Tom Barman’s batteries are running low and he could die any second now. Excuse me? Oh, he’s talking about his phone, which has just emitted a worrying croak.
To be honest, it’s hard to be sure if this is what he has actually said. Barman who leads the Antwerp avant-rock institution dEUS, is rushing to an in-store signing and someone seems to have opened all the doors on his van. "Hello, hello!,” he barks, rather too loudly. “My phone is not behaving!”
Your mental image is of Barman yelling from the far end of a wind-tunnel, his fringe flapping frantically in his face, a bit like that Michael Jackson video where someone ties him between two trees while the world combusts spontaneously.
Slam! The doors have been closed, we are able to converse in complete sentences. The thing is, Barman explains, we’ve only got a few minutes before the band reaches an Amsterdam record store and hundreds of fans. dEUS, returning from a five year hiatus are, it appears, bang in the centre of a minor pop whirlwind.
“Oh yes, it's incredibly busy,” says Barman. “People have this perception that dEUS is something we do in our spare time, but it's a 24 hour affair. We give everything to it.”
Behind the excitement is the new record, the fourth from dEUS in 15 years. With its grinding guitars, shouty choruses and punk-pop melodies, Pocket Revolution is by the group’s standards, remarkably strident and eager to be liked.
Barman says the five-piece recorded a “straightforward” rock album in order to puncture the myth that they're willfully arty and underground, the sort of group that cultivates obscurity as though it was a badge of merit.
All dEUS have ever wanted, he maintains, is to sell huge numbers of records and perform before thousands of people. This they have achieved in their homeland, where they bask in the sort of prominence The Frames enjoy in Ireland. In the wider pop world however, dEUS are hobbled with the ‘art-rock’ tag – to their enduring perplexion and annoyance.
“Art-rock? What the hell is that,” says Barman, shouting again. “I hadn’t even heard of it until journalists in Britain starting going on about it.”
One thing that has perhaps stymied dEUS is their passion for the extracurricular.
In the five years since their last release, the taut and anguished The Ideal Crash (Barman pronounces it Hidey Grass), the singer has sought to re-invent himself as a filmmaker.
Not one for half-measures, he spent more than 18 months directing and financing Any Way The Wind Blows, a disjointed comedy set in Antwerp. If you thought Barman, and hence dEUS, had given up on music well, for a little while, they had.
“For me, it’s important to be always doing new things. I see myself first as an artist, only secondly as a musician or filmmaker or whatever,” he explains, speaking quickly, as though in a race against his phone (which has started croaking again).
The experience of making a movie has, he says, influenced his songcraft; Pocket Revolution posits a brasher, brighter riff on the dEUS sound.
Previously, their albums unfolded at a cautious crawl. Like renaissance clock-makers poring over a maze of gears and levers, the group assembled songs piece by elaborate piece. The results were dense, fascinating and – sorry Tom – extravagantly arty.
On Pocket Revolution, dEUS embrace the potential of loud, raw spontaneity. The record shudders and judders, lurching abruptly into piledriver washes of guitar and melodic choruses.
“We kind of felt we’d been a bit clever with Ideal Crash,” Barman confesses. “Looking back, it sounds like an album that has been assembled from different parts. It isn’t very instinctive. The new material, I think, will be more fun to play live.”
Often it has seemed as though dEUS carry the entire Belgian rock industry on their backs (unless you count Bettie Serveert, which we won’t). The group are proud of their home-country yet shirk the role of cultural ambassadors. Nobody expects Coldplay to speak for Britain or Foo Fighters to embody the American soul. Why should dEUS shoulder the weight of a nation?
“The fact is that Belgium has many great bands,” he concludes patriotically. “Antwerp’s rock scene is very exciting. But nobody gets to hear about it in the rest of the world, and it’s assumed we are the only ones. We just have to live with that, I suppose.”