It was my editor who had the bright idea: let s interview dEUS Belgium s avant-rock gods in Belgo, Dublin s newest, hippest and possibly only Belgian restaurant. It s a Thursday afternoon and, on landing in Dublin on the day of his band s gig in the Point as guests of Blur, singer Tom Barman has just done three television interviews back-to-back.
Understandably, he s as ravenous as a particularly hungry raven. By the end of our meal, there will be one less lobster in town, while thanks to your correspondent the city s mushroom population will have been reduced to almost Dodo-esque proportions. As we wait for the dishes to arrive, the Antwerp-based singer runs an inquisitive eye over the ultra-modern decor of the Temple Bar eaterie. There are mosaics of horse s heads fashioned from cigarette butts and a squadron of decorative irons hanging near the door. What can it all mean?
Barman is as puzzled by the symbolism as Hot Press. But he can shed some light on the pictures of the celebrity Belgians featured on the back of the menu the pictures have numbers instead of names, as part of a special offer the restaurant is running.
He points out Mannekin Piss, the todger-toting pre-pubescent who, as legend has it, put out a fire that had threatened to engulf all of Brussells by making copious use of his God-given water-sprinkler. And next to the great Jacques Brel about whom more later is Plastic Bertrand, essentially Belgium s answer to Johnny Logan . . . Also featured is a still from Man Bites Dog, an arthouse serial killer flick that ruffled quite a few conservative feathers on its release a decade or so ago, and remains, incidentally, one of Cathal Coughlan s favourite ever movies. And even I guess that the bloke on the bike is Eddie Mercx. But who is that unmasked man? I gesture at the photo of a hairy, bearded and, frankly, fat fortysomething, as butt-naked as the day he was born although, strangely, he is missing a vital appendage.
That one is Jan Bucquoy, director of The Sexual Life Of The Belgians, says Barman. On its release, Time Out described the film, whose publicity shot featured a man lying on his bed with an inflatable (make that inflated) doll, as a portrait of the artist as a young slob .
Bucquoy used to be a controversial character, always up for a riot, always trying to shock people, trying to bring down the King and Queen of Belgium because he hates the monarchy.
We move on.
This one s Jean Massis, Barman says, a very strange character: he used to pull things with his teeth, like trains and trucks. I m not sure about this one over here, but it might be Adolf Sax the inventor of the saxophone.
If this man had never existed, I think to myself, Gerry Rafferty s Baker St would be only a minute and a half long.
Who, of Barman s compatriots, should be added to this list?
Definitely painters. But they probably don t have any pictures of the painters: Reubens, Van Dyke, Magritte, says Barman, before naming a host of other masters whose names I won t even attempt to spell.
I notice that there are no writers on the menu and Barman explains that Belgium has never really had a literary tradition in the same way that Ireland has. But he mentions one author who he rates as deserving of higher praise.
There s a great writer called Hugo Claus, who wrote a book called The Sorrow Of The Belgians. That s such a beautiful title. It was written in Flemish as well, in the 1970s. It s now a Penguin classic. It s a piece de resistance. But generally I don t think they translate very well, the Belgian writers.
And no footballers! Personally, I d make a case for Belgian midfield dynamo Enzo Scifo. But we don t go down that road. Instead, Barman lists off a number of fashion designers who, apparently, are feted in Vogue and Harper s Bazaar, including one guy who designs shirts for the Rolling Stones and U2. And who turned down Beck! And I am informed that this year s winner of the Palme d Or in Cannes is Belgian, as is the Best Actress.
Of course, dEUS themselves have, after three albums of skewed and skewered post-rock collages, earned a place on their national menu, not least for their recent opus, The Ideal Crash.
Belgium has always been a country of brilliant accidents rather than great tradition, Barman offers. Our music comes from America and England but we have a European touch to it. It s there. If you re making music in an honest way, you re bound to have that angle. I remember a guy from the band Evil Superstars said that the Americans grew up with Elvis Presley, the English with the Beatles and the Stones, and the Belgians with record stores. That s the way it is: we didn t really have a tradition of big bands. We had Jacques Brel, who is one of the greatest. Where storytelling is concerned, and evoking the place where he grew up and so on, I think he is the best. He was such a genius in characterising his own people.
Barman says that in making The Ideal Crash, he had the best and the worst year of my life .
Personally I was very low and the atmosphere was at some points too intense. I hope there s some amount of humour there too but, no, I wasn t very happy. But I don t think we made a miserable album. Yet with dEUS it s always nerve-wracking. It seems like there s always disaster around us. We ve had so much bad luck.
On a personal level, the girl that I was singing about I met during the making of In A Bar Under The Sea and we broke up during The Ideal Crash. When you have those synchronicities going on between your personal and professional life, it s kind of weird. At the end of the recording of the new album, it was a very miserable time because that was my first big love. I was devastated.
I was like: what is this? I m never going to find anybody again . So I had written everything off and worked like an obsessed person on this thing. Then when the record was finished, I met somebody else, so I felt that I had gone through the hardest part of that crisis.
Is it weird singing songs about your feelings toward a particular person when that relationship has since ended and you re going out with someone else?
No. Palace s Will Oldham, a person that I really appreciate he s one of the great songwriters said once in an interview, you can t possibly expect that I mean what I sing every night . That doesn t mean that you re faking it on stage but you can come into a completely different trip. You can sing a song that was originally an unhappy song with a completely different angle, if you happen to be feeling happy at the time.
This fascinates me: giving songs a perverse angle. You can sing Sister Dew which is a murder song with a smile on your face. n
The Ideal Crash is released on Island Records.
Thanks to Belgo Restaurant, Sycamore St., Dublin 2