A cool band from Tel Aviv, meet The Young Professionals!

Johnny Golstein and Ivri Lider from Tel Aviv electro duo "The Young Professionals" talk about their music, Tel Aviv, and their favourite spots !

Cool new hits from Tel Aviv are about to invade France. You may have heard their cover of DISCO by Ottawan in recent weeks, it is the Israeli group The Young Professional. This electro duo, consisting of Ivri Lider, a charming thirty-ish openly gay man, considered one of Israel's most influential artists, and Johnny Goldstein, young prodigy in the Tel Aviv music scene, joined the big league by signing in Polydor / Universal (Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas and most recently Madonna). We met on the occasion of their visit to Paris.

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Louis Jolly : How did you meet and what made you want to form a band together?
Ivri Lider : Johnny Called me three years ago when I he was seventeen and he made an album as a producer with many different artists on it, and he wanted me to be one of them and sing on the album. I couldn’t really do it because I was busy with my album, and going to the US for some show and things. After his album was realized, he called me again and told me we really needed to do things together. I said ok let’s try, send me something, and he sent me some beats, and I was like “woaaaww this is amazing, let’s try something!”. So we started working like that, we met only four times the first year, because he was living in Jerusalem, I was living in Tel Aviv, so we were both sitting in our studios, working over the internet, sending files back and forth all the time, it was really cool! And then I came over to his place, he made me some pasta (laughs) and we realized at a sudden point that, we were working together and had lots of songs, that we were doing something serious, not just playing around, and we had this idea of creating a band, but we wanted it to be different.

Ivri Lider redacteur en chef d'un numéro de Time Out en Israël LJ : How would you describe yourselves to someone who would discover your album?
IL : We had the feeling we were a bit bored with the way things were in the music business, we wanted to say something different, do something different with the way we expressed ourselves not only with music. So instead of having a drummer, a bass player, a keyboard player and a singer, we wanted to have two musicians, a webdesigner, a graphic designer and a manager, and that was going to be the band, and use different channels of creation also use graphic art and social web communities and create stuff. We have an album but also an art magazine with photos and a special, very different website. We want people to be part of what we do, more then just listen to our music.