‘Would you breastfeed your own father?’ The goofy, spiky world of art-pop duo Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul
Boris Kor Tom Zeebroek is staring up at a grey gothic building in the centre of Ghent, squinting through the late September sun that is covering his home town in a cloak of unseasonal warmth.
Zeebroek is encouraging his bandmate Charlotte Adigéry and I to crane our necks towards the Mammelokker, an 18th-century Flemish relief on the top of the building. It’s a gruesome bit of stone, which sits above the town square and depicts a daughter suckling her own father. The pair are taking me on a tour of their medieval home town, and this disturbing architectural decoration is part of our itinerary.
“Would you breastfeed your own father?” Zeebroek asks me, while still staring skywards. I’m about to tell him I’ve never really thought about it, but he and Adigéry start to cackle uncontrollably. “You might have to one day,” he adds. “Think about it.”
This is part of my initiation into the oddball, utterly fascinating world of Zeebroek (who goes by the stage name Bolis Pupul) and Adigéry, who used the Mammelokker as inspiration for the video to their single Googoo Gaga, perhaps the funkiest ode to child-rearing ever recorded.
In the video, Adigéry takes on the role of wet nurse, breastfeeding an elderly white man who could represent the Mammelokker – or is it an allegory about the Belgian state’s notoriously extractive practices in the Congo? The duo’s work isn’t ever quite what it seems: part joke, part social commentary, but always packaged as pop with dance music DNA.
The pair pick me up outside my hotel on a pair of cargo bikes that they use to cart around their young families. Zeebroek tells me to hop in the front of his and we weave through the cobblestone ginnels of Ghent, dodging fellow cyclists and the tourists who litter the streets. First, we head for coffee, then a quick look at the Van Eyck brothers’ recently restored Lamb of God altarpiece, then the Mammelokker.
Walking or cycling around Ghent with Zeebroek and Adigéry can only be done at a glacial pace: it’s impossible to move 50 metres down the street without someone from their past popping up. Zeebroek’s old babysitter cycles past us, before we turn a corner and bump into Adigéry’s best friend from primary school who happens to be visiting from the US. Another well-wisher turns out to be the original drummer from Belgian rave-rock titans Soulwax.
“You see that guy in that cafe?” Zeebroek says, waving at a tall Belgian in a yellow jumper. “He was one of the lead actors in Belgica,” the 2016 film about a hedonistic club, which featured both Zeebroek and Adigéry on the soundtrack. During the course of four hours, we’re stopped by more than 20 people. Have they set this up? “You’re in the Truman show!” jokes Adigéry.
Adigéry and Zeebroek both grew up in the city, but didn’t meet until 2013. Both were drawn into the orbit of Soulwax (AKA David and Stephen Dewaele), the brothers who helped to put Ghent on the musical map with the notorious mashups made by their alter egos 2manydjs in the early 00s. It was the Dewaeles who suggested Adigéry – a vocalist who they’d worked with on the soaring electro track The Best Thing – should team up with Zeebroek, who was playing in local bands and helping the brothers to catalogue part of their 70,000-strong record collection.
The first album by Adigéry and Zeebroek – 2022’s Topical Dancer – was perhaps the smartest, deftest artistic response to the Black Lives Matter movement. They ridiculed language policing (Esperanto); wrote a certified banger about fitting in as an Afropean (Blenda) and crafted an ode to the limits of new puritanism (Hey). Overall it was a knowing send up of race, colonialism and the performative allyship of the BLM era – “us observing our world and the internet as millennials”, says Adigéry – and often hilarious. It was written on the road, with the pair plucking song ideas out of thin air; they were once travelling to a gig and heard a song riddled with cliches on the radio so they decided to write a riposte – Ceci N’est Pas un Cliché – a Magritte-referencing, ESG-esque single that got the remix treatment by Soulwax.
