The Toulouse Julien Barbagallo multiplies the caps with a third solo album planned for the beginning of the year 2018 and his place as drummer in the psychedelic pop group of international renown: Tame Impala.
Albigensian by birth, Toulouse by adoption, Julien Barbagallo is a musician who has been scouring the French stages for twenty years. If he has collaborated or created well-known bands such as Aquaserge or Thaiti 80, he is especially since 2011, the regular drummer of the Australian band Tame Impala, headliner of the biggest international festivals. After his second solo album Grand Chien and a tour that took him from the Francofolies to Rock en Seine, Julien Barbagallo finishes the composition of a third album. Freshly married to an Australian and always very composed, he multiplies like a balancing act the great gaps between a solo French career and an international group, straddling Melbourne and Toulouse.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Julien Barbagallo, I am 37 years old, I was born in Albi in the Tarn. I learned music there where I played in my first bands. I stayed there until the early 2000s. I moved to Toulouse when I was 23 years old where I played with other bands, some of whom toured quite a bit in France. In the meantime, I founded the Aquaserge group with two of my friends. Aquaserge still continues but I don't have time to play live anymore. I still record albums with them. I also had the opportunity to play with a band from Rouen called Thaiti 80, with whom I started traveling. I also played with Bertrand Burgalat, a French producer and composer. And five years ago, I joined the band Tame Impala with whom I have been playing ever since and who take up a lot of my time through touring and traveling.
How did you come to play drums?
I started when I was 9 years old. I went quite naturally because I tapped pretty much everything that fell on my hand when I was little. It never let me down. I've had this drumming career until today. At the same time, when I was a teenager, I started writing songs on guitar and singing. It's been dotted so far. Since my first album three years ago, I've taken it a little more seriously.
The burning question is: how did you end up in the band Tame Impala?
Completely by chance. It was at the time of the first album Innerspeaker (released in 2010 Editor's note) and I listened to a lot. At the end of 2011, I was in Paris and I was in a bar where I go all the time called Le Motel. There, I see Kevin Parker: he is the brain of the group, he is the one who composes and records everything. He is there because he lived in Paris at the time. I'm going to greet him and tell him that Innerspeaker is a great album. It spoke to me a lot because with my band Acquaserge we were in this genre with things a little progressive, formats a little long. But also a pop side that joined my other influences. It was a mix that I found interesting and that we talked about. Eventually, we ended up spending the evening together and drinking a lot of shots (laughs). Then he thought that a drummer might interest him since he wanted to experiment with loops, etc. He asked me if I was interested in doing some music with him. Of course it is. We both started playing. We had an ephemeral micro project called Long Distance Relationship. We did two concerts in Paris. In fact I realize today that he was giving me a kind of audition because after that he asked me if I was not interested in joining Tame Impala because the guy who does drums was going to do keyboards. Of course, I accepted and it went from there. We went to Perth to rehearse one day in July 2012.
How did the meeting with the other members of the group go?
It was pretty weird because I was a fan and I was on the other side of the mirror. And they were laughed to see Kevin come out with the Frenchman on duty. You should know that this is a group of long-time friends. On the Perth stage, everyone knows each other, so there was this side of really coming out of nowhere, outside the circle. And it went very well, they are adorable, the welcome was perfect and for them I was assimilated after three seconds. They're so cool about playing music that they don't ask questions. There is this pure pleasure of playing music.
Can you tell us about your first concert as a member of the band Tame Impala?
It was a big festival in Australia with 15,000 people. We were almost headliners. In addition, I was playing with equipment that was not familiar to me at all: headphones that come directly into your ears. I had to familiarize myself with that. I was pretty focused. In addition, we followed directly with the Lollapalooza of Chicago. In fact, I didn't have too much time to direct, it was more during rehearsals that I found it funny. In addition, we rehearsed in the basement of a bar. The band wasn't as huge as it is today and the conditions were cool, borderline garage, without the garage. But playing the songs was super galvanizing.
What is your biggest memory with the band?
I tend to say everything because it's an extraordinary experience. Afterwards, we played just before Adele at the English Glastonburry festival in front of a human tide. One thing you won't do many times in your life.
You don't write the albums. How do you work with the band?
Kevin writes everything. For the first album, I knew him almost by heart. For the second, he had sent us the album a few months before its release and everyone worked on the parts of his instrument on his side. When we got together, everyone knew what they had to do. Since then, it's been like that.
