Nic: It was a joke at the beginning. We were afraid the record company wouldn’t like it. But it’s important to have humour in a record. Sexy boy is hip and if you’re hip you see your life through the way others see you. And so you’re happy.

Someone lent me a 1960s Höfner bass, the model Paul McCartney played in the Beatles. Because I was a guitarist, I put it through my guitar amp, which gave this amazing sound: very cool and dry. One day I played a riff to JB and he said sexy boy out of the blue — and that was how we got the song. If we’d sung sexy girl, it would have been a disaster. Sexy Boy felt different. The song was about who we wanted to be; we weren’t handsome when we were younger; our friends always had more success with girls.

Ever since I was a child, I’d dreamed of making a classic album — and I actually did. The night we did Sexy Boy, I knew my life would change.

Nic: For the video we found a couple who are really in love with each other. We filmed where they hang out, where they met. We wanted to show a real love story.

Beth: I went to Paris in the early ’90’s to be an au pair. At that point I had graduated university with a degree in theatre and was planning to act in Anglophone theatre ensembles. Within a few months of arriving, I became friends with a big group of young internationals, mostly photographers and architects. The group kept growing and growing and we partied all the time. A few of them had guitars and we would jam at parties, on the Seine, and anyone who wanted to could sing along.

One night a couple friends and I were singing from a Chris Isaak songbook and they said “Wow, you sing really well”. From then on, every time we went to a party, they’d ask me to sing and through these parties I started to meet music producers who invited me to sing on their projects. The next year at my birthday party, a friend named Marc Collin saw the guitar in my flat and said, “Do you write? Play me something!” I showed him a song called Miner’s Son and he suggested we record it at his studio. This became my first EP (also called Miner’s Son) and he signed it with Rough Trade/Paris. We started working with another producer named Étienne Wersinger who lived nearby in Montmartre. One day there was a guy sitting on the couch and Etienne introduced us. His name was Nicolas Godin.

Nicolas said “Etienne showed me your project — I really like it”. I asked him if he was in music and he told me that he and his partner Jean-Benoît were making an album as Air and that they would like me to get together with them and sing on it.

The underlying content of their music was eclectic and they liked working with real instruments. From what I listened to, it was afterwards that the more electronic elements were brought in. They gave me an early version of the music [based on track Les Professionnels from their first EP] but even in that raw state I could tell the song had something special. I immediately found a melody and shortly after wrote the lyrics for it. We were actually going to call it I’ve been wondering. There’s a high part in the chorus where I’d sing that, but in French, the r’s are hard to pronounce so they decided to change the section and the chorus became a vocal wave instead. The record company re-named the song All I need based on the first line in the verse. I remember trying some background vocals and they said, “You’ve got to sing those background vocals everywhere!” We worked off each other.

It was the mid-90s and it was a great time to be in Paris and I was having, on the whole, a wonderful time, discovering music and other artists, and how amazing the whole scene was. That’s what I tried to express in the lyrics of the song.

Nic: Beth made us sound like a space-age Carpenters.