Interview: WoodKid

Lizzy wanted lions. Yoann had in mind albino Bengals, whiter than cocaine. In the end neither got their way. “We had to settle,” sighs Yoann, “for ordinary tigers.”

‘Lizzy’ is Elizabeth Grant, the eyelash-batting meta-chanteuse known to the world as Lana Del Rey. Yoann Lemoine, meanwhile, is the French-born, New York-based director of Del Rey’s hysterical, grandiose, tiger-strewn ‘Born To Die’ promo – the one where she makes out with a dude on the bonnet of a car while the car is on fire.
“People tell me the video was over the top,” says Lemoine, his Lyon accent upholstered with an unlikely Shoreditch burr (‘alright’ becomes ‘awight’ and so forth). “I say to them: ‘Are there art police to decide what is over the top?’ No – something is over the top because nobody had thought to go there before. That is what over the top means.”
As the maker of pop promos, Lemoine’s CV was caked in stardust. But directing Lana Del Rey, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift did not bring creative fulfilment. So he swapped movies for music and nowadays trades as Antony Hegarty-esque alterna warbler Woodkid.
“Being a creative person I wanted to make music that would go with my films,” he says. “Music that would make my visuals bigger while, at the same time, the visuals made my music bigger.”
He’s backstage in glamorous Norwich as he tells you this, which raises the question whether the difficult transition from pop auteur to jobbing musician was truly worth the heartache. This time three years ago, he was overseeing the promo to Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’, and, as well as Taylor ‘n’ Lana, has since collaborated with Agyness Deyn and Elle Fanning. Swapping all of that for an evening skulking around Alan Partridge’s spiritual heartland doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of progress.
“I may have been established as a director. However, I was not widely-known,” he resumes. “I didn’t receive a lot of notice for ‘Teenage Dream’. The first piece that got me recognised was a video called ‘Iron’, for which I did both the music and the visuals. Until then I had been around all of these creative people and was not 100% in control. I was working on other’s art. That was frustrating.”
This is the only Irish interview Lemoine has given and may well be the last. He’s close to Lana Del Rey, being intimately involved in the long, difficult project of transforming a gawky smalltown girl into a mysterious retro siren. Along the way he learned a few things about the danger of giving away too much of yourself. He had a ringside perch as Del Rey took a pummelling from a community of online haters with nothing better to do than snark about a pop singer’s ‘authenticity’.
“I try not to expose my image in that way,” he says. “I’m not on social networks. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. There’s a record company Twitter feed. I’m not involved in it. Whatever you do nowadays someone is going to say shit about you. That is the era we live in. It’s the era of commenting. People think their opinions matter. A lot of people talk instead of doing. I am a person that does instead of talking.”
He has so far avoided a Del Rey-style backlash. Partly because he isn’t famous enough. His debut album, a gorgeous piece of outsider pop, gently rimed with orchestral drifts and twinkling beats, remains a cult affair. However, there’s a more straightforward reason the Twitterati don’t have their cudgels out.
“Lana is a girl. That’s why there was so much hating. If she had been a boy it would have been totally different. People would have forgiven the things she said and did more readily.
“If you are girl, people judge you physically first. Fortunately that is something I did not have to go through. We are both signed to the same label, to Interscope. It is a big machine and you have to know how to use it – so that you are not broken from the beginning.”
He adjusts his hat (he seldom ventures out without a piece of eye-grabbing headgear) and leans close.
“Lana, she had something broken inside her initially. That is what makes her so deep and intelligent and different.”
Lemoin grew up in Lyon, a provincial town he considered to be artless and suffocating. As soon as he was able he relocated to Paris. Eventually, even the City of Light began to pall. So he moved to New York where he established himself as a documentarian. He was persuaded to reassess his attitude towards music by Richie Havens, while shooting a piece about the iconic rocker.
“He’s just passed away – it’s so sad,” he rues. “Up to that point I had just played piano. He gave me a banjo and said, ‘Try this, it’s easier than a guitar’. I remember it clearly. We were shooting on the Lower East Side. He autographed the banjo and I took it home. I wrote my first songs on it – the ones that got me signed.”
Lemoin’s album, The Golden Age, is informed by a complicated family history. His grandparents were East European Jews who, having fled the holocaust, renounced their faith in France. His mother and father meanwhile were well-to-do Catholics. As a youngster with dreams of a life in art Lemoin rejected his bourgeois roots, a moment of catharsis he chronicles in his music.
“The record is about that innocent and naïve ride towards the grown-up world. About the transition from childhood to adulthood. There is something deeply nostalgic about that. And also, for me, something very megalomaniac and egocentric about it. Compared to what my grandparents went through, my struggles were very much on a smaller scale. However, they denied who they were and, in a way, I denied who I was as a teenager. So there are parallels. It’s a universal theme and, really, it is what the music is about. I am struggling with myself.
“I left Lyon because I wanted to go somewhere bigger,” he continues. “I went to Paris. Then Paris became too small. I went to New York. You always want to experience new things. The further from home you go the more you understand about the world.”

Woodkid plays Forbidden Fruit on the Sunday. The Golden Age is out now