A much shorter version of the following will appear in a future issue of the bimonthly magazine, the Idler:
These days Breton folk music rarely travels east of Rennes or south of Nantes, let alone north of Roscoff. Radio 2’s flagship folk programme devotes airtime to francophone artists from Louisiana and Quebec, and yet it ignores cutting-edge musicians in France itself. Too often Breton folk music is only heard in a bland commodified form best suited to tourists. In stark contrast, fifty years ago Breton artists were headlining rock festivals and selling out concert halls. This was their moment, partly attributable to the prevailing political climate but primarily because one man came to embody Brittany’s centuries old struggle to reassert its cultural, ethnic and governmental identity. The self-assuredness, relative prosperity and unique regional autonomy of Brittany today is largely attributable to tectonic shifts in Breton culture half a century ago, with music driving fundamental change inside Brittany and across France as a whole.
On Quiberon some twenty years ago I saw the folk group Tri Yann. They looked and sounded like the superannuated incarnation of a once cool band, all beer bellies, tired gags and pointless reworkings of one-time crowd-pleasers. It was hard to imagine these guys once raising the roof at the Fête de Lutte Ouvrière, their audience of pogoing Trots planning permanent revolution to the thundering sound of heavily amplified bagpipes. Back in the second half of the ’seventies Breton music was on a roll, matched only by the surge of creative energy in Ireland that saw Planxty and the Chieftains enjoy rock star status: the more sensitive musicians both sides of the border endeavoured to transcend sectarianism, locating an instinctive nationalism in the patriotism of the past. Conversely, Welsh language songwriters embraced the here and now, albeit addressing only a tiny audience. The Scots folk scene fused a focus on historic grievances with trenchant social commentary on the contemporary urban experience. In England folk rock was a spent force, obliterated by punk. Pioneers like Ashley Hutchings and Richard Thompson were nursing their wounds and recharging their batteries. In a turbulent decade they and their peers had no overt political agenda other than what might loosely be termed a progressive nostalgia. English folk rock had for the present run out of options, but the same was clearly not the case in Brittany – enter the musician, folklorist, campaigner and poet Alan Stivell.
Now in his eighties, Alan Stivell grew up in the Finistère town of Gorin. As a child Stivell learnt to play his father’s creation, the ‘Celtic harp’, and other genuinely traditional instruments. Teenage exile in Paris left him a man with a mission, intent on resurrecting the music of his native Brittany. Stivell recorded on local record labels, became a familiar face on the French folk club circuit and surfed the zeitgeist of ’sixties change, but with little success – in Paris and London a harp, an over-serious stage presence and an impenetrable language left fans bemused and indifferent. Breton audiences applauded one of their own, but few found Stivell’s respectful interpretations in any way unique. In England Stivell listened to amplified folk rockers like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, but chose not to go fully electric when forming his first band. Instead, he fused acoustic instruments – Celtic harp, fiddle, pipes and bagpipes (bombarde and biniou) – with drums, bass, organ and the Fender Stratocaster of virtuoso guitarist Dan Ar Bras.
Stivell’s first record on a major label sold well in France, but the following two albums transformed his career. Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique is an artistic tour de force. Enduring and endlessly revealing, the LP accords healthy respect to the indigenous music of the ‘Celtic nations’ while at the same time embracing modernity in its arrangement, instrumentation and production; not least Stivell’s ‘Gaeltacht’ synthesis of Irish, Scots and Manx tunes, which takes up all of side two. The record fixed Brittany on the global musical map, fired up successive generations of Celtic harp players, and signalled a fresh form of fusion music within an established folk tradition. From a quiet, reflective, ambient beginning Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique becomes an extraordinarily powerful piece of music – in short, it rocks. Stivell now had an impressive body of work to take on the road. Ar Bras was a thrilling foil to Stivell’s mastery of the harp and assorted pipes, although ironically this was not evident on the second transformative album, À l’Olympia. From Jacques Brel onwards, recording a live album at the 9th arrondissement’s Olympia Hall was obligatoire for every serious chanteur. On 28 February 1972 Stivell and Ar Bras turned the volume down, let the music do the work, encouraged polite applause not rock’n’roll frenzy, and in performance and choice of material (notably an English language rendition of Ireland’s paean to the 1916 uprising, ‘The Foggy Dew’) set out to attract a wider audience. Astonishingly, sales of À l’Olympia were soon well over two million, with the rousing ‘Tri Martolod’ quickly established as a signature anthem for Alan Stivell and for every high-profile Breton singer since.
