French Punk: Novö

From 1978-1979, French punk started to transform thank to a heavy use of electronics, under the influence of Suicide, Kraftwerk, The Idiot and the disco (Alain Pacadis and Yves Adrien, from the first punk rock-critics, starts the same move a bit earlier, mostly because of Donna Summer, of Le Palace -the Parisian Studio 54- and the Warholian ideal of plastics). And a bit because of TG. Yes, Throbbing Gristle.

Actually all those bands (Mathematique Moderne, Ruth, Modern Guy, The Hypothetical Prophets, ...) created a real proper French version of electro-pop: Minimalist like The Normal/Silicon Teens or Fad Gadget, but lot more poppy, with often a feelingless, passionless voice singing about consummable items, dressed in strict grey costumes with clean haircuts. It seemed to come from a 70's dystopian sci-fi movie where only a robotic entertainement is exists, cynicly celebrating a consuming society. Although a heavy use of absurd and irony, they were deadly serious about themselves.

Oh, just think about the Talking Heads.

And for the music...If on paper, this scene (Les Jeunes Gens Modernes or Novö) seems exciting, on records, it's much more closer to Wendy Carlos with a Casio toy-synth without any classical training than a disco Throbbing Gristle. Honestly, it's just sounds like Soft Cell without a Nothern Soul influence or some Jacno groupies (who was anyway the Godfather of this scene).

If I quite like the whole idea of a generic and personality-free electro-elevator pop music, I think that post-modernity's got some limits, and that part of the Növo wave reached one of them : it’s actually really boring to listen to.

A few of them were actually beyond that: Taxi Girls, Artefact, and Kas Product. Apart from Kas Product, the two others seem to be a pure product of the 70's autonomious politics: influence of Debord, irony, use of symbolic images, of Burroughs, Ballard, Dick, (but also all the debate about western/pan European identity...and were actually a band, not two guys with a synth)

If Taxi Girls are certainly the best known outside France, they always seems to me largely over-rated. I always saw them like Bowie, fronting Kraftwerk. But the cold self-conscious clever opportunist part of Bowie with a lobotomized robotic band.

Honestly, it's quite bad of me to reduce them to those clichés: even if they sound like a FM-friendly comatose Doors without any energy, they still were from the few who took the rock action for truth. From vein-cutting on stage to heroin addiction and death-by-OD, it's pathetic, we agree, but still impressive.

If in France they're seen (and exported as) the French Joy Division, they were definitely the French working-class (and unstable) Talking Heads. Anyway I don't like any of them.

(After, the guy on guitar will produce Madonna. It’s true, it’s Mirwais)

And now the famous...

More cult and totally unknown, Artefact. Ok I don't like them either, but at least I highly respect them. To be quick, they're the band of the far-right junkie cyber-Christian writer Maurice Dantec (AKA The Worst Son Of Phillip K.Dick) before he turned far-right, Christian and writer, when he was just a teenage pot smoker and science fiction reader .

Artefact deserved much better. Imagine a electronic Pop Group doing Afro-beat or Suicide with a cold sense of krautfunk groove...

Ok I can't describe them: they were higly idiosyntratic, mixing influences, references and obession with a high sense of absurd, finishing by created something looking like a musical post-modern catalogue. From Situationist irony to consumer music, they were mixing disco with electronics avant-garde like nobody before them or after them, and especially NOT in the nineties.

All their stuff (one 12", one album, some demo) is now avalaible to download, which you should do right now.

Maybe because they were from Nancy (east of France) and far away from the center of the hype (Paris), Kas Product sound bit different from the other Novö bands, more complex and more straight forward. Darker, but better. When the rest were passionless and cold, Kas Product managed to bring back some energy and some passion in a retro-electronic music.

The sound is rich, quite distorted with some keyboard riff- more D.A.F than D.A.F. (and unfortunatly some fifties film noir pseudo-jazzy inspiration, which is not always a good idea). The voice took too much of Siouxsie, the same urgent high-pitched theatrical singing, the kind of ‘little girl scared by the Monster-Under-The-Bed’ feeling.

At the end of the day, the albums are actually suprisingly really good, mixing the voice of Siouxsie, the riffs of DAF, the ambiance of Wire’s 154 , the reverb of Suicide and a fest of French accents, with a close-to-the-rupture beatbox.

(OK, it’s actually terribly gothic records).

When the Novö scene were too busy looking at themselves like elegant heartless plastic dandies, Kas Product were quite busy inventing a cold, danceable and aggresive batcave sound that no-one ever really ripped off.

