← Back to Countries

France

Chalon-sur-Saône, 1986

Vietnam Veterans

Vietnam Veterans formed in Chalon-sur-Saône in the late 1970s, led by Mark Enbatta. They started out on Rolling Stones and Kinks covers and then pushed into the fuzzed-out psych-garage revival that swept Europe in the mid-1980s. Despite the name, not one of them had ever served in the military. Their 1986 album In Ancient Times came out on the German label Music Maniac around the same time a single Frankfurt show drew some 2,000 fans. That was close to their peak. They split later in the decade.

Paris, self-taught and self-recorded

Ghédalia Tazartès

Ghédalia Tazartès taught himself everything. He spliced together his own voice, chants in invented and half-remembered languages, and instruments like Tibetan singing bowls and harmonica on a reel-to-reel deck, and called the result "impromuz." His 1987 album, Tazartès, drew partly on French poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé's included, and was later reissued with his 1979 debut on a single 2004 Alga Marghen CD. He spent decades in near-total obscurity. Still, his name had shown up as early as 1979 on Nurse With Wound's now-legendary list of avant-garde touchstones, and decades later that mention helped build him a cult following among noise and outsider-music listeners.

Bordeaux, 1985

Noir Désir

Noir Désir came together in Bordeaux in the early 1980s around schoolmates Bertrand Cantat and guitarist Serge Teyssot-Gay, and went through other names before settling on this one by 1985. In the 1990s they went from 1992's Tostaky to 1996's 666.667 Club, which was France's best-selling rock album that year. Their 2001 record Des Visages des Figures was made in New York with Sonic Youth's engineer Nick Sansano. The band went on hiatus in 2003 and formally broke up in 2010.

Knokke, Belgium, 1973

Alan Stivell

Alan Stivell's father spent decades reviving the Breton harp, a tradition that had nearly died out, and by fourteen Stivell had built one of the first electric versions of it and was playing it. His 1970 album Reflets made his career and took Breton music well beyond Brittany.

Paris, defiantly strange since 1968

Brigitte Fontaine

Brigitte Fontaine left Brittany for Paris in 1960 to study drama. By the end of the decade she was one of the strangest voices in French pop, and proud of it. Her 1969 album Comme à la radio, made with her partner Areski Belkacem and members of Chicago's free-jazz Art Ensemble, won the Prix Charles Cros. Before that she had co-written a Left Bank stage revue with Jacques Higelin and the actor Rufus, which ran two seasons in Paris and toured Europe. Decades later she turned up as a guest voice on Noir Désir's 2001 album Des Visages des Figures.

A French Bowie, punk, then silence

Alain Kan

Alain Kan went through nearly every corner of French pop over three decades: yé-yé singles in the 1960s, a cabaret run at L'Alcazar, and an early-1970s glam phase modeled closely on David Bowie. By 1977 he had gone punk, fronting Gazoline, which was modeled directly on the Sex Pistols, alongside a teenage Fred Chichin, later of Rita Mitsouko. Kan disappeared in Paris in April 1990 and was eventually declared legally dead. His final album, Parfum de nuit, had come out just four years earlier.

The Collection