The "three musketeers" have been a close team for 25 years, a fact that becomes evident after just a few bars. Their French flair quickly conjures up images of Delta swamps and alligators: MICHEL DAVID, the charismatic charmer from Paris/France, impresses with his gravelly voice toned by good red wine; YVES GUEIT, gently makes the smokey air vibrate with his Cajun accordion, while the group's joker JOHANNES EPREMIAN, frenetically aces over the strings of his fiddle. These three completely differing personalities come together as a very exciting and almost telepathic musical entity. Cajun-accordion and fiddle support the raw, powerful vocals; bass and drums inject the required push and slide guitar or saxophone provide the songs with a real southern feeling. The band is jumping and threatens to set the hall on fire.

LE CLOU has long been a well established name on concert and festival stages throughout Europe. The band has been a headliner since their 1983 TV breakthrough in the Eurovision broadcast "Songs, Rhythms & Melodies" which was seen by over 400 million viewers and ever since then the band has had regular guest spots on radio and TV. They won the "German Record Critics Prize" two years running and have been presented with awards from all over Europe. They even had a chart success with their instrumental number "Le Printemps Cadien".

 

MICHEL DAVID
(vocals, guitar, fiddle, frottoir):

When I was six years old I decided to punish the fiddle and my voicebox instead of the poor piano. I tried and tried to teach them "Ave Maria" and Schubert's "The Trout" until I was fourteen. I spent my teens in Paris where I used my mother's hatboxes for drums and listened to The Shadows all day long; my love for music was never greater than at that time. Drumming finally gave me the chance to play with a few big names on stage and opened the door to my life as a musician.

YVES GUEIT
(vocals, cajun-accordion, flutes, saxophone, clarinet):

Music came into my life when I was six years old when my parents registered me for school I asked them to get me into the Toulon School of Music. My grandmother, who played the violin, helped me develope an ear for the finer points of music and today her old violin has a special place of honor in our home. Thanks to my love for wind instruments I got into playing the clarinet and then I taught myself the saxophone and flute. It was these two instruments that got me into folk and blues at the start of the seventies. 1971 was the decisive year for LE CLOU: that's when I met Michel David and we laid the foundation stone for the Band.

JOHANNES EPREMIAN
(fiddle, vocals, guitar, Dobro, e-guitar):

I was born in Freiburg, a beautiful town in the Black Forest. My father is Armenian and comes from Cairo/Egypt and my mother is German. When I was a child, my identity card carried the words "nationality undefined". Both my parents are classical musicians and they were my first musical influences. We kids would talk to Dad in French and to Mom in German. From the age of four I took classical violin lessons and it was much later that I realised I could read and even write music before I could read normal writing. I found my second instrument, the guitar, when I was fifteen and I loved English guitar players like Bert Jansch or John Renbourn as well as the American slide virtuosos David Lindley and Ry Cooder. I spent two wonderful years "training" to be a pro-musician, on the stage and in studios, with the English singer/songwriter Ray Austin and then my love for the Cajun music and culture of Louisiana took over and has, for many years, been the heart of my work as a musician. I travel, as often as possible, to the Mississippi where I meet friends to play music with and to learn as much as I can.

In concert we are accompanied by bass player Gero Gellert and by Ralph Schlaeger on the drums.

 

LE CLOU discography:

"Premi�re D�cade"
Moustache Records MR 2100

"Bal"
Moustache Records MR 1000

"Oh! La la!"
Moustache Records MR 1070

"Live"
Moustache Records MR 1080

"Swamp"
Moustache Records MR 2000

"Bayou Moon"
Moustache Records MR 2200

"Mississippi Machine"
Moustache Records MR 2530

 

Order online at the LE CLOU-Boutique.