‍The story of Justice is both colourful and full of suspense. With a revolving cast featuring the likes of Daft Punk, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, N.E.R.D., MGMT, Justin Bieber and the publication that proceeded this magazine, there’s never a dull moment in the world of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay. It’s a world where Justice make noise funky and has seen the duo scoop two Grammys. Craig McLean heads to the south of France and witnesses more drama – rain stops play – and learns that the pair’s new album, ‘Hyperdrama’ sums up the duo perfectly. “To be overly euphoric, overly sad or epic when it needs to be.” And action…

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In a recording studio in Oxfordshire and a practice space in Glasgow, two artists are reflecting on the rough justice they were served, early in their respective careers, by remixes of their music by a pair of (then) unknown Frenchmen.

“I have a funny relationship with that song,” says James Ford, former member of Simian, then of offshoot duo Simian Mobile Disco, and now producer of note to Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Blur, Beth Gibbons and Arctic Monkeys. “Even through the early Simian Mobile Disco days, we were a bit churlish about it – we didn’t play it because we didn’t feel ownership over it and we’d cringe when we heard it. Now I’m much more philosophical. But I’ve definitely had a love/hate relationship with it.”

That song, bien sûr, is ‘Never Be Alone’ and the ongoing afterlife it enjoys as a radical 2003 rerub retitled ‘We Are Your Friends’. In its original incarnation it was the lead single from Manchester indie band Simian’s 2002 second album (also called ‘We Are Your Friends’, the shared name arising from the chorus lyric in ‘Never Be Alone’). As a promotional wheeze by their French record label Source, ‘Never Be Alone’ was offered up as remix fodder to any amateur who fancied having a go. The best, as adjudged by the members of Simian, would bag a B-side slot on a subsequent “special release” in France. 

“Maybe to be belligerent, as we were at the time, we picked a noise, drone-y version as the winner, and thought no more about it,” remembers Ford. As for the runner-up… “I remember thinking it was quite different, it was interesting, but I didn’t particularly love it!” he admits with a laugh. “I remember saying at the time it was like MIDI jazz or something, and I think that phrase got back to the guys.”

Then, a few months later, an email from Paris to Simian’s studio in east London’s Hackney Road: “One of those remixes, we want to put it out on this other label, is that OK?” With a nonplussed shrug, Simian said yes, “but didn’t really think much about that either! And, over various iterations, being put out on different labels, it became That Song”.

“And looking back,” adds the musician-turned-super-producer, the pair of Parisian graphic designers-turned-musicians responsible for that MIDI jazz also-ran “did a better job of producing that song and that particular lyric than we did with the actual [whole] song. The fact that they had the limitations and could only use the strongest bit of the song is great – it’s what makes it so direct and simple and powerful.”

Meanwhile, up in Scotland, Alex Kapranos is also reflecting about those same iconoclastic graphic designers. “What I really loved about them is the lack of respect,” he says. 

By the time the Frenchmen came into the orbit of Kapranos’ band Franz Ferdinand, they had given up the day jobs and become Justice: remixers-for-hire. Cheeky ones, at that. “That’s exactly what I was gonna say!” continues Bob Hardy, following on from his bandmate’s observation. “To have the audacity to do what they did to our song!”

The frontman and the bassist with Franz Ferdinand are thinking back to their early days. Exploding just as Simian were imploding, the Glasgow band enjoyed a suite of #fire dance remixes at the outset of their existence: Hot Chip and Daft Punk each took out 2003 single ‘Take Me Out’; Erol Alkan did what he wanted to ‘Do You Want To’ (2005) and The Avalanches did anything but fade out ‘Fade Together’ (2006). All, though, played roughly within the rules of the remix game. 

“Daft Punk’s was a super-reverent remix,” says Kapranos. “They basically kept the structure of our song more or less the same, souped up the bass a little bit, and just thought: ‘This works as a song, let’s not mess with it too much.’”

“Then when the Justice one arrived in our mailbox,” says Hardy of their remix of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘The Fallen’ (2006), “it was such a departure from that [by] this other French duo. Just brilliant.”

“The way they chopped up what we’d given them to make that!” says Kapranos, marvelling, still. “It basically made it sound like I could rap, ha ha!”

“It was shameless!” beams Hardy. “It makes me smile thinking about it.” The band’s joy, he adds, is there in the official title Franz Ferdinand gave to the remix of ‘The Fallen’. “We called it ‘Ruined by Justice.’”