Stivell hastily released two further albums, both well received, and then set out to replicate the commercial and critical success of À l’Olympia. E Dulen/À Dublin was recorded at the Irish capital’s National Stadium over two nights in November 1974 and released early the following year. The dynamics were very different from the previous live album, with loud audience appreciation, stronger vocals, organ and electric guitar high in the mix and a six-piece pipe band filling out the sound as the set reached its climax. Stivell still played and sung alone, and his band sounded like no other mishmash of plugged-in folkies, but the appeal to mainstream rock fans was obvious. This was evident from the large venues Stivell performed in to promote his new record: in London he played the Royal Festival Hall at the start of 1975 and the Royal Albert Hall at the end. On both occasions stewards failed to stop Breton flags being draped from the boxes and arm-in-arm crowds dancing in the aisles. At that summer’s festivals Stivell enjoyed top billing in a final hurrah for progressive rock before punk swept aside the pomp and dry ice. In the decades that followed Stivell’s appeal to prog rockers appeared more obvious, his compositions and performances becoming ever more elaborate, extended and pretentious. But back at the National Stadium late in 1974, Alan Stivell offered a unique blend of excitement, protest, musicianship and gravitas: a cerebral folk singer with hard-rocking sidemen articulating the concerns and preoccupations of young Bretons, and embracing a radical agenda rooted in environmental activism and the presumption of Celtic subjection to metropolitan colonialism.
In Brittany, as in Corsica, Québec, Ulster and the Basque Country, the 1970s was a turbulent time. Unlike Spain and Northern Ireland political violence was episodic not endemic. Breton separatists railed against Gaullist government initiatives to redefine Brittany’s historic boundaries and capital. The tactics of a small militant body like the Front de libération de la Bretagne generated scant support, but not the complaint that Brittany was penalised by a French state indifferent to traditionally low levels of income and investment. Successive oil spills and the construction of a pressurised water reactor in Finistère fuelled large and often violent demonstrations by young environmental protestors. Language was the other key issue, addressed only when Brittany secured genuine autonomy and a sympathetic regional administration could take concrete measures to assuage local concerns over bilingual education, signage and media. In due course a traditional dependence on fishing, farming and tourism would recede as accelerated public and private investment sought to kill with kindness incipient nationalism and eco-activism: twenty-first century Brittany is one of France’s most prosperous regions. Not that separatism has ever wholly disappeared, rooted as it is in Breton exceptionalism. Separatists have always defined themselves as internationalist, identifying strongly with post-colonial nations in the developing world, and above all, as pan-Celtic. Thus FLB militants in the 1970s maintained close contact with Irish Republicans, while extending Celtic solidarity to their Corsican comrades and to ETA.
Alan Stivell kept advocates of an armed struggle at a distance, but he found himself in the unique position of presenting Breton nationalism to a global audience. Brittany was experiencing a cultural renaissance, embracing literature and the visual arts as well as music. Stivell’s record sales and sold-out concerts made him the voice of a new and powerful message: that a proud and freshly confident Brittany could assert itself as a beacon of hope for oppressed nations in the global south as well as either side of the Iron Curtain. This was Brittany as the epicentre of pioneering environmentalism, cross-border solidarity with the dispossessed and a worldwide struggle against injustice and inequality. The emphasis was on positivity, with no thought of recrimination and revenge: ‘We shall keep our friendship with the people of France/But we shall break down those shameful barriers which prevent us from looking across the sea/Those boundaries which keep us away from our closest brothers/In Wales, Scotland and Ireland.’
The words were from ‘Delivrance’, a poem deliberately chanted in French not Breton and replicated in English on the back sleeve of the British release of E Dulen/À Dublin (the cover simply stated Stivell, as if no more was needed than his name and a blurred shot of him leading dancers around the National Stadium). ‘Delivrance’ was a promise to the downtrodden of Spain, Mali, Chile, Indo China, and indeed all ‘the peoples of the planet Earth’ that out of the Breton skies would come a ‘cleansing rain’ to purify a ‘devastated world’ and sweep away all totems of injustice. In Dublin soaring anthemic guitar chords from Dan Ar Bras and a powerful riff from organist Pascal Stive prefaced Stivell’s crowd-stirring vision of universal freedom and Celtic emancipation. It’s clear the crowd went wild, even if only a handful understood what he was saying. The gist of Stivell’s message was clear, and this was after all Ireland in 1974, a year of appalling violence north and south – for the crowd of two thousand an implicit call to sweep away the border was bound to go down well.
With hindsight it’s clear that 1974-5 marked the apotheosis of Alan Stivell’s long career. Younger, more adventurous musicians took advantage of a changed dynamic within Brittany. Stivell, the one-time pioneer of fusion music, ignored rock’s remarkable capacity to keep reinventing itself. Instead, he double downed on the music that had brought him so much success; but in so doing he failed to rediscover the subtlety and freshness that marked recordings like Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique. His compositions contrived to be both epic and formulaic. The next generation embraced punk and rap, refashioning Breton music for a wider audience. The likes of Stivell and Ar Bras appeared old and anachronistic, and so did their fans.
The 1960s and 1970s grew ever more remote from the Brittany of a new millenium, and yet those decades had proved vital for an assertion of regional – national – identity: Breton nationalism had been reclaimed from the right and refashioned as a progressive force for good in the world. Stivell and his fellow musicians articulated that fundamental shift in how Brittany saw itself relative to France and to the wider world. If this was a revolution then, as in Québec, it was a quiet revolution: over time once powerful separatist forces were deradicalized by a central administration no longer instinctively hostile to an assertive périphérie. A taming of Breton political ambition was paralleled in the arts, now seen as complementing not challenging metropolitan cultural life; here was a new norm of parallel identities, as in Québec, to which Alan Stivell had made a unique and powerful contribution.
