“Hello, I’m Mark”, says Mark Tavassol, bassist of the Band Wir Sind Helden, obviously prepared to conduct the interview in English. I have to disappoint him, explaining to him that I will translate our conversation later (the things I do for you lot!). In a corner of a back room in the Astoria 2 (formerly known as the Mean Fiddler), chairs are assembled and we are joined by Jean-Michel Tourette, the second guitarist/keyboardist.

* Hello Guys. How’s it going?
Mark: I’m good thanks, I hope you are, too.

* Yes I am, thanks. To start with, could you maybe give our English readers a short description of your band and your music?

Mark: Wir Sind Helden is a German Band that’s been around for five years and whose members to this day have not managed to live in the same city in Germany. It’s a group that has been working intensively, has put out 3 albums and, like most bands, has difficulties pinpointing its musical style. Many people say that our early stuff reminds them of the eighties, and although that characteristic has become less striking and although our live sound is guitar-dominated, we definitely have a soft spot for synthie-ideas and like to experiment with that. I guess this is due to the fact that we grew up in the eighties and started to develop an interest in music during that time. We’re in our early thirties now and that [eighties-style synth pop] was the first music we came in contact with.

* You all hail from different corners of Germany. How, in the end, did you get together as a group?

Jean: Well, Judith [singer and guitarist], Pola [the drummer] and me met in Hamburg [northern Germany], having played music in our respective hometowns. Pola had come to Hamburg relatively early, from the South, and had become friends with Mark. Then we all transferred our endeavours to Berlin quite quickly, although Mark and me have never really left our hometowns, Hamburg and Hanover.
Mark: At one point, we were all actually living in Hamburg, and it is from that time that this project stems.

* Recently, you had a sort of “home match” at the Wuhlheide in Berlin. How did that go?

Mark: Yes we did. First of all, it happened without rain. That was really important because we’d heard some horror stories in the weather forecasts and had even bought tons of rain capes to distribute in the audience. The Wuhlheide, for the people in England who don’t know it, is a kind of amphitheatre, with an open-air stage and where there are no real seats but steps going up the sides, which makes for a great view not only for the audience but also for the bands. When you play there in September like we did, you have the advantage that it’s dark by the time you’re on stage, meaning that you can do a lot with light effects and so on. We were lucky with the weather and were able to play a great show, our last open-air show this year, to lots of lovely people [almost 17 000, to be more precise]. We were very happy with it.

* That sounds like a bit of a contrast to the smaller shows you are playing in France and England at this point of the tour.

Jean: That’s the good thing though, and we always try to plan our tours like that. When we come back from the summer, we generally come back from having played lots of festivals. Doing that is fascinating for a number of reasons, for example the sheer sizes of the audiences, for example at Rock am Ring [Germany’s biggest and most famous rock music festival]. But also the competitive nature of it all is a positive factor, because you play to all kinds of people and have to prove yourself in a completely different way. However, when it all gets on your nerves or it starts to become a routine, it’s nice to go back to indoor gigs. We have created a good mode where, before a Germany tour, we try and visit other countries where we might have played before or try them out for the first time. The advantage there is that we have the chance to play in smaller clubs, which, for us, isn’t really possible in Germany anymore, and that’s a good variety to have. You don’t get bored and play in one multipurpose hall after another.
Mark: Yes, that’s really important. In Germany, we’ve played secret shows under the name “Wo Sind Helmet” and sometimes play solo gigs for organisations whose causes we support. Add to that the gigs in Europe, and you’ve got a mode that keeps your feet on the ground. That’s something extremely important for us.

* I read interview last year that, according to Mark, at the end of your tour of Europe, your economic balance was more or less zero.

Mark: If that much at all. This year, it might be at plus €50 or something, because more people fit into the Mean Fiddler or because we sold out the Paradiso in Amsterdam. But the thing is that we are equipped for a tour where the focus is on Germany, Switzerland and Austria later on. Had we said that we were only doing Europe, as an isolated kind of thing, our baggage would be a lot smaller. We don’t come here to make money.

* Then what kind of expectations do you have of your shows in Europe and especially England, with its massive market for pop music?

