Its first album, Exile in Guyville, had opened into 93 a breach in the American rock'n'roll for the first time, a woman dared to sing the sex and her frustrations on bottom of electric guitars and inspired. After four years of a voluntary repli, Liz Phair receives in the Lake Michigan, whereas comes out Whitechocolatespaceegg: a third album with nicely negotiated maturity.

By Emmanuel Tellier.

EIle entered water while laughing, too happy to raise small D éfi that one launched to him to probe his reputation of daring. " Me, not able to make photographs in the lake? You know little about me!"

On the range, with a score of meters in withdrawal, three sunny grannies lascivement contemplate the strange spectacle of this young woman posing vis-a-vis to a photographer himself inserted in water to the belly. A little further, a jogger mark a pause in its race, undoubtedly wondering which is this strange girl and if the happy photographer works for Playboy or Penthouse.

In this end of summer, it is still very hot in Chicago: more than 30 degr és. Six or seven less with regard to the water of the Lake Michigan, vé ritable ocean without history at the edge of which Liz Phair comes to play each day with his little boy - Nick, 2 years, fruit of its marriage with a local scenario writer. On tepid sand where will take place the interview, time runs peacefully: a small perfume of dolce vita to which Liz tastes with delight and idleness, last pleasure of season before the next hard winter. Since midday, without never pressing itself, anxious to receive with old, " with the good mannerss of people of this area, who much less cold and are limited that what one claims ". Liz gave us to see a few pieces of his life - accesses of the zoo of Chicago to his district of Lincoln Park. Enough elements in any case so that one can try to supplement intrigant it puzzle which it became with the wire of time.

" As you can see it, I carry out a rather normal life, between my house, my family and my music. And then, intermittently, I carry out a life a little less normal: the small train of the daily newspaper runs off the line - in any case sufficiently so that I find what to nourish my songs " Five years that that was awaited. Five years of disappointed frustrations and despoirs, to wonder why this girl never yet had put the feet in France - not more to give concerts to it that to promote her discs. Of it, one thus knew only the necessary ones and iné puisables albums - Exiles in Guyville into 93 and Whip-smart into 94 - or some photographs interviews in American publications. A beautiful enigma, this Liz to phair: prolix and inflated on disc, but secret, even completely goes away, at the city. A single character in the American rock'n'roll, also (even definitely more) credible and respect 3rd that the Courtney Madonna coils, but also more just and considered in its work, concentrated on its suiet.

A nourished girl of great principles - to follow its way, not to leave corrompre by temptations, excesses of the medium, to be done rare on scene never not to become a machine with rock'n'roll -, but also an artist able to lower his guard and to become again instinctive time to write its attractive songs and its texts worthy of Dylan. What is this with the Juste that this new language, passionately defended by its admiratrices Chrissie Hynde, Winona Ryder or PJ Harvey? A scientist mé lange of asserted femininity, sagacity, of well felt provocation, the whole soaked in an impressive intelligence - bottom like form - and a radiant irony. More than of the songs of rock'n'roll: something like a visceral need to sing the emancipation and freedom to be oneself in full heart of a puritan country. " Where I live, all is coded, said under the coat.

Blow, I pass for a kind of insane, shameless. " What gâ you nothing, cest that Liz Phair can be also read on several levels, according to what one will have desire for finding there. Envies émoustiller at handsome price by reading some confidences of woman on the fellatio and the love out of greyhound bitch? Liz Phair is there for you. Envies outward journey a little further and of knowing what a girl can feel vis-a-vis with a guy obsessed by the fellatio and the love out of greyhound bitch? Liz Phair is also there for that. In any case, to Chicago, to a few weeks of the French output - after four years of silence - of its third album, Whitechocolatespaceeg, the small media nickname (" The indie Madonna ") of Liz Phair suits him better than ever: very Madonna, indeed, this way to be two women at the same time - one reasoned and wisely vêtue, other unsubdued the, delighted one by botch its elegant silk trousers while throwing itself in water of the Lake Michigan. And very indie, indeed, this manner of remaining simple and comic, incompetent to be really caught with the serious one. Lastly, as what one believes it of Madonna, Liz to phair is also a young woman who can keep in it this surplus of frustration necessary to creation. When it does not evoke an artist only it envies and jealous - in fact Katell Keineg, an Irishwoman about ten thousand times less known and recognized that it -, it deplores one moment its fate wise wife Midwest.

