A few years ago, a stranger stole Sébastien Tellier’s identity. The impostor – sporting the musician’s trademark sunglasses and beard – posed as the Frenchman at fancy parties, nabbed free clothes from Chanel (Tellier used to be an ambassador for the brand), and even held meetings with bosses from Hollywood studios (Tellier has dabbled in soundtrack work). “He [also] took a lot of drugs like ketamine in front of a lot of people,” Tellier continues with perfect nonchalance from his Paris home, sunglasses and beard present and correct. The crime was only rumbled when a confused woman got in touch to tell him she’d been partying with “Sébastien Tellier” in France only to see on Instagram that the real Tellier was playing a gig in Belgium.
This experience has been alchemised into pop gold via Copycat, a sparkly synthpop workout on his upcoming eighth album, Kiss the Beast. “My name you steal it / Hat and success,” Tellier croons for the song’s chorus over a chunky bassline, disco strings and synths that crackle and spark like fireworks. It’s typical Tellier, mixing the serious – things got so bad with the impostor that Tellier was briefly forced to show his passport at the school gates when collecting his two small children – with the playfully naive.
It’s a trait he’s employed throughout his career, be it pairing the majestic, Tony Allen-assisted dreamscape La Ritournelle, a “pop classic” according to friend Nicolas Godin of Air, with a song called Ketchup vs Genocide on 2004’s Politics; or, four years later, performing his sleek Beach Boys-meets-electropop single Divine, co-produced by Daft Punk legend Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, at Eurovision. It’s hard to imagine anyone else associated with the ultra-cool French touch scene going near the derided song contest, let alone arriving on its stage via a small golf cart.
“I don’t want to be the slave of good taste,” he says, a plume of cigarette smoke haloing him as he holds his phone under his chin. “To be just Eurovision, it’s a nightmare,” he continues. “But to be just [fancy Parisian hotel] Plaza Athénée, it’s a nightmare also. Sometimes it’s super-good to have just a burger.”
The title and artwork for Kiss the Beast, the latter shot by revered French fashion photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, may explore Tellier’s “paradox and deep duality” but musically it also features comical snatches of sheep baaing (on Mouton), while the lounge jazz of Loup (or “wolf’) is constantly disrupted by bursts of frantic electronic wig-outs. It’s about balance, Tellier thinks: “You know, it’s very important to feel comfortable with all the aspects of life.”
Last year Tellier turned 50, a milestone age that seemed to unlock something in him. Aware that “the rest of the way before death is not so long”, he wanted this album to reach a bigger audience. Hence why Kiss the Beast features collaborations with the likes of Nile Rodgers and Kid Cudi, plus production input from Oscar Holter, the Max Martin affiliate whose bulging pop CV includes Blinding Lights by the Weeknd. Holter’s presence feels like an interesting mainstream move for an artist seemingly happy on the periphery of pop, I suggest to Tellier.
“It’s hard to explain, but in a way I want to respect my age,” he says. “My favourite album when I was 20 was Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt. You know, this kind of ‘I’m a crazy guy, I feel bad, I hate the world’.” He sucks deeply on his second cigarette of our time so far. “But step by step, in my 50s, now I really love to listen to Lionel Richie, or Barbra Streisand.”
Tellier’s early love for Wyatt mirrored his mindset growing up in the “tough” area of Cergy-Pontoise, north-west of Paris. “I was afraid to see bad guys. I was afraid on the bus. I was afraid at the train station and all this shit,” he says, getting up and pacing around his house. A newly built city, Cergy-Pontoise offered only a concrete life. “So no culture, no soul. I was very sad. If you are in the city but near the sea, for example, you can dream with the sea. But in this new city, in the far suburbs of Paris, there were no mountains, no beautiful river, no ocean, nothing like that.”
He says it felt like only he and his father listened to music, cutting them off as this strange little “island of culture”. After he moved out, into his first “shitty” apartment in Paris, he started to make his own music on a four-track recorder. He was also drinking heavily. “I had a very kind of savage life,” he says. “I partied a lot and I didn’t take care of myself at all.” One night, all that changed after he saw the music video for Air’s Kelly Watch the Stars on TV. “I felt a connection between me and their music,” he explains. “Like pop, electro, and at the same time international, but French.”
Noticing that the name of Air’s then-label, Source, was shown on the screen, a few days later Tellier took his demo tape to their offices. After a short meeting, his dark-hued instrumental Fantino was added to a compilation the label was releasing, nestled alongside Phoenix and various other “cool French dudes”. Shortly after that, Air launched their own label, Record Makers, and signed Tellier. He would also support them on tour in 2001. “We played almost 2,200 times,” he says, still in awe. “This part of my life was really important because with them I discovered the world and with them I escaped my old, sad world.”
Across a career that’s now spanned a quarter of a century, he’s never looked back, playfully crisscrossing genres and exploring concepts. He’s keen to clarify the latter. “Not ‘It’s a concept, oh, that will be boring,’” he smiles. “No, no, no. For me, it’s very important to bring some glamour to my concepts, because just concept, it’s too boring. Conceptual movie, conceptual everything, it’s boring!” On 2012’s My God Is Blue, for example, he mused on religion dressed like a cult leader, while 2020’s Domesticated – its title suggested by his friend, the movie director Sofia Coppola – celebrated his life with his wife, Amandine Martinon de La Richardière, and children via the prism of songs such as the hypnotic sci-fi opus Domestic Tasks.
His biggest WTF moment remains that Eurovision performance, however. Not that Tellier feels any shame. He knew he wasn’t going to win (he finished 19th) and only did it because “a lot of people watch the TV show”. If anything, he wanted his performance to be weirder; his initial plan was to drive his golf cart straight off the stage.
“I had the opportunity to create something huge like an accident at the Eurovision. I thought: ‘I will be so famous with this crash that it will be great in front of millions and millions of people.’” Unsurprisingly, it was deemed too dangerous by the show’s producers. Instead, he arrived in the golf cart carrying an inflatable globe full of helium which he duly inhaled. “But nobody noticed; it was not visual enough,” he says. “Nobody saw it. Nobody talked about it.”
It’s that disconnect between idea and execution, artist and audience, that Tellier can’t stand. I ask him if he agrees with Godin’s appraisal of La Ritournelle, a song that has soundtracked everything from sports montages to a L’Oréal advert to an episode of Come Dine With Me, and – at 63m plays on Spotify alone – his biggest streaming hit by far. “Yes, [it is a classic] in a way, because it’s an important song for a lot of people,” he says, briefly switching nicotine for caffeine. “They play this song at weddings, or at funerals. You know, for important moments in life. So it has a special place in the heart of the audience.”
Creating a bridge to them is what he’s always tried to do. Only now it’s being done via big pop songs about impostors, wolves and sheep.
Kiss the Beast is out 30 January; Tellier plays Koko, London, 23 March.
