Urban Battles, Made-up Languages and Performances in Mental Hospitals: France's Lost Rock Revolution of 1968

This seismic effect that the month of May 1968 had on the French culture has become widely chronicled. The youth uprisings, which broke out at the university prior to expanding throughout the land, quickened the demise of the Gaullist administration, politicised French intellectual thought, and generated a tide of revolutionary cinema.

Much less recognized – beyond French borders, at minimum – about how the radical ideas of 1968 revealed their musical side in music. One Australian musician and writer, for instance, was aware of little about France's non-mainstream rock when he discovered a crate of old records, categorized "French progressive rock" on a before Covid journey to Paris. He felt blown away.

Below the alternative … Christian Vander of the band in 1968.

One could find Magma, the multi-personnel group producing compositions infused with a jazz legend groove and the musical feeling of the composer, all while singing in an created dialect referred to as Kobaïan. Additionally Gong, the electronic space-rock band established by Daevid Allen of Soft Machine. Another group included political messages within compositions, and Ame Son made melodic arrangements with outbreaks of woodwinds and rhythm and flowing spontaneous creations. "I hadn't encountered excitement like this after finding Krautrock in late the eighties," remembers the writer. "It constituted a authentically underground, rather than merely non-mainstream, movement."

The Australian-born musician, who achieved a degree of musical success in the 1980s with indie band Full Fathom Five, totally became enamored with these groups, leading to further travel, lengthy discussions and currently a book.

Radical Roots

What he found was that the French artistic transformation emerged from a dissatisfaction with an previously globalised Anglo-American establishment: art of the 1950s and 60s in European Europe tended to be uninspired carbon copies of Stateside or UK artists, including Johnny Hallyday or Les Variations, French answers to Elvis or the British band. "They believed they had to sing in the language and appear similar to the Stones to be qualified to create art," the journalist states.

Other aspects played into the intensity of the period. Prior to 1968, the North African conflict and the France's authorities' severe stifling of dissent had awakened a generation. An emerging type of French rock performers were resisting what they viewed oppressive control system and the established regime. They became seeking innovative influences, detached from US commercialized pulp.

Musical Roots

They found it in African American jazz. Miles Davis became a regular figure in the city for years in the 1950s and sixties, and members of Art Ensemble of Chicago had found sanctuary here from racial segregation and social constraints in the United States. Further influences were the saxophonist and Don Cherry, as well as the avant-garde edges of rock, from Frank Zappa's his band, the group and King Crimson, to Captain Beefheart. This pattern-based style of the composer and the musician (the latter a French capital denizen in the 1960s) was an additional element.

Frank Zappa at the Belgian festival in 1969.

Crium Delirium, among the trailblazing psychedelic rock bands of France's non-mainstream movement, was founded by the brothers Thierry and Fox Magal, whose parents brought them to the famous Blue Note jazz club on Rue d'Artois as young adults. In the late 60s, amid creating jazz in venues including "The Sinful Cat" and going around India, the siblings came across Klaus Blasquiz and Christian Vander, who went on to establish Magma. A scene started to take shape.

Artistic Transformation

"Bands like the group and the band had an direct effect, inspiring further individuals to establish their personal groups," explains the writer. Vander's band created an complete category: a fusion of improvisational music, classical rock and neoclassical art they christened Zeuhl, a term meaning something like "spiritual power" in their made-up language. It continues to draws together artists from across Europe and, particularly, Japan.

Then came the urban battles, started after youths at the university's suburban branch protested against a ban on co-ed residential visits. Virtually every artist mentioned in the book engaged in the protests. Several band members were fine arts individuals at Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank, where the Atelier Populaire created the iconic May 68 artworks, with messages like La beauté est dans la rue ("Art is on the roads").

Youth spokesperson the figure addresses the French capital crowd subsequent to the clearing of the university in the month of May 1968.