Thank you for the deus

Belgian art-rockers Deus have returned with their first album in three years, Keep You Close, and frontman Tom Barman says that the album grew out of a fairly difficult period for the veteran outfit.

“It was a time for introspection, and maybe a more fragile kind of record,” considers Barman. “The tour for our previous album, Vantage Point, wasn’t the best, and we came home sooner than we expected. Previously, we’d toured for maybe a year or a year-and-a-half each time out, but on Vantage Point we came home after eight months, and we didn’t get to visit any new places. The reaction to the record was lukewarm, so there was a combination of things that left us feeling down. I don’t want to exaggerate the situation – I don’t have the talent for depression. But maybe I should have just taken some time off. I felt a bit sucked dry.”
Usually when rock stars use that phrase, it means something else.
“Oh Jesus!” blurts out Tom. “I’m in Belgium, you can’t use it against me if I use the wrong terminology!”
We’ll let it slide. A couple of years ago, Barman allowed a documentary crew to follow his day-to-day life for a film, and the frontman reckons this may have contributed to the stress he was feeling.
“That’s probably why it wasn’t the best year of my life, Paul,” he laughs. “I’m a big fan of that director. He chooses his subjects from all walks of life, he’s not into music at all, and that makes it all the more interesting I think. He’s done businessmen, cyclists, people who work in the harbour, animators – it’s all walks of life. So he has a detachment from his subjects, which a music buff or a rock journalist wouldn’t have.”

Also on the cinematic front, a few years back Barman – who attended film school in Brussels – made his directorial debut with the Altman-esque Any Way The Wind Blows, which even had a screening in the Irish Film Institute prior to a Deus performance at Electric Picnic.
“We had a couple of good screenings in Dublin,” recalls Tom. “Filmmaking is definitely something I’d like to do again. As well as working on Deus and writing material for Magnus, my electro-pop project, I have been writing scripts. There’s one that’s developed into a 30 or 40 page treatment, which is getting close to the next level, which is actually writing the script. I don’t really want to talk about it, because it’s based on obscure old book, and the rights are very expensive. Also, you know how these things go – you plan things and you have dreams. Then it doesn’t happen, and you get reminded about it ten years later, like, ‘Weren’t you going to do this? You’re a liar!’”
A man with many strings to his bow, in 2006 Barman was also the driving force behind the 0110 concerts in Belgium, which were held in protest against the rise of the extreme right wing party Vlaams Belang.
“It was great, even it was naïve in a sense,” reflects Barman. “Music is not going to change anything, of course. But it was a fantastic day and I would do it again, exactly the same. It was a difficult period in the sense that I was way out of my comfort zone; I’m not a political person. It was an emotional and social thing, in the sense that Antwerp – which has always been a very open town – had 33% of people voting for this extreme right party. But I can tell you with great pleasure – and it’s not because of us obviously – that that party has become marginalised again. It’s gone down dramatically.”

The only time I caught Deus live was some 12 years ago when they supported Blur in the Point, now the O2, a period which Tom looks back on fondly.
“I’m actually a bigger Damon Albarn fan now than I was then,” says Tom. “I’m a huge fan of Gorillaz, and I would certainly love to support them. I remember we had a good party in a nice hotel in Dublin afterwards. Bizarrely, I can even recall what I was wearing! Also, Blur had a private jet, and I remember talking to the pilot at that party about flying, which again is strange as I know nothing about airplanes! It was that kind of evening.”
In conversation, Barman has a very funny deadpan wit which, temperamentally and artistically, places him closer in spirit to German acts such as Kraftwerk and Rammstein, as opposed to French groups like Air, Daft Punk and Phoenix, whose languid conversational style reflects their ethereal music.
This engaging, desert-dry sense of humour is evident when I enquire about Barman’s bandmate, Mauro Pawlowski’s past in a group called Evil Superstars, whose video for the, er, memorably titled track ‘Satan Is In My Ass’ I saw several times on MTV’s show Alternative Nation in the mid-’90s.
“I’m happy I’m not Mauro ‘cos he has to answer these questions all the time,” groans Barman. “Like, ‘Mauro, how is Satan doing up in your ass today? The poor man.’ He won’t be singing a song like that again any time soon, ‘cos it can follow you for years!”

Before we wrap up, there is another humorous flourish from Tom when, after he mentions that he was in film school with Soulwax member Stephan Dewaele, I suggest that it was a particularly talented class.
“Yeah, Bruce Springsteen was there too, now that you mention it,” quips Tom. “I think Lady Gaga was there, but she was still a man then!”

Keep You Close is out now on PIAS. Deus play the Olympia, Dublin on October 12.