" the true life is in New York. The music, the art galleries, litté the erasure, all that is so much more alive over there than here. I believe that if I lived in New York, I would be culottée, more exuberant - in my presentation, my behavior and perhaps also in my music. I would dare things of which I smell myself unable here because of the glance of the others... I have some to live enough in Midwest: the life peuty to be hard, at all justifying. I would like to have courage to flee ". Liz Phair in 98: more Chicago blues that Chicago bulldozers.

Since your beginnings, you gave only four or five concerts in Europe and never in France. Why so much of discretion?
Liz Phair - Until very recently, I did not regard the concerts as a pleasure. At best, it was one moment not unpleasant, the occasion of a meeting with people who like me; in the worst case, a true martyrdom. I always was afraid on scene: fear of being null, not on the level technically and then fear of being disappointing, not with the height of what one wrote on me at the exit of Exiles in Guyville. At the beginning, all these compliments on my songs and my so-called courage of woman paralysed me completely. With the years, I succeeded in slackening me.

The power and the frankness from your texts have you the life very early brought to touch a public of which you had not thought. How did you live this unforeseen success?
At the beginning, not very well. The first year, Exile in Guyville had to be sold with twenty thousand specimens in the United States and already, I found this figure amply sufficient, well above my claims. Then, Spin and the Voice Village elected the disc " album of the year " and the sales started to climb to the gold disc (five hundred and thousand specimens). I could nothing make, just contemplate this unforeseen spectacle while thinking of the following disc and to protect me. I did not want to promote my discs, I felt that these songs had not been written to be thus thrown in grazing ground. Then I raised the foot, I showed that I did not want to play the game... At the beginning, my only ambition was to point out me in my street, to be recognized as an artist by my neighbors, my buddies. In fact, I thought of becoming dessinatrice, not musician. For me, the rock'n'roll was only one passage, a tool. Today still, I do not need absolutely to sell million discs, that does not interest me. A good models for me: Neneh Cherry. A girl who gives enormously to her music but which also succeeded in building a private life cohé revenue.

In the United States, the critical greeting of Whitechcolatespaceegg is shared enough. Some are delighted to see appearing in your music a form of heat and interior peace, others regrets the more corrosive contents of your preceding album.
I had provided that a ditch would grow hollow and I believe that it is rather a good thing. Those which appreciated me for my believed texts and my stories of bottom can go to be excited by listening to younger girls and more beautiful than me, it is a public which does not interest me... In any event, it is the artist who controls the machine or which chooses not to control it. He only holds the keys, him only A a complete and interior sight of its work and the way in which he wants to articulate it. However, more and more of journalists claims to come out of their role to go to say auw artists what they must do or not to make. In my case, I was not even posed only once the question of knowing if I were to mature or remain close to the small chick who spoke about fellatio on her first disc. I changed, it is all. I was success, I married, I had a child: I cannot nevertheless make pretence not have known all that. Unfortunately, maturity is not a value sails very about it in the world of the rock'n'roll, where the lame ones are preferred, déglingués, wounded people. In any case, today, I am much prouder to be able to make pass a certain erotic dimension in a text than to use terms purely pornographic. It is as in a history of couple: at the end of one moment, one so much by heart knows oneself physically that should be invented other thing, to have recourse to more subtle things, with a refined erotism.

However, for this disc, did you sometimes have temptation " to remake of Liz Phair "?
Other people thought of it for me: my manager, for example, which have me D pété each day during several weeks that I was " to become again Liz Phair, to be the girl whom liked so much people at the time of Fuck and run " A the end, I sent it to stroll. Do I said " What to him you know of Liz Phair? What do you know of my life? " The great irony of this medium, it is that one writes songs to release oneself from something, for émanciper and that at once arrived success, one is found again captive, completely blocked by people who think of your place. I never speak about it in my interviews in the United States, and few people know it, but I am an adoptive child. I did not know my true parents, I will never know them and I thus passed my life to be tried to build me a framework which is appropriate to me, a universe where I smell myself well, with my own rules, my reference marks. It is undoubtedly for this reason that I do not support to feel me captive, directed by others, or dispossessed well of the fact that I built. After Exiles in Guyville, I intended too many girls to say to me that my texts had saved the life to them That really soûlée me, this idea to have become their older sister, their godmother. I do not want to be the older sister of anybody, I have sufficient what to occupy myself with myself.

