Rock And Hard Places Part 11

THE RAIN STARTS gently, pattering on the roof of The Cranberries' dressing trailer like polite applause. There are a few half-guilty glances and giggles as Dolores O'Riordan and her band realise how perfectly they've timed things. They were the first band to play on this ominously overcast Sat.u.r.day, and now they're free to make their escape. As they congratulate themselves and commiserate with us, the rain builds to a thunderous ovation.

"Here," says Fergal Lawler, proferring a leftover bottle of red wine. "You're going to need it."

THERE HAVE BEEN better-organised car accidents and less self-important Soviet funerals. We've only been at Woodstock '94 a matter of hours when it dawns on us that we may be witnessing-nay, actually partic.i.p.ating in-the greatest American fiasco since the Bay of Pigs.

Back down in New York City the previous day, the usually mercilessly cheerful television weather forecasters could not have appeared more grim if they'd delivered their reports dressed in hooded robes and carrying scythes. So apocalyptic were their predictions for the Woodstock weekend that I'd been apprehensive about venturing upstate without several cubits of oak, and manuals on elementary boat construction and animal husbandry.

I had tried to reason with my travelling companions, Vicki Bruce of Island records and Vox Vox photographer Ed Sirrs. I pointed out that we were comfortably ensconced in a fine hotel on Park Avenue, that Woodstock '94 was going to be broadcast live on pay-per-view television, that we could cover the event just as thoroughly while staying dry, clean and within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of Manhattan and if they didn't tell anyone, neither would I. They didn't listen. They thought I was joking. photographer Ed Sirrs. I pointed out that we were comfortably ensconced in a fine hotel on Park Avenue, that Woodstock '94 was going to be broadcast live on pay-per-view television, that we could cover the event just as thoroughly while staying dry, clean and within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of Manhattan and if they didn't tell anyone, neither would I. They didn't listen. They thought I was joking.

And so we join the 300,000 befuddled souls gathered in these New York state paddocks. We are being rained on, p.i.s.sed about, ripped off, spattered with slime and generally tormented like no other a.s.sembly in human history, with the arguable exception of General Haig's 4th Army, and at least the footsoldiers freezing in the trenches of the Somme had been able to get a drink, and hadn't had to listen to Del Amitri.

For no, we cannot get a drink. There is no alcohol available on site. Indeed, in the backstage press tent, we cannot even get a cup of coffee. Americans, while admittedly useful to have around if you're trying to liberate a continent, are the last people you should call if you're trying to organise a party. I've had more fun in Sweden. It would take a leaky press tent full of mutinously muddy, bored, annoyed and sober journalists three days to list everything that is wrong with Woodstock '94, and speaking as one of those journalists, I can report that our deliberations are exhaustive. In fact, the only area in which Woodstock '94 lives up to its declared ambitions of, like, bringing people together as one, man, is the manner in which scores of personal and professional British media rivalries are forgotten in the cause of a good self-pitying whinge. "This is h.e.l.l, isn't it?" announces one damp British writer to the a.s.sembled hackery, huddled in the press tent, our chairs sinking slowly but inexorably into the mud. "Utter f.u.c.king h.e.l.l."

There are jails which permit their inmates to get away with more than organisers allow the punters at this crazy, zany homage to the anarchic, devil-may-care, do-what-thou-wilt spirit of the original Woodstock. We are not allowed take our own food onto the site (well, the concession-holders jacking their prices a hundred percent and more over the odds are only trying to make a living). We may not spend US dollars (greenbacks have to be converted for festival scrip, the reason for which is a mystery to everyone). We are strictly forbidden tent pegs. At a festival at which tens of thousands have arrived expecting to camp out, this last edict verges on genius.

It's only Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It's going to get so much worse. We can tell. The rain is now hammering against the tent with all the ferocity of a vengeful G.o.d and, it has to be said, he'd have every excuse. Out in the fields in front of the stages, humanity is returning, literally and spiritually, to the primeval ooze.

THE MUSIC ON the Sat.u.r.day commences with a set by Joe c.o.c.ker, a veteran of the original Woodstock. He's touting the same act that he has been for thirty years, which is to say he still looks and sounds like he's shat himself and it's running down one leg. The crowd go mad, but Americans will clap at anything. Baseball, for example. As c.o.c.ker delivers "With A Little Help From My Friends" like it's being forced out of him with thumbscrews, I traverse the swamp to Woodstock's other stage.

