Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities and Pop Music, 1958-1980

Reprinted with edits by the author from Chapter 5 of Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities and Pop Music, 1958-1980, by Jonathyne Briggs (footnotes omitted), published by Oxford University Press © Oxford University Press, 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

The initial cohort of French punks developed while attending parties at the Parisian home of Elodie Lauten. Lauten, a fixture on the artistic scene of the late 1960s, was plugged into the art and music worlds of New York. Lauten brought together young artists — musicians, actors, and filmmakers — who shared a fascination with the various cultural movements emerging in the 1970s, especially punk. As a film student, Lauten relocated to New York and became involved with the music scene there by forming a band. The early 1970s was a particularly robust musical period in New York, and groups such as the Patti Smith Group and the New York Dolls were active and influential. When she returned to Paris in 1974, Lauten shared her stories of the emergent scene and more importantly her record collection with friends who became the foundation of the Parisian scene, and she herself briefly joined the Frenchies, a retro-style group that followed the same trends that Adrien celebrated. Lauten’s position as a filmmaker also reveals the wide effect of punk culture in 1970s France beyond music, as visual art, film, literature, and theater all had examples of punk influence. While Lauten would leave Paris in 1976, just as a punk movement was taking shape there, her early participation was critical to the community thanks to her inspiration and her connections with scenes elsewhere. Lauten’s ease in moving between the punk worlds of New York and Paris reveals the cosmopolitan character of punk and certainly influenced its development in France.

One of those guests at Lauten’s parties was Denis Quillard. Quillard adopted the moniker Jacno and founded what many consider to be the first punk band in France, Stinky Toys. Jacno, who modeled his personal style after David Bowie, formed a partnership with Elli Medeiros and the pair would begin writing songs in the retro style. Jacno modeled the group’s aesthetic after that of British Beat groups — verse-chorus structures emphasizing the rhythm guitar in arrangements — the same sound that influenced the Groovies and other retro groups, and undoubtedly a style picked up from his time spent haunting the Open Market. But the Toys combined this approach with the rapid rhythms favored by British and American groups to distinguish themselves from retro groups, bringing their sound closer to punk. Nevertheless, other French punks dismissed them, while British audiences never connected with them despite Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm Maclaren’s support of them. Often the charge leveled at Stinky Toys was that they were not real punks, an accusation with which the group at times agreed, while others noted the derivative nature of their music. Nevertheless, as the first of the French punk groups, Stinky Toys grappled with the concept of authenticity both in their music and in interviews, illustrating the pitfalls that French musicians experienced while navigating the conventions of the genre.

Stinky Toys came together in April of 1976, shortly after a performance by the Sex Pistols just outside of Paris. The duo of Jacno and Medeiros was the creative axis of the group, and were joined by other bandmates on guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone to fill out the rock combo. While by no means the only new French group, they quickly gained the attention of the French musical press, which had become fascinated by the punk subculture and were seeking a French answer to the British. Thanks in no small part to the beauty of singer Medeiros, Malcolm Maclaren wanted to sign the Toys to a recording contract, an idea that fell through, but he did book the group for a punk festival in London in September 1976, sharing the bill with more recognized groups such as the Pistols and the Clash. The group’s performance landed them on the cover of the influential British music weekly Melody Maker, and the Pistols were planning on bringing the group on their upcoming British tour, a tour that fell through thanks to the Pistols’ notoriety. Stinky Toys were poised to share the success that British punk bands had by this point, primarily in the form of recording deals and radio airplay. The Toys signed to a deal with the international record label Polydor, one of the major companies in the French market, but never received much attention abroad following the 100 Club gig. And even in France, the group’s commercial and critical success was limited despite the broader interest in punk.

