We Have Band definitely has a band, and its one currently embarked on a grand world tour, from South America to Serbia and many places in between. In just over a year, the band has gone to East-London hopping, to an affair with Kitsuné, and a marriage with French indie label Naïve. The singing trio has been enchanting crowds worldwide with its messianic dance moves, its on-stage multitasking and cross-genre experimentation. As they stopped by Paris to play ‘Jalouse Rocks Paris’ (with The Drums, Thomas, Dede and Darren), Dazed Digital chatted with them about their romance with Paris, fame and ‘the London thing’.

Dazed Digital: There are so many bands in London, how does it feel to be one of the few which has made it out of the country?
We Have Band: That has been really important from us from the beginning. We played at Trans Musicales festival, which was the first international gig we did, and from that we got booked for gigs in America. It makes a real difference, especially on the British scene, which can get really claustrophobic.

DD: Do you think that if you become popular abroad, you lose credibility with indie London bands?
We Have Band: We do decently in the UK. But if your sound is ‘Euro’ and you’re doing really well in, say, Belgium, then that’s not great. If you’re doing the world then you get a lot of respect, because there aren’t that many bands that get out.

DD: You guys formed the band in 2007 right?
We Have Band: We first made music in a room together in 2007, but our first shows were in 2008, and it’s been our full time occupation ever since.

DD: So it’s all gone pretty quickly?
We Have Band: People say that but it doesn’t feel like that, some people say our album has taken ages to come out. It depends on when you found out us, like we were on the first Kitsuné album compilation in July 2008, but they found us when we were fresh. So if you discovered us then, you probably wondered what took so long. But then again, some bands’ albums never come out.

DD: You’re currently on a gigantic world tour, do you find there are national characteristics for the audiences, say, is the French public very different from an English one?
We Have Band: I think we found it varies from city to city as opposed to country to country. Paris is always alright because our label is here, and there is a lot of media here, it’s a bit like the London thing; gigs in London can be a little bit more static than a gig in Oxford or something. But say in Amsterdam they might not dance as much and then in Rotterdam they might go crazy. You’ll be in Madrid and people will say ‘tonight the crowd will be great and tomorrow in Barcelona not,’ they always tell you that, but it’s just stereotypes about the cities. But then you get there, and you just don’t know.

DD: Les Inrocks described you as ‘an excited LCD Soundsystem getting a tan in Ipanema’ – how would you describe yourself?
We Have Band: We describe our sound as pop with difficulty... difficult pop that’s hard to describe. There is an element of LCD Soundsystem, drums, spoken word vocals, three vocals going on, it’s quite hard to describe it. Also the first album is quite diverse and it was written over two years, so naturally different waves and styles of song-writing have come out. We don’t belong to a specific category: a lot of bands play music inside their genre, and they are good or not within than genre, but we’re more cross-genre. And sometimes people struggle with that, and like different songs, depending on what musical background they come from. As the future goes on, hopefully people will get used to it and begin to expect it, and see what new things we’re going to come up with.

DD: There are so many electro-rock-ish bands around, what makes you different?
We Have Band: We’re different because we’re three vocals, not all the songs are 130 beats per minute, there are lots of live drums, lots of live guitars, we never just have a big keyboard and a synthesiser, the sound comes from different places.