Soundtrack to my life: French film festival director Fergus Grady

French film festival director Fergus Grady. Photo / Michael Craig

Betchadupa
My Army of Birds and Gulls

I moved to Melbourne to study after high school. That was a pretty important time and Betchadupa was sort of the soundtrack for that year, for leaving New Zealand, having that mourning and loss, and the excitement of moving to a new country and new friends.

I was tossing up whether I stayed in New Zealand and went to journalism school in Christchurch or moved to Melbourne and pursued film. In the end I decided to go down the film route and it's been a fun 15 years.

Justice vs Simian
We Are Your Friends:

Justice came through mainly the nightclub scene in Melbourne and obviously had bigger commercial songs later but that was the first time I had heard them. They were all on the same label as Daft Punk and it was pretty exciting times for that sort of sound.

When I first heard We Are Your Friends, it would have been like a festival or a nightclub and it was always kind of the last song of the night as well. You know Closing Time? That was sort of the equivalent of the nightclub scene. It's a song that I still listen to and it's still fresh. I think it still sounds great.

Air
All I Need

Air has always been there in the 90s and 2000s but it didn't really hit me until when I was in Melbourne that there was that early pre-Daft Punk influence that Air had on everyone in that electro scene. They were pioneers: a couple of guys probably in their garage making great music. They put French Electronica on the map and that led the way for Daft Punk and Justice and those two-piece outfits to really take their sound globally.

I've been lucky enough to go to France probably 10 times, mainly with my other job as a film distributor. If we had been in Cannes last year, when it was lockdown, it would have been my fifth Cannes. My French is limited to four years at high school and I don't really keep it up, but I do have some strong francophile connections. I'm a big fan of rosé and cheese.

Daft Punk
Overture and The Grid from Tron: Legacy

Out of all their albums, I decided to go with Tron because I think it shows Daft Punk's range of musicality. They weren't just limited to big house music sounds. They were composers, and you can hear that on that Tron soundtrack with that overture opening with the big orchestral start, and that second track with Jeff Bridges.

I don't think the French electronic artists have taken themselves as seriously as, say, other French industries, which I quite like. Some of the French carry-on with the Cannes Film Festival is quite funny, but then again it's their big event and one of their biggest exporters. I like the garage sound of their music. It's not sharp, it's not clean, it's not ordered. It's a bit chaotic and maybe that's a reaction or rebellion to that bourgeois culture.

Marlin's Dreaming
Filling in Time

This was my lockdown song, which I basically played for four months in Melbourne, enviously looking at New Zealand, with Kiwis going back to the cinema in May. It summed up my lockdown blues and that yearning to get back to New Zealand and hear those great Dunedin bands that cut through. Marlin's Dreaming have that really top quality about them. Once-in-a-decade band, I reckon. The whole album I think had the theme of lockdown and the theme of being closed in, or constrained to a certain existence. Those days just dragged, and the time just went. I couldn't have told you if it was a Monday or a Saturday. There was no order or structure. Yeah, it was interesting.

Fergus Grady is the director of the French Film Festival Aotearoa, which starts in Auckland on June 9.