Postcards from Paris: 1. La Place de la Nation – the first free festival
A series of 4 Postcards from Paris by the brilliant Gareth Jones.
Postcards from Paris: 1. La Place de la Nation – the first free festival
Gareth Jones is a music connoisseur and the author of the book “French Pop: from Music Hall to Yé-Yé”
Paris in October. Unusually cold for this time of year – the coats are beginning to appear, although the miniskirts are still very much in evidence. Fashion can be a bugger when you’re young… Despite the slight chill in the air, I take a seat on the terrasse of a café and sit looking out over la Place de la Nation, one of the many great open spaces where the grands boulevards meet. This one is big, even by Parisian standards, so large that there’s a park of some sort in the middle, and it’s picturesque enough but it doesn’t bring out the tourists. It’s not got the history of, say, Place de la Bastille, it doesn’t have the imperial resonance of Place de la Concorde, and it certainly doesn’t have the Arche de Triomphe in the middle of it. Yet, in its own way, Nation has its place in the country’s cultural history, and indeed, in the history of everything that we call pop music. For it was here, six years before Woodstock, that the first ever large-scale free rock’n’roll festival took place, although unsurprisingly, it didn’t start out that way. Let’s rewind…
Rock ‘n’ roll was slow to take off in France. There’d been a flurry of interest in 1956 thanks to Bill Haley and the Platters but it had quickly subsided before being reignited – sort of – by Paul Anka in 1958, after which the first first real homegrown rockers appeared. Richard Anthony landed the first big hit (“Nouvelle vague”) at the end of 1959, Johnny Hallyday made his explosive debut in 1960 and by the end of that year the debut disc from the first big group – Les Chaussettes Noires – was on the market. Twist-fever exploded at the end of 1961, and suddenly teenage pop – most of it French-language covers of American hits – was big business.
The flames had been fanned by two astute radio presenters, Daniel Filipacchi and Franck Ténot. Both were jazz fans but they recognised that teenagers wanted something else, and so established the daily radio show Salut Les Copains in 1959. It was not exclusively given over to rock ‘n’ roll – yet – but it did offer priceless exposure both to American (and British) records and to those made by the new, young French singers. The popularity of both show and music grew in tandem, and in 1962, Filipacchi decided to launch a monthly spinoff magazine, which sold out its first print run in days. By early 1963, SLC was shifting over a million copies per month. For teenagers in France in the early sixties, it was a bible, an up to date guide to fashion, fun and music, and the singers pictured within its pages were quickly catapulted to stardom.
And so to the night of 22 June 1963. To celebrate the first year of the magazine’s publication, Filipacchi decided to throw a free concert at Place de la Nation. Topping the bill would be Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan, the king and queen of the new generation. Lower down the bill were Richard Anthony, Frank Alamo and Danyel Gérard, together with female vocal group Les Gam’s and rock ‘n’ roll outfit Les Chats Sauvages. It was assumed that around 10,000 fans might turn up for the show. By early afternoon, it was already clear that this was a stunning underestimate.
In they came, first hundreds, then thousands. They walked in, they cycled, they came on mopeds, on motorbikes, in cars. They swamped the buses, they flooded the Métro and still, they kept coming. As La Place began to fill up, they climbed the trees, they climbed the statues. And still they came. They climbed onto the balconies, onto the canvas awnings of the cafés, onto the rooftops. And still, they came. Most estimates put the attendance at around 150,000, all of them drawn to hear the music of their idoles and to be a part of the new, young, generation.
Down near the stage, chaos ensued. The running order was cut to ribbons, as singers made their way to and from the stage as best they could. Richard Anthony fought his way to the stage, sang his songs and got the hell out, worried for his life. Hallyday and Vartan were ferried in by helicopter to a nearby spot and then transported to the stage in a police van. Vartan was terrified, Hallyday though was in his element, and as the photographs show, he had the crowd in the palm of his hand.
Watch several photos of the concert at the Place de La Nation at:
For years, it was thought that no audio record of the show existed but in 2015 a limited edition pressing turned up featuring five tracks apparently performed at this legendary show, although some fans remain sceptical that this really is the source. It does seem likely that Europe 1 would have at least tried to record it, and apparently Jukebox magazine had earlier pressed up a recording purporting to be from this show too – but whether or not that’s really what’s on either record is debatable. The sound quality is not great – for a better example of Hallyday live, try the two concert albums issued either side, in 1962 and 1964 – but we can listen to these recordings and try to imagine the night…).
Listen to Johnny Hallyday at the Place de la Nation concert on June 22nd, 1963
The press, being the press, made much of the chaos, but despite the size of the crowd, it was a largely peaceful event. Inevitably, there was damage to some of the properties, a few tree branches proved unable to withstand the weight and there was, again inevitably, some low level argy-bargey around the fringes.There was the usual hyperbole (“What’s the difference between a Nuremberg rally and a twist concert in Vincennes?” – really!!?), the usual lack of comprehension by politicians (with De Gaulle out front: “if the young have so much energy, let them build roads”) but only the occasional insight. Writing in Le Monde, Edgar Morin gave some space to trying to explain the appeal of shows like this to the young, inadvertently coining the term yé-yé along the way.
And then, as is the way of such things, the event passed into history. Hallyday was annointed forever as l’idole des jeunes (although frequently outsold by his rivals, his crown would seldom ever slip). Filipacchi’s magazine carried on selling for another thirteen years (outlasting the radio show by eight years). The yé-yé singers would eventually be supplanted by a new wave of singers who wrote their own songs. La Nuit de la Nation was, if not forgotten, then relegated to the back pages of history. It wasn’t Woodstock. It wasn’t even Monterey. But it predated both, and as Johnny Hallyday recalled, it was the night that French youths shook off their chains. The next time that many young French people massed together in the streets was in May 1968, when the mood was very different.
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