Scenius brings together the collective talents of Steve Whitfield and Fabrice Nau to craft a sound that is an evolution of the late 70s to early 80s period of exploration. Rooted in the distinctive, visceral sound of analogue synthesisers, Scenius are on their third album and have just supported Midge Ure on his UK tour.
At the Barrier writer Peter Freeth caught up with Fabrice and Steve to find out more about their work, their touring experience and their journey as writers and performers and share their thoughts on connecting; with each other, with music, with the audience and with 50 years of electronic inspiration.
Forward looking
Fabrice: In the first place, when we started playing music together, it was about using all the synth and drum machine that Steve had in his place. So it was all about electronic music because we listened to quite a lot of electronic music from the 80s, but we wanted to turn this into something new. So the roots are the same as some of the bands that were founded in the early 80s, Visage, Ultravox, all these bands that definitely had a big influence on the sounds that we use today.
Steve: At the same time, hopefully we are forward looking. We’re certainly not wanting to just copy what’s happened. Both of us are equally inspired by stuff that’s happened since, like LCD Sound System, Boards of Canada, a lot of the darkwave stuff. But outside of that, we’re both big Beatles fans. So hopefully that comes through the melodies and song structures. And things like Joy Division and The Cure. So it’s not just that synth pop thing that inspires us. Hopefully we’re crushing all of that and coming out with who we are.
Foundations
Peter: You may or may not remember from the review that I wrote for the Birmingham show that I likened you to a mixture of Kraftwerk and the Pet Shop Boys.
Steve: Maybe not so much the Pet Shop Boys, certainly Kraftwerk. When I was a teenager, when I left the pop music of my generation and started to look elsewhere, the two things I got into were punk rock and Kraftwerk. So I’ve always had this noisy guitar thing and then the electronic Kraftwerk thing. But Pet Shop Boys, I wouldn’t say they were an influence.
Peter: Not an influence at all, but for me, there was something about those extremes within the way that you presented yourself and the way that their act is built upon a foundation of what people have done before. So the band name, Scenius, there’s obviously something in that.
Fabrice: When you’re looking for a name for your band, it’s always kind of a big thing and you don’t want to miss the target too much. I’m not sure which of us came with this. We were watching a Brian Eno interview and we like a lot of bands that have been the first to use synths and drum machines in the late 70s and early 80s, so obviously Brian Eno is one of them. We were watching one of his interviews in which he was explaining that genius is kind of a scam in a way because it comes from different places and so he’s coined this word which was ‘scenius’ in order to explain that it seems more appropriate to speak of scenius as there’s no way that you can come up with just everything new at the same time.
Steve: Deciding a name for a band is probably one of the hardest things in the whole process. There’s two things I’ve always found hard, coming up with a name for a band and then, which order do you list the songs on an album? That’s much harder than writing the music, actually.
The genius of the many
Peter: The word genius really means inspiration rather than intelligence, so whether it’s the genius of one or the scenius of many, it has to come from outside, it can’t come from inside. Otherwise all you’re ever doing is consuming what you’ve done before. Coming back to a point you made earlier about growing beyond and trying something new, you built a sound on the foundation of things that have come before, like some of the bands you mentioned. You have not only your scenius, your collective inspiration, but also it struck me that you’re building on the collective inspiration of all of those bands that came before that tried new stuff, some of which was great, some not so much. So really you’ve built on that foundation but then not being limited by it. It’s more like a common ancestor in the family tree rather than being the pool that you’re drawing from.
Steve: I’m not going to compare us to the Beatles or David Bowie, but they were amazing artists and they were influenced by people before them as well. So you can’t help but be influenced by people behind you that have broken boundaries but the thing to do is to try and do your own thing, to be influenced but then shift it to do your own thing.
Co-creating
Peter: As a producer you work with a lot of other bands and so you get to work with other people’s ideas some of which are good ideas and some terrible.
Steve: I’ve learned so much working with bands. Good things and negative things. Things to try, things to avoid. Not in song structures or melodies or anything like that, but just how to run your band.
Peter: And how does that inform the way that you two work together?
Fabrice: The first astonishing thing for me was that I had never created music without being in the same room with the person I’m making music with before. So in the first place I thought, well, this is probably not going to work. But we just tried it and it worked. So all my experiences were not really very helpful in making music when you can’t see in the eye of the guy that is working with you. You have to be first very convinced that your idea is good before you send it over to your partner and then when when you get a reply you’ve got to read between the lines or try to take it further without having the physical expression of the return that you get.
Ideas worth sharing
Peter: It almost sounds like there’s a layer of censorship before you share an idea, whereas I have this stereotypical image of the band in the studio jamming and just playing stuff, and something emerges organically from that. But you’ve got this layer where you don’t want to just share the first thing that comes into your mind, you want it to be worth sharing.
Fabrice: Well, unless it’s good. If the first thing that comes into your mind seems good. So usually, as from here, we usually leave a couple of days between the moment when I’ve got an idea then listen back to it and either ditch it when I listen back or stick to it for a few more days then come back later and once I’m sure that it’s good then I send it over.
