The Young Gods: Sounds like heaven

For two decades, have made some of the most primal rock music around - without a guitar in sight

When The Young Gods played the all-seating Queen Elizabeth Hall, in London, in December 2000, the audience was in for a peculiarly frustrating evening. The prelude to the concert comprised pieces of ambient music, one accompanied by a naked dancer and another by an anthropologist recounting hallucinogenic experiences. Then the Swiss rock band took the stage and played some of the most primal, visceral and intense rock music to be found in town that night. Remaining seated was near impossible.

That neatly illustrates the duality at the heart of The Young Gods' work. This band's music is unique: it's rock, but made entirely electronically except for live drumming. It juxtaposes brutal guitar barrages and percussion storms with moments of elegiac sensitivity.

Their front man, Franz Treichler, is something of an elder statesman in the rock scene now. The band are in Britain for a rare national tour, to celebrate 20 years of The Young Gods and to promote the new compilation album, XXY. Their line-up consists of Treichler, as vocalist and composer, with a sample-operator and a drummer, who have changed over the years. Al Comet and Bernard Trontin, respectively, fill those positions now. The core sound is electric guitar, sampled, treated and blended with musique concrète, classical vignettes and electronica.

Treichler is a man of extremes. He played classical guitar for 12 years and electric guitar as well, in a band before The Young Gods. It was a conscious decision to give it up. "I had my clichés and I was hiding behind the guitar," he says, in charmingly accented but fluent English. "I was tired of the E and A strings. When sampling came on the market, it was a new approach to writing music. But I think I learnt a lot from classical music. I had a really good teacher, and he taught me that basically music is an organisation of time. If you take point A and you go to point B three minutes later, what you do between those two points is going to seem long or fast according to how you organise that amount of time. So in a musical phrase, in a melody, time becomes elastic, and that's what's fascinating about music - why sometimes something becomes boring after one minute, and something else is more interesting and you think it's been only 10 seconds after one minute."

This cultured, articulate man had a great idea in 1987 for the cover art of his new band's debut single: a photo of the words "The Young Gods" carved into his chest. Nearly two decades later, he plays down the incident. "Regarding the name of the band in the skin, it was not that dramatic. I never liked tattoos myself and I thought I'd rather have a scarification. The scar disappeared after five or six years."

If The Young Gods' music is out on a limb, their lyrics are equally idiosyncratic. As well his grade-I rock voice, Treichler has a poetic facility with words and a distinctively Gallic sensibility, evoking Baudelaire in his symbolist narratives. "A lot of our songs are love songs," he says. "'Kissing the Sun' is... you get close to the light, the sun, with love, with a partner, but it's also a song that has a second meaning, which would be the Icarus syndrome - people playing with fire. Everyone knows we're going to be kissing the sun if we carry on the way we are, exploiting the planet.

"I like to play with double meanings, so the song 'L'Amourir' can mean the end of a love affair and the distress you can have because of it, and you lose control and your emotional state is down to zero - or minus. Or it's also the fact that there's a tiny line when... you talk about Georges Bataille, orgasm and 'little death', and to lose yourself into this and wanting to die because everything is perfect at that moment. It's a little bit of both together. You can take it as an intense love song or the end of a love affair."

After two albums with largely French vocals - their avant-garde, self-titled debut, which was Melody Maker's album of the year in 1987; and their 1989 masterpiece, L'Eau Rouge - the band made their first English-language record, TV Sky, in 1991. "Nowadays I've started to mix... French and English," says Treichler, "and I hope to find a solution in between. But they're very different to sing; they both have their rules."

In fact, a very different record plugs the gap between L'Eau Rouge and TV Sky: the 1990 album The Young Gods Play Kurt Weill, a work that fully unleashes their experimental side. The set was originally commissioned for a festival of Swiss culture in Geneva and Fribourg, Treichler's home town. "I knew Kurt Weill, and was kind of a fan, because I think he is the god- father of pop music - in my definition of pop music as something popular, basically. The Threepenny Opera is about hookers, criminals and priests and a small community of people in foggy Soho... it's a bit edgy. Also, the music is pretty dissonant, like Tom Waits 60 years ago. And there is a socio-political content. Good pop music is like this - there is a pertinent message underneath something that everyone can sing along to, and there are question marks when you go a bit deeper into the song. The Beatles could do that, too.

"So Kurt Weill is a model. That's what we're trying to do - experiment with music but still in a song format. He is a master at that. And the quality of the songwriting is fantastic. I always take his 'September Song' as an exemplar, because it showed me that I, as a singer, could be intense without having to scream."

The Young Gods' second decade may not seem to have matched the wild creativity of their early years, but each album has had a distinct character, and the fervour that greets their live shows is undimmed. "We are getting out of a period of two or three years of ambient collaborations and side-projects," Treichler explains. "We did this CD last year called Music for Artificial Clouds, which was completely instrumental, and lots of different collaborations with contemporary dance companies and things like this.

"But for the 20 years, we wanted to go back to live action and have a raw, in-your-face music again. What we've been writing for the next CD is short, in song-form, with lots of guitars. OK, it's treated with computers - the guitar sounds are a bit weird - but it's more frontal, more direct.

"When we're on stage with the band, I have this feeling of volcano, fireballs, euphoria, chaos, danger," Treichler continues, with relish. "I like this feeling of something that can get out of your hands. I'm glad we still have a response, people interested. Twenty years, it's... who would have thought?"

'XXY' is out now on PIAS. The Young Gods tour the UK to 3 December ( www.younggods.com)