In a dimly lit hotel room in Marseille, that self-same ‘other French duo’, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, are lounging side by side on a bed, sipping lager, puffing vapes and rueing a festival ruined by weather. Two decades on from those game-changing remixes that both noised up a pair of British guitar bands and helped catalyse their own career, Justice are still forging a path – genre-bending, ear-splitting, shit-kicking, fist-punching, two-Grammys-winning, no-f’s-giving – that consistently, brilliantly, busts the boundaries of what we will call vaguely (très vaguement) rock’n’rave.

But four months into the tour in support of their fourth studio album, ‘Hyperdrama’, an all-star, all-vibes set that features, for the first time, “name” guest vocalists (Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Miguel, Thundercat, Connan Mockasin), Justice have hit a speed-bump. Well, a giant, Marshall stack-deep puddle. But when it’s over seven years since you last released a studio album and when this tour stretches well into 2025, there’s no point in stressing over a single cancelled gig.

Justice were booked to headline today’s opening instalment of the four-day Delta event, held on the waterfront of the French port city. But for hours now, here at the fag-end of summer, it’s been raining chats et chiens, a cacophonous electrical thunderstorm rolling into Marseille from the Mediterranean and turning the streets into murky brown rivers, the sky into a lightshow worthy of The Chemical Brothers and the festival site into a life-threatening bog.

“We had a safe place in the tour bus. But it was hell on earth,” says Augé of a main stage on top of which rainwater had pooled like a reservoir, threatening to burst through onto their equipment. Cue the organisers’ decision to pull the plug on today’s festival. “Everything was ready, the guys had been sweating since five in the morning,” he adds of their 40-strong road crew. “So, it’s a bit disappointing, but what can you do?” Sip, puff, shrug. Rain may have stopped play, but it hasn’t stopped the indoor wearing of sunglasses radiating 70s chic and ineffable French cool. 

Travelling here to the south of France for a no-show was bad enough for the Paris-based Augé. It’s worse for de Rosnay: he’s flown in from his home in Sweden. It is, then, a frustrated, wearied but hospitable pair who, despite today’s cancellation, honour their interview commitments this evening.

To be fair, there’s time to kill. A few hours from now, around 3am, the pair have to climb on their tour bus and drive through the night all the way back up through France. Destination: Normandy. Purpose: a week-long, full-production “residency”, by which they mean running repairs to a tour that began at the twin-weekend Coachella in early spring – two headline gigs, one and two weeks ahead of the release of ‘Hyperdrama’, Justice’s fifth year appearing in the Californian desert – then continued through Mexico, Europe, Glastonbury, London’s Field Day and North America. Reasoning: “We’re gonna tour for at least one more year,” says de Rosnay. “So, it’s trying to prepare for the future and also assess what we’ve done so far, see what we can fix.”

So, mid-tour, Justice and their crew get all their gear in a big shed and set up “like we’re doing a show” says de Rosnay, 42, by some margin the more voluble half of Justice, “and then we sit down. Part of it is working on the music: practising, seeing how we can change the sounds we make so we can play them on keyboards. The other thing is writing [out] all the lights, everything that’s happening on stage”.

As the man intimated, those shows will continue for many months hence, including two gigs at London’s Alexandra Palace in February 2025. By then, their live spectacular will be so big – or, just, so determined to go its own way – that a regular tour of UK arenas would be, well, a miscarriage of Justice. 

“We aren’t doing it the smartest way to make money,” acknowledges de Rosnay. “The production we build costs a lot to operate. When we had American management on the previous tour, they looked at the books and were like: ‘Are you stupid? Touring is supposed to make you money, not to make you poorer!’ But at the same time, we are always believers that money isn’t a good driver. We try to make things as good as possible and then find ways not to be ruined.”

One gig that reportedly got away would have been the biggest of their career: the Paris Olympics. I tell the pair that I heard from two sources that the organisers of the Closing Ceremony first asked Daft Punk to perform. After they declined, the organisers asked Justice. And after Justice declined, they asked Phoenix, who said yes. 

“No!” exclaims de Rosnay.

They were never asked?

“Let’s talk about another topic!”

Would they have liked to?

“Yeah, it’s a great opportunity and it’s cool. But whatever it is, it’s always good to make things on your own terms. And that [Ceremony] was great, Phoenix were cool.”

The same question is put to Justice’s manager, Pedro Winter. A hallowed figure within French music, he also managed Daft Punk and founded Ed Banger. It’s the discerning label that, in June 2003, with its second release, introduced the world to ‘Never Be Alone’, as it was still called, credited to Justice vs. Simian.

