{"id":256,"date":"2024-09-03T09:21:43","date_gmt":"2024-09-03T09:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=256"},"modified":"2024-09-03T09:21:43","modified_gmt":"2024-09-03T09:21:43","slug":"when-bagpipes-rocked-the-world-alan-stivell-and-the-making-of-modern-brittany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2024\/09\/03\/when-bagpipes-rocked-the-world-alan-stivell-and-the-making-of-modern-brittany\/","title":{"rendered":"When bagpipes rocked the world – Alan Stivell and the making of modern Brittany"},"content":{"rendered":"

A much shorter version of the following will appear in a future issue of the bimonthly magazine, the Idler<\/em>:<\/p>\n

These days Breton folk music rarely travels east of Rennes or south of Nantes, let alone north of Roscoff.\u00a0 Radio 2\u2019s flagship folk programme devotes airtime to francophone artists from Louisiana and Quebec, and yet it ignores cutting-edge musicians in France itself.\u00a0 Too often Breton folk music is only heard in a bland commodified form best suited to tourists.\u00a0 In stark contrast, fifty years ago Breton artists were headlining rock festivals and selling out concert halls.\u00a0 This was their moment, partly attributable to the prevailing political climate but primarily because one man came to embody Brittany\u2019s centuries old struggle to reassert its cultural, ethnic and governmental identity.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

On Quiberon some twenty years ago I saw the folk group Tri Yann.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was hard to imagine these guys once raising the roof at the F\u00eate de Lutte Ouvri\u00e8re<\/em>, their audience of pogoing Trots planning permanent revolution to the thundering sound of heavily amplified bagpipes.\u00a0 Back in the second half of the \u2019seventies 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.\u00a0 Conversely, Welsh language songwriters embraced the here and now, albeit addressing only a tiny audience.\u00a0 The Scots folk scene fused a focus on historic grievances with trenchant social commentary on the contemporary urban experience.\u00a0 In England folk rock was a spent force, obliterated by punk.\u00a0 Pioneers like Ashley Hutchings and Richard Thompson were nursing their wounds and recharging their batteries.\u00a0 In a turbulent decade they and their peers had no overt political agenda other than what might loosely be termed a progressive nostalgia.\u00a0 English folk rock had for the present run out of options, but the same was clearly not the case in Brittany \u2013 enter the musician, folklorist, campaigner and poet Alan Stivell.<\/p>\n

Now in his eighties, Alan Stivell grew up in the Finist\u00e8re town of Gorin.\u00a0 As a child Stivell learnt to play his father\u2019s creation, the \u2018Celtic harp\u2019, and other genuinely traditional instruments.\u00a0 Teenage exile in Paris left him a man with a mission, intent on resurrecting the music of his native Brittany.\u00a0 Stivell recorded on local record labels, became a familiar face on the French folk club circuit and surfed the zeitgeist of \u2019sixties change, but with little success \u2013 in Paris and London a harp, an over-serious stage presence and an impenetrable language left fans bemused and indifferent.\u00a0 Breton audiences applauded one of their own, but few found Stivell\u2019s respectful interpretations in any way unique.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Instead, he fused acoustic instruments \u2013 Celtic harp, fiddle, pipes and bagpipes (bombarde<\/em> and biniou<\/em>) \u2013 with drums, bass, organ and the Fender Stratocaster of virtuoso guitarist Dan Ar Bras.<\/p>\n

Stivell\u2019s first record on a major label sold well in France, but the following two albums transformed his career.\u00a0 Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique<\/em> is an artistic tour de force.\u00a0 Enduring and endlessly revealing, the LP accords healthy respect to the indigenous music of the \u2018Celtic nations\u2019 while at the same time embracing modernity in its arrangement, instrumentation and production; not least Stivell\u2019s \u2018Gaeltacht\u2019 synthesis of Irish, Scots and Manx tunes, which takes up all of side two.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 From a quiet, reflective, ambient beginning Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique<\/em> becomes an extraordinarily powerful piece of music \u2013 in short, it rocks.\u00a0 Stivell now had an impressive body of work to take on the road.\u00a0 Ar Bras was a thrilling foil to Stivell\u2019s mastery of the harp and assorted pipes, although ironically this was not evident on the second transformative album, \u00c0 l\u2019Olympia<\/em>.\u00a0 From Jacques Brel onwards, recording a live album at the 9th arrondissement<\/em>\u2019s Olympia Hall was obligatoire<\/em> for every serious chanteur<\/em>.\u00a0 On 28 February 1972 Stivell and Ar Bras turned the volume down, let the music do the work, encouraged polite applause not rock\u2019n\u2019roll frenzy, and in performance and choice of material (notably an English language rendition of Ireland\u2019s paean to the 1916 uprising, \u2018The Foggy Dew\u2019) set out to attract a wider audience.\u00a0 Astonishingly, sales of \u00c0 l\u2019Olympia<\/em> were soon well over two million, with the rousing \u2018Tri Martolod\u2019 quickly established as a signature anthem for Alan Stivell and for every high-profile Breton singer since.<\/p>\n