Things here are, if anything, worse. I hadn't been expecting great things from Woodstock on a musical level, but nothing had prepared me for the horror of Zucchero in full flight. Zucchero is Italy's idea of a pop star, which explains why Italy, over the years, has been to rock'n'roll roughly what Rwanda has to package holidays. Zucchero resembles nothing so much as a drunk Albanian taxi driver in the process of emptying a karaoke bar. He is followed by Youssou N'Dour, today's token world music artiste, who is something of a stranger to Mr. Tune, and then The Band, or part thereof. They play for a week, then bring on someone from The Grateful Dead, and play for another month.

With blood beginning to collect on my palms and visions of St. Francis dancing in my eyes, I strike out for the press tent, hoping to reach sanctuary before night falls and jackals begin emerging from their lairs to pick off the fallen and unwary. By now, the walk from the South Stage to the backstage area is at best ankle deep, and at worst capable of swallowing troops, horses and cannons. On the liquefying hills and slopes along the way, those who have surrendered to the conditions hold mud toboggan races on stretchers stolen from the medical tents. Gangs of mud-covered vigilantes roam the site looking for clean newcomers to haul forcibly into the slime.

One forlorn form, naked but for a pair of shorts and an all-over suit of steaming slime, totters around in the downpour clutching a smudging, hand-written sign that reads "I Want Drugs." Alone in the middle of a vast mud lake, a drenched youth sits in a half-submerged deckchair, cradling a sodden hardback book, having clearly plumbed Colonel Kurtz-like depths of dementia. Woodstock now looks like the set of one of those nuclear armageddon films that were so big in the 80s, and I am walking through a crowd scene from the day after the bomb.

In the press tent, the atmosphere is souring further. Two distinct, mutually hostile camps have formed: i) the British media; ii) everyone else. The festival organisers think we're being a bit hard to please. "You have things like this in England, don't you?" asks one. "Yes," replies the journalist, without lifting his head out of his hands. "But with the one crucial difference that ours are, in some respects, any fun at all." The American media, meanwhile, charge around us foreign types, waving television cameras and tape recorders, asking us What We Think It All Means. "It's a bunch of bands playing in a field, it happens all the time in Europe, it doesn't mean anything," is one common response. "p.i.s.s off," is another.

Almost excitingly, from an Australian perspective, among the visiting press is Ian "Molly" Meldrum. Meldrum spent the 70s and 80s hosting a television rock programme called Countdown Countdown, on which he mumbled a great deal, crawled like a millipede cowering from sniper fire to anybody foreign or famous who deigned to turn up, and promoted a succession of desperately witless local acts. Countdown Countdown is often recalled with fondness by people who grew up in Australia during this time, in much the same way that people will, a few years down the road, laugh about a night in the cells. Call me humourless, but I don't think the man who delivered fame, however fleeting and local, to (for example) Kids In The Kitchen, Pseudo Echo, The Uncanny X-Men and Indecent Obsession at the expense of (say) The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Ed Kuepper and The Hummingbirds should get off quite so lightly. The thought of seizing his trademark cowboy hat and tramping it into the mud occurs to me, as does the idea of kicking away the crutches with which he's walking today. But no. He's here, and he's him, and between them that's punishment enough. is often recalled with fondness by people who grew up in Australia during this time, in much the same way that people will, a few years down the road, laugh about a night in the cells. Call me humourless, but I don't think the man who delivered fame, however fleeting and local, to (for example) Kids In The Kitchen, Pseudo Echo, The Uncanny X-Men and Indecent Obsession at the expense of (say) The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Ed Kuepper and The Hummingbirds should get off quite so lightly. The thought of seizing his trademark cowboy hat and tramping it into the mud occurs to me, as does the idea of kicking away the crutches with which he's walking today. But no. He's here, and he's him, and between them that's punishment enough.

Outside, the music is degenerating as fast as the weather. The North Stage hosts tedious crusties Blind Melon, tedious weightlifter Henry Rollins and tedious n.o.body Melissa Etheridge. These acts are introduced by a ridiculous bulls.h.i.tter in a tie-dyed t-shirt who spouts interminable cosmic drivel about how we're all "beautiful" and "making history, man." History is what he'll be if he comes within chair-throwing range of the press tent. I realise that, all things considered, I'm quite looking forward to Crosby, Stills & Nash, which is a new experience.