“We had discussions to do something for the Closing Ceremony,” reveals Winter. “But it was too complicated. The band were performing in New York at the time. So, it was more a schedule thing. Both the Paris Olympics and Justice wanted to do something, but the moons were not aligned. So, that’s sad. I would have loved them to have performed along with Phoenix and all those guys. But at the end of the day the Justice sound was all around in the stadium,” he notes, referring to a handful of Justice tracks – ‘Genesis’, ‘Love S.O.S.’ and ‘Hyperdrama’s blissed-out closer, Thundercat collaboration ‘The End’ – that rocked the Stade de France as the athletes paraded and the Olympic torch was ultimately handed over to Snoop Dogg and Billie Eilish on Long Beach, California, the opening soundtrack of Los Angeles 2028.

As the French music industry veteran who first released music by Justice, Winter is a crucial figure in their origin story. Equally, he’s better placed than most to contextualise their unique place within the music scene broadly known, by we rosbifs and probably by anyone outside Paris’ 18th arrondissement – the home of Ed Banger and of the Justice studio situated within de Rosnay’s home – as the French Touch. That is, Justice’s ability to tap into rock dynamics and presentation, not least in their album art and their immediately identifiable “cross” logo.

“Firstly, it’s coming from their culture – Gaspard and Xavier are definitely more rock- and prog rock-influenced artists than electronic,” says Winter. “They don’t care about Detroit and Chicago. They like it, but they don’t know the history and they don’t belong to it. They don’t have the knowledge compared to Daft Punk, who is a pure dance-heritage band. Justice is definitely more rock-orientated. 

“You feel it in the way they are, the way they sound, and of course in the way they grab the attention of the audience with the big Marshall amps and the energy onstage. This is why probably Vampire Weekend [indie] fans and old metalheads like me go: ‘Woah, we can dance to a band which is as noisy as Metallica.’ It’s in their DNA.”

Prior to forming Justice, Augé and de Rosnay had indeed played in rock bands, “so we had written tracks but nothing was ever released”, says de Rosnay. Then came that record label competition to remix some British indie band.

“At the time, we didn’t have computers so we made ‘We Are Your Friends’ without them,” says de Rosnay, nodding to those “limitations” that Ford flagged. “The sampler we used was an Akai S2000, so there wasn’t enough space. We had to pick only the chorus. We didn’t even listen to the full track, just the stems on a CD because, at the time, there were no transfers… We also took the first sound of the track because it was short enough. So, our remix is basically the keyboard sound, drums, vocals, the sound we sampled and bass. If we wanted to add more, we couldn’t.”

“But a fun fact is that James hated our remix,” says a smiling Augé, 45, before confirming that, yes indeed, Justice did hear his “feedback” that “he felt it was sounding like MIDI-jazz”. 

“I take full responsibility!” laughs Ford when I, in turn, “feedback” this comment. “I wouldn’t say I hated it, that’s maybe a little strong. But I maybe didn’t focus on it like I should have. And I definitely didn’t recognise it for the song it would become. Which, considering that’s essentially now my job most of the time, is one of those classic A&R ‘didn’t sign U2’ moments!”

Winter, though, had his ears screwed on.

“We met Pedro when he started Ed Banger, he’d only put out one record at the time,” recalls de Rosnay. Over dinner, they played him the two tracks they’d completed: a pair of remixes, one of them the Simian track, the other the electro-funky ‘Steamulation’, credited to Justice vs. Gambit. “We were like: ‘We only made these, but we can make more.’ He was like: ‘I like ‘Never Be Alone’.’ We were like: ‘Are you sure? The other one sounds much better to us.’ Pedro was like: ‘No, I want to put this one out.’ And he was right. But it didn’t immediately work. It started becoming something maybe one year later.”

As it happens, that journey was aided by the House of Disco Pogo. As de Rosnay points out: “Another fun fact – the first licensing of ‘Never Be Alone’ was on a CD of Jockey Slut,” he says of Volume 12 of ‘Disco Pogo for Punks in Pumps’, given away with the November 2003 edition of the magazine. “That was the first time we ever licensed a track in our lives.”

That same year, Erol Alkan received a CDR from Winter, three tracks comprising the initial releases on Ed Banger. The third of those was an unmastered version of ‘We Are Your Friends’, albeit “it was just called something like ‘Simian Justice Remix’,” Alkan recalls. 

