Key early '80s album by wild, seminal Crammed band gets a vinyl reissue

This much sought-after album created quite a sensation in the early '80s, and got the band to become the darlings of the UK & German music press whilst appearing on mainstream pop shows on French TV. Fronted by the late Yvon Vromman, The Honeymoon Killers were a provocative band with a strong pop sensibility, and their delirious live shows gained them a following across Europe.

The Honeymoon Killers resulted from the fusion of Brussels primitivist band Les Tueurs de la lune de miel (Yvon Vromman, Gerald Fenerberg and  Jeanf Jones Jacob III) with Aksak Maboul’s Marc Hollander and Vincent Kenis, soon joined by singer Véronique Vincent.

The band’s music was often described as a blend of New York No Wave and French pop, with a pinch of Captain Beefheart and a serious dose of absurd humour. Alongside Vromman’s relentless energy, incisive lyrics and compositions, and the inventive arrangements performed by a unique combination of players, one of the main charms of The Honeymoon Killers was the contrast between the onstage personas of the two vocalists, the beauty-and-the-beast-like duet of Véronique Vincent (aloof, cold and elegant) vs Yvon Vromman (chaotic, scruffy and extravagant).

The album contains seven songs written by Yvon Vromman and three irreverent cover versions. It is reissued with its original artwork, plus an insert with pictures and lyrics, as well as a digital download code for the album plus 8 bonus tracks (including the band’s cult “Subtitled Remix EP”, and live tracks recorded during a tour as Aksak Maboul in 1981).

Watch here an excerpt from The Honeymoon Killers’ concert at legendary Manchester club the Hacienda, showing frontman Yvon Vromman at his scathing, nasty, insane best.

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Founded in 1974 by the charismatic Yvon Vromman (who was also a remarkable visual artist, see below), Les Tueurs de la lune de miel were legendary in the Brussels underworld. Consisting of an assortment of miscreants, taxi drivers, cooks, professional gamblers and other musical delinquents who performed a massacre on all genres, their shows were dangerously unpredictable (they were known for throwing raw meat on their audience). They recorded the savage Special Manubre album for Marc Moulin's ephemeral Kamikaze label in 1977.

In the spring of 1980, the respective cores of Les Tueurs de la lune de miel and Aksak Maboul (who had released two albums) recruited each other. Aksak Maboul's Marc Hollander (who went on to create Crammed Discs) and Vincent Kenis (who later produced albums by Konono N°1, Taraf de Haïdouks, Staff Benda Bilili etc) joined forces with Tueurs leader Yvon Vromman, guitarist Gérald Fenerberg (now a sound designer and engineer) and drummer Jeanf Jones Jacob III (now a painter and visual artist). Yvon then brought in the young Véronique Vincent (then an aspiring journalist-cum-model, now once again a touring artist with VV & Aksak Maboul). This wasn't originally intended to be a complete merger, as each band was meant to keep developing & performing a separate repertoire, and to record an album.

The combo resulting from this unholy alliance between musicians with such diverging styles (the Tueurs' twisted raw energy vs Aksak Maboul's refined avantgarde leanings) generated explosive results. They toured first as Aksak Maboul (version 3.0), then as The Honeymoon Killers.

The Tueurs de la lune de miel album was recorded in 1981. The first single, a cover of Charles Trénet's Route Nationale 7 (merrily deconstructed by Vromman & co), became a radio hit in Belgium and France.  When the album came out in 1982, it got the band a lot of attention in France, Benelux, Germany, Japan and the UK (with a John Peel session, a cover feature in the NME, etc).

The band then released a second single (Décollage, sung by V.Vincent) and the unusual "Subtitled Remix" EP (in which additional, English-speaking characters commented the actions described by the songs' lyrics).

They successfully toured around Europe and Japan until they unmerged into two factions in early 1985. Véronique Vincent and Aksak Maboul wanted to resume work on their album, which was only finally completed and released in 2014 (as Ex-Futur Album). Yvon Vromman started working on songs for a new Honeymoon Killers album, which he hadn't finished when he died tragically in September 1989.



In the press

Somewhere between Maurice Chevalier and James Chance (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1982)

Here comes Yvon Vromman wearing a baggy dark two piece pinstripe just on the sharp side of parody, battered cream fedora, bottle of Smirnoff in hand, Napoleonic of stature and command. His soliloquy and manner crack me up… I feel sure that James Cagney and Tom Waits would appreciate this song-and-dance man (NME, UK, 1984)

Véronique Vincent sings like a deranged pop idol, smiles like Bardot but stays as cool as a refrigerator (FAZ, DE, 1982)

Warm, melodic, innovative, savagely funny and viciously danceable, they have created a unique pop vision. From the oblique synthings of Marc Hollander through a rhythm section as relentlessly and perfectly timed as Beefheart's to the vocal spearheads of Yvon Vromman and Véronique Vincent , the Honeymoon Killers are staggering (Sounds, UK, 1984)

Voluptuous, tearing, stamping, petulant... A truly Nietzschean stand-up comic spirit is at work here…  Hats off to any band that can cover a Serge Gainsbourg song and still sound like Talking Heads-meet-Pinky & Perky… Everything they touch becomes their own, matchless style. From raw to rare to burnt to ruination. (NME, 1982)

A concentrate of dada pop, a dazzling band (Libération, FR, 2003)

A pop monster  (Nova Mag, FR, 2003)

A refined blend of New York No Wave influence and French chanson (Rolling Stone, DE, 2008)

With their first album Special Manubre, Les Tueurs had transformed iconoclasm into a paradigm  (Les Inrockuptibles, FR, 2010)

Décollage has the slinky elegance of a panther (featured alongside songs by Jacques Brel, Telex & Front 242 in a selection of 10 tracks showcasing "the country at its sparkling best", The Guardian, UK, 2012)

Possibly the best Belgian band of all times (Le Vif/L'Express, BE, 2016)
 
Arguably  the best Belgian rock album ever (Le Soir, BE, 2016)