the anthology “Rock La France” recounts six decades of guitars and electricity made in France

Is France more rock than we think? The answer is no doubt once closed Rock France. This work, which has just been published by Marabout, tells a guitar epic that runs from the 1960s to today: how French rock emerged, established itself then mutated, and with what burning embers it continues to heat itself, while waiting for the time to wake up.

This copious anthology, which is not intended to be exhaustive and assumes its choices, shows, decade by decade, the effervescence and creativity to which French rock has given rise. His key figures and movements, but also his underground formations, from Vince Taylor to Starshooter, from Magma to Édith Nylon, from Taxi Girl to Wampas and from Shaka Ponk to Feu! Chatterton. It highlights the network of labels, venues and record stores spread across the country, and the behind-the-scenes activists who accompanied it, including turners, sound engineers, producers and graphic designers.

Richly illustrated and punctuated with numerous interviews carried out for the occasion, Rock Francewhich presents itself as “an overview of the past and present” of French rock, is the fruit of the collective work of around ten contributors in total, which took a year and a half. But actually, what do we mean by French rock? We interviewed Alexis Bernier, one of the three authors of this large-format 260-page anthology.

Why publish such a thick book on French rock in 2023, when it is not the most popular musical genre?
Alexis Bernier : Because contrary to appearances, we affirm that French rock continues to live today and is very current. As a journalist, I regularly receive incredible French rock records. I am fascinated by all these groups, certainly totally underground, but whose members are under 25 and have a passion for guitars, and play rock, in a context in which rap is ultra-dominant and where everything screams to them that they will not be able to make a living from their music. These small groups are signed to labels like Howlin’ Banana or Born Bad and they play in venues like the Supersonic or the International in Paris. Of course, we see a lot of sub-Pavement, para-Idaho, proto-Dinosaur Jr. but we are not safe from one day all that coming back. My firm conviction is that all it takes is a spark, a group that has a hit, a group that breaks through, for us to rediscover French rock.

What was the initial idea for “Rock La France”?
The main idea is that, having been nourished by this French scene, important to us, we could not find a book like this. There are a whole bunch of dictionaries and discographies of French rock, and biographies of groups, but it always revolves around the same groups, like Telephone which was the subject of 25 books, or Trust, Indochine, Johnny and Phoenix . We wanted to get off the beaten track, to make a different book, which talks about the celebrities of French rock, the groups who took it to the top, as well as the lesser known groups who made it rich, but also about the places and the cities where this scene was most active, and then the people who behind the scenes worked to ensure that there was a French rock scene. The idea was also to do a book on French rock and not on rock in France. There is a distinction: if you do rock in France, you are talking about major festivals, major concerts, concert halls. This is not the subject of our book.

What is French rock for you? Was the choice of singing in French favored? Phoenix and Lysistrata that you speak of sing in English. And do French-speakers, whether Swiss or Quebecois, make French rock?
The principle of the book, which is not necessarily ours individually, was French groups playing in France. That is to say, there are no Belgian, Swiss or Quebecois French speakers. Whether they sing in English or they sing in French, it doesn’t matter. They had to be French and had to have recorded their records in France, and spent most of their career in France. That’s what guided us. We based ourselves on something very Franco-French.

Which artist symbolizes French rock for you?
For me, the artist who most symbolizes French rock is Bashung, and not in his entire discography. In albums like Play Injuries (1982), Pizza (1981) and Novice (1989), in my opinion it embodies something fundamentally rock and very French in expression. Afterwards, there are also groups like Métal Urbain or Bérurier noir who really invented a rock form that doesn’t exist at all elsewhere. Before Métal Urbain, for example, this mix between guitar, prehistoric synth and scansion ultimately quite close to rap, I don’t know of any equivalent. It’s something that seems to me to have been invented in France and then taken up and developed by the Bérus in their early years.

What is the border, sometimes tenuous, between French rock and French song?
I don’t have the answer to this question, we’ve asked it very often. In the book, we talk about Etienne Daho for example, who talks about his favorite French rock groups. However, I’m not going to pretend that Daho is a die-hard rocker. Nevertheless, and that’s why he is there, he is a close relative, and a close friend: he is nourished by the whole history of French rock, by his friendship with the Stinky Toys, with Jacno, the having participated in the first Trans Musicales in Rennes. But why did we do Daho and not Murat? Murat is a kind of French country folk-rock, an artist that I adore, we talked about him, we talked about his most rock album, but we could undoubtedly have done more. Niagara, typically a frontier group, has given rise to many debates among us. In the end, there is Niagara in the book and I think it’s good. This question of the border between rock and French song is difficult, and ultimately, we didn’t really try to resolve it, preferring to let ourselves be guided by our instinct, our passion and our tastes. We accept our biases and our mistakes. But we were also limited by the number of pages in the book. My only regret is that we didn’t have 40 more pages to welcome a few more people from behind the scenes like Alain Maneval, a few more cities, a few more venues, a few more forgotten groups wrongly. I would love to do a volume 2.

What did you discover while making this anthology? Did you have any surprises?
The surprises, as far as I’m concerned, are groups that we rediscovered by listening to them again. A group whose importance may seem minor like WC3, I listened to all the albums again, it’s still crazy. They were called “À Trois dans les waters” and had been forced to rename themselves WC3 at the request of their record company. This group has an unfortunate history since the singer committed suicide, but I find it incredible. It’s sung in French, there is a universe, they play with words, they also have a sound, between new wave, cold wave and rock, which belongs only to them. Another group that I rediscovered is Extraballe. These are training courses whose posterity is almost zero, which are often forgotten and not always available on the platforms, at least for Extraballe, but which we nevertheless realize with hindsight that they held up. With this book, we wanted to give thanks to these groups, decade by decade. Show that we have nothing to be ashamed of in the face of the Anglo-Saxons.

In fact, in rock, France has always been mocked by the Anglo-Saxons…
This supposed phrase from Lennon that we are constantly fed, according to which he said that “French rock is like English wine, it should not exist”, I wonder how much longer it will last us broken foot. I think that if we were also made fun of, it’s because French rock started in a somewhat particular way, in the form of parodies. The first French rock 45s were Boris Vian and Henri Salvador, pastiches to make fun of rock. Then there was the yéyé wave and as Dominique Blanc-Francard tells us in our interview, all of this was very controlled by record companies and radio stations who wanted formatted products more than anything else. The yéyés did covers, reinterpretations in French of Anglo-Saxon pieces. So French rock was not ultra creative in its beginnings. It took him a while to speak in a personal voice and it undoubtedly harmed his image. Afterwards, the paradox and the counter-example of all this is Boris Vian himself, who, a few years after his parodic rock single, wrote the ultra-sulphurous lyrics of Hurt me Johnny, sung by Magali Noël, who recorded the first female rock in the world in 1956, two years before the American Wanda Jackson. The history of French rock is complicated…

“Rock La France”, 60 years of guitars and electricity (collective, Marabout editions, 39 euros)