Focus Knack had a phonecall with Tom tonight. Here's what he told them.

• France and Germany will get Keep You Close as the first single
• Constant Now will be the second single in these country, when the album is released
• Tom will be the director for the video of Constant Now
• They will starting filming the video at the beginning of Augustus
• Two young Britains will make the video for Keep You Close (this one is fake)
• They will release a couple of EP's with non-album tracks by the end of this year

Belgium's greatest living graphic designer Guy Peellaert (born 1934) worked together with ao. The Rolling Stones, David Bowie en Martin Scorsese. For Focus Knack he portraid for the first time in his career dEUS. You can watch the picture here and a small video below.



(thx to Wouter)

The highlights from the interview in Focus Knack

• A Dutch journalist described Vantage Point as testosteronrock
• Tom admits that they've cultivated the conflict-model in the early days of dEUS
• Mauro has influenced Tom to start working faster (Mauro released four albums between Pocket Revolution and Vantage Point)
• Renaat Lambeets in one of his most important friends and Tom finds his opinion important
• There's a cover of The Alcoholics by Jim Thompson on the back of Pocket Revolution
• He thinks the concert at Werchter 2006 was one of the best ones they've ever played
• There will be a gig in Antwerp in autumn, on a special date, on a special place
• He would never uses djembés and he will never uses words like monkey and guitar in his lyrics
• He hates to write songs about the songwriting itself
• The Manu Riche-documentary will probably be released by the end of the year
• He would like to ask James Gray for the recording of a clip
• Tom is making clips for every song on Vantage Point
• He thinks it's great that some fashion-designers use dEUS-songs at their defilés
• Martin Margiela used Roses once
• Dries Van Noten asked for a 13-minute version of Bad Timing last winter
• about the capitals in dEUS: Tom thought Deus was ugly typograficly
• Add (N) To (X) also has a song about Buckminster Fuller
• He doesn't want to go in politics, making music and movies is what he wants to do
• He mostly writes his lyrics minutes before they start recording
• Tom thinks his lyrics are way too long most of the time
• About the fans asking for old songs: Zea is too old, Right As Rain is too slow, but Great American Nude could be great
• Klaas has been asking to get Roses from the setlist for years
• There will be a day that they will only play new stuff during gigs
• CJ Bolland's father helped them with the building of the control room in the studio
• They also got help from Albi, a 74 year old guy who used to work in Abbey Road

Focus Knack will have an interview with Tom in the issue of tomorrow. They've already published some snippets online. The most interesting one is probably that Tom is negotiating to get the movie rights for The Alcoholics, a novel by Jim Thompson.

Christian Pierre reacts on the Heineken-incident in the Belgian media on the Knack-website.

• He confirms that Universal asked Co-Operative Music to disable the streams on the Heineken-website
• He says they Universal doesn't know everything about the international deals
• COOP is part of Universal so in fact it's one record company
• They've done a couple of other actions with Myspace (the Slow-video), Last.FM (The Architect), Les Inrocks (Oh Your God in the podcast),...
• dEUS thinks the internet is a very important medium to promote and sell music
• The deal in Heineken wasn't that exclusive, they've done other things in the rest of Europe
• They picked Heineken in Spain because their music site is the best way to reach the audience they're aiming at. It's not a marketing-website, it's a normal music site.
• They're not promoting Heineken, they're just using a platform offered by Heineken to promote their new album
• The embargo and the 25.000-euro thing for the Belgian media is just a way to prevent the media-battle they see each time the band releases an album. Three years ago they asked the media the same thing, but De Morgen broke it the day after.

Knack has also a contest running. If you mail a question for Tom Barman, you might win an autographed version of Vantage Point.