Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme has some sage advice for anyone who finds themselves in a difficult situation.
“If you’re going through hell,” Homme says, “keep going.”
Easy for him to say: He’s one of the few lucky souls who has left the Paris Catacombs, the subject of his band’s new film and the final home to more than 6 million deceased Parisians following an 18th-century effort to fix Paris’ overcrowded, dilapidated cemetery system. Homme has long been fascinated by the underground burial site, visited by more than a half-million people each year, and chose the dark and foreboding underground capsule as the central motif for Queens of the Stone Age’s new project Alive in the Catacombs, a concert and concept film directed by Thomas Rames and produced by La Blogothèque.
“This place is like trying to run on a sheet of ice,” Hommes explains in the accompanying documentary Alive in Paris and Before, shot by the band’s longtime visual collaborator Andreas Neumann. “You have no idea how much time has passed up there, up above, and no time has passed below. It’s the same time, all the time, every time.”
It’s easy to get lost in the maze-like film as it wanders through the subterranean tunnels and ossuaries buried deep beneath the City of Light. The film captures Homme at a low point in 2024, having to cancel a major European leg of the band’s tour due to a cancer diagnosis from which he has since recovered. Performing in the Catacombs had been a lifelong dream of Homme’s, and he pushes though the pain to delivery a carefully arranged performance of music from the band’s back catalog, “stripped down bare, without taking away what made each one wonderful,” band member Dean Fertita explains in the documentary.
The band recruited violinist Christelle Lassort and viola player Arabella Bozig to repurpose tracks like “Paper Machete,” “Kalopsia” and “Villains of Circumstance”; while each song was performed acoustically, Homme was adamant the project not simply feel like “Queens of the Stone Age Unplugged.”
“When you go into the Catacombs, there are 6 million people in there, and I think about, ‘What would you want to hear if you were one of those people?’” Homme said Wednesday night (June 4) during a Q&A in Los Angeles following a screening of the film. “I’d want to hear about family and acceptance and things I care about. A lot of the songs we picked are about the moment you realize there’s difficulty and the moment you realize you’re past it, so a lot of the songs we picked were about letting the people down there know it’s all right and that we care about them.”
Homme said the challenges of the performance was that unlike a traditional concert where the band plays to the audience, “We’re in the belly of this thing. The ceiling is dripping and it’s an organic thing that’s really dominating.”
The Paris Catacombs were built during a time of great upheaval in French society, as revolution completely reshaped civic life and laid siege to the political fabric of the French monarchy. There are no coffins or headstones in the Catacombs, with the bones of the princes and kings mixed with peasants and non-nobility.
The band shot the entire film in one day, Homme said, securing permission from the historical group that oversees the Paris Catacombs to shoot on a day the space was closed to the public.
“We didn’t over-rehearse; we just rehearsed twice,” Homme said. “It’s not supposed to be perfect. You try to make a plan, but you go down there and all the plans are off.”
Fans can preorder the film in advance on Queens of the Stone Age’s website; fans who order the video before Saturday will also receive the mini-documentary film. Watch the trailer below:
