Eddy Crampes
Eddy Crampes does not exist. Sometimes you can see him (drawing slowly in the smoke, opening his eye of burnt coral on his flock). Sometimes we see him but it doesn't prove anything. Eddy Crampes does not exist. Besides, this impossible name, Eddy Crampes, is his real name and one must not exist to be really called Eddy Crampes.
Pure virus in the emotional memory of everyone (that is to say you, that is to say me), pure projection, pure collective hallucination, Eddy Crampes has however the real smell and weight of a tree that lightning has left blackened on the night road. Like the thunderbolt, Eddy Crampes exists and does not exist. Apart from that, he sings. And for someone who exists and doesn't exist, he sings pretty damn well, with that pale ashen hemline that crooners have when they stagger, tobacco breath in the soft breath, that only a few clic clac consonants come to hook with small strokes of very sure teeth. Metaphysical singer, it is the job of the superheroes when they did not take the measure of their super-powers yet. We then direct his magnetism in the backstage of an everyday poetry, a sung theater in a minimal decor where depression is raised to the rank of fine arts, sensual, washed out but burning with a secret fire that we guess without understanding and that troubles us.
Eddy Crampes' songs will teach you nothing else but to keep on repeating your mistakes, but you will know how to dance them like a slow dance, or replay them like the stuttering band of a cosmic karaoke. Forget the ideas you had about the real rock'n'roll, about the virtues of the avant-garde: Eddy Crampes may not exist, but he understood before anyone else that music that doesn't glue you together, two bruised hearts that a chorus awakens and catapults against all the castles in Spain, is a negligible music.
Forget your punk years, your learning of jazz things, discover this: everything that matters flashes in your most buried memories, informed at a distance by the paternal car radio. The ghostly, hypnagogic, or whatever variety that this damn son of a coyote sizzles directly into your heads will leave you transfixed, hilarious, and flabbergasted, happy to still be the same tomb on your feet, proud heroes of your paltry and magnificent lives. It is a contradiction that Eddy Crampes exists or does not exist. Eddy Crampes is THE great French singer and that's all.