Jean: Well, to have expectations for a specific show or set of shows is difficult because every evening is a little different and each audience is special. We’ve played in London a couple of times [they sold out the Garage twice in 2005 and played at the iTunes Festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in July this year] and it is astounding that an audience which hasn’t got a complete grasp of the language…of course, when we play in London there are lots of Germans in the audience, people who live here or are here on vacation or whatever, but there are also lots of people who don’t understand the language and experience the shows on a different level, with the focus on the music. That’s a nice contrast to what it’s like at home, where we are mainly liked for our lyrics. It is always hard, because you do get asked: “What’s the audience like in blahblahblah” etc., and I find it difficult to say: “Well, the audience in London is…”, because I don’t want to stereotype our audiences. What I have to say is that when we’re abroad, where we might be more of an insider tip, the audiences have a similar structure to those we had in Germany four or five years ago: Lots of students…
Mark: …people who are into or interested in “Indie”…
Jean: …by now the diversity has increased, e.g. dads with their children or something, which is great and I don’t want to devaluate that, it’s just an observation you make. And that’s cool.

* Your compatriot Herbert Groenemeyer played the Royal Albert Hall yesterday, the Beatsteaks are playing London next month…

Mark: Oh really? Are they playing the Royal Albert Hall as well? (grins)

* It’s around the corner from here, actually, at the Borderline…

Mark (mockingly upset): Is that a bigger club than this one?

* …Tomte came over last year…

Mark: But only to get wasted, right? I’m joking, we’re good friends.

* …and you obviously have played in London, and yet people can’t even buy your records here.

Mark: I think the important question here is how important being able to buy a CD will be in the future. There are the websites and online stores where people can buy albums without owning a physical copy. It’s revealing how irrelevant the fact that you can’t buy our record here has become, and how little we are behind the times by not distributing our albums here in England. That also mirrors some times we had at home, when we managed to play clubs almost as big as this one in Southern Germany without having a record out. This self-maintained momentum is much more interesting to us than a sales figure, especially abroad.
Jean: We are on a major label, EMI Records, and that slows the process down a bit compared to smaller labels, where it’s a bit more intricate but at the same time they often distribute in the whole of Europe. That wasn’t a problem for us at the beginning, but now we realise it’s not that easy. In each country there are representatives of the label, like in France, for example, where our record just came out. Apparently they liked it. As for England, just because we’re playing in London doesn’t automatically mean that EMI England is going to say, “Wir Sind Helden – OK, let’s do this”.
Mark: I think of it like this: coming over to England with your music is like going to a pub with a beer in your hand. They have so many great bands; we won’t be offended or anything. It’s not our aim to conquer England. We are already quite busy in Germany to be honest, and it’s just awesome to play here.

* That leads me to my next question. To what extent, as full-time musicians, are you able to follow the music scene here in England, where every week there’s a new “Next Big Thing” being advertised?

Mark: First of all, the English music scene is something that interests us a lot more than the German music scene. That might actually be of interest to the English readers: In Germany, it is not the norm to make German music and, at the same time, to consume and to listen to German music. Until a while ago, it wasn’t even self-evident that German music would be popular in Germany. That’s changed in the last five years…

* …some say because of you…

Mark: …some people say that, yes, put we’re not really comfortable with putting ourselves in that position because we love a lot of bands that have been around for a bit longer and maybe aren’t as successful. Let’s say we were around at the time it all started, but nevertheless none of us four are people who listen to German music, we like mainly British stuff. (At this point, Mark gets up to let his girlfriend into the venue. Jean takes over.)

* So what kind of English/British bands are you into at the moment?

Jean: Erm…Bloc Party, Maximo Party and Franz Ferdinand are probably my personal favourites that I’ve been listening to for a while now (Thinks). There are so many! Art Brut, I think they’re great…

* But you do engage yourselves with what’s going on at the moment?

Jean: Well yeah. For me it’s a kind of wave-like movement, right now I’m actually in a phase where I don’t listen to music that much, but then there are times when there’s lots and lots of good music coming through and where I’m really looking forward to hearing it. You generally can’t concern yourself with music endlessly, and when, as a professional musician, you’re busy with your own music, then the eagerness to listen to other music isn’t as strong as with someone who is into music, but not a musician.

* Let’s go back to expectations. In interviews and on the new record, it comes across as if fulfilling expectations isn’t your thing. No record of yours sounds like the previous one.

