Alan Stivell, “both Celtic and global”, celebrates his fifty-year career

Alan Stivell is an author, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, inhabited and passionate since a young age by Celtic culture. Lover of the harp, a common love shared with his father since he was very young, he has also always campaigned for the acceptance of the Breton people with their language, their culture, their music and their territory. Moreover, he is “citizen of the world of Breton nationality”, he says. He was the first Breton singer to use the Breton language and that did not prevent him from revolutionizing it by incorporating Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon influences.

It has been going on for fifty years already and he will celebrate this anniversary on stage with his audience through a tour, a celebration called Symphonic Celtic and which begins on April 7 in Rennes and April 8 at the Salle Pleyel.

franceinfo: 50 years of career, but still as animated?

Alan Stivell: It’s even more than 50 years. It’s 50 years since the Olympia, which was my encounter with the general public. Improbable meeting because really, I always had the feeling to be somebody of alternative, underground and finally, it turns out that sometimes, one can make popular underground. And that’s what happened.

It was your father who passed on the torch to you, out of his passion.

Obviously, he had this dream of putting this secular Celtic art back in the saddle and it touched me. I was 9 years old and touching this string was also touching something that went back almost to the origins, there was that feeling.

You actually had this need to affirm this identity very early on. Since primary school, you were different from the others. You knew it ?

I felt it in the sense that I still had a lot of friends who still took me for a madman and suddenly… Couldn’t I have fallen into madness if I hadn’t found antidotes? What is very strange in Breton and Celtic culture is already this notion which appeared to me, as a child, that there were connections with so-called oriental music, music of Amerindians, music of Far East and it is still something very surprising. It was my antidote, the basis of my approach which was: world music in its Celtic version.

Quickly, your teachers and your father will nevertheless understand that you have predispositions, that you are gifted, in addition to being inhabited.

I was on stage at the Olympia supporting Line Renaud in 1957. I was 13 years old. I think that we are already sensitive at the base and when we see a young child on an improbable instrument, there is something that happens. I think it appealed a lot.

“There was the arrival of rock’n’roll when the Celtic harp was already reinstalled in Brittany, that is to say that in 1958, 1960, utopia was accomplished.”

Alan Stivell

at franceinfo

In 1958, when you discover rock, what is important to remember is that you discover especially at that time, that you have the soul of a rocker.

They tell me, afterwards, that I have a ‘rock attitude’. At first, I still came as a tourist in rock’n’roll, I was very attracted by all that it represented. There was this notion of our generation which was revolting a little, which was innovating. All that is something that fascinated me. Indeed, I absorbed, I was soaked in all this rock culture, but not only.

In 1970, you meet your first and big success with the 45 laps Broceliande. It’s really at that moment, I have the impression, that you realize that this success will also allow you to obtain this freedom.

The fact is that I have always been a musician and I have always been an activist. There is no claim to think that the disappearance of a single culture is a tragedy for all of humanity, since it is even a form of thought.

“I fought from the start for the survival of cultures, even when they are a minority.”

Alan Stivell

at franceinfo

Philosophy, science, all of this is impacted by the disappearance of certain cultures.

What does it represent, precisely, the fact that you have become an example for these so-called “minority” cultures?

Above all, it’s an enormous joy to realize, in fact, that people could more easily be seduced by something that seemed to me to be a niche for a few people and manage, perhaps, to do a little bit that the doors s open. But this success with a very large audience was not expected, it’s incredible.

Citizen of the world of Breton nationality. On January 10, 2019, the Académie Charles-Cros awarded you the In Honorem Prize for all of your work in the World Music category. What does these 50 years of life on stage since the Olympia represent?

It is complicated. That now, people don’t reject me like when I was 8 years old, 12 years old and even 13 years old… No one calls me crazy anymore! I feel the joy that things can evolve, influences can exist through music. We can do without violence, that’s the proof.

Finally, how do you define yourself? Because you’re not a rocker if I understood you correctly, you’re not “flower power”, but a little bit all the same!

When I search a little bit, I say that there is this worldwide and Celtic search. I am both Celtic and global.