In a bar under the sun
Danish musiczine GAFFA, April 1999
By Jesper Nykjær Knudsen

New intimacy found its way to dEUS. The Ideal Crash, their new album, permeates with Tom Barman's collapsed relationships, and this made the lyrics more personal and the music less harsh. GAFFA met the band at their hangout in the sunny Southern Spain.

The taxi is full of postcard-size pictures of Jesus stuck with pins. The driver's talking in his mobile phone while he seemingly fearless leads his car on the curved road which plunges into the mountainous landscape between Malaga and Ronda in South West Spain. The sun is blinding here during the months of the Danish winter weather ; oranges are growing on their trees, and it feels as if C-vitamins were flowing in through the eyes.

It's therefore not surprising that dEUS chose these paradisiacal surroundings to record a big part of their third LP The Ideal Crash. Even though the calendar says February, it's 18 grades and deep blue in the sky over Ronda. En Frente Arte is the name of the complex located in the older town with room for both a fully equipped recording studio and an incredibly attractive guesthouse whose ornaments, shutters and deep colours make something of the most romantic place one can imagine. And there's no key to the rooms. Doors are always open.

Down in the living room, the band members are walking around. Two of them have their girlmate along. The atmosphere is almost that of a collective. "It's difficult to retrospectivedly judge whether the output gets influenced by all this. But the place you make things always matters to some extent", says Craig Ward, the band's Scottish guitarist, as next morning we're sitting on the terrace. "When we made demos of the songs, the music felt more backed than anything we'd done before. But the more we worked on the songs, the more our relationships began to act on the music. Things from our own lives started permeating the music and the album we ended with isn't backed at all. It's very dark and intense. It doesn't sound like a disc recorded during the summer in Spain."

An opening

Definitely not. "So you're suffering, I know it hurts a lot if it's the first time" is the first thing Tom Barman sings on the album, and with that he already lays the foundations of the most personal album dEUS ever wrote. Not the least because 1998 was a shitty year for him - his first really serious relationship broke off. "I couldn't keep my eyes off the things that happened in my life. I couldn't say I'd rather sing about surreal things or whatever we'd been singing about lately. Whatever I did, it would become more personal. Seen from outside, perhaps this seems a perfectly normal evolution, but to me, writing such superpersonal lyrics was like an opening. And it scared me at the beginning", Tom Barman acknowledges, since he hadn't understood music that way before. But all those feelings made him want to sing more, and this came as a shock in his eyes. When he recorded a demo of the Instant Street song and wrote its lyrics, he couldn't sleep at night and lay awake because his whole body felt tensed. "This had never happened to me before. I'd always seen music as a good way of spending one's time. But this here achieved so much in me, and I was upside down. In a good way." "Did you keep your private life apart from your music in the pase ?" "I don't know. Maybe I merely didn't have so much to write about at the time. It took me more time finding stuff to write about. Perhaps writing so personally has been part of me since the beginning, but on the other hand, Craig says my texts ain't as obvious as I believe they are. But my experience of talking with people shows they do know what it's all about. And this is new, too.

More dangerous

(translation to be continued when I find some time - come back in 2007)