The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

It’s not often a press biography deserves mentioning, but Zombie Zombie’s is great. Etienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman met at a Paris cinema during a retrospective of seventies horror flicks, it says. They got talking on the way out and, a few beers later, had a plotline for their own: two fugitives drive across the desert, their car breaks down, they’re chased by wolves and end up in a ghost town where things go from bad to worse. A few more beers in and they discover they’re both musicians - Etienne a keyboardist, and Neman a drummer - and set about making the soundtrack for this future masterpiece. The result? A Land for Renegades, a record filled with all kinds of fear-inducing bleeps and motorik drumming. “Terror disco,” they call it.

It’s a marvellous story. Unfortunately, it turns out to be utter bollocks. “Yeah, sorry about that,” laughs Neman. On the plus side, the reality is almost as good. The pair met at a recording studio where Neman was playing with his other, rather different, group - indie staples Herman Dune.

“We had separate bands at that time,” Neman explains, “and it just happened we were in the studio at the same time, so we started jamming, me on drums and him on these old keyboards he collects.”

Although both love horror films, the band promise they weren’t trying to sound like one: “We didn’t come up with an idea to sound like this. I think it’s probably more Etienne’s instruments that made us. We only use analogue keyboards and most of them are the ones people used in horror soundtracks. Like we’ve got this Space Echo and it’s what they used to make screams sound really scary.”

So where’s the interesting bit of this actual biography? Well, it turns out Etienne and Neman have a rather unusual approach to getting some of the sounds on the album. After spending five minutes trying to deny he has any evil character traits by stressing he only likes “beautiful horror movies”, Neman says, “I have this little cassette recorder and sometimes I record stuff while watching horror movies to use in songs or I just go and record things in the street, like people screaming.”

You walk the streets of Paris looking for people screaming?

“No, I don’t look for people screaming, I ask them. It’s a really funny thing to do, especially with kids. Sometimes they don’t want to because they get really scared. But when they do it, they get really into it, and their parents can’t stop them.”