With A Bullet

Combining a love of harmonies and chamber music in the context of pop rock, Revolver craft songs with all the elegance and singalong sensibilities of their seemingly disparate influences. Named after the celebrated Beatles release and taking cues from the variety of great harmony singers of the '60s, singer/guitarist Ambroise Willaume explains why Revolver's French heritage provides little of their unique flavour.

“When we started writing songs we were listening only to English or American music. I've never been really a big fan of the typical French music, but I don't mean that I don't like it, but it's not a real influence for me,” he explains with a cautious chuckle. “When I started playing guitar I started listening to old stuff because I was not really keen on what was playing on the radio and so I tried to discover other music. I really, really enjoyed discovering Simon And Garfunkel for example or Leonard Cohen or The Beach Boys or Elvis Presley…”

Progressing from the quieter acoustic arrangements of 2009's debut album Music For A While, the Parisian trio slipped some classic rock'n'roll vibes across 2012's Let Go, even nodding to the likes of Crosby, Stills And Nash and Steely Dan. From the outset, cello has remained an integral part of Revolver's sound.

“We were not trying to do a mix between pop and classical,” explains Willaume. “The cello, we try to use it in a new way. It's like a little different to what you're used to hearing in classical music or in pop music. I feel like a cello can really sound very, very bad with a pop band but it's a beautiful instrument so there's a lot of possibilities and we are very, very focused a lot on the role of the cello in the band. We didn't want to add it just to make something pretty; it's like the fourth member of Revolver.”

Having met each other in high school, Willaume and guitarist Christophe Musset shared a common popular music bond, whilst cellist Jeremie Arcache had little exposure to modern music though his studies at renown classical music academy Maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Paris.

“Actually, we met when we were six-years-old, so it was a long time ago,” says Willaume of Arcache. “The first time I saw him playing the cello was maybe ten years later and he was playing a very classical part, and in the middle of it there was this moment of improvisation as you have sometimes in classical concertos, and he was really going mad on his cello and making weird noises with the cello! And so at the end of the concert I went to him and said, 'Hey, do you know Jimi Hendrix? He's one of my favourite musicians – you should listen to him', and he didn't know anything at all about Jimi Hendrix or anything, and I thought he was pretty rock'n'roll.”

Considering Revolver's influences, there was no question of what language the trio would sing in, despite initial resistance from some quarters.

“It's getting kind of popular for French bands to sing in English. When we began like six or seven years ago, when we started writing songs and doing some gigs, a lot of people tried to convince us not to sing in English but to sing in French because everyone was thinking that French artists singing in English would never do anything. It has changed the past few years with bands such as Phoenix, our Soko, and many others…” Plus, Willaume says harmonies just sound better in English. “It doesn't sound good at all in French; it's very, very bad!”