“And immediately I was drawn to it,” says the DJ who, at the time, was the London club underground’s tastemaker-in-chief, courtesy of his Monday night sweatbox Trash. “It had immediate classic impact from the opening bars. It reminded me of a corner of dance music which I really loved, which was then mainly inhabited by someone like Jacques Lu Cont. It married a lot of the electronic influences that I was really into and were also a big part of Trash.”

He immediately played it out at Trash, and kept playing it out, there and during his regular sets at Bugged Out!. “To be honest, that original Simian track wasn’t well known. So, this felt like an original track, and it built up interest whenever I played it.” When he asked Winter who the creators were, the answer came back: “They’re two kids from Paris, you should meet them.”

As it happened, the excitement went both ways. “Erol was a huge deal for us when we started. When we heard his [booking] agent was interested in [signing] us,” says de Rosnay of Martje Kremers at Decked Out! (the agency founded by the people behind Bugged Out!, Jockey Slut and this very magazine), “we were like: ‘Of course! The same management as Daft Punk and the same agent as Erol? Why not? Let’s do it!’”

That said, “when we signed to Ed Banger, we had no idea we’d make music for a living. Gaspard and I were both graphic designers; at the time, I was graduating from school. It was only in 2005 or 06 that we decided we could give it a try full-time. When we started we had no idea what we were doing. We built it up brick by brick.”

Those bricks came in the form of commissions to apply their particular French touch to songs by myriad established artists who were themselves no slouches on the dancefloor. These included ‘She Wants To Move’ by N.E.R.D. (2004), ‘Blood On Our Hands’ by Death From Above 1979 (2005), ‘NY Excuse’ by Soulwax (2005) and, eventually, MGMT’s ‘Electric Feel’ (2008), for which Justice won the Grammy for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical. 

In those first few years, “I was really pushing them to do remixes,” says Winter, “and every time they were putting their hands into something, they were making it better. This is what they did with Franz Ferdinand, with Fatboy Slim (2005’s ‘Don’t Let the Man Get You Down’), with Britney Spears (2005’s ‘Me Against the Music’, which also featured Madonna), with Justin Timberlake (2007’s ‘LoveStoned’).”

That veritable production-line of remixes – we haven’t even mentioned the sixth one they did in 2005 alone, for Mystery Jets’ ‘You Can’t Fool Me Dennis’ – was, considers Winter, “the best way for them to get their sound, get their signature and, at the end of the day, get the Justice touch. And it arrived so quick. I met them in 2003, and within three or four years, they did 20 or 30 remixes”.

Touring, too, was important to that development.

“Because of having a British agent very early in Justice,” says de Rosnay, “we were playing more in Europe and Asia than France.” Plus, they had those forebears to follow. “Daft Punk especially, and Air, they really opened the door of the concept of being a French musician – it was like being an international musician. So, as it was happening to us, we were very happy and excited, but it didn’t look abnormal [because] we saw these examples.”

Meanwhile, Winter’s other managerial charges “were really, really supportive. Daft Punk were giving advice, and they spent some time in the studio [with Justice]. The vibe was super-nice and really [viewing them] as small [sic] brothers”.

“I had a very protective style with Daft Punk,” continues Winter, “and of course I tried to do the same with Justice. Not grabbing everything at the same time, not saying yes too fast. We took our time. At every level, what I learned with Daft Punk was useful to help create Justice.”

Or, as Alkan positions them, Justice back then were a band single handedly progressing “the marriage of Motörhead and electronica” with “a “fiercer, brasher music… Between 2004 and 2006, whenever I had a new Justice remix to play at Trash, I could feel the anticipation and energy before I even played it. Because I knew it was going to work. And I knew that everyone on the floor would understand it and react to it – and in some ways, even know who it was, without knowing who it was.”

Eventually, in June 2007, came a ferociously funky debut album titled, depending on your keyboard capabilities, ‘†’, or ‘Cross’, or ‘Justice’. The band characterised it as an “opera-disco” album, its appearance trailed by their dancefloor-igniting, Michael Jackson-channelling single ‘D.A.N.C.E.’. 

The doors, though, had already been blown off in September 2005 by the album’s long-lead first release. After those proof-of-concept remixes, the fat and fuzzy riffology of ‘Waters of Nazareth’ was Justice’s debut single. In Winter’s estimation: “That was a statement, a sonic statement: ‘This is who we are, this is how we’re going to make noise funky.’ And also it was a way for them to break the Daft Punk legacy: ‘OK, we’re going to sound our [own] way.’”

