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 philosophy, 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.
