Arnaud Fleurent-Didier

Guestpost! Adrian of DCR on Arnaud Fleurent-Didier:

The worst interview I ever did was with a famous US comedienne who, at the time, was huge in the UK. It was over the phone and she was talking on a mobile, in the back of a car, being driven to a concert somewhere on Britain’s motorway network. It was terrible. Every other sentence was lost in a haze of horrific static and buzzing. I managed to salvage a piece out of it but, really, it was awful.
French pop star Arnaud Fleurent-Didier had warned me that his phone line was ”a bit noisy”, but I wasn’t really prepared for the sound of a swarm of bees that hit when I called him. But whereas other interviewees might have shrugged and said ‘forget about it’, he legged it along the road, found a landline and called me back. And all this the evening before he was due to fly to China for a fortnight of shows. Chapeau!
He turned out to be an engaging interviewee. Speaking in English, he talked about playing in China to Chinese people, rather than to an audience of French expats (“that would be terrible!”), playing all the instruments on his most recent album La Reproduction himself (“apart from the flute”) and the trouble you encounter by having a beautiful woman as a drummer.
You can listen to the whole interview in You and the Night and the Music on Different Class Radio.

Arnaud Fleurent-Didier – France Culture