Street Confrontations, Made-up Languages and Performances in Psychiatric Hospitals: French Lost Rock Uprising of 1968

The massive effect that May 1968 had on the French way of life was extensively chronicled. The youth protests, which broke out at the university before spreading throughout the nation, quickened the end of the Gaullism government, radicalised France's intellectual thought, and produced a surge of revolutionary films.

Far less understood – beyond French borders, at minimum – about how the transformative thoughts of 1968 manifested their musical side in music. An Australian musician and writer, for example, knew little about French underground music when he found a collection of classic LPs, categorized "France's experimental rock" on a before Covid journey to the French capital. He became impressed.

Below the non-mainstream … Christian Vander of Magma in 1968.

There existed Magma, the large ensemble producing music infected with a jazz legend style and the orchestral emotion of the composer, all while vocalizing in an created language called the language. Also present was another band, the electronic experimental band created by Daevid Allen of the band. Another group included protest slogans inside compositions, and Ame Son made catchy pieces with explosions of instruments and percussion and rolling improvisations. "I never experienced thrill like this after finding German experimental music in late 1980s," recalls Thompson. "It represented a authentically hidden, instead of merely alternative, culture."

This Australian-born musician, who experienced a degree of artistic achievement in the eighties with alternative band his previous band, absolutely developed passion with these artists, causing further travel, long conversations and now a book.

Revolutionary Foundations

His discovery was that the French musical revolution emerged from a frustration with an formerly globalised Anglo-American establishment: sound of the fifties and sixties in European Europe tended to be generic imitations of American or UK artists, including Johnny Hallyday or Les Variations, France's responses to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "They thought they had to sing in the language and seem like the band to be qualified to make art," Thompson states.

Additional factors played into the intensity of the era. Prior to 1968, the Algerian conflict and the French authorities' harsh repression of protest had radicalized a generation. Fresh artists of France's rock musicians were opposed to what they viewed authoritarian control system and the Gaullist government. They stood searching for innovative inspirations, without American whitewashed material.

Jazz Inspirations

They found it in African American jazz. The legendary trumpeter was a frequent presence in Paris for decades in the 1950s and 60s, and artists of Art Ensemble of Chicago had found sanctuary in Paris from separation and cultural limitations in the America. Other guides were Ornette Coleman and the musician, as along with the experimental margins of music, from the artist's his band, the group and King Crimson, to Captain Beefheart. The repetition-driven minimalism of the composer and the musician (Riley a Parisian denizen in the sixties) was another influence.

The musician at the Amougies festival in 1969.

One band, among the groundbreaking psychedelic music ensembles of France's underground movement, was founded by the siblings the Magal brothers, whose relatives took them to the famous jazz club establishment on the street as teenagers. In the end of 60s, amid performing jazz in venues like Le Chat Qui Pêche and travelling around India, the musicians met another artist and Christian Vander, who went on to establish the band. The movement began to form.

Musical Innovation

"Groups including Magma and Gong had an direct effect, encouraging other individuals to create their own ensembles," states the journalist. Vander's group created an entire genre: a fusion of improvisational music, orchestral rock and neoclassical music they named the genre, a expression representing approximately "cosmic power" in their made-up tongue. Even today it draws together artists from around Europe and, most notably, the Asian nation.

Subsequently occurred the urban confrontations, initiated following learners at the university's suburban campus resisted challenging a ban on mixed-gender dormitory visits. Nearly each band referenced in Thompson's publication took part in the protests. Various artists were fine arts learners at the art school on the Parisian district, where the Atelier Populaire produced the legendary May 68 artworks, with slogans including La beauté est dans la rue ("Creativity is on the streets").

Student leader Daniel Cohn Bendit talks to the Paris gathering following the clearing of the university in May 1968.