Quite fortunately, because, despite the fact that they’re really good, half of their songs are about to fall into caricature.

YM

French Punk: Stinky Toys, Elli & Jacno, Marie & Les Garçons, Electric Callas

Stinky Toys/Elli & Jacno

The other big piece of pride in French punk is Stinky Toys. Invited to play at the 100 Club, for the punk festival of McLaren, they gained a small cult following. I have to admit I never get into Stinky Toys: The music is fine (even if way too much mod revival), they're cute, but hell, no I can't. Apparently the reason for this cult following is their second album (known as the yellow one), that even our glorious corrector, redactor and man of taste (we're waiting for your article, Michael) admires.

The thing I can tell you about them is: they've got a terrible French accent, the music is alright, they sound like The Who of My Generation, Elli, the singer, is born in Montecasino and looks a bit like Francoise Hardy or France Gall (That should attract all the pervs of the indie community. Come on, you just love Yé-yé because they're cute).

(the language used on that track is still unidentified)

The driving force of the Stinky Toys was Jacno, guitarist who left them in the middle of 1978 to buy an EMS and start electronic music. The result is an album call Jacno and it's cute and kitsch. But really cute.

And after Elli came to him and started to sing with him on some other cute but kitsch but cute records. (OK, I really don't have a damn thing to say about them).

Oh yeah, in 1980, Eli & Jacno wrote a cute but kitsch song for a young girl called Lio, who after became really famous in France and in Japan. (Pervs, it's for you, check as well "Banana Split")

Well... well... well.

Ok, I really like Jacno, he is the perfect French dandy: elegant, funny, great looking, but... that's all, basically.

OK, next.

Marie & Les Garçons

Honestly, in the same kind of "upper-class student with a 60's obsession" I have to say I highly prefer the underrated Marie Et Les Garçons.

Born and raised in Lyon, they were a typical school band except that Marie was the drummer, not the singer and their influences were Nico, The Velvet Underground and The Modern Lovers. And they weren't able to play their instruments.

Actually they could have been called "The French Answer To Jonathan": they give the same feeling of cute love of life and have a great amateur teenage sound. Their songs all observe a great mod emergency circa 66, mixed with some lazy feedback psychedelia VU-type thing. The guitars are melodically abrupt, the solo's have 3 notes, the tempo is quick and the voices are out of tune. And the songs are all around 2 minutes long. And the lyrics have got a naïve feeling of fake lust, close to an early Pastels or a teenage Orange Juice.

Honestly, Marie & Les Garçons get nothing to be punk (a great Gang of Four/Postcard look as well), but everything to be one of the Cherry Red/RT'81girl bands (think Dolly Mixture with a guy singing in French). They would have been perfect to dance along to in your room, face to the mirror, all dressed in polka dots. They were purely genuine love.

(Ok, for the history, they did a 6-songs 12" with John Cale on Ze Records) Cherry Red or KRS or Rhino have to reissue that quickly.

And that's the myspace link.

Electric Callas

Also from Lyon and sharing some members with Marie Et Les Garçons, Electric Callas is the real great loser of the first wave.

Totally underrated and impossible to find, but you MUST check them out, Electric Callas is certainly the first French “punk” band to take a little further the rock’n’roll revival that French punk was at first. What will be called Novö after.

Taking a LOT from Young Americans period Bowie, mixing the feeling of the German trilogy, and adding a good dose of punk pioneers (Stooges and VU for short) with touching elegance, Electric Callas had a incredible sense of measure and balance between the whole dandy supercial stuff (great attitude, shitty music) and the rock’n’roll show (shitty attitude and great music). And they were for sure the first and last post punk-post glam band ever (no, you can’t say Pink Grease). One of the only bands for whom “plastic” would not be a insult but a quality.

Cold, but still incredibly danceable, they did just two 12”in 79 and 80 before disappearing. And those 12” are absolutely impossible to find. Few stuff remains of them (even on Youtube, the only thing is underlit footage with a deficient sound –see below-): one of the best covers of I Wanna Be your Dog on Le Rock d’Ici A L’Olympia, a live compilation (the rest is shit and the compilation became quite cult apparently, it's not really worth spending £30 just for one track), some other tracks on some other obscure compilations (Kill Me Two Time, Sex, 77) and those incredible 12”, W.S.B and Winner. Apparently few years ago, Seventeen (a French punk label) was supposed to release an anthology, but I never saw it.

