Biography
EARLY YEARS:
Some time in the 90's on the island of Mauritius, schoolmates Paco, Nico & Mabloon set up a band they call Eclectic. They quickly decide they would concentrate on originals rather than playing covers. They start playing mauritian venues and soon create a buzz. MLP completes the line up in 1997 in a definite way. This coincides with the band’s natural change in artistic orientation: the songs become raw and atmospheric, dominated by real song writing efforts and wizardry.
It is an important period for Eclectic, as it inaugurates their sound which will remain to date Island Rock. Raw rock’n’roll built on the ashes of grunge music, echoing to Britpop but radically heading towards the future. Lyrically too, the band got thicker throughout the years, in spite of the fact that rock’n’roll bands in Mauritius have next to no future. Unable of vesting into a quiet life plan, they re-united in Europe, named themselves A RIOT IN HEAVEN and started it all over again.
EUROPE YEARS
A RIOT IN HEAVEN becomes internationally visible as from 2003, where they play a series of gigs at the House of Live (now Chesterfield Café) on Les Champs Elysées in Paris. These gigs earned them the ‘end of the world band’ nickname as their themes and commitment seemed at that time to forecast a dull future, which of course contrasted with the cynical cheesiness that this decade’s pop music will be remembered for. Wherever they played, people witnessed their sense of emergency, felt concerned by their truth speaking songs.
New songs kept merging, stuff up their already rich live sets & recorded demos. their many live performances have been punctually praised in independent media, and their work so far also include an award-winning video (Frank Sinatra is dead), original motion picture soundtrack (Toute la beauté du monde, by Marc Esposito) and recently a theatre play (J.P Sartre’s The Flies, by Echange theatre company).
WEEK END ON PROXIMA 2007
A morse-like intro followed by roaring guitars was what unlocked WEEK END ON PROXIMA when it was launched in 2007. The record echoes an anguished outcry about a fading planet and the resulting urge to fly outer space, to discover and colonise new areas for mankind. While leaving the earth, this astronaut sings in his transmission to earth: ‘hypocrite people: you live on your polluted cities, obsessed by capitalist deceit’.
Excluding the many unofficial demos and EP’s that circulated at a time, 'WEEK END ON PROXIMA' is to be considered as the very first international release from A RIOT IN HEAVEN. It is available on a 'pay-what-you-want' basis from the band's website as well as conventional internet platforms (Itunes, Rapsody) and a post-delivered crystal box version is also available.
A RIOT IN 2009
For the last 15 years, they’ve maintained the same discourse, home and overseas, vociferously warning that our so-called modern lifestyle is perverted and is quickly snapping us from our true considerations. We are drifting away.
An abundance of new songs, gathered within a project called PEOPLE, is expected for the first half of 2009. An unprecedented initiative known as A BUNKER TO BUILD will also be unveiled around the same period.
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