Different Drummer: Magma

For a quarter of a century Christian Vander’s Magma have been engaged in a musical quest that frames visions of apocalypse and redemption with bulldozing experimental fusion. In this exclusive interview, Vander talks to Paul Stump about invented languages, John Coltrane, children’s songs and the striving towards the light

I'm sitting in a tiny theatre in Paris waiting so see my first performance by (and conduct my first interview with) Christian Vander. Magma. The name of the group that Vander has led, on and off, for much of the last quarter of a century is an appropriate tag for his music; suggestive of seismic activity, volcanic eruptions, torrential flows of molten lava cooling into huge edifices of solid rock. In those 25 years, Vander has recorded the most towering and ambitious music ever to be damned by the label 'Progressive rock'. But the audience at this particular Paris show isn't made up of the acid-casualties, Kobaïan kompletists and fortysomething Prog nostalgia freaks one might expect. Instead, I'm surrounded by sickeningly winsome under-fives. Vander's latest project, A Tous Les Enfants, isn't another brontosaurial cosmic epic. It is, as the title suggests, a show for kids, "I don't just write Magma-type stuff, you know," he says, fixing me with his spookily intense state. But isn't this a bit offbeat, even for you, Christian? "No", he says mildly. "All my music has at its heart a logical progression. I just write it for different occasions. There are various aspects of it. At the moment I just happen to be writing for children. And it's a real pleasure performing to them…"

The mythology that has built up around Vander, of a grim, obsessive paramilitary, is an apt counterpoint to the phantasmagoria he has catalogued in his work. But like all myths, it admixes a little more fiction than fact. And despite two and a half decades of unrelenting media enmity of the sort that vilifies pre-punk 70s rock (and groups like Magma in particular) as a kind of giant historical aberration, the myth still has a following. The response to a brief Magma name check in The Wire last year indicated that it wasn't only the Ambient rediscoveries of Krautrock (so admirably outlined in these pages by Julian Cope in The Wire 130) that warranted a journey back in time and space: it was time to reopen the files on another Euro-rock legend long since lingered as one of pop's bêtes noires.

"Ask me anything you want," he says. "I'll try and help." But it isn't easy the myth gets in the way. I expected to meet a wild-eyed, polysyllabic fount of Gallic enigmas, but the hirsute Vander, for all his musical excesses, is a remarkably reticent man and tends towards shy generalisations in his answers. "I don't understand where everyone gets this image of me from," he complains.

Maybe from the score-or-so albums, recorded under various pseudonyms (Magma simply being the best known), with which Vander has produced some of Europe's most relentlessly bizarre popular music. While 'popular' may not mean what it once did to Vander (and Magma were very big in Europe in the 70s), his esoteric odyssey continues.

Magma's formation, in 1969, coincided with the belated consecration of a French rock culture. Fertilised more by indigenous folk and parlour song as well as the musics of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, French pop songs only paid comparatively token homage to the jazz and blues elements so central to Anglophone pop, and it was this that the roisterous bouleversements of 60s youth culture sought to subvert in their music. But in discovering The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, putative French rockers (the better ones, in any case) found the traditional bonds on their musical upbringing more of an inspiration than an encumbrance. Additionally, there was French jazz (largely, but not entirely, independent of the French chanson heritage) to draw on as well. And so, as Situationism sought to dismantle the Spectacle, the French rock scene set about rearranging the pieces in some stunning musical hybrids all but unknown to British audiences: Ange (Brel versus Genesis), Barricade (Zazou 'n' Racaille before the event), Etron Fou Leloublan (Folk Rock In Opposition), and, inevitably, Magma. As Germany's technocrat post-war miracle and resultant urban alienation fed the futuristic, hardware-oriented inspiration of the Krautrock groups, so multicultural vibrancy and instability of 60s Paris informed French rock's own Year Zero of 1969. But to Vander's reckoning, only one year counts.