Croquet Club

Croquet Club is an electronic music initiative by Jeremy Villecourt (Paris, France, 2012) creating songs and remixes out of love.

Villecourt grew up in the South West of France, close to the Spanish border and between the ocean and the mountains. In school, he was a huge fan of Nirvana. “My dad had an acoustic guitar at home, which I found a bit boring and then I went to a friend’s place and he had a proper electric guitar with an amplifier and I played it and I was like, ‘Man, this is the sound of Kurt Cobain, it’s amazing,’” he laughs.

He begged his parents for one of his own and formed a band with friends from school, playing covers for fun. Despite the small town where he lived, there was a strong community of musicians who would gather for gigs on the weekends and promote each other’s music. His mum owned a big house in the countryside where the band rehearsed. After every practice his friends would leave their instruments in place, giving Villecourt access to learn each one in his own time.

It was through another of his friends that Villecourt first discovered the possibilities of music production. “He had a Pentium, back in those years, and I was amazed by the fact that we could record in some kind of a studio fashion, even if it was really low budget,” he says. “It was amazing for me because it was like, I can actually record myself like a band. It was a real revelation and it was what made me want to work in the studio.”

Nonetheless, Villecourt never considered music as a plausible career. Instead, he did a masters in law and travelled to London, Dublin and Canada, working in the legal departments of large companies. “It's probably the time I've been the most unhappy about my life,” he says.

He was still making music on the side with a friend, and slowly they began to gather attention from friends in film and advertising. Eventually, Villecourt moved to Paris and the pair established their own agency specialising in composition and music supervision.

Even as music became his fulltime endeavour, Villecourt still felt the itch of independence. “I got a bit frustrated working on a brief because you always have to follow people's inspiration. Very quickly I understood that people were not interested in my music, they were interested in getting something achieved for the pictures,” he says. “At some point I felt like I would like to have something for myself.”