Urban Battles, Invented Tongues and Shows in Psychiatric Hospitals: France's Forgotten Music Revolution of 1968

The seismic shock that May 1968 influenced the French lifestyle was extensively recorded. These youth uprisings, which broke out at the Sorbonne before expanding around the nation, hastened the end of the Gaullist administration, politicised France's philosophy, and produced a surge of radical movies.

Far fewer recognized – beyond France, at least – about how the radical concepts of 1968 revealed themselves in sound. An Down Under artist and reporter, for instance, was aware of barely anything about France's underground rock when he discovered a crate of classic records, labelled "French progressive rock" during a pre-Covid journey to Paris. He felt impressed.

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

There existed the group, the expanded ensemble making compositions imbued with a John Coltrane style and the orchestral feeling of the composer, all while singing in an created language referred to as Kobaïan. Also present was Gong, the synthesizer-infused experimental outfit co-founded by the musician of the band. Red Noise included political slogans throughout songs, and yet another band made catchy pieces with bursts of instruments and percussion and flowing experiments. "I never encountered enthusiasm like this since encountering Krautrock in late the eighties," remembers the writer. "This was a truly hidden, as opposed to merely non-mainstream, movement."

This Brisbane-native artist, who experienced a degree of musical success in the eighties with indie ensemble Full Fathom Five, totally developed passion with these artists, leading to additional journeys, long conversations and currently a book.

Radical Origins

The revelation was that France's musical revolution came out of a discontent with an previously globalised English-speaking status quo: sound of the 1950s and 60s in European Europe typically appeared as uninspired replicas of American or English artists, like Johnny Hallyday or other groups, France's answers to Elvis or the Rolling Stones. "They believed they must perform in English and seem similar to the band to be able to produce sound," the journalist states.

Additional aspects contributed to the passion of the moment. Before 1968, the North African war and the French government's harsh repression of dissent had radicalized a cohort. A new breed of French rock musicians were against what they regarded as authoritarian police-state apparatus and the postwar regime. They were searching for new influences, without US commercialized content.

Musical Influences

They discovered it in black American music. The legendary trumpeter became a common visitor in the capital for years in the fifties and 60s, and artists of the jazz group had relocated in France from discrimination and artistic constraints in the US. Further inspirations were the saxophonist and the musician, as along with the innovative fringes of music, from Frank Zappa's his band, Soft Machine and the progressive band, to Captain Beefheart. The repetition-driven approach of the composer and the musician (Riley a Parisian inhabitant in the 1960s) was another inspiration.

The musician at the Belgian gathering in 1969.

Crium Delirium, part of the pioneering mind-altering rock groups of France's underground movement, was created by the brothers the Magal brothers, whose family took them to the renowned jazz club venue on the street as youths. In the end of sixties, amid creating jazz in establishments such as "The Sinful Cat" and going around India, the siblings met Klaus Blasquiz and Christian Vander, who eventually form the band. The movement commenced take shape.

Artistic Revolution

"Bands such as Magma and the band had an instant influence, inspiring other individuals to form their own bands," explains the journalist. Vander's group invented an whole genre: a fusion of experimental jazz, symphonic music and modern classical music they called the genre, a expression signifying roughly "celestial force" in their made-up tongue. Even today it draws together groups from throughout the continent and, most notably, Japan.

Then came the urban confrontations, begun when students at the university's Nanterre branch protested challenging a restriction on co-ed residential access. Almost all artist discussed in Thompson's publication took part in the protests. Several musicians were creative individuals at Beaux-Arts on the Parisian district, where the collective printed the now-famous 1968 images, with slogans such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Creativity is on the streets").

Student spokesperson Daniel Cohn Bendit speaks to the French capital gathering following the evacuation of the university in the month of May 1968.