The only act to properly sum up the squalor of the weekend are Nine Inch Nails, who address the crowd, with commendable accuracy, as "miserable, muddy f.u.c.kheads." Reznor and company are plastered from head to foot in brown goo after a pre-show punch-up, and are a welcome torrent of cleansing venom. Their triumphantly misanthropic set ends with "Head Like A Hole" and a comprehensive demolition of their equipment. After that, Metallica's gruff barking, pointless widdly-widdly soloing and dim macho posing is only ever going to look a bit daft, and does. We beat a retreat to the strains of redoubtable heavy metal pantomime queens Aerosmith. How we chuckle at "Walk This Way" as we blunder through the dark, damp undergrowth in search of our car.

IT RAINS ALL night. The swimming pool in the middle of Pollace's Crystal Palace Resort in Catskill bursts its banks at about two. Me, Ed and Vicki sit on the porch behind one of our villas and drink too much. Pollace's Crystal Palace Resort is a kind of Italian-American Butlin's, a couple of dozen white weatherboard villas cl.u.s.tered around a tatty mermaid's grotto constructed of theatrical mache rocks and artificial waterfalls. The clientele, aside from us, consists of Italian-American families who each have a dozen wheelchair-bound grandparents and a thousand screaming children. The decor of the reception area resembles the plunder of inept archaeologists who've excavated a Bulgarian discotheque.

Still, the staff are friendly, and excited beyond reason that they have "you British press guys" staying with them.

"WOULD ANDREW MUELLER . . ."

It's six o'clock in the morning. Christ.

". . . PLEASE COME TO RECEPTION IMMEDIATELY . . ."

It's booming from the loudspeakers that sit on poles around the resort compound. It's some consolation that everyone else is being woken up by this.

"WE HAVE AUSTRALIA ON THE LINE."

What are they talking about? I stand unsteadily up and get hurriedly dressed; it's only by great good luck that I don't get my trousers over my head and my shirt around my knees. I squelch barefoot through the pouring rain in the dawn half-light to reception.

"There's this radio guy on the phone for you," beams the bloke at reception. "He's calling all the way from Australia!" He's beside himself. "Are you, like, famous or something?"

Not that I'm aware of. I exploit my celebrity as far as asking for a cup of black coffee, which the reception bloke positively sprints off to organise, and pick up the phone. It turns out to be a researcher from Radio National back in the old country, who's got my name and contact number from someone in London, and wants to know if I'd be okay to be interviewed about the Woodstock catastrophe by Philip Adams. Adams is a reliably amusing and acerbic commentator and columnist, and something of a childhood hero. On one hand, the idea of bantering on air with the great man is no problem at all. On the other, I'd prefer not to do it on the strength of two hours' sleep while sweating tequila through my palms.

"How's it going, Andrew?" comes Adams' unmistakable, sonorous drawl. And so, after years spent dreaming of just such a moment, the first word I speak to the distinguished broadcaster is, "s.h.i.thouse." "I can imagine," he laughs. "I've seen the pictures on television. Though if you could give us a slightly more tactful perspective once we start, I'd be grateful."

I get through it okay, suffused by the coffee provided by the receptionist, who smiles ecstatically and hops from foot to foot while the interview takes place. At the conclusion of an epically self-pitying rant wishing all the miseries of the pit upon Woodstock's organisers, Adams says, "Well, Andrew, you've acquired a most engaging mix of Australian cynicism and English detachment," which, until I get a better offer, will do as an epitaph.

Back at my villa, after two more hours' sleep, I am woken again, this time by a knock on the door. It's Ed Sirrs.

"I don't care," he announces, "if it means I never work in London again. But I am not going back to that terrible f.u.c.king place today."

Ed is no lightweight. He has braved the most violent of moshpits, the most inadequate of stagefront security, the most temperamental of musicians. He is probably the best live rock photographer working, and does not baulk at much. But his mind is made up, and I for one will not hold it against him.

Indeed, a few miles up the road, Vicki and I wish we'd had the same resolve. The entire Woodstock site now has the consistency and colour of French onion soup, but smells a good deal worse. You'd get further in a punt that you would in car. All the roads into the festival area are closed. We try to reason with a security guard, using the time-honoured means of waving our laminates and trying to sound as foreign and as important as possible. We claim to be Peter Gabriel's management, Bob Dylan's children and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' trombone section. "I don't care who you're here with," he tells us. "You can't drive a car where there ain't no road."