(Shit, I can' find the youtube video anymore)

After, the leader, Jangil, went solo and is still doing music. Well, despite all the respect and love I have for Electric Callas, I have to say that I’m really not fond of it. Mostly down-tempo sleazy electro (think French Touch). They are certainly some amateurs, but… well. At least on the myspace (one of the best 90’s gif art myspace ever), you can listen to W.S.B and So Chic (from the Winner 12”) –a new version and even if the original is far better, that one is quite cool-

YM

French Punk: Métal Urbain

Ok, let's start with the most internationally well-known of the French punk stars: Métal Urbain (first 7inch of Rough Trade, that's cult, kids!).

Heavy distorted guitars playing mathematical riff on primitives beatbox rhythms. First electro-punk band ever. Nothing less than that. And according to the legend, they gave the aim to Steve Albini to create Big Black, and Jello Biafra is a huge fan. Cult, kids, I told you.

Ok, Steve Albini is a joke (and the baddest producer ever) and Jello Biafra quite an idiot.

Honestly, the problem is Metal Urbain had for singers something sounding like a drunk dog barking stupid lyrics (OK, non French speaker doesn't have this problem, still the barking is quite... hem.... embarrassing). Criticising a punk band by the barking of the singer is quite lousy, but, honestly it's the main problem of Metal Urbain (with the beatbox sounding out of rhythm and the quite common and unimaginative riffs). So commonly they were flirting with the really bad and the worst.

Still a few total cool songs such as Panik, Paris Maquis, Hysterie Connective, E 202 and Crève Salope (that one's got quite funky lyrics like 'Die bitch! You got blood in your cunt! You stink, you shit, you scream! A chainsaw in your face! You blow up, red all around!' Yeah, they certainly can pretend to be the first grindcore band ever)

The really funny thing about them is that they are actually widely respected in France as a French Sex Pistols and are actually seen as Situationist legatee. They're actually just bad and singing non-sense pseudo-anarchist shit.

After a while, Metal Urbain split to form two other bands, both underrated when you compare it to what they did before. On one side, half of the band (something like 2 guys) went to form Metal Boys, and the rest (something like 2 guys) went form Dr Mix And The Remix.

Yeah both names are shit. I don't know that much about Metal Boys, I heard 2 songs maybe. It's sounding a bit like a Japanese Telex (like a homemade Yellow Magic Orchestra, if you prefer). Well at least in my memory.

I do think Dr Mix And The Remix is better. The project was to cover some legendary R'n'R songs in an electro-punk style. Honestly, that sounds far better than anything by Metal Urbain. Imagine the J&MC guitar noise with the Big Black beatbox and some mechanic Lou Reed vocoder voice, in some Chrome noisescape... Really goooood. And fucking violent. The pre-industrial/noisy robotic rock cover of Sister Ray is an incredible blast. (here is just a 30 sec-clip, just put in a loop 22 times and you will have something sounding like the actual song)

After that, Metal Urbain decided to reform some years ago (well 2 guys with some professional) and finally committed an absolutely terrifying shit, produced by Jello in person. Don't buy, don't even download it, it just sucks. And it's not even funny. (Ok, the title is funny: J'irais chier dans ton vomi, roughly "I will shit in your vomit")

YM

French Punk: Introduction

Punk in France starts as a hipster joke, more or less.

In France, there are no bands, nothing musical (stop with the Yé-yé- it's mostly worthless horrible easy listening- in comparison Cliff Richard is good. And Magma sucks).

Nothing but rock-critics. Lots of them, actually. And like every rock-critic in the world, their only aim is to be more hipster than you.

It starts like this: Imagine a bunch of semi-writers on Quaaludes in a contest to be the new Huysmans, dreaming of Between The Buttons, dressing in fur coats and sun glasses, reading about mods (or better, used to be mods before mods, and hippies before hippies), idolizing The Velvet Underground and Nico and discovering The New York Dolls. It starts like that.

(Remember that and you will understand)

From that, their brains start to melt and mix Andy Warhol, David Bowie, black leather, heroin, NYC and writing. Quickly they discover the word PUNK and its use in the New-York underground, and spray it all around their articles... (actually all these guys -Patrick Eudeline, Philippe Garnier, Yves Adrien, Alain Pacadis and some others- wrote books about it and they all worth reading. Well actually, avoid Patrick Eudeline- he's got some writing skill but it's mostly conservative meaningless wanking. I mean, the others are also really wank-writing -think "fin de siecle" and "decadent"- but at least they try to say something.)

And because they didn't have so much to write about (between their review of the last trendy club they went to and their review of the underground cinema festival, organized by a friend), they started to write. In an incredibly beautiful & dandy posture, they started to write about music. Bands. Gigs.

(Yes they were rock-critics before that).