Stivell hastily released two further albums, both well received, and then set out to replicate the commercial and critical success of \u00c0 l\u2019Olympia<\/em>.\u00a0 E Dulen<\/em>\/\u00c0 Dublin<\/em> was recorded at the Irish capital\u2019s National Stadium over two nights in November 1974 and released early the following year.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 On both occasions stewards failed to stop Breton flags being draped from the boxes and arm-in-arm crowds dancing in the aisles.\u00a0 At that summer\u2019s festivals Stivell enjoyed top billing in a final hurrah for progressive rock before punk swept aside the pomp and dry ice.\u00a0 In the decades that followed Stivell\u2019s appeal to prog rockers appeared more obvious, his compositions and performances becoming ever more elaborate, extended and pretentious.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In Brittany, as in Corsica, Qu\u00e9bec, Ulster and the Basque Country, the 1970s was a turbulent time.\u00a0 Unlike Spain and Northern Ireland political violence was episodic not endemic.\u00a0 Breton separatists railed against Gaullist government initiatives to redefine Brittany\u2019s historic boundaries and capital.\u00a0 The tactics of a small militant body like the Front de lib\u00e9ration de la Bretagne<\/em> generated scant support, but not the complaint that Brittany was penalised by a French state indifferent to traditionally low levels of income and investment.\u00a0 Successive oil spills and the construction of a pressurised water reactor in Finist\u00e8re fuelled large and often violent demonstrations by young environmental protestors.\u00a0 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\u2019s most prosperous regions.\u00a0 Not that separatism has ever wholly disappeared, rooted as it is in Breton exceptionalism.\u00a0 Separatists have always defined themselves as internationalist, identifying strongly with post-colonial nations in the developing world, and above all, as pan-Celtic.\u00a0 Thus FLB<\/em> militants in the 1970s maintained close contact with Irish Republicans, while extending Celtic solidarity to their Corsican comrades and to ETA.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Brittany was experiencing a cultural renaissance, embracing literature and the visual arts as well as music.\u00a0 Stivell\u2019s 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.\u00a0 This was Brittany as the epicentre of pioneering environmentalism, cross-border solidarity with the dispossessed and a worldwide struggle against injustice and inequality.\u00a0 The emphasis was on positivity, with no thought of recrimination and revenge: \u2018We 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

The words were from \u2018Delivrance<\/em>\u2019, a poem deliberately chanted in French not Breton and replicated in English on the back sleeve of the British release of E Dulen<\/em>\/\u00c0 Dublin<\/em> (the cover simply stated Stivell<\/em>, as if no more was needed than his name and a blurred shot of him leading dancers around the National Stadium).\u00a0 \u2018Delivrance<\/em>\u2019 was a promise to the downtrodden of Spain, Mali, Chile, Indo China, and indeed all \u2018the peoples of the planet Earth\u2019 that out of the Breton skies would come a \u2018cleansing rain\u2019 to purify a \u2018devastated world\u2019 and sweep away all totems of injustice.\u00a0 In Dublin soaring anthemic guitar chords from Dan Ar Bras and a powerful riff from organist Pascal Stive prefaced Stivell\u2019s crowd-stirring vision of universal freedom and Celtic emancipation.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear the crowd went wild, even if only a handful understood what he was saying.\u00a0 The gist of Stivell\u2019s message was clear, and this was after all Ireland in 1974, a year of appalling violence north and south \u2013 for the crowd of two thousand an implicit call to sweep away the border was bound to go down well.<\/p>\n

With hindsight it\u2019s clear that 1974-5 marked the apotheosis of Alan Stivell\u2019s long career.\u00a0 Younger, more adventurous musicians took advantage of a changed dynamic within Brittany.\u00a0 Stivell, the one-time pioneer of fusion music, ignored rock\u2019s remarkable capacity to keep reinventing itself.\u00a0 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<\/em>.\u00a0 His compositions contrived to be both epic and formulaic.\u00a0 The next generation embraced punk and rap, refashioning Breton music for a wider audience.\u00a0 The likes of Stivell and Ar Bras appeared old and anachronistic, and so did their fans.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 national \u2013 identity: Breton nationalism had been reclaimed from the right and refashioned as a progressive force for good in the world.\u00a0 Stivell and his fellow musicians articulated that fundamental shift in how Brittany saw itself relative to France and to the wider world.\u00a0 If this was a revolution then, as in Qu\u00e9bec, it was a quiet revolution: over time once powerful separatist forces were deradicalized by a central administration no longer instinctively hostile to an assertive p\u00e9riph\u00e9rie<\/em>.\u00a0 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 Qu\u00e9bec, to which Alan Stivell had made a unique and powerful contribution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Radio 2\u2019s flagship folk programme devotes airtime to francophone artists from Louisiana and Quebec, and yet it … <\/p>\n

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