Josh Homme on filming a live performance within the Paris Catacombs
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Deep beneath the town streets, 20m under floor degree and stretching throughout a sprawling 1,500km community, the Paris Catacombs are dwelling to the stays of greater than six million residents. Consecrated because the Paris Municipal Ossuary (a container for the lifeless) in 1786, it’s the largest instance of its sort on the planet: a monolith to mortality mendacity nonetheless underneath the bustling hub of the French capital.
It’s an area that has lengthy captured the creativeness of Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, since he first tried to go to 18 years in the past. The band have spent a lot of their 30-year profession exploring the precarious seesaw between life and demise, and this week, the storied Californian desert rock outfit will launch Alive In The Catacombs: a efficiency movie recorded final summer time alongside director Thomas Rames and La Blogoteque that represents the primary time any artist has been granted permission to play within the bowels of the landmark.
Removed from transposing their heavy dwell present underground, the efficiency is contemplative and meditative, remodeling 5 songs from throughout their again catalogue into new acoustic varieties, with strings, glockenspiels and extra. The endeavour, Homme explains, calling in from his Malibu dwelling, was an train in letting your environment dictate the motion. ‘We by no means had any intention of taking part in loud in there, that simply appeared disrespectful by some means. You may’t plug something in and we actually didn’t need to. It was extra like, “What lets play for these people who find themselves a lot older?”’ he chuckles. ‘It was about attempting to be romantic with the individuals who have been in there.’
(Picture credit score: Andreas Neumann)
‘We by no means had any intention of taking part in loud in there, that simply appeared disrespectful by some means. It was about attempting to be romantic with the individuals who have been in there’
Josh Homme, Queens of the Stone Age
‘Very early on, the band made it clear that the catacombs ought to be the true star of the movie,’ Rames explains. ‘They wished to seem solely as ghostlike echoes, mixing into the surroundings. That idea led me to collaborate with cinematographer Théo Fauger, whose work I enormously admire. He developed an unbelievable software referred to as the STEMIRAX, which permits real-time superimposition results. Since this was a dwell efficiency at its core, it was the proper software to create a spectral, layered look with out disrupting the band’s power.’
‘The band wished to seem solely as ghostlike echoes, mixing into the surroundings’
Thomas Rames, director
(Picture credit score: Andreas Neumann)
Years within the planning, the mission gained an added layer of symbolism and reactiveness when, halfway by way of a stint of European exhibits and within the run-up to the proposed filming, Homme started to develop critical well being points associated, he tells us, to his earlier most cancers battle and subsequent surgical procedure again in 2022. The night time earlier than the shoot, the band have been pressured to cancel a proposed competition date in Venice to ensure that Homme to attend a close-by hospital for emergency exams. Confronted with the physician’s directions to stay on the ward, he discharged himself and went forward with a 102.8 fever that ‘solely stored on creeping’.
‘The day after the catacombs, I used to be on an emergency flight and, from touchdown, I used to be underneath the knife three hours later,’ he remembers. ‘[On the day] I used to be mendacity down in a cot between takes, however I simply couldn’t let it go. I knew that if we didn’t play it then, it was gonna evaporate like attempting to catch smoke in your arms. However that made it higher too, as a result of then there’s one thing of “Don’t simply play right here, keep right here…” I would like that romantic threat. I would like that shit to really feel good generally.’
Lots of the movie’s most hanging moments arrive on account of this uniquely excessive confluence of eventualities. The opening moments see Homme mendacity nonetheless on an altar earlier than standing to start opening observe ‘Operating Joke’; a shot that got here to cross out of necessity. ‘I simply wanted a spot to lie down for a second. I’m within the foetal place on this altar and Thomas is like… “Wait! Are you able to simply keep there?”’ the frontman remembers. At one other level, he’s heard muttering ‘While you’re going by way of hell, preserve going’ – a pep discuss to himself that was caught on the wi-fi mic and stored within the closing edit. ‘In every single place you look, it’s you. You’re subsequent,’ Homme remembers of his environment. ‘It was intense and you are feeling the depth.’
‘In every single place you look, it’s you. You’re subsequent. It was intense and you are feeling the depth’
Josh Homme, Queens of the Stone Age
(Picture credit score: Andreas Neumann)
Negotiating these appreciable challenges, there’s an electrical energy to the recording that, explains Rames, got here from prepping sufficient to permit the ‘completely happy accidents’ to happen. ‘The purpose is to make the technical side disappear in favour of spontaneity and the dwell expertise, whereas nonetheless delivering a cultured, cinematic end result,’ he says. Impressed by German expressionism, he employed ‘static photographs and really sluggish zooms’ to immerse the viewer within the room. ‘The 4:3 side ratio was a deliberate alternative: it really works fantastically with the vanishing traces of the catacombs’ limitless corridors, and it allowed us to isolate the band members throughout the body, virtually like figures in a portray.’
Homme and the band, in the meantime, totally embraced the brand new potentialities afforded to them by the visceral location. ‘That area makes you do issues,’ he says. ‘With Thomas, we have been like, “Proper, once you say ‘motion’ we’re not gonna do something for 20 seconds so don’t journey out. We’re gonna stare at one another and let the ceiling drip, and let the vents simply type of moan, and once we’re completed with the tape let’s simply not do something for 20 or 30 seconds. We’ll play for these individuals after which we’ll flip the room again over to them.”’ Essentially creative with the staging, the broader photographs of ‘Villains of Circumstance’ totally plunge the watcher into the tightness and claustrophobia of the setting, whereas, conversely, ‘I By no means Got here’ finds Homme strolling by way of a hall of string gamers – a wierd juxtaposition of precision and grit.
‘What I’m happy with is you’re listening to Take Certainly one of two, or Take Two of three. There’s no fixing, there’s no correcting. Within the first music, there’s a second the place I [groan] as an alternative of singing – it’s this guttural factor, and what am I presupposed to do, take it away? Frankly it’s my favorite half,’ he suggests, ‘as a result of that is the lifelong search to simply really feel actual for one second, and it’s not simple however I don’t care about that. I simply need to really feel regular for one fucking minute, and in that setting it’s humorous how one can really feel such as you’re precisely the place you have to be.’
(Picture credit score: Andreas Neumann)
The mission has made the band take into account what else could possibly be doable for his or her dwell present. ‘We’ve been speaking about reimagining reams of our songs and possibly going and doing a tour this fashion. I simply love going the place I’m not presupposed to. We’re in Wallpaper*, proper?’ Homme laughs. ‘So this catacombs factor is making me suppose we must always go to venues the place we wouldn’t usually be, the place everybody’s all dressed up. Infiltration in one of the best ways doable: infiltration and corruption as if it have been a superb factor.’
Alive In The Catacombs additionally lays the breadcrumb path for what would possibly come subsequent for the band, as Homme exits whereas singing a line from what seems to be a brand new music with the lyrics ‘insignificant different’. ‘You is perhaps proper…’ he teases when the concept is recommended. Again in ‘nice’ well being, the band have been writing extensively and with a brand new lease of life following their brush with the Parisian lifeless. ‘We’re very busy proper now, and [the catacombs] has impacted all the things in the way in which we actually hoped it could,’ Homme says. ‘You’re at all times in search of one thing to cost your batteries and ship you in a brand new course. This has despatched us off on a search and that search is essentially the most thrilling half.’
Alive In The Catacombs is accessible at qotsa.com from 5 June 2025
