Urban Confrontations, Made-up Languages and Shows in Mental Institutions: French Overlooked Music Revolution of 1968

This seismic shock that May 1968 exerted on the France's culture was extensively recorded. The youth uprisings, which broke out at the Sorbonne before spreading across the country, quickened the conclusion of the Gaullist government, radicalised French thinking, and generated a wave of avant-garde cinema.

Far less is known – outside France, at bare minimum – about how the radical concepts of 1968 expressed their musical side in music. One Down Under artist and writer, for instance, was aware of little about French underground music when he stumbled upon a box of vintage vinyl, marked "France's progressive rock" on a pre-pandemic journey to the city. He became impressed.

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

There existed the group, the large ensemble creating music imbued with a jazz legend style and the orchestral pathos of Carl "Carmina Burana" Orff, all while performing in an invented dialect called the language. There was another band, the synth-dabbed experimental band co-founded by Daevid Allen of the band. Another group embedded protest messages inside songs, and Ame Son created catchy arrangements with bursts of flutes and drums and flowing improvisations. "I hadn't encountered thrill like this since encountering German experimental music in late 1980s," states the journalist. "It represented a genuinely underground, as opposed to just non-mainstream, movement."

The Australian-born musician, who had a degree of musical accomplishment in the mid-1980s with alternative ensemble his previous band, totally developed passion with these artists, resulting in further trips, extensive discussions and now a book.

Radical Roots

The revelation was that the French creative uprising came out of a discontent with an formerly worldwide English-speaking establishment: music of the fifties and sixties in European the continent typically appeared as generic replicas of American or UK artists, such as French singers or Les Variations, French responses to Elvis or the Rolling Stones. "They thought they must sing in the language and seem comparable to the band to be capable to produce art," the journalist says.

Other elements contributed to the intensity of the era. Before 1968, the Algerian struggle and the France's state's brutal stifling of protest had politicised a cohort. Fresh artists of French music musicians were resisting what they viewed authoritarian surveillance structure and the established administration. They were looking for new influences, without US mainstream content.

Jazz Roots

The answer came in US music. Miles Davis became a frequent presence in Paris for a long time in the fifties and sixties, and members of Art Ensemble of Chicago had found sanctuary here from racial segregation and cultural constraints in the United States. Additional guides were the saxophonist and the musician, as well as the innovative fringes of music, from Frank Zappa's his band, the group and the progressive band, to Captain Beefheart. This pattern-based approach of the composer and the musician (Riley a Parisian inhabitant in the 1960s) was a further element.

Frank Zappa at the Amougies gathering in 1969.

Crium Delirium, one of the trailblazing mind-altering music ensembles of the French alternative movement, was established by the brothers Thierry and Fox Magal, whose family took them to the renowned jazz club establishment on the street as teenagers. In the late 60s, amid creating music in establishments such as "The Sinful Cat" and going through the country, the siblings met Klaus Blasquiz and the future Magma founder, who later create Magma. The movement commenced coalesce.

Artistic Transformation

"Artists like the group and the band had an immediate influence, inspiring other individuals to create their personal bands," explains Thompson. Vander's group invented an complete genre: a combination of jazz fusion, classical rock and modern classical sound they named Zeuhl, a expression signifying something like "cosmic force" in their made-up language. Even today it unites bands from across Europe and, especially, the Asian nation.

Subsequently occurred the street confrontations, begun after learners at the university's Nanterre annexe resisted against a prohibition on integrated dormitory visits. Nearly all artist discussed in Thompson's publication took part in the demonstrations. Some musicians were creative students at Beaux-Arts on the Parisian district, where the people's workshop created the iconic 1968 artworks, with phrases including La beauté est dans la rue ("Creativity is on the streets").

Student leader Daniel Cohn Bendit talks to the French capital gathering after the clearing of the university in May 1968.