Nicola recently branched out in a new direction, publishing a collection of short stories - "Les Mauvaises Nouvelles" (J.-C. Lattès) - at the beginning of this year. Adolescent concerns were rather less extensively treated in Nicola's writing, but in his songwriting teenage concerns come sharply to the fore. Indeed, the lyrics on Indochine's new album plunge listeners directly into the heart of teenage angst and adolescent mood swings. But "Dancetaria" is far from being a morbid album. On the contrary, New Wave electro beats and trip hop ambiences drift in and out of most songs, instantly lifting the spirits. Twenty years after their humble beginnings, Indochine now look set to have another major hit on their hands.

RFI went along to meet one of the group's surviving members, singer and songwriter Nicola Sirkis, who talked to us about the ups and downs of the group's career.

Nicola, how do you feel about Indochine's new album "Dancetaria"?
It wasn't an easy album to make, but I'm proud of it. In a way, it's the album I hate most out of everything we've done, but at the same time it's the one I love most too. This album took the most from me in terms of time and worry - it was also made while we were going through the most negative period. In fact, "Danceteria" was the hardest album for me to make, given the terrible things I was going through at the time. (Ed: the death of his brother, Stéfane). However, having said that, the albums we made while we were going through happier, upbeat periods are certainly not the albums I'm proudest of.
Writing the music took Stéfane, Jean-Pierre Pilot and me between six and eight months all in all. We'd set our aims pretty high, deciding that we'd record as much as we wanted but that we'd only use songs with really strong melodies. We really insisted on that, we wanted melodies that stuck in your head right from the first two notes. When the music was finished one of our young fans came into the studio to add a second layer to the album, incorporating special sound effects on certain tracks. He created a real atmosphere for the songs, adding in all kinds of weird sounds in the background. Then after that we got round to writing and recording the lyrics. We always leave that till the last minute. You know, even when I've had a song title in my head for weeks, we'll wait until the very last minute before writing it. That way the lyrics are directly inspired by the music.

And did the lyrics come to you easily this time round?
I had a lot of problems writing the songs this time round because of my short story writing. When you break away from the world of story writing, where you've got total freedom of form, it's not easy to get back into the structure of songwriting. You know, it's like getting back into the format of couplet, break, chorus, couplet, break, chorus all over again. In fact, I ended up working so hard on the lyrics this time round that I don't think I noticed when they were finally finished.

Certain lyrics seem a bit surprising when you think about the tragic events that unfolded …
In fact, most of the songs were written before Stéfane died, but they've taken on a different connotation since his death. It's really strange. I recorded "Atomic Sky" and "Dancetaria" three weeks after Stéfane's death and it was really awful singing these lyrics which seemed to fit the situation so perfectly. But the weird thing was that the songs had actually been written before we'd known what was going to happen. I was really shaken and upset by it all.

You're due to set off on tour again in November. How do you feel about that? Are you confident about the kind of reception you'll get?
Yes. We've already played four tracks from the new album at a couple of concerts this summer and they went down really well with the audience. I don't want to sound presumptuous, but I think it's fair to say we always feel fairly confident that our concerts will be a success. And that's thanks to our fans really - they make the show! For a start there are more of them than there are of us and they end up doing it all really! Having said that, we have to play our part too - we can't afford to mess things up on stage and let people down.
What's changed for us recently is that we've been doing a lot of free gigs. We performed at the Fête de la musique in Grenoble, for example, where there were 17,000 people in the audience. But I'd say only about 2,000 of them knew our music. The best thing about that for us was that none of the audience left when we appeared on stage. They all stuck around and had a good time listening to our set. Actually, when it comes to concerts, I don't think Indochine have ever really struggled. Even in the early days of our career when we were supporting bands like Depeche Mode and Taxi Girl, the audience often preferred our music to the main groups!

Indochine have been going for 20 years now - do you ever toy with the idea of giving up or is your desire to keep going as strong as ever?
After Dominik Nicola (Ed: the group's guitarist and original composer) quit the group and Stéfane died I did start wondering whether there was any point going on with it all. But in the end I felt that the concept of Indochine was more important than the people who actually make up the group.

Is there anything you feel you've lost since the group's beginnings?
Yes, we've maybe lost the carefreeness we had when we first got together. You know, we were just a bunch of friends hanging out in the southern suburbs and one day we got together and decided to form a group. We went on to quit our studies and gave up everything to concentrate on the group. I remember Dominik, the group's guitarist turning round and saying to me, "Well, Nicola, you don't know how to do anything, so you'll have to write the lyrics and sing!". Dimitri had just bought a sax, so then he was brought in as our saxophonist. Six weeks later we were already up on stage performing our first gig - we didn't really know what had hit us. None of us were really aware of what we were doing up on stage! But it's a good job we snapped out of that totally carefree state pretty quickly, otherwise the whole thing could have been a disaster!
But I think it's now, twenty years on, that we're writing our best material. We started out with the idea of creating something really atmospheric, music which was a bit magical and mysterious, which would transport listeners to another world. And I feel like that's exactly what we've done. I'm sure that the new album will linger in people's minds long after a first listen.