Watch the Litzomania video

We may have mocked their music for decades — at least until Air and Daft Punk ushered in some contemporary cool — but there is something about the French. Call it savoir-faire or je ne sais quoi, but Phoenix have it in abundance. An interview with the Versailles quartet is like attending a modern-day salon: a round-table discussion on every aspect of art — music, film, literature, painting... even football.

Today, an hour with the singer Thomas Mars and the guitarist Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz takes in subjects as diverse as the cultural oppositions between present-day Japan and the Renaissance period, the mysteries of Metallica’s backstage behaviour, the Catholic imagery in Damien Hirst’s skulls and tales of near-death experiences at various festivals — all of them liberally peppered with references from Milton and Byron to Da Vinci, JG Ballard and Thierry Henry. It’s hard to imagine, say, the View or the Enemy comparing a Metallica show to “watching the fall of the Roman Empire”, or Daft Punk’s performance “feeling like a Ballard science-fiction novel”, but this is the way Phoenix talk. Even in their second language.

Classical music inspired their latest album, with references to Liszt, Wagner and Mozart running throughout Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which is released tomorrow on V2. It refines the polished pop-synth sound that belatedly brought Phoenix to popular attention when Too Young, from their 2000 debut album, United, featured in the film Lost in Translation — a stroke of good fortune not entirely unconnected with the fact that its director, Sofia Coppola, is Mars’s girlfriend and the mother of his child.

In keeping with the album’s classical theme, they shot the video for its first single, Lisztomania, at Bayreuth, in the historic 19th-century theatre where the annual Wagner festival takes place. Yet it has already been surpassed in popularity on YouTube by an unofficial home-made video in which footage of people dancing from the 1980s brat-pack movies The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Footloose and Mannequin is synchronised to the song. Phoenix prefer it to their own, rather expensive “official” effort. “It’s great,” Mars says. “It’s our best video.”

And what is the significance of the classical-music references? Brancowitz’s answer is, typically, oblique. “I saw the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Château de Versailles, and I felt was the perfect place for it: an exhibition with two worlds colliding. I didn’t see it as a provocation, but as an attempt not to be overwhelmed by history, but, instead, to make it yours.”

Brancowitz, who clearly harbours an obsessive streak, adopted a rigorous regime of listening while making the album. “When we were recording it, I listened for one month only to the Smiths,” he says. “Every album. Then I got bored and listened only to Crosby, Stills Nash and Young. But only the songs written by David Crosby.” It goes without saying that the album bears no trace whatsoever of the influence of 1960s country, 1970s folk-rock or 1980s indie.

Mars opted for a more diverse approach, taking his inspiration as much from cinema and literature as music. “My inspirations for Liszt­omania, for example, were The Great Gatsby — the novel, not the film — the film American Gigolo and Franz Liszt’s biography.” Despite a passion for cinema and a girlfriend who directs films, he says he has no desire to follow suit, adding: “To me, music is the perfect art.”

Phoenix, in keeping with their vision, have suffered for their art. “We almost died at one festival,” Mars reveals. “Actually,” Branco confesses, “there are two when we almost died.” They confer in French before agreeing that, yes, there were in fact two occasions when they almost died.

The first was at the inaugural V Festival in Canada, held on an island in 2006. “We took this tiny boat with the equipment, and the boat started sinking in the middle of the sea,” Mars explains. “It was beginning to get dark, we had no power and the walkie-talkies didn’t work, so we just had to hope that help would come, but we did not know if anyone knew we were in trouble. We were right in the

middle of the sea, between the land and the island. We were talking about which way to swim, whether to take off our clothes and shoes, and which way help was most likely to come from. And all the time, the boat was sinking.”

Help eventually came after 40 minutes, when they were rescued by another boat. But things got worse the following year, at a show in the gardens of Versailles. “We were playing with Air and a lot of other bands from Versailles, so it was a special event for us, and people had travelled from all over the world,” Branco recalls. “But because it was the first time they had put on an electrified musical event there, they had forgotten to prepare for the possibility of rain.”

Inevitably, it did rain, and Mars was electrocuted on the uncovered stage during his soundcheck. But that was only the beginning.

“During our set, it started to rain directly on all the electrical equipment, and an electrical fire broke out on the stage,” he says. “But we were determined to carry on playing, because it was such an epic moment for us, so we stayed and played. At one point, I went to the front of the stage and people started to move forward. That’s when I heard someone from security say that the PA would fall — and, moments later, the whole system collapsed.”

True to their name, Phoenix rose from the ashes.

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