Michel Mailhe et Bernard Meyer - Le Bateau Ivre (1979)

I want to continue on with the series of french rarities I mentioned pre-alpha. This is about as french as it gets, with poetry from Rimbaud (of course) on top of wonderful proggy music by Bernard Meyer, I daresay it would be difficult to enjoy unless you are either french or a francophile. Similar obviously to what the group Catharsis did on the same theme. Rimbaud is a true hero for the French, he wrote only a handful of books (incl. this "Le bateau ivre," the drunk ship) and then abandoned literature at 20, to become a true adventurer in Indonesia, Yemen, and Africa, before dying young at 37 of cancer, of all things. Not only are his works incredible (esp. une saison en enfer - a season in hell), and highly influential in France, they deal with the kind of debauched lifestyle that harkens forward to the rock stars of today, a big factor in their success at the time too.

As much as I love french poetry though, I gotta say it's a shame we can't separate the speech from the music when it's of this calibre. There is a lot of variety in the compositions here, with a nice pleasing rock style to it-- similar to Janko Nilović or Laurent Petitgirard. All of the composing is credited to Bernard Meyer, with the exception of the Jacques Brel poem (this was done by Ange too, wasn't it?) Strangely each composition's title is different from the poem so I included both.

In fact I primarily bought this for the remarkable cover painting, which I include in toto. Credit to un certain Jean-Pierre Blanchard for the very three-dimensional and structural style of the troweled-on paint. I've said before what a lost art this was-- creating graphics for LP covers. Now with the amazing pollux for help we can get some really awesome high resolution scans of the art - check out the work he has done on all the covers using a small scanner and photoshop to repair the images.

Credits:
Poumy Arnaud - batterie
Alan Jones - basse
Bernard Meyer - guitares, basse, synthetiseur
Claude Meyer - Percussions (1,2)
Jean-Robert Rossi - orgue, synth
Jean-Claude Touzet - guitarre electrique
Peinture - Jean-Pierre Blanchard

Track 2
Poeme de Guy Demaysoncel - Femme de longtemps, Tentative de Poeme;
Musique de Meyer: Catherine M



Instrumental intro to the side-long bateau ivre:


Stay tuned to our show because there's a lot still coming, some more french material, some british jazz-rock, then back to my country of Germany to complete a few bands and a huge progressive masterpiece that I'm dying to feature, all guaranteed rarities of the highest calibre. One album I mentioned earlier, that's so rare it doesn't exist, I will not even post about given the fact of its nonexistence.
Unless I get a lot of requests for it.