The Stool Pigeon

British bands and actors say that when they’re interviewed by the French, they are often asked wide open questions like, “What is cinema?”

Today, we are in the company of Justice, Parisian dance music super-duo, so let’s turn les tables around and enquire, ‘Who are Justice?’ or, more pointedly, ‘What is Justice?’

A grand, empty room at Somerset House in London with a sky-high ceiling and a view across the stately courtyard where Justice will perform tonight, brilliantly. For those who were there, it was a defining moment of the summer; a full-on, throbbing rave in the most dignified of settings. And, yes, it was shedding it down.

Justice - Gaspard Augé, curly hair, and Xavier de Rosnay, the younger one - seemed more grown; more in charge of their performance than they have been in the past... confident, aggressive. Xavier even came from behind their wall of machines to acknowledge his public. He appeared resplendently small and feeble-looking stood frozen with his arm in the air, his fingers locked into a peace sign, but he made the effort and Justice are nothing if not the reluctant pop stars.

Or perhaps they aren’t. There are so many layers of design and calculation behind the pair, it’s hard to work out when they’re being true and what to them is a joke. And if Justice is something of a hoax, at which point did it, or will it, slip out of their control?

Justice were born on a something of a gag - one that has an excellent punchline: they entered their remix of Simian’s ‘Never Be Alone’ into a competition, and lost. And maybe that isn’t even the punchline. Ed Banger boss, Pedro Winter, heard it and originally used it as a B-side. And then, when the track blew up, it got renamed and became an A-side. Justice were suddenly being offered high-grade DJing gigs, despite the fact they couldn’t mix, and they’ve always said they learnt how to produce by doing remixes for artists like Franz Ferdinand and Britney - hardly your entry-level ‘ones to watch’ musicians.

All this is ancient history. As the Somerset House show spectacularly proved, Justice is a two-man disco powerhouse these days. But they still enjoy playing with people’s perceptions of them. In an August interview with Pitchfork, Xavier said: “Music is more about making decisions than having skills. We are not great musicians. We are not great producers. We are not great songwriters. We are just nothing.”

Today’s surprise is Gaspard. “We’re not supposed to, but it’s okay,” he says in response to the printed-off A4 ‘No Smoking’ signs blu-tacked to all four walls in this room. Throughout our conversation he constantly tap, tap, taps his cigarette on the table. In half an hour he smokes ones, rolls another, taps it persistently but never lights it. He’s anxious as hell, but he says he’s not nervous about the gig. And he stutters terribly. An example: I ask him about how the live show has progressed recently and he says: “B-b-b-b-b-because it’s been six months that we have been doing the live show like zis, we are constantly changing it one night to another and, er, w-w-w-we are almost reaching... not perfection, but at least the idea we had of it at the beginning. I-i-i-i-i-it’s definitely more efficient and fluent than six months ago.”

Who is this man? He’s polite and you can tell he has a warm soul, but the uneasiness is unbearable. Fifteen minutes in, I stop and say: “Is this very painful for you? Is talking about Justice a chore?”

Gaspard is startled. “No, no, no!” he says. “It’s cool. Really. I’m sorry.” And for the first time he looks up from tapping his cigarette. He changes too: the stutters become less frequent, and he seems to enjoy being pushed.

Are you a pop star and, if so, do you enjoy the attention? “We are definitely not pop stars; nobody recognises us. And we are definitely not frontmen; we hide behind this huge machine.”

You said that the visual side of Justice - the omnipresent cross, the stage design - was 50 per cent of what you were all about. That’s bullshit, isn’t it? “No. I really hope we are providing interesting music and also a bit more than that; something exciting for people to look at. We think that is definitely a part of the history of pop.”

The Fabric CD. What’s the story there? You cut a mix for them and they didn’t want to put it out? “Ah yeah, it’s quite complicated. They had this length policy - they wanted it to last 74 minutes, the maximum length of a CD - but we could only clear 24 tracks and it would have been really boring to make the songs longer to fill up the CD. And aside from this length problem, I guess they just didn’t enjoy the tracklisting: they were very French songs. In France, they are considered cheesy music, but for us the songwriting is amazing and it would have been fun to see if people who come from a different background would enjoy the music.”

Did Fabric think it was joke? “Maybe they thought it was a kind of joke.”

What about the video for ‘Stress’. You were accused of making a racist video. Were you surprised by the reaction? “No. We were expecting some fuss obviously, but definitely not on those topics, such as racism. We wanted to make something very far from our universe, just because the song was different from ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ [their preceding single]. We were looking for something violent because the song is violent, and that’s it. If we were to do it again, we would do it exactly the same. It was kind of an experiment in making an un-broadcastable video for an un-broadcastable song, because we knew the song would never be played on the radio. It’s funny because some papers were saying we were banned from TV, but it was exactly the opposite: it was on the internet and then every music and TV channel called us to get the hi-res version to play on MTV and news programmes. We just said no.”

The ‘Stress’ video isn’t racist: it’s very violent, but not racist. Nonetheless, the reaction must have worried Justice. “Making an un-broadcastable video for an un-broadcastable song” sounds like a gag too. But what if someone else comes up with the punchline, and it’s not funny at all? Is that the moment when the divine order slips away from them?

Onwards. ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ came out - a tribute to Michael Jackson - and it had kids in it. That was a joke, wasn’t it? “Of course we were thinking of the irony of having kids in a kind of Michael Jackson tribute.”

People not knowing whether you are being serious or not must be fun: it gives you a kind of freedom, doesn’t it? “What’s cool about it is that people don’t really know what to expect from us. We are trying to surprise ourselves by going from one extreme to another - putting ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ out, then ‘Stress’, for example. They’re very different songs.”

Suddenly our time is up. Gaspard smiles, we shake hands, and he says: “I’m sorry that I was a bit focussed on rolling this cigarette.”

Before he leaves, I give him the chance to make one more joke, if indeed they make jokes at all. My flatmate’s boyfriend is desperate to come to the show. I ask. “There is a name on the list: El Toro. He can use that, it’s no problem.”

El Toro. El Toro. Surely not?

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