in and play the difficult parts. We also take melodies and the musical feel from traditional music and use loops from old scores that we've found and play them like you'd play an old piece of vinyl, with sections of melodies that we the reinterpret into our songs.

Q. You've said that Basque culture influences your visual style.

A. We're interested in clothing and style from this area that have been there for the last however many hundreds of years, as well as European style in general. But this Basque style seems to throw it off in quite a bizarre way. The figures from the costumes in local festivals have this kind of individual quality that was something - coupled with the music and the discovery of the opera - attractive to us, and we wanted to use it in our show.

Q. Your live performances have been described as theatrical. How do you achieve this?

A. We dress the set with various fabrics and we dress up in old clothing and we sing the lyrics that are based on different passages from the opera and ideas about the world. Each song has its own drama and theater to it.

Q. You started as a live band before ever going into the studio. Opera is similarly a live art. Is this a connection you feel to the source material?

A. When we wrote the songs we lived together in a warehouse in east London, in these small rooms cooped away on a journey of the imagination about how these songs were going to come out when we end up performing them live. There was an intention that the songs would be dramatic and full of melodies and ideas so that when we did perform them live we would have to give it all the effort and all the drama and theater of the original idea.

Q. Do you think Spanish people connect to your songs because of the Basque connection?

A. I think it could be, but we've paid enough attention to the musical history and the music as a whole that hopefully you don't have to know anything about the background to think the music is good. We tried to make the best music we could for any audience; it wasn't necessarily for Spanish people. But we're delighted that they like it, if they do.

Crystal Fighters. April 7 at Sala KGB, Barcelona. April 8 at Wah Wah Club, Valencia. April 9 at Sala Vivero, Málaga. See http://crystalfighters.com for more information.