| Bart
Cabanier (translated by me)
People who saw Bettie
Serveert in Nijdrop (Opwijk, Belgium) or in the Democrazy (Ghent,
Belgium) were lucky: as support act they were presented the Antwerp
phenomena dEUS.
You might remember dEUS as the band from the Humo Rock Rally with the
violin, even though you’d probably have frowned your eyebrows once or
twice if you saw them recently. After
all, the band has a new guitar player and a new drummer, which makes
their sound has changed fundamentally.
dEUS makes fantastic music, not only because you can’t really put a
label on it right away. Some people have tried, but all had to refer to
at least eight different bands. In
other words- the least you can say about dEUS is they dó have a sound
of their own.
To make another attempt, we could
come up with names as Buffalo Tom, Pixies, Velvet Underground, Leonard
Cohen, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, REM en Tom Waits, but will that
help you any further?
Music for which expressions as ‘you can get lost in it’, and
‘discover new things every time you hear it’ all apply for
dEUS for a full hundred percent. Fortunately there’s an excellent
single coming up (‘Zea’) which –if it would depend on me-
should be released as soon as possible. But releasing singles appears
not to be as easy done as said; the band is- if I’m not mistaken-
still on the search for a record company to release the thing.
Lead vocalist/guitar player Tom Barman (his real name) speaks to you.
Tom Barman: “We’ve been
working with this group for seven months now. I think this is the best
group we’ve had so far with dEUS. It will be this group or no group.
If it won’t work with these people, it never will.
This is also the first time I’m feeling we’re a real, solid band
now. Which is not so obvious, because you know almost everyone in the
band is also involved in other projects. dEUS is somewhat of a melting
pot of that. We’ve
recorded our single here, in the Democrazy. Peter Vermeersch (of
X-legged Sally) produced it. We just sent him a tape and he wanted to do
it right away. We thought that was a real honour, that musicians who
have worked with Bill Laswell want to spend time with us. In the world
of jazz, people often look down upon pop and rock as if it was worth
less, but Peter was very much open for our music. That man is very
‘pure’. He allows for a false tone to sneak into the music.
”I’d like to make music, and not necessary a lót, which I can
–without any feel of shame- put next to the things I like myself. It
doesn’t have to sound like Buffalo Tom, JJ Cale or Leonard Cohen, but
it would be nice if it would have the same ‘eternity-value’.
I don’t want people to say: ‘dEUS doesn’t sound bad for a
Belgian band.’ I want to make good music. I can imagine if a
hundred people go watch Ashbury Faith, eighty of them will have a good
time. If a hundred people come see us, I think about twenty will say
afterwards: that was awesome. You understand the difference? I
don’t think we’re able to thrill everyone, I’d like it if the ones
that can relate to our music, will keep following us.
”We try our best to keep things interesting. We don’t disapprove of
good popsongs, you know? We’re not hard people to handle. We don’t
strive to sound per se atonal or jazzy. The way we work is as follows: I
come up with a super-poppy song, and the rest of the band tries to
sabotage it. (laughs) With my approval though, dEUS isn’t a one
man show, we’re a real band. Sometimes that does cause problems;
everyone in dEUS writes songs, and has a vision on what music should
sound like. Usually we can
work it out, we understand each other well. That helps.
”We don’t have a lot of songs yet. A good mini-cd we could handle,
but actually, we’ve got only one song we wrote with the entire band.
We threw away a lot of the old songs, which we for instance
played in the Rock Rally days. That’s a period which is over now. I
did have good time back then, but it’s over. Only Klaas (violin),
Kamil (bass) and I remain from that period. The mouth harmonica player
we had back then has left, and we’ve got a new drummer and guitar
player. Musically, we’ve got nothing to do with that period anymore. I
can understand if people who saw us back then, will be confused when
they hear us now. Should we have changed our band name? I don’t know,
I don’t really think about those things. The name isn’t that
important. I think dEUS sounds okay, as long as you write it with a
small ‘d’. It hàs to be written with a small 'd'. Deus means God,
while dEUS means 'a god', or well-educated young man.”
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