Their second album – Mainland Madinina, out in February – is different: much more personal, rooted in their collective grief. Zeebroek lost his mother in between the two records, and Adigéry’s father, who had Alzheimer’s, also died. “We wanted it to be more introspective and more vulnerable,” Adigéry says.
To write it, the pair decamped to Martinique, the tiny Caribbean island Adigéry’s parents moved to Belgium from (Madinina is the original Arawak name for Martinique and the name of her mother’s now-closed cocktail bar; “Mainland” is a nod to Zeebroek’s Hong Kong heritage). When visiting as a child, Adigéry says she found the island’s energy inspiring and all-consuming, but on this trip with Zeebroek the pair rented an Airbnb on a quiet hillside, got out an acoustic guitar and produced a bunch of stripped-back demos. “It was a little cringe,” says Zeebroek, mimicking plucking a guitar, after we sit down to talk at a restaurant. “‘Hey, does this chord sound good?’”
But what started to form was a deeper version of their sound. There’s still the humour in Googoo Gaga, the glam-rock stomp of Stepmother and the maniacal funk of Losing My Shit, but overall this is a record about growing older and raising children, all while processing the loss of loved ones. “Looking back at those four years,” says Zeebroek, in between mouthfuls of steak tartare, “there were some darker things happening and we had to digest them.”
The album is bookended by opener Restless, and closing tracks Rite of Passage and I’m Lost – a song in which Adigéry breaks down while sing-talking about finally throwing away flowers from her father’s funeral. It’s raw, visceral and beautiful songwriting, and was cathartic as the singer tried to come to terms with her grief. “When you become a parent, I think it’s such a mirror,” says Adigéry. “What’s the trauma from my parents or my grandparents? What do I want to leave behind? I don’t want to be a bag lady with all this baggage.”
The most ambitious track is the eight and a half minute From Healer to Dealer, a piss-take of wellness culture and therapy speak, with the pair performing a dramatic vignette in the middle of the song as alter egos: Ruben and Grace. What starts as an apparently compassionate conversation descends into absurdist mud slinging of buzzwords and bullshit: “You love-bombing, breadcrumbing, emotional dumping, energy-draining mess!”
The song was partly inspired by a pair of not-exactly-zen club bouncers they knew who became life coaches. “I think this holistic approach to health and mental health is good,” says Zeebroek. “It’s great to see that a lot more people think of meditation and how to heal yourself, but then there’s also this obsession with healing. It creates a blind spot … and it’s all very superficial.”
After our meal we make our way to the Deewee studio, the cavernous monochrome lair of Soulwax, which was designed by local architect Glenn Sestig. Its exterior is an obsidian black block with a small embossed Deewee logo: the only real clue about what goes on beyond its walls. Once inside, I’m led to a recording booth which looks like the hideaway of a Bond villain with a taste for analogue synths: an audiophile’s dream, where Adigéry and Zeebroek honed Mainland Madinina. “They keep on buying gear,” says Zeebroek. “It is never ending.”
The Soulwax duo co-produce everything on the Deewee roster, and Zeebroek describes them as being musical “chiropractors”, able to nudge their music joints into position or give their ideas a high-fidelity rubdown. “Whenever we’re stuck they know when to push,” says Zeebroek. Adigéry adds that they often ask “what’s the real intention behind what you’re writing now?”, pushing them to add extra layers to their songwriting.
Zeebroek remembers first seeing how their music could be a Trojan horse for bigger ideas. On their first UK tour, an up-for-it Manchester crowd began screaming the chorus to their bouncy 2022 single Blenda. Witnessing a couple of hundred Mancunians shout “Go back to your country where you beloooooong!” was a pinch-me moment for the duo, who had hoped that politics and pop could in fact mix and audiences were smart enough to get the joke.
“It really brought tears to my eyes,” says Zeebroek. “That was the first time I felt like we were the Beatles or something. My monitors were being overpowered by the shouting.” Manchester gets it; hopefully the rest of the world is ready.