Steve: I get surprised sometimes. I sent the music over to Fabrice all by the internet so this couldn’t have happened 30 years ago. He’d have been sending cassettes or something. I don’t know how we’d have done it. So I send the music off, Fabrice listens to it, tries to write some words and melody to it, and then sends me back. Quite often it’s chopped up, so what I think is the chorus might end up being the verse and vice versa. So when I get it back, I have to listen a good four, five, six times to get used to the new version. Sometimes it’s a real shock and then the more I listen to it, I realise what’s going on and pretty much every time I think I’ve liked it once I got used to it.
Peter: That element of shock, as you put it, the unexpected, seems to be adding another source of inspiration.
Steve: Something’s emerging. Sometimes in rehearsal rooms, even if you’ve got four people, the traditional thing, sometimes you still get that shock anyway. Someone does something and it’s like, wow, what was that? So it’s just a bit more delayed.
Fabrice: Yeah, the same would happen, but more instantly.
Musical democracy
Peter: So I know that you’ve produced for other bands and if we go back to the early 80s, which I think is the era that we would probably associate most with early electronic music, then we can see why the 80s and the synthesiser were so important to music. The synth democratised music production. Musicians no longer had to learn how to play a guitar or drums or whatever. They could make music in their bedrooms and they could produce stuff themselves, which consequently means a lot of the stuff they produce is stuff that nobody should ever hear. But if we’re interested in inspiration and experimentation, then that has to happen.
There was a period where people were really famous for being producers and it feels to me that we’ve lost that now. So if we go back to people like Thomas Dolby, Trevor Horn, Dave Stewart, Richard Hewson, these were people who were producing big names and they were making their own records as well when they wanted to do something that didn’t fit into another band. I wondered if you were channelling a bit of that as well
Steve: I think part of that is there were only so many really big expensive studios and it cost a lot of money to go into that studio with an engineer and producer but now it’s as you said it’s democratised music. Everyone with a computer and the right software can do it so pretty much every producer will have at least a mix studio at home. For me, if it’s electronic stuff, people quite often record themselves and then just send me the files and then I mix.
If I’m working with a live band, I’ll source a studio to go and record in, but then the mixing will be done online. It’s the same process, whether they’re just the other side of Leeds or in a different country, I email it to them they’ll have a listen send me comments back and I’ll do some tweaks and that might be a bit back and forth a few times and then the mix is done. It’s very rare now that I’m in the same room with the band and I think that’s quite common because at the touch of a button you can just recall that mix and do some little tweaks.
Delving down
Peter: Is that less personal, less intimate, less enjoyable for you?
Steve: It enables me to spend more time mixing and really delving down. There’s less distraction. There isn’t a party going on next door.
Fabrice: Without having to explain to the drummer that, no, we can’t put the snare even louder than that.
Steve: I would miss if I didn’t go into the studio with bands and produce and record as a group of people. So I think that’s still important.
Accelerated experience
Peter: That brings the other piece of the puzzle in, which is the audience and getting a sense of what they think. It’s an audience who are, if I can put it this way, seeing you by accident.
Steve: It’s one of the questions when people come and talk to us afterwards and say that they’ve liked it, I generally ask them, have you heard of us before tonight? And a lot of them haven’t. So one of the great things about coming on the tour is that we’re meeting a lot of new people and playing songs in front of a lot of new people.
Peter: I think it’s quite common in a tour like this that not everybody who’s bought a ticket is there for the support act, unfortunately, but also for more established musicians, one of the really important things they do is select support acts to give them a start. But neither of you are starting out in the music industry, you’re already on that journey. What impact does a tour like this have for you?
Fabrice: It has an impact on the way we play on stage. When we played the first gig on the tour in Bath, we realised that it was only our ninth gig. So by the end of the tour, we’d have tripled the number of gigs, in one month, that we had made in three or four years. So there’s nothing that beats the experience that you can get on stage in terms of learning how to play your songs on stage. You can rehearse as much as you want, but being on stage is the only thing that will really teach you how to do it. So, obviously, hopefully there will be more. For me, if it was only for the experience that you get on stage, I’d be really very happy just with that. So all the rest is a bonus, really.
Let the music flow
Peter: And has your presentation changed then, even during the course of this tour?
Steve: I think it got better.
Steve: We’re not used to playing in such big spaces, it’s kind of different, and I think we’ve been learning as we’ve been going along.
Fabrice: We also had to adapt to the fact that we were going to play with the in-ear monitors, which none of us had done before. So I would say that for the first gigs on the tour, we were a bit cautious because we had to adapt to the new situation. In your body there’s no sound coming from the stage monitor so there’s no vibration. The first gigs, we were trying to first handle that and get used to that. But now we’re starting to get used to it. I don’t know where it comes from, but you start to find other ways to let the music flow through your body. From the ears down and not from the bottom.
Full circle
Peter: Do you find that the experience of performing live then loops back into the studio? Do you write and record differently as a result?
