Etron fou leloublan | Interview

Ferdinand Richard: EFL was a quite cynical and satirical underground group, and although we would appreciate the technical and esthetical musical approach of Magma, we found (and still find) the Magma contents, image, message, quite ridiculous.

What do you remember from early shows? What kind of material did Etron Fou play before recording your first album? Were any of this shows ever recorded?

Guigou Chenevier: I remember very well that when we opened for Magma in December 1973 we were already playing ‘L’Amulette et le Petit Rabbin’ (as you know maybe the beginning of this long piece was very satiric against Magma (that we founded much too serious, black and pretentious). I also remember very well that I already played my drum solo ‘Sololo Brigida’. After the 1st set in the afternoon (we played 2 concerts) Giorgio Gomelsky (who was the manager of Magma) came to me and asked me if I seriously had the intention to play again my drum solo in the evening (meaning I guess: “Christian Vander is doing a very long and impressive drum solo…you will not be arrogant enough I hope, to play your little stupid solo before ‘the master’???!!!” )…And my answer has been: “YES OF COURSE, I’ll play it again!!!”

About possible unreleased recordings of the time…I don’t know about any good live recordings, that could be released. Probably exists some, somewhere…but I have no idea where!

Ferdinand Richard: We started to compose the Batelages material and this is what we played on stage since the early beginning. Recording at this time was a rare and complex and expensive process.

Chris Chanet, you have been also involved with the film industry.

Chris Chanet: I was not in the film industry at that time but in the invention of a new form of theater, street theater; a free theater for all, invented for the street/city and played in the street. I still practise this form of theater with my company ‘Delices Dada’.

You’re still active. How about music? What are you currently working on?

Chris Chanet: As for the music, I participated in the recording of the first vinyl of ‘Urban Sax’, some records from or with Guigou Chenevier (‘Arthur et les robots’, ‘Octavo’), a big-band ‘le Grot’Orkestre’, and I remain specialized in improvised music, but also electroacoustic music and composition for theater. I have a band named ‘Le T. T. (Trio Triple)’.

Chris Chanet left the band and you added the word Leloublan. What happened?

Guigou Chenevier: Nothing special…just a normal evolution…as you know ‘Etron Fou’ means something like ‘Mad Shit’, and the scatological connotation of the name started to become a bit ‘heavy’ to carry after a while…so Ferdinand had this idea to add ‘Leloublan’ (which means ‘the white wolf’ and there is a french expression saying ‘known as the white wolf’ meaning to be very famous. So the idea was just a stupid ‘commercial campaign’ calling ourselves ‘leloublan’ would necessarily implie that we will become famous!!! And as you know, this worked perfectly!!!

Chris Chanet: The cover artwork was done by Jeff Thiébaut, also known as A.Suivre, who is an actor and director of the company Delices Dada, and with whom I still play nowadays. We used to live in a farm in the countryside and this bike mummified like a Pharaoh, this white cat, this door of a barn, this suspended time matched us completely. Then the photo was taken and treated by J-P. Bos, who taught the photography to the students of the city of Valence.

Ferdinand Richard: This was a joint operation between two visual artists. The bicycle was made by Jeff Thiébaut, who lately created with Chris Chanet a fantastic (and visionary) street performance art group (one of the first in France). The picture was made by a friend, a professional photographer, and the cat was there, by chance.

Were you politically active as a band?

Guigou Chenevier: In fact, I am much more politically active TODAY (!) than we were at the time…still we lived in a community, that refused to be too much engaged in the ‘music business’, and that was already something. Our idea, for a couple of years (1975-1977) was to share our time between our musical activities and the ‘normal life’ of farmers in the country. The aim, was to be economically independent. We were quite utopists of course, but to tell you the truth, these ideas were in the air, we were living only some years after 1968, and in a sense it was very common for young people at the time to act like that. Anyway, it was a great time and we were absolutely certain that ‘the revolution’ will come soon!!! A very optimistic and exciting period indeed! Then, as you know, everything exploded and the utopia disappeared to leave only the sad reality of the brutal capitalism all over the world. I am still struggling against it nowadays, on different levels, but on a more ‘practical’ way than before.

