Start Listening To: Good Morning TV

French four-piece Good Morning TV share their origins, talk album artwork, and play favourites in the run-up to their new album.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from, and a little bit about the music that you make?

We are Good Morning TV, a French band based in Paris.
Hugo is our perfectionist drummer, the one pushing us to play better; Thibault is our wildcard on guitars with tireless inspiration; Barth serves as the bass player and as a judge of quality, being in charge of the production; and I (Bérénice), along with singing and playing guitars, am the one keeping them from turning into an AC/DC cover band!
We try to make music that is true to ourselves, mixing different musical universes, adventurous structures and the immediateness of Pop. The truth is we never planned anything other than enjoying ourselves playing and writing songs. We like to see where things go and if we like it, it stays!

What is your songwriting process like?

While Béré (or Thib) still write most of the demos, we work together around the first bricks.
Sometimes we are more into building a song from scratch, the four of us in the studio, and adding the leading voice after. The most important thing for us is to have a true emotion and a consistent pop song and not a recorded jam.

How was your debut album Small Talk recorded?

We recorded the album ourselves at Barth's family home, in an old stone house in the south of France in a couple of weeks. There we found the peacefulness we needed to experiment. Which is weird to say considering we slept between microphones and drums and amps and worked from sunrise to sunrise to get every idea we could have in the box.
Back in Paris, we took some time to produce every song as perfectly as we wanted it to be, then called Vincent Hivert and Alexis Fugain (Biche) at Studio Claudio to help mixing the album. It was quite a long journey, but it was definitely the good tempo for it.

How did you form as a band?

Béré : I had a band back in 2014 with my friend Léa, called 'Talkie Walkie'. Barth had recorded the album but we split up. Then I decided to continue on my own with my songs that would later end up on the EP. Barth helped me to produce it, and soon joined the band along with Thibault and Hugo. Good Morning TV was born.
We were already good friends and we found in each other the perfect bandmates, being big admirers of one another.

What’s it been like working with record label Géographie recs?

Nicolas (one half of Géographie Records) has followed us since almost the beginning with Hello Acapulco, his indie management agency. The duo (Nicolas & Rémi) are very supportive and we are glad to be part of the Géographie family along with friends Paper Tapes and Marble Arch.
It's the most "across the pond" label in France and it deeply matches with our inspirations.

Who are some of your biggest influences?

We all have very different influences, but somehow they don't clash when we're writing together. Of course we share some, like Broadcast, Autolux or Deerhunter… Hugo is very into Japanese videogame music at the moment, Thibault is a big fan of 90s rock like Blur but he's also crazy about the crazyness of Deerhoof. Béré loves old pop songwriters. Barth comes from black metal and gets off to sleep with white noise…

We love the artwork for your debut. Could you tell us more about it?

It's a photograph by Yann Stofer. We loved his work, so when he accepted doing the artwork for the album we were very excited. This photo just had that peculiar angle, that unusual subject: the hair on the seat, the girl on the floor almost out of the frame; nothing is known from the context but it is visually very direct. It's a weird view on something that would not be so interesting otherwise. We felt it well represented the feeling we had named the album, Small Talk. Something very common viewed as most interesting.

Do you have a favourite track from the album?

Béré : The smooth vibes of ‘Lethargic Way’.
Barth : ‘Tourism Business’ (parts I and II).
Hugo : The direct simple pop of ‘Make Me Feel’.
Thibault : ‘Insomniac’.

What do you love right now?

Simply being at home, watching movies, play music and see our close friends.

What do you hate right now?

To stay at home… Gigs miss us.

If you could tour with any artist, who would it be?

A pragmatic answer would be Crumb. We loved the first two EPs and when we were working on the album they released Jinx and we were blown away. They just released Ice Melt so we know they'll get touring soon… It would be very consistent because we feel both bands share some DNA. While there are a lot of artists we'd love to tour with…

Is there any new music from 2021 that you’re enjoying?

Béré : Paul Mc Cartney III Imagined (featuring artists like Krughanbin, Beck or Blood Orange…)
Barth : Crumb again, Luha just released a nice EP recently.
Thib : Mildlife & Astrel K
Hugo : Kero Kero Bonito

What else can we expect from you in 2021? Any more releases planned?

Maybe not another release this year, after Small Talk we're very excited to play live and we will take some time to enjoy that since we've not been able to do so for so long.
But we already started working on new songs, we have a lot of things to do!

Do you have any final life lessons or tips for our readers?

Drink plenty of herbal tea.