It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see Hubert Blanc-Francard, better known as Boombass, during the Paralympics closing ceremony. It promised “an odyssey through French electronic music” and Blanc-Francard was behind some of the country’s most celebrated dance records of the last 30 years, as a key figure in the scene that became known as French touch. The surprise was that he billed himself as Cassius, which was the name of the duo he formed in 1996 with Philippe Zdar, but that he had very firmly announced was over after Zdar fell to his death from a Paris building in 2019, two days before Cassius were due to release their fifth album Dreems.
He and Zdar had been best friends for 40 years and, after Zdar’s death, Blanc-Francard said: “If you even said the name Cassius, it was like someone stuck a knife in my body. I couldn’t even listen to a note of the music.” Cassius only released five albums, because the two prioritised their friendship over their career: if things became strained, they’d take a break rather than fall out. “I had my kids, my friend and the music, the three most important things in my life,” says Blanc-Francard. “I lost my friend and I lost the music, so I fell into a big depression.”
