Debout Sur Le Zinc

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Simon Mimoun

Debout Sur Le Zinc is a French music band.

After their first 1999 self-titled album, their subsequent album L’homme à tue-tête released in May 2001 gained them media acclaim and public popularity. By the time their 2004 album Des singes et les moutons enhanced their repertoire, they were selling out venues such as La Cigale and touring internationally. Songs from their latest album Les Promesses were featured in their first concert at the oldest music hall in Paris, the Olympia, where they played to a full house on May 16, 2006.

The band acknowledges influences from traditional French and Irish music, rock, klezmer, and many styles that are considered dance hall music, such as gypsy jazz, tango, waltz. Music critics and fans admire their ability to mix these different styles into an exuberant, cohesive whole.

[edit] Background

Christophe Bastien

Band members have described themselves as originally being an Irish folk group combining with a rock band. Simon Mimoun and Olivier Sulpice met Christophe Bastien and Cédric “Momo” Ermolieff in high school. Simon met Fred Trisson at university, and Fred introduced the band to his childhood friend Romain Sassigneux. They began performing together in bars and on the street and with groups such as Garçons Bouchers and Les Ogres de Barback under the name Debout Sur Le Zinc as of 1996. William Lotvi joined as their bass player in 1998.

The idea for the name Debout Sur Le Zinc, literally “standing on the zinc,” originally came after a concert in which Christophe, guitarist/singer was standing on the bar counter playing the accordion. The discovery that the bar or zinc--the material bar countertops were once made of--used to serve as a stage for people to recite poems, sing or make political speeches, and the expression also being in a poem by Jacques Prévert further reinforced the name.