I.Boat, 2011 to 2026

Mark Neilson asked if we wanted to write something. This is the two of us, with Yanis typing.

The court in Bordeaux ordered the liquidation of I.Boat on Wednesday. Before that, the prefect ordered a two-month closure in January, after what happened in November, and a boat with no customers and all its costs still running cannot last two months. It was already on a recovery plan. Nobody has told us of a buyer. About twenty people have lost their jobs. We know some of them, and we used to do their shifts.

About November. Someone was assaulted there. We were not there, and we are not the people to write about it. It would not be right to write about a boat and leave that out.

What it was

It was a ferry for the Île d'Yeu. In September 2011 it was tied up in the Bassins à Flot with a Funktion-One sound system inside the hull. It held 400. It was hot and it dripped, and the stairs were built for sailors. For fourteen years it was where you went in Bordeaux to hear something you did not know, by someone who had not played here before, for not very much money.

Théo was on the door and Yanis on the bar. Théo learned from the door that only the bass gets through a wall. Yanis learned not to play sax in a staff room at 6am. We met in an argument about a mop. We found the lock-up in Bacalan through someone who worked on the boat, and we still use it. So everything we have done started there.

The record is named after the docks. People take it for a nice French phrase, but it is the water the boat sat in. We wrote the sax part walking back from work along the quay at first light.

What we did on it

We played the release party in March 2023 and played the track twice. We came back in September for the boat party, when 200 people on the quay could not get in, and Yanis went up on deck with the sax. Those were good nights. There were many other nights, eleven people on a Wednesday and someone trying something and getting it wrong. Those were what the place was for, and nobody writes about them.

What now

We do not know. Bordeaux will have something else one day, in another building. Someone will be twenty-two and working the door there and will not have heard of this one.

We went down there on Friday. It is shut and it was raining. There is still a poster up for a night that will not happen. Théo wanted to take it, Yanis said it was not ours, and we left it.

Merci à l'équipe, all of you.

"We're writing something for the next compilation, about the last boat." Théo Marchand