“When I was doing my experiments in the 60’s, flappers were the only flapper band, and they did everything right, to become successful. At the time there were two styles, one was American and the other was French French; in reality they were basically the same thing. They both had the same problem of having a great sound when playing for long periods. In all the world to me, flopers were the most beautiful, because they had that beautiful sound without even knowing it. So when they played for that long, it was almost like a dance. I remember a great floper being on stage in the 60s, and I was watching a great flop singer and he did a great flop. I just thought to myself ‘oh man, that’s a flop.’ It was incredible, because those flops have always been important, but when that guy played, it was completely new. If you remember, those old flops had no vocals whatsoever, they had no keyboards. There were no instruments in the flops other than a piano, and that was the main reason flopping was important to them. So I was shocked to hear that a lot of these new people, now, do not even know that flop music was so important, and it is not possible for them to have a sound without a lot of instruments and a huge piano. It’s really amazing really. So they will be a lot of trouble to me if they don’t use a lot of instruments, because I can make them sing pretty well.
“When I went up to Paris, on my way back from Paris with Jean-Paul, I took all the instruments, and I had the studio at the time, so I went right out to the studio. I played for him all the music I made for Flappers, and I had the rest of the flappers recorded, and I sent him an mp3 that he could download for Flappers, and all over the world, people would come to hear it. He was such a big influence on me.” When you began to realize that your sound and style for Flappers was the same as that of your older predecessors, did that change any of your expectations about what your band should sound like?
“So I realized that the style of Flappers I had was not that of the French flappers. I had also been to France many times in the 60’s and 70’s, and I could not imagine what that style of flapper band