It’s the going, not the getting there. That has always been the force that drove us on, now for 25 years. Which is quite an uncomfortable truth, but you know, time flies when you’re having fun. Come to think of it, thruth is stranger than fiction. Or, to quote the ever-distinguished Mr. Robert Wyatt, Ruth is stranger than Richard. When we kicked off La Gare early 2001 it wasn’t meant to be anything more than a vehicle to express our contemporary interpretation of traditional jazz & blues. A flexible home base where we would be connected to each other only through the music. We dig music, I mean, really dig it. The basic honesty of the blues, the raw energy of soul and the freedom of jazz; sincere music of any kind. So we built this place where we could do our own thing, on and off. A place where we could meet all kind of cats on equal terms. Not an ego thing. This has never been an ego thing. Just a pop-up station, where people appear and then disappear. That is one of the reasons why we called it Gare du Nord, the name of a train station. A come and go thing, like the tide. You know, be together if it works, as long as it feels good. And then let go; people must move on. Organic, all the way. No expectations. So, that’s exactly what we did.

And then, out of the blue, this track Pablo’s Blues, built around the great blues classic Come On In My Kitchen by Robert Johnson, became the darling of the airwaves. An overnight sensation. So, these dj’s and journalists would ask: Who are you? Where are you from? No response. We simply had no publicity, no artist profile, no masterplan. What we did have was heavy rotation on the airwaves with a very a-typical kind of sound. We were self- supporting and kept a very low pro-file. Flying under the radar. Maybe out of self-protection. Maybe because it was never meant to be a big thing. Neverthe-less, with the debut album (in search of) Excellounge Gare du Nord became a concept with a following and that was when things started to change fast.

Success was definitely proving to be a mixed blessing. Especially when, with Sex ‘n’ Jazz, the whole thing exploded in an unprecedented way. Who would have thought that we, as the only act in the world up till now, would be granted permission to sample Marvin Gaye? Or to have international stars like Paul Carrack and Erik Truffaz to play on our albums? That album, Sex ‘n’ Jazz, machine-gunned us in the platinum jazz league and even made us heroes on the pop charts. That may sound as cool as an igloo in the Sahara. But with clowns to the left of you and jokers to the right, it’s hard to keep your balance and create a higher tolerance. So, what do you do? It helped that we always knew that It was never our cleverness which created Gare du Nord’s success. We’re no glamorous talents, no marketing geniuses, we’re just different. Sometimes we get great ideas, sometimes we don’t know what the hell we are doing. It was the loyalty of people who heard our records and played it for friends who played it for other friends. That is why we still grow. We are no catholics, so we don’t know about saints. But we feel very blessed and priviliged with everything achieved and we are grateful to all the people who brought us here.

The world around us has changed a lot in 25 year’s time and so have we. Change is not a sin; the whole of life is change. With La Gare, we have been fortunate enough to be able to create extended runs of cool music. By occasion, not by inten-tion. The music we recorded in the studio and continuously play live on stage is living proof of what we created together while we had this urge for going. It has always been the going, not the getting there. So here we are, folks: Gare du Nord, 25 years on the move. So what’s next?