RFI Musique: Can you tell us something about how the bands started out and who your formative influences were?
Plastiscines: We got together four years ago. Katty (vocals) and Marine (guitar) knew each other from school. Then we met Louise (bass) at a concert and after that we hooked up with Anaïs who ended up as our drummer. We started out playing gigs in Paris at venues like La Flèche d’Or and Le Gibus… Journalists picked up on us pretty quickly but the press interest was never too much hassle. Our reputation spread by word of mouth really and our music ended up on the desks of the right labels. I think we stood out a bit on the French music scene after all those politically committed bands in the nineties. We were just making music for fun, dressing up in these super-stylish clothes and tapping into influences like The Ramones!

BB Brunes: The current line-up dates back three years when Bérald (bass) joined the band after Félix (guitar) five years ago. But things really began with Karim (drums) and Adrien (lead vocals/guitar) who were school mates from the age of 12. They used to get together and rehearse in basements and stuff. When you're that age and you're into Hendrix, The Stones and The Sex Pistols you spend your time watching their videos and all you want to do is get up on stage and be like them!… The week before our first album came out we played Le Triptyque and the place was absolutely packed. It was amazing! Everyone knew our lyrics because they'd all been on Myspace beforehand. People were leaping around in the audience going so wild that you could actually see sweat dripping off the ceiling!

Your new albums - About Love for The Plastiscines and Nico Teen Love for BBBrunes - seem to revolve around the same theme…  
Plastiscines: Well, there are 13 songs on About Love and 10 of them are about love, whether it's love for our boyfriends, for our family, whoever… We made our second album in this cosy little cocoon, working with our professional 'family.' It's very much centred on what we love and what we wanted to do.

BB Brunes: Nico Teen Love started out as a tribute to Nico from the Velvet Underground but the title also works as a pun referring to how you can get hooked on things like love, friendship, your mates, a girl…

How did your studio sessions go?
Plastiscines: We spent two months over in the U.S., living in this gigantic house in Venice Beach (Malibu) and then we stayed in the Valley. That made a bit of a change from life in the Paris suburbs! But don't get us wrong, we didn't spend our time hanging out at the beach or anything! We worked pretty much non-stop. We spent an entire day talking with our producer, Butch Walker (Ed: famous for his work with Avril Lavigne, Pink, Les Donnas), explaining exactly what we wanted to do. He took his time over things and there was no stress at any point. That's what made us really comfortable with him. Butch is this really huge producer but he was really cool about everything. Even when we made a mistake he'd find a way of sorting things out. Things were really chilled!

BB Brunes: We recorded back in July, squeezing the studio sessions into a week between two concert dates. We worked at Le Hameau, in Normandy, which is this really cool place that's a holiday cottage as well as a studio. The weather was fantastic and sleeping on the spot meant we could get up in the morning, have a coffee, pick up our instruments and start playing. We worked with Antoine Gaillet (famous for his work with Mlle K, Julien Doré, Wampas) and on the first day we arrived in the studio with a stack of CDs like Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys and The Dandy Warhols… The funny thing was Antoine turned up with exactly the same bunch of CDs so we knew we were all on the same wavelength. Antoine's open to everything. He does a lot of different music from electro to really heavy stuff …He knows how to adapt!

Do you think your sound has evolved since your debut albums?
Plastiscines: For our first album we basically turned up in the studio, plugged in our guitars and away we went! But this time round we tried to come up with a much cleaner sound, making the guitars a lot punchier, the melodies more pop and finding the best possible arrangements. I think we've broadened our musical culture a lot. And we learnt to play properly out on tour. We're more serious these days and more rigorous when it comes to songwriting and composing…

BB Brunes: We played really badly on our first album - but we've made a lot of progress since! This time round we tried to concentrate on the sound and not do things in too much of a rush. We've added strings on the new album, too, using violins and sitars, probably because we've been listening to The Beatles more lately. As far as the songwriting goes, Adrien's still more or less dealing with the same themes, but approaching them in more of a mature way. He's come a long way with his vocals, too!

How do you feel about the fact that French critics dubbed you "les Bébés Rockeurs"?
Plastiscines: It was so pejorative! It made us sound like some sort of joke! But what's more rock'n'roll than a bunch of kids getting together to play in a basement?

BB Brunes: We thought the whole thing was completely ridiculous! In the UK - and just about everywhere else in the world - there are plenty of bands who start out at the age of 15. We've never understood why in France people always want to pigeon-hole bands with ludicrous labels.

Les Plastiscines have just signed to the American label Nylon Records. Are things in the States very different? Meanwhile BBBrunes you're still plugging away in French. Aren't you tempted to sing in English to try and break through on the international scene?
Plastiscines: Americans have a lot less preconceived ideas. They respond to music more directly and more positively. They hear something new and decide whether they like it or not without asking a million questions about the band. When we started out in France we were dismissed as four little airhead "rockeuses." We weren't considered to be a 'real' band and a lot of people wrote us off as four girls from bourgeois families… But over in the States people are really enthusiastic about our music and they take us as we are. Music fans in the U.S. are much more receptive. They have more of an instinctive rapport with rock’n’roll!

BB Brunes: We wanted our second album to be more or less in the same vein as the first. Also, Adrien's used to writing in French. But we're going to record a 5 or 6-track EP exclusively in English. We'd like to reach out to international audiences in the UK, Japan, South America and Africa…

What have you got out of your success so far?
BB Brunes: Money! We're not going to pretend we don't like the cash! But more importantly we've made the dreams we had when we were kids come true. We always imagined touring would be totally wild - and it is!

Plastiscines: We've travelled so much and met so many people that it's made us grow up fast. We really notice the difference when we see the girls we used to go to school with who've ended up going to college up the road… The band's been brilliant for our personal development. It's saved the more timid of us from wasting years as introverts! Having to live together 24 hours a day has made us more tolerant of one another, too, and better at controlling our emotions. Communal living encourages a healthy sense of communication and I think we're all a lot less egocentric these days!

Who were you most excited about meeting?
Plastiscines: Well, a lot of people, like Patrick Wolf or the lead singer from Paramor. But meeting Iggy Pop was the biggest buzz! Can you imagine Iggy Pop sitting there with his glass of wine, telling us how much he liked one of our songs? We were totally blown away by the fact that this legendary icon actually talked to us! It's amazing meeting living legends like him with 40 years' career behind them and finding out that these guys are actually really humble. 

BB Brunes: We met The Kooks and they're really, really cool! Other than that, the French band Deportivo who were like big brothers to us during the first leg of our tour.