Ferdinand Richard: I would not say that we were registered in any political organisation. But at that time we had made the ‘drop out’, as quite a few hippie style communities, and we were living in a commune in a remote part of the central mountains of France. When we moved there, I was the oldest person of the group and was not even 25! Guigou was less than 20. We were kids. But there were several of these communities in the area, and we would exchange goods, tools, political views, way of life, and tried to be as much disconnected as possible from the ‘system’. The general political orientation of the group was anarchy.

Would you share your insight on the albums’ tracks?

Guigou Chenevier: Whaooo, this is not an easy thing to do, but I’ll try…

“L’amulette et le petit rabbin”
Guigou Chenevier: As I told you above, we composed the music of this piece starting from the text. Chris and I wrote this crazy text with the famous process invented by the surrealists called in French ‘cadavre exquis’, which means: someone starting to write something and then hides it (he only lets a few last words appearing at the end of its text that the next writer can see). Then the second person writes something and hides his part of the text etc. until the end of the text! Of course, generally the result of such a text is quite crazy which was the case for ‘L’amulette et le petit rabbin’. Then, we composed the music, inspired by this crazy story. I must add to that, that the beginning of the piece is (as I said above) a parody of Magma…and to finish on the subject, I should also say that during at least 2 or 3 years, we ALWAYS began our concerts with ‘L’Amulette et le petit rabbin’. What contributed for sure to a certain ‘success’ of Etron Fou, specially when we were playing at festivals. This piece was so different by its humoristic, musical and theatrical aspects than the other groups were playing around 1974-1976 (mostly inspired by groups like Genesis, Pink Floyd or Magma…), that we were generally a kind of ‘attraction’ at the festivals!

“Sololo Brigida”
Guigou Chenevier: “Sololo Brigida” is the first drum solo I ever played!!! But in fact, I composed it already as a real ‘song’. My idea was not at all to do a ‘virtuoso’ performance like most of the drum solos are (especially in jazz). It wasn’t quite common to do such a solo in the early seventies…especially with the theatrical aspect of it (I was playing with a helmet, and my drum set was painted in green with the Botticelli ‘Venus de Millau’ on my bass drum skin + an umbrella over my drum-set). These visual and theatrical elements were at least as important as the music itself! But in fact ‘Sololo Brigida’ is mostly important (for me) because of the idea, that I will develop later on, (especially with ‘Les Batteries’ with Charles Hayward and Rick Brown) that drums can be a real melodic instrument was already there.

“Yvett’Blouse”
Guigou Chenevier: This piece was mostly a joke or ‘how to do the shortest piece possible’!

“Madame Richard Larika”
Guigou Chenevier: This is quite radically a different piece than ‘L’Amulette et le petit rabbin’. First of all, it’s an instrumental. Here, no jokes, no text…and a quite complex rhythmical structure on drums and bass. The other side of Etron Fou (who were not ONLY clowns!!!).

“Histoire de graine”
Guigou Chenevier: Here is a text written by Ferdinand. It is also a story, but less surrealistic than ‘L’Amulette’ for example. The structure of his text is more classical, and also more ‘literary’. Ferdinand would be certainly a better person than me to speak about it…

Ferdinand Richard: No. It is not to me to do this job. Listening to music is personal. Anyone should be able to listen without being influenced.

Les trois fous perdégagnent (Au pays des…) was your second album. Francis Grand joined you and played saxophone on it. 

Guigou Chenevier: When Chris decided to stop to play with Etron Fou to join ‘Delices Dada’, we looked for another saxophone player. Francis was a friend of a friend living in Grenoble. We met him, tried to play with him, and it worked!

Chris Chanet: I met Francis during a visit to my parents. We lived in the same small town of province, and he used to play in a band of young people still in high school, a music of composition which was not rock ‘n’ roll, which was very rare at this time. Before definitely leaving EFL, I asked him if he would like to replace me, Guigou and Ferdinand agreed.

