We know the (perhaps apocryphal) nonsense attributed to John Lennon: “French rock is like English wine.” Let’s answer him without chauvinism: far from being piquet, our pop is on the contrary equal to the best Scottish whiskeys. But it is true that it is sometimes in the margins of official history that we should look for our unjustly overlooked geniuses.
Alain Kan is one of them. An improbable mix of Aristide Bruant and Johnny Thunders, he made his debut at the Alcazar under the pseudonym Amédée Jr., a nickname found by Françoise Sagan. He loves records by Lou Reed and David Bowie, with whom he claims to have slept. At the beginning of the 1970s, this androgynous and caustic boy switched to glam-rock and signed a handful of improbable albums, including Fortunately in France we don’t do drugs – wishful thinking, when we know Alain Kan’s tenacious addiction to heroin. Both tortured (as a child, he was raped by a peasant) and well connected to the musical scene (his brother-in-law is the singer Christophe), Kan navigates troubled waters until a mysterious event: April 14, 1990 he takes the metro at Châtelet station (or Rue de la Pompe, depending on the version). No one ever saw him again.
Ten years before his death, he had written a novel that remained unpublished, The Widowed Child, which Séguier editions are publishing today. It’s a discovery. Certainly stylistically inferior to the cult NovöVision by Yves Adrien, closer to Electric cherubs by Guillaume Serp, The Widowed Child will please those nostalgic for the Palace and Alain Pacadis (who appears in the book, “in need of young ephebes”). It’s about a toxic relationship between a punk and a son from a good family who lives on Avenue Foch – the latter will leave his parents’ posh building to be interned in a psychiatric hospital. Love stories usually end badly, and it’s not Alain Kan who would have said the opposite, he who had Fred Chichin, future founder of Rita Mitsouko, as a musician…
Fateful meeting with Idi Amin Dada
Another funny bird: Jean-Yves Labat de Rossi, aka Mr Frog. In 1977, a priori, things are going well for him. He has just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. A pioneer in the field of electroacoustics, close to Todd Rundgren, he lives in Woodstock. Unfortunately, a quarrel with the omnipotent Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan’s manager) ruins him in the United States. A producer offers him $250,000 to go to Uganda to record a new version of Little Drummer Boy to Idi Amin Dada – when he is not throwing the bad guys to the crocodiles, the dictator likes to play the accordion to relax. Neither one nor two, the intrepid Labat de Rossi lands in Africa. A French diplomat warns him but he doesn’t care. He manages to meet Robert Astles, known as Major Bob or the White Rat, the president’s henchman. Received at the Cape Town Villas, he meets Amin Dada, leaving for this musical interlude. Labat de Rossi rehearses with his orchestra. Everything is bathed in oil.
And then the tide turns: the regime has still not digested the documentary made by Barbet Schroeder three years earlier, the French musician is suspected of being in reality an American spy and the terrible SRB State Research Bureau imprisons him in the camp by Nakasero. Our man suffered corporal punishment there and witnessed massacres with machetes. His last hour seems to have arrived. The day before his execution, miraculously, he was transferred to the Kampala police station, and from there, his synth under his arm, he was able to take a plane to France…
Now in his seventies, Labat de Rossi has been the boss of Ad Vitam Records, the classical music label, since 2003. Rock Me Amin is his first book, but he demonstrates real talent as a writer, recounting his Ugandan epic with an intact memory and a twirling pen. Anecdotes, settings, secondary characters, humor, everything is there. The pop slang language is unique, very inventive, less close to Céline than to Frédéric Dard. We will still warn sensitive souls: this story is flowery to say the least and, in terms of male gauze, Labat de Rossi would make Gérard de Villiers look like Patrick Modiano. That was also the libertarian spirit of the 1970s, and Mr Frog remained a child of his time. He is completely excused: writing a chapter of his Memoirs and producing a 300-page adventure novel, you have to do it. Not so bad, French rock!
The Widowed Child, by Alain Kan. Séguier, 201 p., €21.
Rock Me Amin, by Jean-Yves Labat de Rossi. Arthaud, 298 p., €19.90.
.