Jean: Generally, it’s not like we have a problem with expectations or try to circumvent them, but we’ve sort of freed ourselves from them. From the beginning, when we started out, we’ve always felt a strong independence. That probably has to do something with our development was different to other bands who emerged out of nothing and whose record labels tried to influence them etc. We’ve always made our music without compromise, and it worked. When it comes to our music, I think we’ve got a healthy self-confidence, and we’re not afraid to try out something else or to drop an idea completely.

* In the song “Ode an die Arbeit” (“Ode to work”), there’s the line “You are Prussia” [Prussia = a historic state that, for centuries, had substantial influence over German and European politics. Its capital was Berlin.] That reminded me of the “You are Germany” –poster campaign before the World Cup last year.

Jean: Of course, this line alludes to the campaign, which was a quite controversial one at that. And Prussia in this case is meant to typify a certain sense of duty, which is not necessarily something that is found in the area of work but more often is associated with the military. Ultimately, it plays with that cliché, without any historic references to Prussia and how things were done there at the time.
Mark: We wanted something parole-esque at that point in the song, and that’s what Judith came up with.
* Have you, at some point in the history of the band, thought about singing in English?

Jean: From the start, there were no discussions about this, because at the time we met, Judith had already written about 20 songs with good lyrics in German, and it somehow became clear that that was the way we wanted to do things. The bands I had been in before, the English language was a means of avoiding to write bad German lyrics. So personally, I was pretty happy to be in a band that sang in German, also because you’re understood much better by the people there. It came to a point where we played around a bit with different languages and recorded a song in three different languages. We knew someone who spoke very good Japanese, and who coached us in an extremely funny way. Japanese people are always very polite and go “Yes, yes” and nod, but they actually mean “No, no”. But it was clear from the beginning that this could only be a one-off gag sort of thing, because you can’t sing in a language that you yourself don’t speak.
English would have been a possibility, but somehow it didn’t become us.
Mark: It wasn’t like we tried it in order to find out if it works for us, I think it was pretty clear from the start that it wasn’t something we would do often. I think it’s an important point that we didn’t check out if it was “cool” or not and then decided what to do accordingly. There isn’t another language in which we would do a whole album.

* Tokio Hotel, for example, thought differently and recorded their songs in English and French. I saw them on MTV here the other day.

Jean: A lot of people say that you can’t translate our lyrics properly. We like to play with clichés within the German language, and there are puns in our lyrics that you can’t just translate without losing a lot of meaning.

* On your website, there is a Remix-competition for one of your songs. Whose idea was this?

Mark: It was this organisation [Start-ab] that regularly holds these kinds of competitions, and they approached us asking if we would supply a song for people to remix. And because all of us four, especially Jean and me, are very interested in studio and music technology, we’re quite curious as to what people make of the tracks, and I think with the song “Haende hoch” we gave them a good challenge. I think it already is a very fragile song and to remix it and to let it stand on its own feet again will not be very easy. But I think there are lots of people out there who enjoy that sort of challenge.

* Is there someone whom you’d love to remix a song of yours?

Mark: Moonbootica did one we all liked [of “Gekommen um zu bleiben”], but I’m not really a remix kind of guy, and I don’t know a lot of people who do it.
Jean: If you ask me like that, I’d be very interested in hearing a Timbaland-remix of one of our songs!

* You are called Wir Sind Helden – We are heroes. Who are your personal heroes?

Mark: The name of the band isn’t ironic without a reason. On principle, the glorification of someone you don’t know personally - which is the case with most people who have heroes – often leads to an uncritical view of the person, you hang on every word they say and try to re-live that person’s life. That’s why I think when you have an idol – to use a different word – then you should look for it in your circle of friends or family, or even create a mosaic from different components of your friends. Most of our personalities have been shaped like that, when you discover something in someone else you admire: fairness, honesty or whatever, humour or cheekiness. That’s where you should look for heroes instead of in the sphere of celebrity. Even though they might be good people, their image is always presented in a distorted way. Musically, it’s a lot easier, there’s no shame in saying “I like that band and that singer”, we’re all pretty different in that aspect. I’d put down Peter Gabriel, even though his music doesn’t have a lot to do with ours. Nowadays it’s more unknown, American Indie-bands that take up that position for me.
(thinks) Or hang on, write down Radiohead.

Interview by Matthias Scherer