#62 Menomena

You really can’t emphasize enough the huge role that little kids play in the magic of Take-Away Shows. Little kids are standouts, still pretty unusual. Little kids like music, especially when it just appears where they don’t expect it; they react as if they were somehow not surprised. Little kids stop, watch, listen. Little kids dance.

This became one of our preoccupations: to signal to Vincent Moon, always behind his camera, to pay attention to the children hidden behind him. We were in a courtyard in Charonne, and he had already noticed the baby held by his mother at the window, while Menomena played “Wet and Rusting”. But behind him, there were these two little ones, who, within two seconds, completely got it: understood that this dislocated pop, both chaotic and extremely structured, was made for booty-shakin’. At that point, the band didn’t have much to show—though they had so much for us hear—and these kids stole the scene.

When they’re 15, they’ll smoke cigarettes and make out in dark corners—just like this gang that we ran across in the abandoned railway, who nonchalantly scattered when we began to set up. We might have scared them. They were, after all, just kids.

From Guillaume and Mathieu from the record label and Lucas our film editor, who had agreed to play the battery-carriers in the dark tunnel, to Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, who scaled the smaller wall during the session, to me, smiling like an idiot because I got to play with a tambourine at the end of the session—Horray for little kids, indeed.

Translated by Caitlin Caven