Ferdinand Richard: Don’t really remember. He was a friend of Chris’, if I remember well. Hanging around in Grenoble.

Ferdinand Richard: At the initiative of Henry Cow (especially Chris Cutler), RIO was above all a gathering of independent and very diverse groups who had in common ‘alternative’ in their economy. It was nothing to see with an esthetic common ground. It became later on a ‘genre’, but this is a deformation of the original goal of this movement.

Ferdinand Richard: Yes, and no… since the beginning of RIO they were tensions between members who did not share the same political positions. L’Orchestra was rather radical, as we were, and had not very much to do with Univers Zero, for example. Political discussions were tense. The only thing in common was that we did not want to be a part of the regular music business, that’s all. Henry Cow, l’Orchestra and Samla Mammas Manna organised a few common tours/festivals in their respective countries. They were extremely important for us, but that was it. There has never been a long run centralized/organised common organisation. Each group was organizing its own business. I did it for EFL. I have to say, that I’m a bit upset by the way, the RIO branding has been instrumentalised by people who did not have anything with its beginning, aims, objectives, and who made it a fashion, or an esthetic movement. I have nothing to do with RIO today. It is a manipulation of the history. But I guess this is very common in the history of arts.

You released your second album also on your own label 9H17 Productions (L’Orchestra released it as well).

Guigou Chenevier: Yes! It was a real choice for us to do it like that, but this choice was also influenced by the fact that at this period, it was normal to sell a lot of records at the end of the concerts, and also in record shops etc. A situation completely different than now!

Ferdinand Richard: Purely self-production.

How many copies?

Guigou Chenevier: We always pressed 1000 copies of each album at first with the print that L’Orchestra made in Italy, plus the different re-issue on CD later on, probably we sold more than 5000 copies of each album? Maybe more???…In fact, I really don’t know!

Ferdinand Richard: I do not remember precisely, but I don’t think we ever printed more than 1500 copies, as original production.

You toured USA and performed at Squat Club in New York City and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where you recorded and released a live album, En Public aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique. How was it to play in USA? The RIO scene was not so strong there?

Guigou Chenevier: That’s true, the RIO scene was nearly not existing in the US when we played there the 1st time in 1979. Even though Cuneiform was already existing. But we had strong contacts with some musicians like The Orthotonics, V-Effect, Massacre etc. through Fred Frith who was just starting to live in New York. We also discovered the New York Scene (Plasmatic, Suicide, James White, Sonic Youth etc.) with many groups that we found very close of the Etron Fou ‘spirit’ (much more in fact than many ‘RIO’ groups!). Anyway, for us, it was really exotic to play in the US! I remember strongly our first concerts in Providence and Boston organized by Michael Bloom (thanks to him!) and Jonathan Thomas. In Boston we played with Hatfield and the North. We also played with some crazy american groups like The Stikmens (a kind of ultra punk and over speed band from Philadelphia if I remember well). I remember that their concert was really astonishing, but who remember this group now??? I would be curious to know if some of these musicians are still making music. But anyway, for us, the shock in the US was that EVERYTHING was bigger than in Europe…the cars…the distances…and the funny thing was that a lot of american people told us that our music was ‘so french’!!!. It was a real discovery for us, and we never thought before that we had something specifically ‘french’!!!

Bernard Mathieu: I met Ferdinand just before the US tour. I was the owner of a little record shop named Margot Music and Margot was my nickname. That explains my name Margot on the first solo album of Ferdinand. The saxophonist was Gérard Bôle du Chaumont who left EFL suddenly before the US tour for a pop solo career as a singer that failed. I met EFL by Michel Augier leader and founder of Johnny Be Crotte, band with whom I played before. At this time I was the founder and leader of a Street Brass Band named l’Etrange Napolitaine. This band played on the first solo album of Guigou. When I knew that EFL was searching a sax player, I said to Ferdinand I was interested. At the first time Ferdinand refused because I play tenor and soprano sax. And EFL used to play with alto sax. Finally we start to rehearse together 3 or 4 weeks before the US tour. And it was OK. The tour was fantastic. We played at Boston, Hartford, NY, Philadelphia and Baltimore. It was Fred Frith that helped us to organised this DIY tour. At the time, Fred lived in NY and played with Bill Laswell in the band Material. That explain why we recorded with Bill Laswell on Speechless Fred album.