Steve: Not yet, not yet. I’ve been very aware of a lot of bands that I’ve liked in small clubs and they’re kind of writing for that. Then when they get huge fame, they start writing for stadiums. That’s when I normally go of them. But we’re still a small band. We’re not used to playing in huge stadiums. So at this level, I don’t think the next things we’re going to write will be influenced by having played live on this tour. I could be wrong.
Peter: I was thinking more in terms of the performance, for example, the way you sing. I understand you like to play the keyboards manually rather than programming them.
Steve: It’s both, but yes, I have the computer that I can use to play it in, correct everything, get perfect timing. Some sequences I do that, but then a lot of the top lines, a lot of the melodies would be played live and left, sometimes not even with the computer running it, just literally play it in, record it, done. And it just adds a slight bit of humanness to it. For me, it’s just the pure thing of writing. Anything else comes later. It’s just, if I come up with an idea or a line, that’s the inspiration, nothing else.
Fabrice: Same here, I find that having an audience in mind when you write music is too dangerous in a way, I wouldn’t know exactly who that person is.
Steve: It’s kind of almost second guessing what someone might want. We just do what we do and once the process is done and it’s finished it’s then listening back to it, is it any good, is it worth releasing.
Feeling the music
Peter: What have you learned or perhaps would even do differently as a result of your experience on the tour?
Fabrice: I would have started rehearsing with in-ear monitors sooner than that so as not to discover it just a couple of days before the tour started.
Peter: That’s a really interesting point because it’s a technology that you might take for granted, I wouldn’t have thought about the effect that you’ve described. If I listen to music, it’s definitely not loud enough to feel it! So the idea that when you’re on stage, you are using that tactile sense as a way of orienting yourself within the performance, that’s very interesting.
Fabrice: In a nightclub, some people do that now. You can dance with just headphones on. So it’s not the same dancing in your bedroom with headphones on. Or in a nightclub with monitors in the room, maybe it gives you a sense of how different it is. There’s something that happens to your body when the music hits the body.
Steve: If you can imagine as an audience member, if there was no PA and everyone was on headphones, that would be a different experience. In a big gig, half of it’s visual, all the lights and the movement and everything, but half of it is the music. It would be the same thing for a lot of audience members. If you just put them on in-ear monitors, they’d feel detached from everything. I think even the audience would take a while to get used to it.
Peter: Isolating was the word that came to mind when you said that.
Steve: It’s great with in-ear monitors. You can hear yourself. You can get the exact mix that you want. It’s great for that but it’s getting used to the fact that you are slightly detached.
Connecting
Peter: What else have you learned or you would perhaps do differently?
Steve: There’s a lot of travelling. So I think by the time of the end of the tour we’ll have done at least 4000 miles in a month. People are surprised that the dates are not in a perfect circle, it’s up and down and across, so we’ve passed the same place many times, a lot of places we’ve passed many times, but that’s the way it is.
Peter: You’re obviously spending a lot of time physically together that you wouldn’t normally do given the way you talked about recording earlier. How does that affect the relationship between the two of you?
Fabrice: We had already spent probably up to eight or nine days together. We hadn’t played many gigs before together, but whenever we did, it would usually be two or three days of rehearsals before, then two or three gigs, then a couple of days before departing. So I think we really stayed together for probably a week or 10 days. So we knew that worked and probably it was possible to extend this to a whole month. Plus there are three of us on the road.
Steve: We’ve got a friend of mine on tour with us who’s been invaluable. He’s our, driver, merch guy, tour manager, whatever needs doing, he’s helping us and that’s been a godsend.
Fabrice: We meet people that we’ve been in touch only by emails or Facebook and some of these are people who have played us on their radio shows or interviewed us or reviewed us. So we keep saying we’re happy to see them in real person for the first time. We wouldn’t be there on stage opening for Midge Ure if it had not been for all these people who kept us going, in a way. And when we applied for the Midge Ure tour, obviously, that’s what you do, you send a few articles that you’ve had in the press. These things have definitely made us more credible.
Steve: I think that, along with Midge, has got a bit of a history of helping newer bands and new things. So I think speaking to the people, he’s always been keen on that.
What’s next?
Peter: What do you plan to do next as a result of what you’ve achieved here?
Steve: One of the big things for both of us is to plan our own gigs, hopefully around the autumn (2026). Not as big as this, but some small sweaty clubs around the country. Hopefully a lot of people that we’ve met will want to come and see us again. If we can play to 150 people a night, that would be a massive success story for us. My last band was a guitar band and I feel so far it’s been harder getting gigs for electronic music than guitar music so hopefully that might change after this.
Fabrice: On the back of the tour, we would also like to not take too much time before we finish new songs and release new stuff, because for both of us, that’s the thing that really drives us, to write new songs and to see how, without changing the recipe totally, which is what I think we’ve managed to do so far. We’ve just kept the same instruments, the same influences and the same way to approach writing melodies and all that. But the three albums are quite different from one another. So I think we’re quite impatient to see what’s going to come next.
Steve: We’ve already got about 12 songs, half of them have vocals so we’re kind of halfway to the next album anyway but obviously we need time to finish it.
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