One of the reasons was that the group was divisive among French critics due to their decision to compose original songs in English. There were numerous examples of earlier French groups who chose not to sing in French for commercial reasons, but Medeiros, the singer of the band, had a different rationale. Mederios and her family had immigrated to France from Uruguay during her teen years and she had spent little time in France, a situation that affected her linguistic decision: “I write in English because it’s my culture, my second language… and then the music you hear is in English, because I know nothing about French culture.” The group certainly connected with many of the major themes in punk — alienation, artifice, and finding escape—showing how these ideas certainly found an audience in France. Their songs addressed many of these topics. For example, the group’s first single — “Boozy Creed” — highlights one of the primary aspects of punk, the use of drugs as a form of escape. In the song’s lyrics, Mederios sings: “Have no religion/ need no good/ Have no illusions and no dreams/ But I know a few things that could make us happy/ Give us lots of beer and let us play loud.” Excessive alcohol consumption was common in the various punk scenes, often to the detriment of their members. Built on a blues riff and a 4/4 beat, “Boozy Creed” borrows much of the musical style of American and British groups with little innovation. Nevertheless, “Boozy Creed” speaks to the alienation of young people in the mid-1970s and their desires to escape in any way possible…

However, this decision to compose and sing in English colored perceptions of the group, leading many critics to label the group as mere imitators of British bands and inauthentic. The tendencies of French musicians to emulate Anglo-American models had already drawn the ire of cultural observers earlier in the decade, evident in the column of critic Jacques Attali. Attali had bemoaned the influence of Anglophone music on French pop music in a 1973 jeremiad in the pages of the popular music weekly Maxipop. Asserting that the French are “phonies [bidons] and copycats,” Attali remarked that the French were trying to be “anglo-saxons.” The traditional practice of translation had been a part of building the copain community in the 1960s, but critics had begun to change their opinion of the practice. The issue for Attali was that by merely copying foreign models, the French were in essence creating poor facsimiles. His attitudes were quite common during the 1970s, especially as more and more foreign artists were afforded access to the French market. At the end of the decade, Patrice Boullon of Libération noted French rock’s “hopeless provincialism.” Indeed, French audiences in general were becoming less interested in consuming translations of American and British songs and instead were increasingly purchasing the original recordings of popular songs by the middle of the decade. These same issues, which were part of the larger cultural discourse on popular music in the postwar period, were common among the punk subculture in France, whose denizens often judged music along similar lines despite their rejection of cultural conventions.

These assumptions colored perceptions of Stinky Toys. Some French critics saw the Toys as a band that had “perfectly assimilated the image of English punks while contributing to the creation of French groups.” For these critics, Stinky Toys’ music offered an example of how punk could be adapted and integrated into French cultural communities and how the French could follow the Toys’ example to create a French form of punk, although critics implicitly suggested that it would be distinct from “English punk.” However, since for most critics the British punks embodied authenticity, French punks’ attempts, in this case with Stinky Toys, were bound to fail as facsimiles of a foreign culture. Two journalists, Jean-Dominique Brierre and Ludwik Lewin asserted that the cultural meaning of British punk fit uneasily in the French context because of its alien nature: “Here [in France], one finds a cultural and political terrain that is vastly different. Punk in France is imported. The result [of French groups composing punk] is often artificial…” What Brierre and Lewin assert is the inherent difference of punk in relation to French culture, showing how critics accepted notions of national authenticity and found the French punk scene had a “completely artificial manner without invention or originality.” In a subculture predicated on authenticity, Brierre’s and Lewin’s words struck at the anxieties of French punks as they attempted to construct their own community or assert belonging to the larger punk community….

The anxieties of authenticity speaks to the importance within the punk community of the need to develop a French expression of punk as well as the lack of consensus among observers of punk about the applicability of punk to French culture. Despite the intellectual commonalities between the British subculture and the French counterculture, critics and artists questioned the place of punk in France and often found it irreducibly foreign. Previous examples of French pop, which had been so defined by its deference to Anglophone models, colored the experiences of punks in the 1970s in France, as they were often defined in relation to American and British artists. While French audiences could be appreciative of punk, French artists could produce only inferior copies of British and American models, even as French society shared the same problems that fostered the development of punk in those places. The attempted construction of a shared punk community that connected to those foreign scenes was limited by preconceptions based on the history of popular music in France.