Of all the artists to emerge from the French touch scene, Sébastian Tellier was/is the most esoteric. His quarter-century career has seen both high concept albums and out-and-out pop.
He’s never been afraid to dress up and look ridiculous either – his 2004 Politics album sleeve saw him grin inanely with Polish flags painted on his cheeks, whilst on 2012’s My God Is Blue, he depicted himself as a sinister cult leader.
One of the more ridiculous episodes was the time he took part in Eurovision back in 2008. He’s been talking to the Guardian about that this week saying that “I thought I’d be famous after Eurovision – but nobody noticed.”
His original idea for his performance of Divine at the Contest that year in Belgrade was to drive a golf buggy onto the stage and then crash off it, creating a true WTF moment in front of several hundred million TV viewers.
“A lot of people watch the TV show,” he explains. “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.’”
Alas, the show’s producers nixed the idea. Instead, Tellier drove the golf cart on with an inflatable globe full of helium, which he inhaled. “But nobody noticed; it was not visual enough,” he says. “Nobody saw it. Nobody talked about it.” Divine finished in a lowly 19th place that night.
The ridiculous aspects of his career, like the Eurovision encounter, he argues, is a way to bring ‘glamour’ to his conceptual work. “Not ‘It’s a concept, oh, that will be boring. 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!”
And so for his new album Kiss The Beast, he’s on the sleeve, dressed as what you only describe as a sexy shipwreck survivor. Et voila...
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