Las Vegas Weekly

Q&A with Thomas Mars of Phoenix

The French rocker talks Coachella, Versailles and the sounds that slot machines make

Phoenix’s cheekily named latest album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, is up for a Grammy. In front, Thomas Mars.

Photo: Pascal Teixeira

In advance of Phoenix's January 28th show at The Joint, frontman Thomas Mars talks Coachella, Versailles and the sounds that slot machines make.

You opened for The Killers in Las Vegas in September at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. How was that show?

It was great! It was the Las Vegas experience — playing in a casino and playing with The Killers. It was like the ultimate Las Vegas trip. It felt like we won a contest to go to Vegas and play before The Killers in the Mandalay Bay. I think it's probably the place that's the most different than the place that I grew up in, Versailles.

Vegas and Versailles probably couldn't be more different.

Yea. I grew up in a museum that was very boring. It was beautiful, but it was very dead and not stuff happening. Las Vegas is not a museum, it's recreating. It's like a fake museum, but full of life. It's very exotic for us.

Do you still go back to Versailles to write and rehearse?

We still have our basement there where our equipment is. We go back, but it's a place that's never going to change. If you see Blade Runner, you think that Versailles is going to be the same. Versailles will always be the same cause people want to keep it the same way. They think that everything that's great happened before, and it's really hard to create something. I think it was the perfect place to write music because you have to deal with that frustration and you really have to be in your own parallel universe.

You have a couple of days between your show in Las Vegas on January 28 (at The Joint) and your next show in Phoenix. Do you have any plans for things you want to do or see while you're in town?

I think the best way to go to Vegas for us is we go there without any specific idea and you're just drifting. You have no idea where you're going and you're just taking it in. The last time we were in Vegas we recorded all the music of the slot machines and of the whole city. I don't know who does all the sounds for the slot machines, but they always get these slightly in tune moments that's almost like a classical orchestra that's tuning. It's very unique. It's something we really like. I think we're going to spend our time recording those things.

Is there a show on this tour that you're particularly looking forward to?

Portland is a place we played once and we played a pretty big place, but there were only like 50 people in the crowd. So this time it's sold out, but also, the 50 people were the nicest 50 people. It was the loudest crowd that we played for. I had no idea 50 people could seem like a big crowd. So, this time I'm just curious to see what a room like this full, what it can do. And Mexico City, too. I really want to play there. We played there twice and each time it was very special. It's just a very intense audience and they sing along. They know all the words.

The Coachella 2010 lineup was just released and you're on it. How was your performance when you played the festival in 2006?

It was awful. It was the worst in my life. You play to a very big crowd and ... you're just playing for an international taste-making crowd. Because we have French equipment, it was so hard. A lot of instruments broke up. I don't think people noticed, but we knew we could have done so much better. We can't wait to go back, because this year has to be something else. When you have something really important you kind of have to focus before, and last time we were coming from France and we were all tired and we didn't sleep before. It was just a bad situation. It was terrible. This time we're going to go there a month before or something. We're going to live there, and then we can do it.

Your most recent album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, has been nominated for a Grammy and received all kinds of critical acclaim. Did it feel different than your other albums when you were recording it?

No. We even thought it would be not successful. We grew up with the idea that we do music for ourselves, not with the idea that we do music to get girls, because there were no girls in Versailles or to get attention, because there was no one to pay attention. You couldn't play a show; there was no crowd. ... At some point when we made this record we thought, "OK, we've reached a level of selfishness. This is not going to please anyone. We're talking about things no one can relate to and Franz Liszt, and we're doing instrumental songs that are not going anywhere." Then we gave a song on the Internet — we gave "1901" — and suddenly we realized that people really loved it. We knew that they would love the record if they loved that song, because the record had all these sounds and was in the same spirit and it was all crafted the same way. We knew that something was going to happen.