Gojira’s Joe Duplantier explained how they got the Olympic gig in Paris 2024
Gojira’s Joe Duplantier explained how they got the Olympic gig in Paris 2024
Gojira‘s huge opening ceremony performance for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games last Friday, July 26th was something metal really needed world wide …. . The French metal band awakened the masses with their French Revolution firey and heavy performance of “Ah! Ça Ira” a French anthem from the 1700s.
how did this come about as you don’t see havey metal bands play on TV during the olympics usually …
Gojira‘s live performance was a milestone for the genre of metal.
As for the opportunity to actually play the opening ceremony and the significance it represented Joe stated : via rolling stone artivel here https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gojira-olympics-marie-antoinette-interview-1235070037/
“The Olympic Committee could have asked literally anybody to play. I’m thinking of bands like Metallica or AC/DC that are household names and powerhouses in our genre that we all revere and are our heroes. We never considered ourselves the biggest band in the world that would be worthy to play the Olympics or anything like that. It’s so weird.
The way I think about it is it’s a challenge in 2024 to give hope to people, to show something original. People have seen everything from landing on the moon to AI. So it was a challenge for Paris and the Committee to express something fresh, new, and original [by booking us] and also show what France is all about.
At least for our part, the fact that metal and opera had never been seen together on TV and in front of so many people before is a statement for the country of France. It’s saying, ‘Hey, look. We’re still pushing the boundaries in the world.’ So congrats to France for putting this together.”
Regarding the song choice, Duplantier stated:
“That wasn’t us at all. That was the team of young people and composers and designers that decided the whole theme. We were in the dark when it came to the whole ceremony; we were just concentrating on that picture and that moment of Marie Antoinette. We didn’t know how it was going to look or how it would fit in with a whole performance.
I didn’t know Lady Gaga or Celine Dion were going to be there. We were in [the Olympic Committee’s] confidence, and we weren’t allowed to tell our people that we were going to do this. We didn’t know what was going to happen at all. We just went back and forth with the composer of the Olympic ceremony, Victor le Masne. He threw us a tempo and a guideline. And then we did our thing.”
Gojira also had freedom with their own metal rendition of the song as Duplantier explained:
“We very simply and organically came up with riffs and grooves that we like to play. We took it as an opportunity to represent the metal scene. So it was our task to really go for it and lay it down, not just be there and play a few notes to shock people. We decided to go full-on with double-kick drums, screaming, growling, epic moments, and a tempo breakdown at the end; we really wanted to show what metal is all about. And to our surprise, it was all accepted by the committee.
But they gave us some guidelines and things that were mandatory, for example, saying ‘Ah! Ça Ira’ which I ended up saying three times in the song. It’s rare for me to sing in French in Gojira. So it was a bit of a challenge. I was the one pushing to put some English in the middle of the song to make it more international.”
Gojira’s Joe Duplantier explained how they got the Olympic gig in Paris 2024
