RFI Musique: What exactly does the title refer to?*
Thomas Boulard: It’s more a mental state than a geographical place. The title evokes the need we all have for a place where we’re separate from everyone else and we can be ourselves. I certainly need it when I’m writing. But ultimately it’s chimerical. In the world we live in, you’re never far from something. The further away you get from one thing, the closer you are to something else! If people today are suffering, it’s because there’s no way of cutting yourself off. Since the advent of television, mobile phones and the Internet, the world is coming at us all the time and that destroys our desire to go after the world.  

Have you become a sociologist since the last album?!
I’m just trying to listen to the people around me, in order to write songs! But it’s true that I’ve thought a lot between albums. I was getting sick of the whole rock star thing, people coming up to me backstage and saying “you really blew them away, man!”, all that macho stuff. You get stuck in a persona, and you find yourself not doing harmonies, arrangements, not singing about certain subjects or using particular writing styles because “it’s not Luke”. You get into this situation where you become a guru or an ideologue. After a while it’s not so funny any more and I realised that I couldn’t care less about all of that. That it was the music that was important, and that in the end it had to work on different levels, and be alive.

How did this new thinking affect the way you made the album?
Before, we composed the music and then wrote the lyrics, a bit on the fly, if we had the time… It was pretty routine and frankly, sometimes it would have been much the same as singing in English. But I started to write during the tour for Enfants de Saturne [their previous album], without any tune in my head, without really knowing whether it was for Luke or not, but just to keep my hand in. Coming out of concerts, still buzzing, I realised I was writing and singing different things.

Your view of our times is pretty dark: a society that doesn’t know how to laugh (Fini de rire) or how to forgive (Le gardien de prison)…
I’m very sorry about that! I’m happy in my life, but in my music I find it harder.
I take my inspiration from the common traits of people today and our modern era. And I notice that it’s a world without humour, a world that sneers, that mocks the weak and looks up to the rich. There’s no moral at the end of the stories I tell. My job is to open the window on certain subjects and then close it at the end of the song.

Who are you writing for?
People who listen to music naively, simply. Not the snobs who judge everything with a thousand references. I’ve got a lot of non-specialist friends and those are the ones I write my songs for.

Who are you listening to at the moment?
I’m only listening to French classical music: Berlioz, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Debussy… Not for snobbish reasons but because it’s the only way for me to listen to music directly. Listening to songs makes me anxious. When the song is good, I’m pissed off I didn’t write it! I need an ascetic musical life to create and manage this schizophrenic work of putting lyrics and melody together. I try not to spread myself too thin. I’m like a cabinet maker specialised in doing the feet of Louis XIV tables! I write my songs with a sense of craft, even if songwriting is not really a craft.

What do you think of the French "baby rockers”, teenage bands who sing in English?
What they do is great, but I don’t agree with them. Do they want French to become merely a regional language? Already, corporate board meetings in France are all in English. Soon, we’ll be voting in European laws in English and doing maths and sociology in English. Do we want French to become a language just for the poor, the ignorant and the artists? Personally, I don’t. I’m in favour of globalising cultures if it means blending them, but not if it simply means imitating another culture.

*“D’autre Part” is a pun that can mean “moreover” or “other place”