Ferdinand Richard: In the summer of 1979 Fred Frith, with whom I had a closed friendship, decided to move to the US, and I went together with him, not to stay, but to see if organizing a tour for EFL was likely. This first US trip of mine came at the same time, the New York Gong was touring the East Coast, so I followed them a bit, since I had good relationship with Giorgio Gomelsky, who was in charge of this group at the time. He also had a club in NYC, the Zu Club, where a young musician was living (in the club) and was also the bass player of the NY Gong. His name was Bill Laswell, and we we were good friends then. The EFL tour came a few months later, in 1980. We recorded it on a 4-track machines, although one of the track was most of the time out of duty, so you can considered this has been recorded on 3 tracks, in very acrobatic conditions! At that time, it was really unusual, I think we were the first french group to tour there, at least the first to record a live album, which was unbelievable for the regular french music business. Some of these Parisian guys declared that this was a fake US tour, that we had invented everything and had never been there.

After US tour you became a quartet. Bernard Mathieu, what do you remember from joining the band? Les Poumons gonflés album followed. It was produced by Fred Frith.

Bernard Mathieu: I joined the band just before the US tour. We met a Swiss guy, owner of Turbo Records and also a very good recording studio. He was really enjoying EFL and he produced as the French meaning (Fred was the executive and artistic producer): ‘Les Poumons Gonflés’.

It was a very good experience. Working with Fred as a producer was really great. But I recorded this album (which is very good, I think) even when we decided, that I was leaving EFL. Because I was not very OK with the evolutionary stagnation of the music of EFL.

For the fifth album, Les Sillons de la Terre, the lineup changed with saxophonist Bruno Meillier replacing Mathieu. What can you tell us about your involvement, Bruno?

Bruno Meillier: My first memory of the band goes back to June 1975 at a pop music festival in St Just sur Loire, a small town along the Loire river, this is where I discovered them. Nana Vasconcelos was part of the program and it was mostly folk acts which I was not so excited about back then. But when the trio got up on the stage, I liked them immediately. It reminded me of Captain Beefheart, a bit of Egg and Van Der Graaf Generator. That combination of bass and drums, odd time signatures and no electric guitar was unusual. The next morning I approached Chris, their sax player and asked if they would consider hiring a synthesizer player (which I desperately tried to be at the time)…’Why not give this a try ?’. His reply made me walk on air! I was only 18 then. Luckily the opportunity never arose, it would have been a disaster musically.

Later I happened to see the trio in other festivals, here and there, each time with a different saxophone player. In July 1980, Ferdinand Richard came to hear my own band, Les i, in Tournon (we opened for Here & Now) and proposed, since he was living next door to an 8 track recording studio in Avignon, to produce us an album (he was going to produce the three we made actually, it would be the beginning of a successful and lasting collaboration). At about that time Les i had become part of a new rock circuit here, festivals and clubs, and eventually opened up for a Captain Beefheart last tour’s date in Lyons. Our music was a mix of no wave, jazz and funk with probably a French twist, certainly not as original as Etron Fou’s. But our drummer, Dominique Lentin, had belonged to Dagon, Fille qui mousse, Kool Gool, all mythic bands from the early seventies underground Parisian scene, bands which just like Etron Fou, had walked on the Beefheart, Zappa or Soft Machine trail (a major influence here in France in the early ’70s).

