The seismic shock that May 1968 had on the french way of life has been widely documented. The student protests, which erupted at the Sorbonne before spreading around the country, hastened the end of the Gaullist regime, politicised French ideology, and spawned a wave of radical films such as Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore.

Much less is known – outside France, at least – about how the revolutionary ideas of 1968 expressed themselves in music. Australian musician and journalist Ian Thompson, for one, knew little about French underground rock when he stumbled upon a box of old vinyl, labelled “French prog-rock” on a pre-Covid trip to Paris. He was blown away.

Beneath the underground … Christian Vander of Magma in 1968. Photograph: Philippe Gras/alamy

Ther was Magma, the multi-personnel collective making music infected with a John Coltrane groove and the orchestral pathos of Carl “Carmina burana” Orff, all while singing in an invented language called Kobaïan. There was Gong, the synth-dabbed space-rock outfit co-founded by Daevid Allen of Soft Machine. Red Noise embedded anti-police slogans within songs, and Ame Son made poppy arrangements with explosions of flutes and drums and rolling improvisations. “I hadn’t experienced excitement like this as discovering Krautrock in late 1980s”, recalls Thompson. “This was a truly subterranean, rather than simply underground, scene.”

Brisbane-born Thompson, who had a degree of musical success in the mid-1980s with indie band Full Fathom Five, fully fell in love with thes bands, leading to more travel, long interviews and now a book, Synths, Sax & Situationists.

What he found was that france’s musical revolution came out of a frustration with an already globalised anglophone status quo: music of the 1950s and 60s in western Europe tended to be bland carbon copies of American or UK bands, such as Johnny Hallyday or Les Variations, French answers to Elvis or the rolling Stones. “They thought they had to sing in English and sound like the Stones to be able to make music,” Thompson says.

Other factors played into the intensity of the moment. Before 1968, the Algerian war and the French state“`html

The French Rock Revolution of the 70s

Aesthetic differences began to harden. Magma and Moving Gelatine Plates were influenced by jazz, Art Zoyd were avant-rock.Gong and Ame Son were more psychedelic. Red Noise made freeform noise-rock, Barricade drew inspiration from Captain Beefheart. What distinguished these French bands, from the German motorik sound of La Düsseldorf, Can or Faust, and the heavy intensity of Soft Machine was a gargantuan appetite for appropriating other genres, all while creating an entirely new mix. The goal was to release their potential. “Everything could be incorporated into ‘rock’ music!,” says Thompson.

After the initial revolutionary carnival there came music festivals, which helped solidify the scene. October 1969’s Amougies in Belgium was the francophone answer to woodstock and Isle of Wight, where Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Art Ensemble of Chicago played alongside native bands including Ame Son and Gong. As with their counterparts, money made on tickets was meagre as many festival-goers simply jumped the fences. The organisers and the bands wanted culture to be inclusive, but a lack of funds would hamper the scene’s longevity later on.