Urban Battles, Made-up Dialects and Performances in Mental Institutions: France's Lost Rock Movement of 1968

This tremendous impact that the month of May 1968 exerted on the French culture was extensively documented. These youth uprisings, which broke out at the Sorbonne before expanding around the land, quickened the end of the Gaullism regime, politically awakened French thinking, and produced a surge of radical movies.

Much fewer understood – beyond France, at minimum – about how the transformative concepts of 1968 manifested themselves in musical expression. An Australian artist and reporter, for instance, understood barely anything about France's underground rock when he found a crate of classic records, labelled "French prog-rock" on a pre-pandemic journey to Paris. He was blown away.

Beneath the underground … Christian Vander of Magma in 1968.

There was the group, the expanded collective creating compositions imbued with a John Coltrane style and the symphonic emotion of Carl "Carmina Burana" Orff, all while performing in an invented language called Kobaïan. There was another band, the synthesizer-infused cosmic rock group co-founded by Daevid Allen of the band. Red Noise embedded anti-police slogans inside tracks, and Ame Son produced catchy arrangements with outbreaks of instruments and rhythm and rolling spontaneous creations. "I never experienced thrill similar since finding Krautrock in late the eighties," recalls the writer. "It represented a genuinely hidden, rather than simply underground, culture."

The Brisbane-native artist, who experienced a measure of musical success in the mid-1980s with indie ensemble his previous band, absolutely developed passion with such groups, resulting in additional travel, lengthy interviews and currently a volume.

Radical Foundations

His discovery was that France's creative transformation emerged from a frustration with an already international anglophone establishment: art of the 1950s and 60s in western the continent often were generic replicas of Stateside or English bands, like Johnny Hallyday or other groups, France's equivalents to Presley or the British band. "They thought they needed to sing in the language and appear similar to the Stones to be qualified to create art," the writer says.

Further factors contributed to the intensity of the moment. Before 1968, the North African conflict and the French government's harsh suppression of dissent had politicised a generation. A new breed of France's music musicians were opposed to what they considered oppressive surveillance structure and the postwar regime. They stood searching for innovative influences, free of American whitewashed pulp.

Musical Roots

The answer came in African American music. The legendary trumpeter had been a common figure in Paris for a long time in the 1950s and sixties, and artists of the jazz group had sought refuge in France from racial segregation and social restrictions in the US. Additional guides were the saxophonist and Don Cherry, as well as the experimental fringes of rock, from the artist's Mothers of Invention, the group and the progressive band, to the experimental artist. The pattern-based style of La Monte Young and Terry Riley (the latter a Parisian resident in the 1960s) was another element.

The musician at the Amougies gathering in 1969.

Crium Delirium, one of the trailblazing experimental music bands of France's non-mainstream movement, was established by the siblings Thierry and Fox Magal, whose relatives accompanied them to the renowned jazz club venue on the street as teenagers. In the late 60s, during playing jazz in bars including Le Chat Qui Pêche and journeying through the country, the musicians encountered another artist and Christian Vander, who eventually establish Magma. The culture started to coalesce.

Musical Transformation

"Bands such as Magma and Gong had an direct effect, inspiring additional individuals to form their individual groups," explains Thompson. Vander's band invented an entire style: a hybrid of improvisational music, classical music and contemporary classical art they named the genre, a word signifying approximately "spiritual force" in their created language. It still draws together artists from across the continent and, most notably, Japan.

Following this the street clashes, initiated after youths at the Sorbonne's suburban annexe protested opposing a ban on integrated residential visits. Virtually every artist referenced in Thompson's publication engaged in the uprisings. Some band members were art learners at the art school on the area, where the collective produced the iconic May 68 artworks, with slogans like La beauté est dans la rue ("Art is on the streets").

Student activist the figure talks to the French capital gathering subsequent to the evacuation of the Sorbonne in the month of May 1968.