So you go back and forth with the France?
There, the cycle of the tour more or less stopped last February. Before that, you rarely had more than a month and a half between tours. In fact, we see each other a lot for tours but not in between. Everyone is a little scattered around the world (Amsterdam, New York, Perth and me in Toulouse).
You even had a date in your city, at the Bikini in Toulouse in 2013. What did it do to you?
It was almost a joke because it wasn't planned on the tour. We joked about coming to play in Toulouse who were on the road to Primavera. And then we managed to set the date with friends of mine from the association La chatte à la voisine. It's been really huge and magical. As a reminder, I played with my TFC jersey. Afterwards, I don't know if people knew I was from the area but in any case it made them laugh. Today the band is too big to come and play at the Bikini.
What is the future for Tame Impala?
At the moment the cycle of tours and closed. Basically, we are waiting to see when the next Tame Impala will be released. Kevin is busy, so the project is muted. And it doesn't get any worse, so everyone was able to take care of their own stuff.
But back to you since you also have a solo career in parallel. How do you find time to write while you're on tour?
In a tour, you have a lot of free time and a lot of hours where you don't do anything, so you might as well do something, like an album. Well I also watched The Sopranos in a week.
Are you the do-it-yourself type?
Yes. I record everything, all alone at home, at home but also a lot on tour, in hotel rooms, tour buses. I did what I could, where I could. The third one that I am finalizing soon, I recorded this time in a studio called Barberine, in the Lot, which is the former home of Nino Ferrer. His son takes care of running it. I spent about ten days there and the same, I recorded everything myself but in much better recording conditions.
How do you compose your albums? Do you start with writing or music?
I mainly do music before. In the future, I plan to try the opposite by writing the text first. I always carry around with a little travel guitar, a small synth that fits in my backpack. I have pretty much everything I want on hand to move forward on the songs. After that, it takes me a lot of time, I write on the length.
How is your meeting with the public as Julien Barbagallo?
It's going really well because it's not really music. The music is accessible but the lyrics are a little different from what you can expect in French song. Finally, the music serves as a bridge between me and the audience to facilitate the reception of the texts. This gateway side is more true in non-French-speaking countries because the reception of the public is very good. I think music has this very pop, Anglo-Saxon side that puts everyone at ease. We speak a bit of the same language, we have a common basis. We have these Anglo-Saxon references that serve as a binding agent on stage.
Why did you decide to sing in French?
I sang in English for a long time. I just realized it wasn't me. It created too many filters between what I wanted to say and the end result. I started French a bit as a challenge, but now it's a real pleasure to write in French because it's such an inexhaustible source of nuance, lyricism, magic that you don't have with English if you're not 100% bilingual.
What are your influences? In your songs you talk a lot about your region like the one where you evoke the Sidobre du Tarn.
It's archi-tarnais, but at the same time the song is about a place in the state of Victoria in Australia where I had walked and which reminded me a lot of the Sidobre. The Sidobre serves as a bit of an excuse to talk about something else: the nostalgia of the country when you travel, the universality of certain landscapes. It's just stepping stones. I'm not a regionalist, it's part of my culture. It's not about talking only about me in my songs.
Your previous album had medieval sounds, is it a period that attracts you?
It covers 1000 years of history but it fascinates me. It's true that during the recording of Big Dog, I listened to a lot of medieval music or songs. These were things that calmed me a lot in the recording phase because it's very simple in terms of instruments and harmonies. A bit mystical in the background. I was trying to inject it into my own songs.
Where did the name Big Dog come from?
It comes from an Australian Francophile friend who is learning French. He had sent me a message ending with "See you soon big dog". He had literally translated the English expression "Big dog". Seeing these two words together, it made me "tilt". I didn't have the album ready at all, I hadn't even composed it but I immediately thought it would be the name of my next record. The association of the two words is quite bizarre and poetic.
You're finishing your third album, what will it look like?
Compared to what I've done before. You have to imagine an elastic that I stretched with on one side my words that tend towards even more magical things. I try to move further and further away from the concrete, from the down to earth. On the other hand, the music, I stretched it even more towards the pop side. With a little less synths and a lot of real drums. There, it's very organic, very acoustic. It will be more refined in textures and sounds, very pop in compositions, but that's still my opinion. More dreamlike. The release is scheduled for February 2018 and it will be called Dance in the Elsewhere.
