“What made me dream was to have a little notebook to have things to write in. I dreamed of taking notes, ”says Thomas Vandenberghe, alias Thomas VDB, in Comedian rhapsody, which appears this Wednesday at Flammarion. At 44, the artist had the opportunity to make his childhood dream come true. Pages of notebooks, he has blackened by the thousands as the creator of the French fan-club of Korn, journalist, humorist, columnist of By Jupiter! on France Inter and therefore, henceforth, as an author of a novel. In this first autobiographical work, Thomas VDB focuses on the first three decades of his life. He tells about his admiration for Queen, his collections of “Monsieur Cinéma” files, the rock groups where he gave voice, his experience in the magazine. Rock sound of which he was briefly the editor-in-chief and his first steps as an actor… in the aisles of a supermarket. With his inimitable tone (reading it, it’s his voice that we hear), he gives a hilarious relief to the simplest anecdotes – his adventures with the Club Dial – as well as the most extraordinary – it goes suddenly Moby’s pressuring interview to Liam Gallagher’s embarrassment at an Oasis post-concert cocktail party. “This book is the story of a passion for music,” he explains to 20 Minutes.
Did you come up with the idea for this book, or did we pick you up?
She’s mine. As a long time fan and consumer of music and my job of writing jokes for the past 15 years or so, I have found that there are lots of things that make me laugh in music. At the beginning, I wanted to make this book a sum of thoughts on the music since I listened to it, but the problem is that I had not noted all that, so I said to myself that I was going to relate chronologically the story of my passion, to the point of obsession, almost neurosis. I’m talking about how this passion was achieved when I became a journalist. I had put on a costume that was too big for me because, in reality, I liked music, but I didn’t want to be a journalist. The book stops when I find my vocation as an actor and when I decide to stop having to have an opinion on everything. I received hundreds of records, but I was forced to get an opinion about them very quickly. This is what was very heavy for me. It was going too fast, I didn’t have time to appreciate the music. I had to take a lot of perspective to digest this story and make it into something funny, with self-mockery.
What is striking about your book is that your journey is full of good luck. The opportunities presented themselves to you without your trying to provoke them, without your wanting to do anything. Did it really go like this or are things pretty for storytelling?
It really happened like that (laughs). Maybe this feeling comes from my way of telling it but I don’t remember having inflated anything. I have always operated on instinct. When, as a child, I said “I would like to work in music”, my parents replied “Pass your baccalaureate first!” Finally, I succeeded without studying. I have been very lucky. This book is the story of a passion for physical music before the advent of digital made everything available. I tell a lot about my tribulations with my compilations, my tapes copied when I was a teenager, my record collections which are really cumbersome in my life. The first two or three years of journalism, I loved doing this. Afterwards, it was with the responsibilities that the sky fell on my head. My book also tells us that when you have made your dream come true, the time may have come to fulfill another one. I hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly.
You don’t have journalism nostalgia?
I was part of a press group which sold very well musical magazines on rock, rap, techno. But he was super stuck with all the labels. I had never set foot in the United States and there, I was told: “You are going to Los Angeles for a week to interview a group that you adore. I felt like I was winning a competition, but it was actually my job. I was very aware of my luck. But when I realized that I was nothing more than a pawn in the music industry, I quit. If I couldn’t cover the band I dreamed of on the front page while thinking of our readers because, above me, an ad manager was pressuring me by telling me that another band had bought five pages of ads in the magazine… That’s the moment that demotivated me. At the same time, while I was editor-in-chief during the week, on weekends, I would do street shows. I think it’s not a very universal thing. This is what opened the breach and made me want to fulfill myself in comedy.
Is your taste for comedy still intact?
I love going to see the comedy buddies’ shows, but I’m not necessarily laughing at seeing how it’s built, which doesn’t detract from their talent. This did not erode my passion, however. When I was a music journalist, I was not a musician. Today, I am an actor so I have this outlet, which I cultivated when I was doing street theater alongside journalism. I got tired of hearing musicians tell me about their albums. I too wanted to do stuff, not ask people questions about what they do. When you interview a lot of metal bands that are twenty years old, they don’t necessarily have very interesting things to tell you. I felt more of an artist than a journalist.
It is not easy to use humor today. Comedians can be pilloried for making certain jokes. Are these the “risks of the trade”?
Today, a joke that does not pass can generate a lot of resentment and even threats. Basically, I did not foresee that this would be part of the risks of the job. When we think of comedy, we don’t think of threats. I sometimes ask myself the question “In six months or a year it will be as easy to make jokes as we are doing here?” I hope so, but all is not going to get lighter.
You recently gave your support, in a column on France Inter, to Charline Vanhoenecker who had been the target of virulent criticism for having drawn a mustache “à la Hitler” on an Eric Zemmour poster. You argued absurdly. Are the times absurd?
We are so antagonized on all subjects that it is difficult to have a coherent reading grid for everything. We can very quickly be caught in the act of inconsistency and I have the impression that people see an enormous gravity in it when we are not all blocks of coherence. For me, bad jokes, bad skits [des humoristes], it works – sometimes it does not go well – but it certainly does not deserve physical threats. People are not able to say to themselves “This is just humor”.