The thing was, in France, by this time, you didn't have that many bands that weren't in the sub-Pink Floyd/Magma/RIO/prog-folk. So they start to write about a few bands, all of them more or less revivalists (from Gene Vincent copyists to Pete Townsend copyists). Spraying in their article of splits of journal, of "OUR TIME IS UP" (in English and caps) and other "Dressed in Black Leather, somewhere between Scorpio Rising and Heinrich Himmler, he's taking his guitar like a mighty phallic machine gun...", they wrote about bands during one year before they got bored and started to go to disco clubs, dreaming about screwing Donna under Neon Lights.

So, the thing you have to keep in mind when you're talking punk in France, is, there were actually 2 scenes,both quite different: the first one, from 76 to 79, was actually a huge mix of different influences, and whatever the band did, they were punk.

You had a full range of music: from (terrible) bluesy ballads influenced bands (the really bad Asphalt Jungle of this horrible writer, Patrick Eudeline) to Novö post-punk Young American influenced (the amazing Electric Callas), and from the quite fine "girls-band & mods fantasies" made by upper middle class kids (Marie et les Garçons, Stinky Toys) to the kitschy Kraftwerk, and cute (Jacno, leader and guitarist of the Stinky Toys going solo with a VCS 3).

After punk became a common thing in England (so from 79 to 84), France started to get real punk bands. And real industrial bands. And real post-punk bands. And real new wave bands. And honestly, they were much better.

OK, two of them were much better. But all of the others were totally decent (apart from the new wave/synth-pop ones, but, I guess you expect that).

The really funny thing about that is, in France, not a lot of people really respect and like that second wave. Often seen as terrible, certainly by analogy with the English second wave of punk. But let's be serious, I'm not living in France any more, I can say it loud: most of the first wave stinks of the deadly self-conscious hipster and the pretentious arty trendy shit.

The point is most French rock people (especially rock-critics and the indie community) commonly despise bands such as Bérurier Noir, Lucrate Milk and others. And they're wrong.

YM

Fireworks!

We're not dead yet. Actually we're pretty much alive and working on the next issue of WIAL.

And for going with the amazing interview of Amelia Fletcher that Diana did, we were about to offer you the new digital and free single of Tender Trap. But, because I'm quite shity about upload and HTML code, you will have to get it yourself on the Fortuna Pop website.

(That's not a ramdom image I found on Google with Fireworks as key-word, that's the actual cover )

The first one, Fireworks, remind me a lot of The Aisler Set, wich is actually fair, considering that Aisler Set actually rip-off every band of Amelia Fletcher.

And, because Aisler Set is a good band, Tender Trap doing Aisler Set it's sounding like a Heavently spring pop song with some optimistic "Pap-pap-pap-pap-lalala" on the chorus in a 50's fashion with a big distored bassline. That's cute and touching.

I have to say I actually prefer the B-side (that's sound weird b-side for a digital single, isn't?), Grand National: it's more or less the same song with quiet-est backing vocal and the best rhythm in the galaxy: the famous Be My Baby/Just Like Honey "drum + tambourine", which give a good mod feeling to the song. And you can almost dance to it.

So anyway, go and download it: http://www.fortunapop.com/tender_trap_free_download.php

YM

Paypal

Dear everyone,

I just wanna inform you that "Working in a legend" now have a paypal account. For more information and/or if you fancy to get a copy of issue nr 1, please send us an email at; workinginalegend@gmail.com

xxx

Glasgow school

Dear people of the world,

let me update you (since we're really bad to write for the moment);

the fanzine is in progress, even if we're lazy with the blog. I don't want to tell you all about it already now, but I think it will be totally smashing! On the way I have been in contact with some really nice and cute people, which I will thank later on when we finally having the next issue in our hands.

We're as well trying to organize things a bit better for the next issue, like opening a paypal account so you, who is interested actually can send us some money (only 2 pounds) and get a copy in return and do some more promotions. Hopefully we can sell some more copies at Mono here in Glasgow. But just to let you know, we probably still gonna be quite small, we don't have any plans to be the next evil emperor like in Star Wars. I basically just write this 'cause I'm excited about it and 'cause I love old school fanzines.

As well, Glasgow is like the best city ever and we have already been seeing some heroes like The Pastels, Edwyn Collins and Stuart Murdoch dancing to the music of Orange Juice. I guess we just have to do an 'Glasgow school'-issue next!

xD

ps. Sorry about the pictures in the last post, of some reason I can't turn them right...

ps 2. keep an eye on the blog, soon we'll present some exciting articles by Ym.