It’s September 3, 2014, a 24-year-old Australian arrives in Paris, accompanying a punk band on a European tour. He decides not to go home. Since then, everyone knows Nathan Roche. If you haven’t seen him haranguing the crowd on a festival stage with Le Villejuif Underground, then you’ve come across one of his hallucinated noise performances within CIA Debutante in a squat in Poland . Like Kevin Ayers in Montolieu or Robert Crumb in Sauve, Nathan has chosen the heart of the Roya Valley. Thus, he perpetuates this tradition of the uprooted freak that we sometimes come across on the terraces of cafes in the South of France which, like a storyteller, make you escape with crazy stories. Judge for yourself: The Sahara desert? He got stuck there for lack of a visa! Italy? He cycled Marseille – San Remo by 40°C last summer! China ? He has already played in front of 15,000 people at a festival in Wuhan! It’s therefore easy to understand that A Break Away, this new solo album, is a journey disc in the form of a breakaway (literally A Breakaway, for those who haven’t followed, be it from society, taking holiday, or a strategy in competitive cycling), the album recorded during a return to Australian soil during the last March. In eleven titles, Nathan brings together the great story (Ground Zero) and his most personal memories, mourning his dear collection of records, sold in order to survive on his arrival in France (Recollection) and suffering memory loss because of it, narrating his successive encounters with his idols David Berman (Silver Jews) and Daevid Allen (Two Davids House) in his youth. This naturalistic writing, which can evoke Jonathan Richman, is combined with an encyclopedic knowledge of guitar music, forged while he was a record store in Australia. Thus he delivers songs evoking both the greatest hours of Fire Records (The Stevens) and the Lou Reed of the mid-70s (Tristan Winston Price, and his Hunter/Wagner style solos on R&R Animal). As I write these lines, he is finishing the cherry picking in Haute-Ardèche, but he will probably tell you better than me when you meet him! Emile Cartron-Eldin credits