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the way he felt when Prince and Bowie
died unexpectedly in 2016. Or, as Thomas
Wolfe once wisely put it: You can't go
home again. Mars cites the late American
artist Cy Twombly – whose retrospective
he recently caught in New York – as the
perfect example of an artist who managed
to maintain his naïve childlike wonder-
ment throughout his long, productive life,
reflected in his primitive but alluring scrib-
bles.
“I have two kids, and when you look at
their drawings when they’re really young,
these drawings are really peculiar,” Mars
notes. “But then every kid’s drawing looks
good – they have these imperfections that
make them very intriguing. And if you ask
an adult to draw like a kid, they can’t do it.
But I’m sure that there will always be an
appreciation for new things that have
never been done before, or artists just seek-
ing new territories.”
Besides Candide and The Stranger, Mars
has certain other literary efforts that keep
him firmly grounded. He loves re-reading
the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, because
they never hit him the same way twice – he
always picks up on a new, otherwise unfa-
miliar aspect. For non-fiction, he swears by
Legs McNeil’s punk-era breakdown Please
Kill Me, and he adores the long career of
novelist Romain Gary, for great books like
Your Ticket is No Longer Valid as well as the
fact that he was the only person to win
France’s Pulitzer-equivalent Prix Goncourt
twice, as himself and under his pseudo-
nym, Emile Ajar. “Every single one of his
works has so much depth, whether it con-
nected with my parents’ generation or it
foresees the future, through the fact that he
was once a resistance fighter,” he says.
Ah, yes. The Resistance. In France,
photo by Emma Le Doyen
You can’t force yourself. But somehow, Cy
Twombly kept this – he managed the best
of both worlds, managed to turn this kid’s
scribbling style into something that carries
all the weight of what it means to be an
adult.” The album cover, in fact – a graffiti-
scrawled heart – is an absentminded doo-
dle the man made while talking on his cell-
phone, a perfectly-formed idea that he
believes would not have occurred to him
anywhere outside his unguarded subcon-
scious. Carpe diem. Seize that artistic
inspiration when and where you can.
And it can materialize just about any-
where. Phoenix opened its current tour –
which actually features Italian-designed
merchandise vending machines, another
crazy concept the group had – in Antwerp,
Belgium, where the local language was
a