"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. Beneath the underground Christian Vander of Magma in 1968. Photograph: Philippe Gras/Alamy 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 Kobaian."
"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."
May 1968 radically altered French life and fed revolutionary currents that also shaped an experimental underground rock scene. Bands such as Magma combined John Coltrane-like grooves with Orff-style orchestral pathos while singing in an invented Kobaian language. Gong created synth-dabbed space rock; Red Noise embedded anti-police slogans; Ame Son mixed pop arrangements with flutes, drums and extended improvisation. Many French musicians rejected mid-century anglophone imitation—Johnny Hallyday and Les Variations—and resisted the pressure to sing in English. Brisbane-born musician Ian Thompson rediscovered this subterranean scene through old vinyl, conducted interviews and documented it in Synths, Sax & Situationists.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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