“For us, nostalgia is a game”
MPL is a pop music band composed of 5 artists: Cedric, Julien, Arthur, Andreas and Manuel. But MPL is much more than 5 men falling in love with the same woman named Lucette. Lucette, a.k.a. Lulu disappears. She becomes their muse, their imagination, their mystery. So, they bring her to life through a parchment scroll, they tell her story like a tale and make their feelings about the loss of their lover and friend evaporate little by little from their lives.
Who is Lucette? Who is this bewitching woman who stole the first pure love of these 5 men? Is she really dead or has she simply vanished out of the world? Thanks to heady and catchy melodies on guitar tunes, poetic texts overflowing with images and landscapes they also approach the deconstruction of grief and virility – this toxic virility that avoids any type of expression and feeling. They also have fun leaving some doubt about the veracity of this story and turn it into a myth that haunts them.
Their first album, Ma pauvre Lucette released in 2015, is a compilation of all their feelings collected for this woman, an untidy drawer full of the obsession and the enigma that she represents. During their tour for this album they offered more than concerts, but real theatrical epics that took us through the different stages of mourning. You were taken to a funeral ceremony led by a curious guru, who arrived on stage with a strange urn. The other 4 members arrived in turn, a sullen look on their faces. They went through a ritual, the guru put lipstick (probably Lulu’s) on their faces. They then belonged to the same group, the same “sect” in search of the truth about Lulu and her story. The urn is supposed to contain Lulu’s ashes, which you could see, which they ate and they threw at the audience. You then witnessed the collective mourning of 5 friends, where nostalgia and sorrow were transformed into joy and resilience. Between the song “Elle dit”, where they invited the audience to dance with a little choreography, and “Lulu”, which told us more about this woman, or “Déjeuner du matin”, taken from Jacques Prévert’s poem in a more than intimate atmosphere, MPL’s songs take us through all kinds of emotions and moments. “Requiem” is a nostalgic, sad and painful song where each member of the band shows their deepest and darkest emotions staged with frenetic lights… They show us in this way, in their own way how Lulu turned their lives upside down. MPL is all that, and it is her.
They are much more than a music band, they are also storytellers, writers, scenographers, storytellers of emotions… MPL is a package that reminds us that feeling is not a shame, that mourning is not an end but the beginning of something else, the beginning of a new self.
