Punk Globe: I saw a post on Facebook about your band  Les Sans Culottes are playing with my long-time pals The BellRays how excited are you? 

Very and extremely. They’re such a great band. I first learned of them when we were playing in France, at a small festival in Chalons-en-Champagne (the Champagne region!) and after our show in the town’s main square, a guy came up to me asking if I was familiar with the BellRays who had played there not long before us. I didn’t but soon investigated and discovered what a powerhouse band they are. 

Punk Globe:  How did you decide on your band name? 

I was a Francophile, loving their cinema, literature, etc, and aware of the historic “san-culottes”, the French citizen soldiers of their 1789 revolution, the one that dethroned King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. So, I liked that revolutionary aspect. And it can also mean without underpants. And I liked that too. 

Punk Globe:  Who are the band’s influences? 

So many, but choose just a few: Serge Gainsbourg, The Kinks, NY Dolls, and The Shirelles. 

Punk Globe: Who all is in Les Sans Culottes and what do they do? 

There’s seven of us, three singers and four musicians. We all have French stage names and the band presents as French people, rather than people who live in Brooklyn and are born in the U.S. (I’m from Detroit originally). The seven: Kit Kat Lenoir, Brigitte Bordeaux, and myself, Clermont Ferrand, on vocals. Jacques Strappe, on drums, Benoit Bals, on keyboards, Jean L’Effete (guitar), and Monsieur Pomme Frites on bass. AKA: the “Seven-headed Beast from the Hard-scrabble Streets of Menilmontant”. 

Punk Globe: Does the band have any releases out and have you toured?

Yes. We have nine releases: Les Sans Culottes (1999); The Ennui and The Ecstasy (2000); 

Faux Realism (2002); Full Frontal Crudite, Live in Paris (2003),  Fixation Orale (2004), Le Weekender (2007), ‘Pataphysical Graffiti (2010), The Gods Have Thirst (2013) and “She is Tossed By the Waves But Doesn’t Sink” (2018). 

We’ve toured extensively in the U.S. and also in Canada and France. In L.A. we’ve played the Troubadour and Spaceland/The Satellite a couple of times and in S.F., the Bottom of the HIll a number of times, also the Cashbah in San Diego a bunch. I hope we can next play in California (or France) with the BellRays sometime. That would be fantastic. I know they’re heading to France again in November.