You went on to remix the album in Florida - in Miami, I believe?
Yes, we remixed the album in Gloria Estefan's "Crescent Moon" studios where we worked with Gloria's sound engineer Javier Garcia. Two of the songs on the new album - "O Madiana" and "Dejame disparar" - were remixed by the Puerto Rican DJ Pablo Flores. Pablo was 'discovered' by Emilio and Gloria Estefan and went on to work on Ricky Martin's hit single "Un, dos, tres".

There are a few major changes on Kassav's new album - and one of the most blatant of these is the fact that you sing in Spanish not in Creole these days. Is this an attempt to 'Latinize' the zouk style?
Well, you could say that the Kassav sound has already been 'Latinized'. A lot of our songs have been re-arranged and covered by other groups, you know … There are quite a few artists in South America who regularly cover Kassav songs, translating the original lyrics into Spanish. So, it's only normal for us to react to this and step in and do something ourselves. So, in a way, singing in Spanish is also a bit of a commercial strategy. We've toured a lot in Africa and Europe, but our music is also extremely popular in Latin America.

So singing in Spanish is a way of breaking into a new market?
Yeah, sure. With the new album, "Un toque latino", we're aiming to make a major impact on the Latin American market. And then, the idea is that success in Latin America will open up the North American market to us. It's also a way of re-asserting our identity. You know, when you see all these other artists like Chayan covering your songs and scoring a huge hit with them … Did you know that when Chayan recorded a salsa version of our song "Syé Bwa", he went on to sell over 2 million copies? It's crazy, sometimes people think we're the ones who've done the cover version! We have to justify ourselves all the time. Like when we were on this tour of Bolivia and Chile recently, and we were doing a radio interview and we actually had to point out that our songs weren't covers of stuff people had already heard - they were the original versions! ... I mean, what are you meant to do? People are not open to zouk, they're not open to Creole, but they're quite happy to hear our songs adapted into Spanish. If that's the case, then we might as well record the Latin version ourselves, no?

While certain tracks on Kassav's new album have been re-arranged, several songs still have a very strong zouk feel …
Well, in fact, only three songs on the new album were re-written in a salsa style. We really wanted to keep a strong zouk feel on the rest of the tracks - it is our speciality, after all! It's normal, you know, we didn't make this album to prove to South American artists that we could play salsa as well as they could. It's more like an encounter between two different styles of music. It's like we're bringing a little variation to their salsa tradition. But, at the same time, of course, our aim is to get committed 'salseros' to enjoy our zouk!

Critics might say that Kassav have just jumped on the salsa bandwagon, attempting to cash in on the current craze for Cuban music …
I don't think that's true. You know, back home in the Antilles, we didn't have to wait for Cuban music to become fashionable before we started listening to salsa. We all spent our teenage years dancing to Cuban sounds and Haitian rhythms, like 'compas'.

What kind of audience is Kassav's new album aimed at?
Well, the original idea was to make an album which would appeal to South American music fans. But we soon realised that, in fact, fans back home in the Antilles would also enjoy an album which mixed zouk and salsa. You know, the frightening thing about it is that music styles go in and out of fashion... but our music is very much alive and happening all the time. Zouk is still going strong, you know, and now there are all kinds of variations such as zouk-love, which is set to a much slower rhythm.

You say that zouk is very much alive and happening. Zouk has also thrived because it comes from a background of musical fusion, doesn't it?
Yes, exactly, before zouk took off in the Antilles our music scene was dominated by Haitian sounds. The Antilles never really had a wealth of traditional music - our music roots were limited to folk stuff or music which had been imported from Europe. Even the really good Antillais groups tried to imitate the Haitians all the time. When we first got Kassav off the ground, we wanted to try and create a completely new style of music, which would be a kind of synthesis of everything we'd grown up listening to. When we started out we looked to traditional sounds for inspiration, adding a bit of percussion to the music which was imported to the Antilles ... Zouk was the 'offspring' of so many different musical styles, everything from mazurka to bolero and biguine. In fact, zouk grew out of so many different backgrounds that it wouldn't be surprising if tomorrow someone came up with zouk-Rai, zouk-jazz or even zouk-mazurka! And why not zouk-latino? Anything's possible. Zouk is a music which is open to infinite permutations.

Kassav's new album, "Un toque latino", is a very clever mix of zouk and salsa - in fact, there seems to be just the right amount of each. How did you go about selecting which songs to include on the album?
We looked back over the group's career and chose the songs which we considered to be the most significant. Basically, the new album's very much a Best of compilation. We decided to leave two songs exactly as they were, in Creole - "Zouk la sé set médikaman nou ni" - which was one of our biggest hits and still remains extremely popular today. And "Siwo" (Ed. The title track from Jocelyne Béroard's first solo album which went gold soon after its release). In fact, Siwo became "Malo, malisimo" on the new album.

When it came to re-writing the rest of your material you chose to collaborate with Etienne Roda-Gil, the French songwriter renowned for his work with Julien Clerc. Are the songs a literal translation of the Creole original?
I'd say the songs were 'adapted' rather than translated. Etienne grew up impregnated with Hispanic musical culture - he traces his origins back to Catalonia, in Spain. So what happened was we explained the general theme of each of the songs, then left him free to write his own lyrics, using our music as a basis of inspiration. Of course, it goes without saying that Etienne was careful not to make the new songs too exotic-sounding!

The five members of Kassav - that's Jacob Desvarieux, Patrick St Eloi, Jean-Philippe Marthely, Jean-Claude Naimro and yourself - have always pursued your own solo careers in tandem with your work with Kassav …
Yes, we've all pursued our own solo careers right from the start, right from '82, in fact, when Kassav moulded itself into its definitive form. We've all gone off and recorded our own solo albums every now and then, while continuing to work with the group. It's another way of imposing our style, I guess - getting as many different variations of zouk as possible onto the market. And the latest variation, of course, is our new album which opens zouk up to salsa.