Postcards from Paris: 2. La Sorbonne – Synths, Sax and Situationists
A series of 4 Postcards from Paris by the brilliant Gareth Jones.
Postcards from Paris: 2. La Sorbonne – Synths, Sax and Situationists
Gareth Jones is a music connoisseur and the author of the book “French Pop: from Music Hall to Yé-Yé”
Walking away from the Seine, down Boulevard St. Michel, on a tolerably warm afternoon. Zipping past what’s left of Cluny, weaving left and right and slowly inching up one of the twelve hills of Paris, ducking in between the buildings that comprise La Sorbonne. Stopping for a coffee, I look out at the students bustling by, reminding me that back in May 1968 (oh, so long ago), this place was awash with tear gas and flying cobblestones as the student protestors took on the police, kicking off les évenements, a spontaneous wave of demonstrations and strikes that came within millimetres of toppling the government. Seeking to get into the mood, I grab my IPod and flick on a “France 68” mix, looking for the soundtrack to a revolution. Instead, I get Sheila’s version of “Delilah”, Antoine’s proto-Europop “Bonjour salut”, and Sylvie Vartan’s cutesy “Comme un garçon”. I also get Johnny Hallyday’s thundering biker anthem, “À tout casser”, but that’s more luck than anything else. The truth is, the yé-yé generation was pretty much caught napping by May 1968. While anti-war protestors in the U.K. or US could march in step to the Beatles, the Stones or Dylan, the French had… what?
Those seeking something more meaningful than the joyful (and often wonderful) inanities of yé-yé had three choices. There was the great French chanson tradition, with its emphasis on the primacy of the lyrics over the music – great for communicating ideas but rubbish as the soundtrack to a revolution. Then there was jazz – always the intellectuals’ music of choice – and the more far out and ”free” the better. And finally, there was rock music, in particular the harder-edged, post-psychedelic sounds coming out of Britain and the US, collectively gathered up in France under the confusing (for anglophones) title la pop progressive. And in the aftermath of May 1968, a new French musical underground would fuse together elements of all three, bubbling away before exploding into some sort of prominence the following year.
Finding information in English about French underground rock has always been a dicey business. There are few, if any, written histories out there and much of what can be found on the web is patchy, misleading, contradictory and even wrong. There is a wealth of authoritative sources in French, but that doesn’t help much if you don’t speak the language. Fortunately, help is now at hand in the form of Ian Thompson’s well researched new book, Synths, Sax And Situationists, the title of which pretty much sums up what was going on. Forgoing the more popular wing typified by Triangle or Martin Circus (the overground?) and sidestepping the more contemporary (if out there) take on chanson (no Brigitte Fontaine then), Thompson instead dives straight and deeply into the underground. And oh! What treasures he finds…
From the political to the personal, from the stoned to the anarchic, the French underground of 69-76 was a strange place indeed. There are some big names here – Gong, Magma – or at least, they are big names to those used to foraging in the undergrowth, but there are a host of equally interesting, in some cases completely baffling bands to be found within the book’s pages. Helpfully, Thompson starts with a bit of a history lesson, allowing readers to get some kind of handle on things, and then highlights five distinct, if interlocking “styles” or themes that typified the underground – politics, acid, free jazz, the avant-garde and electronica – with lengthy features on the “biggest” (or at least, most interesting) bands operating in each of those spheres. Sensibly, he draws on a host of interviews (his own, and others), allowing the musicians to tell their own stories, and what strange tales they tell…
Tales of commercial suicide, political naivety, purism and violence, acid-fried visions, science-fiction fantasies, technological exploration and a desire to create a form of rock music owing little or nothing to Anglo-American models. Given that rock music is by definition an American form, this last sounds particularly futile, but fuelled by free jazz, the French had a serious go at it, and created much thrilling music too. Even the foreign touchstones that they did favour – Zappa, Beefheart, Soft Machine – are well outside the usual canon, and Thompson’s writing catches this, too, reflecting the playfulness and wilful weirdness that often offset the political slant of many of the bands’ agendas.
This is not the sound of 1968, but as Thompson makes clear, it is the music made as a response to the upheavals of that most seismic of years. Whether slipping Dadaesque skewers into society (Red Noise), tripping out into fantasyland (Gong), venturing into free rock anarchy (Moving Gelatine Plates), getting caught up in an electronic storm (Heldon) or inventing their own language (literally) and voyaging out into God-knows where (Magma), these were all bands (and performers) with a mission, even if they often didn’t really know what, exactly, they were trying to achieve. Making sense of this confusing maelstrom of cosmic (and yet earthly) musical meandering, Thompson succeeds in bringing it to life, and out into the light.
In my suitcase, somewhere down near the bottom, there is a battered map of the Paris Métro. Although it’s been years since I have ever needed it, it was, in its day, a valuable guide to the city’s underground rail network. Thompson’s book serves a similar purpose, offering readers a helpful – and completely vital – guide to a different underground – the French musical underground. If way out, seriously way out music is your thing, then you need a copy of this book. You really shouldn’t leave home without it!
Synths, Sax and Situations by Ian Thompson is out now. Get it before it slips back underground. https://french-underground.com
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