That sound, of course, inevitably, was a bricolage of ideas – just ones that hadn’t necessarily been jammed together before. “That’s the important thing about Justice,” says Alkan. “When you listen back to a lot of those productions, they are indebted to a vast array of influences. There’s a glitch aspect which you could hear in Aphex Twin, Planet Mu records and Mr. Oizo especially. Then there’s also a pop aspect with the hooks. And then the energy is completely lifted from a rock aesthetic.”

As is their visual flair. These one-time graphic designers are huge fans of the sleeve art of Hipgnosis, the legendary, London-based 60s and 70s design studio responsible for the covers of multiple canonical rock LPs. Says de Rosnay: “They made something with Led Zeppelin that we used as a template – to make a record cover where you don’t have the name of the band or the record, the tracklist, just an image.”

Fourteen years after Justice began using their own immediately recognisable logo, with the “t” in their name shaped like that cross – a cipher they’ve rolled out across all their album sleeves and their merch – Justin Bieber decided he’d use something similar in the depiction of the name of his new album. The title of that 2021 record? ‘Justice’. A legal letter from the band Justice to Team Bieber requested that the Canadian superstar cease and desist his use of “Justice” in tandem with the “cross”, a “Mark” that had been trademarked by Justice. 

“Let’s set the record straight,” says de Rosnay, a twinkle surely lurking behind those 70s shades, when BieberGate is mentioned. “He’s always been a very big inspiration for us, both as a musical artist but also as a visionary.”

“A fashion icon,” murmurs Augé.

Turning (slightly) serious, de Rosnay says that “we can’t fully disclose the type of exchange [of legal communiques], but everything was so blatant that there wasn’t much to say”.

Did Bieber have to pay them money?

De Rosnay: “No.”

So, did Justice get justice?

De Rosnay: “It’s something we can’t discuss, unfortunately.” 

Augé: “It’s a very American way…”

De Rosnay: “Not [necessarily] American, but one thing that really annoyed us [is] when you think that, because you have money, you can do whatever you want… All of this [legal complaint] was just for us to make a point that, no, it’s not because you have money that you are the king of the world and you can do whatever… At least we’re going to make it a bit of a pain in the ass. But hey, it happens. Everybody who knew, knew. It doesn’t matter.”

If Justin Bieber asked Justice to remix one of his tracks, and the track was good, would they do it?

“You are saying two things in a sentence that are incompatible,” de Rosnay replies, poker-faced. “I’m not going to say what.”

This year, on ‘Hyperdrama’, the cross is front and centre again, this time as a transparent sarcophagus, its corporeal contents evoking a see-through anatomical body where, as de Rosnay says, “you see the innards and everything”.

“We thought let’s do the cross like this because this image sums up this album, but also all the music we’ve done so far in a very simple and straightforward way. It’s a blend of something dirty that we don’t really want to touch but is cool to look at through something that is clean. The digital versus the organic instrument… It was just the most simple image we could come up with that described our music so accurately.”

The title, too, tells us where they’re at. Kinda.

“I just like the way it looks,” states Gaspard Augé, fed up explaining what it means several months after the album’s release, “how it resonates with the record.”

“‘Hyperdrama’ is a good sum-up of the music as we like to hear and make it: as exaggerated as possible in every sense,” expands de Rosnay. “To be overly euphoric, overly sad or epic when it needs to be.”

It also, ultimately, speaks to where Justice find themselves this evening, this moment, in this interview after the gig that never was. In Marseille, at the bottom of France, anticipating their Normandy “residency” reboot and readying for their next phase of international touring. Glastonbury, they say, was “a good one” – a rave endorsement from a conversationally understated pair who save everything “exaggerated” for the studio and stage. But they promise that their upcoming shows, including the London stop next February, will be – pardon my French – fucking off-the-scale.

“Right now, ‘Hyperdrama’ means to us a good time, and it’s a good time for this record to come out,” concludes Xavier de Rosnay. “We’ve been here long enough that we see a new generation of people coming to the shows and listening to the record – exactly the same way that, when we met, we were digging for records and finding bands that started in the 80s.” 

This fortysomething pair of intuitive pals have, quite happily, “now entered this vintage zone. But at the same time we still have one foot in the contemporary world. I could be wrong, but the new audiences are still seeing a band from today, and not a band that’s been doing the same thing for 20 years”.

This, then, is Justice for now… and Justice for all.  

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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