Had nobody played this role for you?
Not, I always managed only. And I do not say that all the girls must only manage, I say simply that a song can possibly give indications, but certainly not to play the role of a pair of bé skittles. There are three or four years, this idea to have become a model made me much reflect. The need to write my first songs had come to me after an unhappy and rather violent history with a type of my district: these songs were my manner with me of avenging me for this guy. That a person living with 3000 kilometers of my street can adapt them has me foutue very badly at ease.

At which time you did feel the need to express you by the music?
That came to me when I was very small. My adoptive parents had pushed me to take lessons of piano and I hated that:. All the academic, repetitive side came out me by the eyes, I wanted only one: to improvise, write my own melodies. As of the age of 5 or 6 years, I thus understood that I was not like the others. Moreover, in the street O ù we lived, we were the least easy by far financially and I lived that like an injustice. At the school also, I felt diffé revenue, I did not want to register me in the great school competition: after the courses, I returned at home and I défoulais myself on my piano instead of making my duties. Then, towards 12 or 13 years, I knew my first stories with boys and I there too felt the need to consign what I lived in small poems, drafts of songs. When my mother saw what spoke my texts, the climate quickly worsened between us. It did not understand that I can be as fascinated by the sex, as I like as much to speak and live physical experiments about them.

With which point your personal experiment it did clarify your songs?
One should not be a light to realize that the women were injured, flouées since of the thousands of years, about everywhere in the world, and which this obvious imbalance between the sexes is still not corrected today whereas we are supposed to cross one period of progress. However, in the United States or in Europe, 3rd noncer this kind of truth immediately makes you pass for one fé minist to the long teeth, a post-feminist, or well a girl who has v ecu of the insane experiments - what is not my case. Do you know the history in my very first concert in England? Did Ç A occur there are four or five years in Manchester, in a room where we were to play with a small local group in first partie..Quelques minutes before playing, I join the cabins and I fall vis-a-vis to the types in question, five guys which disfigure me and start to ask me increasingly weak questions, kind " And your musicians, you them pays in their edge of the pipes? " I was completely under the shock, at the same time disconcerted and in anger and the history failed to finish in brawl between my friends and these five animals. However, do you know which was this group? Oasis.

On a song of Whitechocolatespaceegg, you sing " the domestic life is very ordinary, I am made to carry out a double life. "
It is one of the significant sentences of the disc, because it calls in question all that I could earlier sing a few minutes on the need for interior peace, fidelity, happiness to be mother. In fact, I can be more honest with difficulty than that: it is true, I need to have a double life, to endanger my small well ordered existence. That can pass by transfered as a recluse, evenings where I drink and smoke much too much or of the nights in studio, only with my musicians. Certain days, I still smell myself very near to the sauvageonne which wrote Fuck and run. Only now, I am not any more that girl tous.les.jours. In a certain manner, I am really a pure creation of Midwest. The winter, the life here becomes so hard because of the cold that people spend their time to puff out and drinking, to forget the wind, snow, all this shit which it is necessary to undergo during four or five months. And then, when spring arrives, people pètent leads literally. Everyone sleeps with everyone, the girls are trotted with half naked, the guys fight on the least occasion.

Did teenager, you re-enter yourself in this mould?
When you have 16 or 17 years and that you live in suburbs of Chicago, you do not have too the choice. It is necessary to impress the girlfriends, to be pointed out, to be ruined batch. C is a way of surviving, which does not mean that one transforms oneself obligatorily into small pute décérébr ée. Me, I always liked to take the initiative with the guys, to control the situation, to go at my rate/rhythm. I liked to allure, to arouse the guys. But in parallel, I was always very romantic, sensitive to the love, the beautiful stories. For this reason my songs speak at the same time about the things in a very raw way and with a form of decency and naivety. I believe that these two provisions can be complementary perfectly, just as one can perfectly want to make rock'n'roll without wanting to walk on everyone to become largest star of all times.

Whitechocolatespaceegg (Matador/Chrysalis).