Laurent, thank you very much for joining us for the latest episode of Tea For Two.
So you actually used to work here.
Live here!
You used to live here.
I worked and lived here yes for two years.
I was just coming out of l'ecole hoteliere in France.
I did two years of catering
school and as my very first job
I came here as a we used to call it footman
looking after the Ambassador
from breakfast till dinner, looking after
and cleaning these rooms, all the reception rooms
Serving tea and coffee?
yes indeed and yes serving lunch, dinner
and doing all the receptions and
looking after this place basically
and it's quite strong for me to come back here because I just left my parents
and my first job outside my, you know, student life.
I come to London so I discover London and
then I'm in the French Embassy
so I've got the best of both.
Can you remember who the Ambassador was?
For sure, yes. I had Emmanuel de Margerie first
who his wife used to call
Bobby all the time and actually
the little anecdote: the first day I got
here they had a lovely dog and then
Madame just comes out of her bedroom and
she goes "Bobby, Bobby" and I thought she
was calling the dog so it was my first
day the first time so I'm trying to be
really nice so I walk out and say no
madam I haven't seen the dog and she
goes no I'm actually looking for my
husband and I thought this is starting
really bad but they were beautiful
people. I have such good memories of it
and I still have a picture of them at
home you know and I treasure it because
they were wonderful people.
But then while you were in London you became drawn to the music scene which perhaps was your first love.
I was into music before I came here.
It's funny because the first time I met Madame de Margerie was in Paris.
I went to to meet her, I was still working, not working
studying and she looked at
me and I was like with the split jeans
and I had my look of the time and she
looked at me like that and I thought
I'm never gonna get the job and she said "you know in London there's a lot of punks"
I'm like "what" and she says "yeah there's
a lot of punks I think you'll feel very good at home there"
and this is how she said yes to me
so I came here and I knew I was gonna you know live London the full time, the full thing
so the great thing is even though we were waking you
know up early here and stuff
I had London just here so I was
going out every night and living here
was wonderful because all my wage was just going into music
clubs, buying records. It was just
for music so I knew it was gonna get all this
And was it around that time that you
began DJing in clubs?
No I mean I wanted to be a DJ
since I'm 12,13 years old I mean
I already had decks and a mixer
and I actually came with everything here in my bags. I wanted to be a DJ
but my job was a waiter so it's only in 1987
when I started DJing professionally
but before I was just you know making tapes
for my friends I was spending all my
spare time mixing so it was like my real
passion but being here there were so
many great djs there's so many great
clubs back then I just I was just going
out and taking it all in and it's when I
moved to Manchester when I started to
get connection in the scene and this is
how I kind of met the right people at
the right time gave them tapes and I
became a DJ. I mean there was no doubt
for me since I'm very young that I was
going to become somehow somebody
who would make people dance but I never thought I was gonna have this parcours [route].
You arrived in Manchester, it's the late
80s?
I leave London in late 1985.
I got offered a very good job in Manchester to look after a restaurant so I went and I
did that for like two and a half years
and I got called by the army so I had
just as I start DJing as I do
something in my biggest dream the army
comes in and bang I have to...
You were playing at a venue, which for an English person the Hacienda was the most iconic nightclub.
In Manchester, for sure.
It was an amazing place and yes my very first... I'm very
lucky you know starting my job
here in the French Embassy and then
starting my DJ career in one of the best
clubs around the world. I was very lucky.
Yeah I mean you had bands playing there, people like Madonna, The Smiths who played in these clubs.
Well yeah and it was owned by one of the members
from New Order and we were seeing them
all the time. They were in the club all the time so we kind of
you know met them I met them
straightaway so it was very exciting
and again it was the moment
where the music scene completely changed
I kind of saw the changeover you know
from the music that was played before
in clubs and what became the house and
techno scene and what we're listening to today.
Sure and then you went back to France for your military service.
I did for one year, yes.
And then you went back to Manchester?
Well the funny thing is I was still DJing
when I was at the Army. I didn't sleep
very much but I did six weeks
in Montlhéry in the Régiment de marche du Tchad and then after that I had a job straight away
in the mess des officiers [officers' mess]
in Versailles and of course I was staying there
I was sleeping there and then I was
going out every night
so as I DJ'd in Manchester in the Hacienda, the Hacienda was already known in Paris
I kind of got jobs in Paris in clubs as
well and because I lived the explosion
of house music and the beginning of
techno music I brought it back to France
and I was you know I was the little
French man coming from England
so it was kind of exciting for people in
France who was discovering this music
and then as soon as I finished the army
straight back to Manchester for six months
and then I kind of felt that I
missed the train because when I left
you have to understand I leave England in
June or July 88 when the whole thing explodes
when the scene changes
completely and then when the whole of England
is going into a new scene of
music.
They call it the [Second] Summer of Love.
