Laurent Bergot is the man that created Décades. He doesn’t understand our interest in this project. For him, all this is long gone and forgotten and meaningless but he was kind enough to let us do the two Décades records that we had in mind. He really underestimates the quality of his music, the quality of the recordings. He is no longer aware of the beauty that lies within his compositions, but we’ll show him that he can be really proud of what he did, of what he wrote.

He started Décades as a solo project in Rouen, France, around 1986, recording and mixing demos on a 4-track cassette portastudio. In February 1987 he locked up himself in the Quasar Studio during five restless days for the recording and mixing of six songs, but only five could be ‘finished’. Laurent performed all the vocals and played all the instruments on his own with the only help of the sound engineer for programming the drum machine. He was very disappointed with the mix and the end result, everything was done much too fast, there was no possibility for corrections or revisions… but even despite being far from happy with it and considering the songs unfinished, finally a first release was carried out. ‘Premières Données’ (meaning ‘first data’) was put out in very small numbers on cassette only. Laurent met Christian Dumesnil who would join him playing bass and while writing more songs, Laurent started looking for other players that could help him with live performances and further developing his project. That’s how Joël Ecolivet (drums) and Rémi Hauchard (keyboards) joined them and by 1990/91 Décades had turned into a full 4-pìece. Between 1991/92 they recorded some more songs at the Quasar Studio and a second release took place, this time in the form of the 4-songs ‘Le Jour Se Lève’ maxi cd. A couple of tracks made it to samplers on cassette and cd, some were Laurent’s self-made demos, some were full-band recordings but that was basically it. By the spring of 1993 Décades disbanded. As mentioned, Laurent doesn’t regard Décades as something that is or should be remembered, but we definitely think otherwise. Laurent helped creating the original French ‘cold wave’ genre and that’s an undeniable fact. And we love everything that he wrote.






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