Right after the first Les i album came out, we heard Bernard Mathieu, EFL sax player, was to quit and I proposed to replace him. I was thrilled to join them. But guilty as I felt to leave my own band aside, I always saw this as a temporary replacement, limited to a one-album only collaboration. The reason why I remained less than two years in the band although we had fun and it was an intense creative time. Les i would not get invited abroad – I think we played just one gig in Basel – while, EFL’s image not suiting the new wave inclination here – they were regarded as old hippies, communes, goatherds, etc -, I remember I played four gigs only with them in France, one of them which I put on in Saint-Etienne, my hometown. Thanks to Ferdinand’s obstinate management, EFL would tour Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Holland, Sweden, east-European countries and USA instead, places where audiences were more open-minded. The four of us composed the material for Les Sillons de la Terre, their most jazz-oriented album (I listened to a lot of jazz back then). After I quit, the no-sax trio would be (in my own opinion) the band’s strongest incarnation. I saw that trio on a special event on the Effeil Tower’s first floor in 1984. And Face aux éléments… sounds to me like their best album ever. Fred’s production is terrific, adding colours and knitting all instruments together perfectly.

One evening in 1984, Ferdinand called and proposed we would start a duo together, Bruniferd, which now looks to me like an expansion of what I did in EFL. Except that duo worked on a more minimal concept (no chords, no drums, no electricity, just bass, flute and saxophones skinny lines, and poems of our own, in between pieces), chamber music of a more ascetic kind. A lot more flexible economically, that duo would export itself better than a four or five members band with equipment, etc, and lasted longer. From 1984 to 1997 we made several tours in Europe and Japan and recorded 4 albums (one of them, produced by Hat Hut, is still in the vaults).

By the mid-eighties, we had all committed ourselves in various projects including solo albums, well we had to; restricting to just one band could not be enough to make a living or gain recognition. Conditions were difficult, and are, by the way, much much worse now. Would EFL reunite today, I am convinced life would not be easier. To be honest with ourselves we would probably not play the same music, create new challenges and as a result not get invitations elsewhere than from those festivals for R.I.O. nostalgics. Which are indeed not so many and have not cared much about EFL anyway. No tears, no regrets ! Etron Fou were true originals in a sense, always against dictated rules, with a strong and typically french ‘esprit de contradiction’. Should people expect us to play rock, we would turn improvised, should they expect us to sound prog or rock in opposition-like, we would play regular 4/4 time signatures, and so on. While still making of our own technical limitations an asset.

Since there has always been a lot more of interesting bands around than opportunities to perform for them, the idea came naturally to Ferdinand to set up in St Remy de Provence in 1986 the MIMI festival (where Etron Fou played his last gig), and I followed his example with one called Musiques Innovatrices at the Saint-Etienne’s public theatre the next year. Almost 30 years later, both festivals still exist and do connect in style. Guigou also started one of his own in the meantime. It seemed musicians could not be satisfied with making music in the old-fashioned romantic way, the genius retiring from the world to compose timeless masterpieces! We definitely had to seize the bull by the horns and commit ourselves in extra activities (recording, writing, producing, labels, festivals, etc) to help the economical survival for these musics. I know France is regarded internationally as the number one country for culture. Our experience, I am sorry to say, reflects just the opposite, grants do not exist for musicians of our kind, private sponsoring is just a dream, culture money goes to opera houses, to big prestigious venues,… Neither the independent musician nor the independent producer gets supported. My festival (22nd édition) does not get any financial help this year in 2014. After years of struggle and keeping on. C’est la vie…!

Face Aux Éléments Déchaînés was your last album, released in 1985 as a trio of Richard, Thirion and Chenevier. Frith produced the album and guested on four of the tracks.

Guigou Chenevier: Yes, and this is in my opinion, one of the BEST album by Etron Fou. I would like to mention Sophie Jausserand, who made the art design of this album…and it is NOT because Sophie is my wife that I want to say that her sleeve art design for this album was absolutely great. The music of this album is also completely different than on the early albums by Etron Fou. Less humoristic, satiric and funny…darker, deeper and stronger…The line up of the trio with Jo was also going to the essential in terms of composition.