thu 28/03/2024

Magma, Barbican, the Cosmos | reviews, news & interviews

Magma, Barbican, the Cosmos

Magma, Barbican, the Cosmos

The return of French Prog Rock heroes

I am not that objective about Magma. For one thing, when I saw them as a 16-year-old in the Seventies the intensity of the band caused me to have an out-of-body experience, something that has happened neither before or since. It’s the kind of thing you remember. It’s hard to formulate balanced critical opinions when you are floating up near the ceiling, looking down on your body. I met the leader and creative visionary behind the band, Christian Vander, a couple of weeks before last night’s Barbican concert, which was billed as a Celestial Mass.  As someone more expressive than me put it, “Meeting Vander's gaze was like looking into the eyes of a super-intelligent Siberian husky."

The band were labelled as Progressive Rock, a genre history has for often good reasons not been kind to, although signs of its revival are not hard to find.  Muse with their symphonic visions, currently atop the charts, are decidedly Proggy, and one of the year’s hippest bands has been Animal Collective.

Supporting Magma last night were the Sun Ra-influenced Chrome Hoof, a younger, poppier band, with sci-fi silver theatrical gear and funky dancing girls, who acknowledge Magma’s influence. Last night they collaborated with another cosmic sonic traveller  J P Massiera, another man whose vision was rewired by the events of Paris in May ’68 and the landings on the moon. Massiera has often been called the French Joe Meek after the tortured producer who had a hit with "Telstar", even if Massiera’s guises on record included a futuristic Messiah, a mutant fish and other gory comic book personas.

Vander’s compositions might sound about as Prog as you can get – concept multi-album-length pieces about spiritual struggle and purification and the colonisation of space, among them, but he is a true original. If you had to analyse the strongest ingredients for a record of his like Mekanik Destuctiw Kommandoh (MKD to the fans - see video below for a performance from 1977)  you might point to Carl Orff, Stravinsky’s Les Noces with an element of John Coltrane rather than anything in the pop or rock canon.  He rejects the Prog Rock label (but then, musicians in general tend to reject labels) and invented his own, which he calls Zeuhl.

Vander told me when I met him in a Paris café that Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones was a friend of his music–loving mother and taught him informally from the age of 11, and he remains a paramount influence. Chet Baker was another friend of the family, who gave him his first drum kit. When Coltrane died in 1967, the 19-year-old Vander was devastated and decided “it was the end, somehow, of music. He opened many doors, but many of those who followed him were mediocrities, and copyists. After him, it was as though music had to start all over again, however difficult it was to come up with something new. Someone had to pick up the pieces and try to find a new way. It took years before I managed to find a new direction.” 

Vander’s new artistic direction involved the creation of an entirely new language called Kobaïan, which provide the lyrics for most of his music. This rather guttural language has two versions – a courtly or priestly style and a more colloquial style. Zeuhl, for example, means "celestial" in Kobaian. “French wasn’t expressive enough for the sound of the music I had in my head." Although born in France, I’m not entirely surprised that his family were German and Polish. His music is not in the least bit French, with its towering Wagnerian visions. When other Prog Rockers were floating in hippy euphoria, Magma were considerably harder-edged. Their visions of hope come through conflict and struggle, which may explain why John Lydon, ex-punk turned almost Prog rocker with PiL, likes them.

Like Orff and Stravinsky, he has drawn inspiration from pagan, “particularly Indo-European and Nordic” sources, and told me that in his country estate he and his friends practise pagan rituals for the turning of the seasons. Even though he has never made much money, he explained that the mother of a fan he helped out - “he was drifting and I suggested he take up organic farming” - gifted him a large property as a Christmas present. “If you never compromise in your art, eventually the fates are kind to you.”

One of the roadies on tour with the band in the mid-Seventies said it was “the most terrifying experience of my life”. While Vander was a pagan, the bass player Jannik Top (at the time they were arguably the best rhythm section in the world) was following the ancient Tibetan religion of Bön.

Vander told me the stories I’d heard, of hotel rooms mysteriously set on fire and other weirdness, were mostly true. “One time we had done a concert in Ibiza and I was swimming and suddenly couldn’t move, as though I was frozen. The same thing happened to another musician at exactly the same time who was also swimming. We were both rescued, but when he met Jannik he had the band’s symbol scratched into his arms.” Having your bass player practising ritual magic, with some almost deadly apparent effects, was not conducive to good band relations and Top left.

These days Top still sometimes comes back to guest with the band, but is "more introverted in style than before", according to Vander. I still missed Top's astonishing playing last night, or rather the chemistry he used to have with Vander, good as Phillipe Bussonet was. The vibe player Benoit Alziary was on good form too, even if he was phoning in his performance from a cocktail bar in Alpha Centauri. Vander’s wife Stella led a trio of Kobaian sirens to unearthly effect. Vander remains in a class of his own, his muscular drumming as precise as ever, even if the intensity of the band was slightly diminished, perhaps fortunately for those of us hoping to avoid astral travelling. (As for that out-of-body experience, apparently this happened reasonably often.  “A friend of ours recently thought he had turned into a bird and was able to fly.”)

While Vander, now 61, has prolifically been producing albums either under the Magma label or as The Offering, a more jazzy outfit, there remain numerous, often grandiose projects he hopes to realise, particularly for orchestra, for which he says he needs “a mad king of Bavaria”, referring to Wagner’s great benefactor. Certainly his tonal, apocalyptic music is out-of-step with the well subsidised French avant-garde establishment, personified by Pierre Boulez.

He has already written what will be his swansong, “The Story Of Zero". “I wrote it in 1977," he explains, "and haven’t recorded it. When I do, it will be the last thing I do." Last night, Vander was premiering material from his 36th album, out next month: more tuneful, laid-back music. His titanic journey into inner space has had a stop-off at an oasis of relative calm somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

For more contemporary music at the Barbican, book here.

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