Summer of Love, exactly, and then everybody switched
from whatever they were listening to
to house and and whatever
music that was played back then
but I live that in France through magazines
and we didn't have internet and stuff like that
so it was very difficult to
get the real idea, the real picture
of what was happening in England and when I
come back I feel like it all exploded
and I missed the train and after like
six months when I came back I thought
you know what I'm only gonna be the
French guy who left during the good times
and came back and I thought this
is not a good position for me.
I'd rather go back home and as nothing really happened yet in France back then
I thought I'd rather do it in France.
So talk to me about how it's changed today compared to back then in France.
Well it's changed because now
that music is played everywhere and we
don't have to fight for it anymore.
I mean it was very very hard, I guess like
the beginning of rock-and-roll
like the beginning of jazz or even before that.
Every new movement has detractors and people are 
very violent and the press were very violent
against it. It was very tough at
the beginning especially in France
and you know now it's it's everywhere
and we travel all around the world
we sell records, we fill rooms and you
know we became artists
where at the beginning it was not seen like that at all.
Do you want some tea?
Oh yeah!
Do you have it with milk?
I do yes.
Thank you very much. It should be me doing this but 
I guess it came naturally to you.
There you go.
Thank you. You also take milk I see.
I do.
Old habits die hard.
I'm married to an English girl, there you go, couldn't get away from it!
I've heard you say before that you really feel that France is the place to be now.
Nowadays yes. It was very difficult at first.
Paris was very creative at the beginning
of the 90s. They were discovering this music
a lot of clubs, a lot of places
were vibrant regarding that music
and then it kind of all died out completely
because the focus was less on music
it as more on personalities and for me
this doesn't work you know
it's a music scene and we have to always focus on the music and then
in the last six, seven years a new generation came
and thought we want to go against this image thing
and we want to come back to the real roots of what it's all about which is the quality of the music
and this is when new places opened in France
it kind of brought new kids, it
excited a lot of people and then
the scene [was] reborn again
completely and then now for the last
six, seven years it's been amazing
absolutely amazing.
I mean playing in France now is always my favourite place.
Do you have any particular venues? You were at the Rex club.
I mean the Rex is my house.
I've been kind of starting there but there's
a lot of places which are you know
opening for like three or four months at
the moment. There's a lot of young blood
and this is what we need and a lot of
people mixing things together, creating
it's becoming very very creative
which is really good.
It's the place to be for creation.
France has always been quite creative, in music
in painting, in poetry and a lot of stuff
and it's true at one point in music it
was boring and then now
even if you follow the the French rock scene or even
the French rap scene it became again
very exciting I don't know what happened
but something happened maybe they have
more things to say now I don't know.
I just wondered what you've made of the way that we consume music nowadays which has changed.
I think the big difference now and I can see that with my son, the two or three big differences with him
and maybe who I was at his age: nowadays I feel like they don't listen to music
that consume it more. I remember as a kid
it took me an hour and a half
to get to Les Champs-Élysées to go to Champs Disques which was a very iconic record shop in Paris
and when you were going to Champs Disques a record was about 120 to 190 francs
which is a lot of money for somebody who was 16 years old
and when you were buying that
during the way back to my house
which was quite far away I
remember spending an hour reading
every single word on the sleeve and I cared a lot about about what I bought
and it had a very strong meaning because
there was money involved with it.
When I listen to music with my son he switches
from one track to another very quickly
and sometimes he doesn't listen to the
end he goes "oh here's the hook, here's this"
and I go "do you listen to the track the whole way together?"
and they don't, they don't have that. And the second thing which I found very strange
is they don't have the concept of sound.
When I was a kid we were going to each other's house because he had a great sound system
and we could listen, to sit down and listen to music on a really good sound system
and I see that the younger generation don't have that
so for Christmas I insisted on buying a proper sound system to my son
so I bought him a nice
amplifier and two really good speakers
and I said now you sit down, you play
your favourite music and you will see
the difference and it's funny because within
two weeks since Christmas
he's listening to music a bit differently. It's an education to listen to music on proper speakers
really and to listen to an album from the beginning until the end
because there's a story there and
it's something that I kind of learned
because it was like that before
and again records were expensive
so you were not seeing records the same way as
they do now.
We talked about the influence that the UK had at the start of your career.
What's the thing that you take as a lasting influence on your life and career from the time you spent in the UK?
I don't know. I came
here, I wasn't expecting anything
and then again I had the best of both worlds.
What I liked here was a structure. It's
something I always kept: la préséance [precadence]
there's a lot of things you learn in
catering in general but even more here
because here is even more important and it's something
they're values that I kept all my life I think, really, and then against that
in the UK, British people are pretty rock and
roll, they're a bit crazy and you know
they live their life quite crazily and they they're really good fun
I guess this is why I married an English girl, but I don't know
I like contrasts and living here in
London at the time where there was punk clubs
there were new wave clubs, I was
going to to sixties nights
and rockabilly nights and disco nights and
and then living here during the day
having served the Queen, having served a
lot of French presidents.
It's really kind of brought me into different levels
where I learned from all, from everywhere. I guess. I hope!
And a perfect place to end. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
