The seismic shock that May 1968 had on the French way of life has been widely documented. The student protests, which erupted at the Sorbonne before spreading around the country, hastened the end of the Gaullist regime, politicised French philosophy, and spawned a wave of radical films such as Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore.
Much less is known – outside France, at least – about how the revolutionary ideas of 1968 expressed themselves in music. Australian musician and journalist Ian Thompson, for one, knew little about French underground rock when he stumbled upon a box of old vinyl, labelled “French prog-rock” on a pre-Covid trip to Paris. He was blown away.
There was Magma, the multi-personnel collective making music infected with a John Coltrane groove and the orchestral pathos of Carl “Carmina Burana” Orff, all while singing in an invented language called Kobaïan. There was Gong, the synth-dabbed space-rock outfit co-founded by Daevid Allen of Soft Machine. Red Noise embedded anti-police slogans within songs, and Ame Son made poppy arrangements with explosions of flutes and drums and rolling improvisations. “I hadn’t experienced excitement like this since discovering Krautrock in late 1980s”, recalls Thompson. “This was a truly subterranean, rather than simply underground, scene.”
Brisbane-born Thompson, who had a degree of musical success in the mid-1980s with indie band Full Fathom Five, completely fell in love with these bands, leading to more travel, long interviews and now a book, Synths, Sax & Situationists.
What he found was that France’s musical revolution came out of a frustration with an already globalised anglophone status quo: music of the 1950s and 60s in western Europe tended to be bland carbon copies of American or UK bands, such as Johnny Hallyday or Les Variations, French answers to Elvis or the Rolling Stones. “They thought they had to sing in English and sound like the Stones to be able to make music,” Thompson says.
Other factors played into the intensity of the moment. Before 1968, the Algerian war and the French state’s brutal stifling of dissent had politicised a generation. A new breed of French rock musicians were against what they considered fascist police-state apparatus and the Gaullist postwar regime. They were looking for new inspirations, free of American whitewashed pulp.
They found it in black American jazz. Miles Davis had been a frequent presence in Paris for years in the 1950s and 60s, and members of Art Ensemble of Chicago had sought refuge here from racial segregation and cultural constraints in the US. Other influences were Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, as well as the experimental fringes of rock, from Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Soft Machine and King Crimson, to Captain Beefheart. The repetition-driven minimalism of La Monte Young and Terry Riley (the latter a Parisian denizen in the 1960s) was another.
Crium Delirium, one of the pioneering psychedelic rock bands of France’s underground scene, was founded by the brothers Thierry and Fox Magal, whose parents took them to the legendary Blue Note jazz club on Rue d’Artois as teenagers. In the late 60s, between playing jazz in bars such as Le Chat Qui Pêche (“The Sinful Cat”) and travelling around India, the Magal brothers met Klaus Blasquiz and Christian Vander, who went on to form Magma. A scene began to coalesce.
“Bands such as Magma and Gong had an immediate impact, inspiring other people to form their own bands,” says Thompson. Vander’s band invented an entire genre: a hybrid of jazz fusion, symphonic rock and neoclassical music they christened Zeuhl, a word meaning something like “celestial force” in their invented language. It still draws together bands from around Europe and, most notably, Japan.
Then came the street battles, started after students at the Sorbonne’s Nanterre annexe rebelled against a ban on mixed-gender dormitory visits. Almost every band mentioned in Thompson’s book took part in the protests. Some band members were art students at Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank, where the Atelier Populaire collective printed the now-famous May 68 posters, with slogans such as La beauté est dans la rue (“Beauty is on the streets”).
Aesthetic differences began to harden. Magma and Moving Gelatine Plates were influenced by jazz, Art Zoyd were avant-rock. Gong and Ame Son were more psychedelic. Red Noise made freeform noise-rock, Barricade drew inspiration from Captain Beefheart. What distinguished these French bands, from the German motorik sound of La Düsseldorf, Can or Faust, and the heavy intensity of Soft Machine was a gargantuan appetite for appropriating other genres, all while creating an entirely new mix. The goal was to release their potential. “Everything could be incorporated into ‘rock’ music!,” says Thompson.
After the initial revolutionary carnival there came music festivals, which helped solidify the scene. October 1969’s Amougies in Belgium was the francophone answer to Woodstock and Isle of Wight, where Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Art Ensemble of Chicago played alongside native bands including Ame Son and Gong. As with their counterparts, money made on tickets was meagre as many festival-goers simply jumped the fences. The organisers and the bands wanted culture to be inclusive, but a lack of funds would hamper the scene’s longevity later on.
Another factor that narrowed the influence of these bands was a lack of media exposure. There were magazines such as Best and Rock & Folk, and later on a TV programme, Pop 2, which showcased some of their live performances. But the commercial potential was limited, restricting recording opportunities. Many bands split after their debut albums.
This was no cause for great laments – many of the bands were socialist or even communist in their convictions and perceived the music business as a capitalist venture they wanted to transcend. Live performances mattered most. “They interacted with the audiences, they provoked them, they wanted to erase the distance between each other,” says Thompson. Militant bands such as Komintern and Maajun formed Flip (Force of Liberation and Pop Intervention), and staged gigs in psychiatric hospitals.
Thompson thinks this proto-punk attitude as well as ideas driven from Situationists – the French intellectual revolutionary movement whose ideas fuelled May 68 – were key. They accepted the ephemereality of what they were doing – the point was to do it. Some of the most interesting acts, such as Un Drame Musical Instantané, formed later in the 1970s but the scene had largely died off by the early 80s. Post-punk came in, and France’s underground rock scene fizzled out.
Yet its legacy is still tangible. “It cleared the way for French rock music to take a decisive turn away from slavishly copying English and American musicians,” says Thompson. “It was the very beginning of the process that eventually led to the international success of a specifically French style of music in the 1990s, with bands such as Daft Punk, Air and Phoenix.”
The scene’s most attractive quality, in the end, was not individual songs but the potential for true freedom of expression, Thompson says. “France’s musical revolution was a true experiment, not just a declaration.”
• Synths, Sax & Situationists: The French Musical Underground 1968-1978 is published by Roundtable Books