We're still seven miles from the gate when we abandon the car in a ditch by the road. A bit further along, some enterprising yokels from nearby farms are running a tractor shuttle from the point at which the road is closed. We pay a man with no front teeth and eyebrows on his cheeks ten dollars each for a lift as far as he can take us, which is to a roadblock four miles from the entrance. We walk the rest of the way, proceeding against a steady human tide-an exodus of filthy early leavers, refugees from the disaster occuring over the ridge. The only good news is that by the time we squelch into camp, we've missed The Allman Brothers and Traffic. I hadn't realised they were still alive.

"I'm not sure they are," says someone who saw them.

Surveying the now half-submerged press tent, it's clear that we've actually been quite lucky. There were some whose devotion to duty was such that they stayed until the end of Aerosmith's set, with the result that they weren't able to get out of the site at all, and had been forced to sleep here on whichever tables and chairs hadn't sunk down to the mesozoic layer. There is a Woodstock poster still clinging to one wall of the tent, bearing the festival slogan "3 Days of Peace and Music" in stars-and-stripes-coloured writing. Over the "3 Days," "Peace" and "Music," some sleepless soul has written, with feeling, in red marker pen, the words "f.u.c.k," "RIGHT" and "OFF."

Today's bill is no less dismal than yesterday's, featuring sets by The Neville Brothers, who I forget while I'm listening to them, Santana, during whose performance I swear I grow a beard, and Jimmy Cliff's All-Star Reggae Jam. There are few more frightening phrases in the language than "All-Star Reggae Jam." All three acts, though atrocious, play to large crowds, and I have to wonder how many of these people are so mired by the sludge that engulfs everything that they can't move even if they want to.

Cometh the hour, though, cometh some unlikely heroes. In the late afternoon, Green Day appear. Their daft Buzzc.o.c.k-ish pop romps are perfectly agreeable in and of themselves, but their singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, displays an instinctive understanding of what the weekend is about, or at least what the weekend has degenerated into. He goads two sections of the audience into a mudfight. This, inevitably, leads to an avalanche of earth landing on the stage itself, and the weekend's only stage invasion. Green Day's set is abruptly curtailed by venue security, but Billie Joe frees himself of their grip, runs back onto the stage and begins heaving great handfuls of mud back into the crowd, before being removed again by the bouncers who are supposedly protecting him. It's a fine, fine performance and one which, when replayed on the television monitors in the press tent, draws a heartfelt standing ovation from the by now almost hysterically irritated media.

It's on the North Stage today that Woodstock II achieves some sort of redemption-ironically, through a figure who famously snubbed the original Woodstock. Bob Dylan appears just as the clouds break, for the first time in forty-eight hours, to reveal an appropriately apocalyptic sunset. Behind the stage, it looks like the sky is on fire, and Dylan and his band rise to the backdrop. He delivers "It Ain't Me Babe," "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Masters Of War" with chilling conviction; where his voice these days often resembles an asthma sufferer blowing into a kazoo, tonight it's as startling and forceful as it must have sounded when he first imposed it on an unsuspecting rock'n'roll landscape. During "I Shall Be Released," his face, up on the giant stage-side monitors, looks transported and tear-struck, as if looking for escape from his myth in the raging red sky above us. The expression stays with him during "Highway 61 Revisited"; he now looks like a man with nowhere to run but the endless road ahead, and it's just about been worth coming here and putting up with all this nonsense to discover that Dylan, of all people, can still sing it like he means it.

THE ONLY WAY to get out afterwards is pay two inbred solvent-abusers a hundred dollars each for a lift in their van. I sit between them in the front, trying not to think too hard about the possibility of our ride ending in shallow graves in the surrounding forest. Our mercenary rescuers bicker about my directions to our stranded car.

"Hey," says one. "I think that's, like, near the t.i.tty bar."

"Yeah," says the other. "We could like, drop these guys off, and go to the t.i.tty bar, and spend all their money."

"Yeah," agrees the first. "That'd be, like, cool."

They have their radio tuned to Woodstock's on-site station, which is now playing highlights of Dylan's set. When "I Shall Be Released" comes on, I hum along, quietly.

14.

BASTILLE CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.

1968 revisited, Paris MARCH 1998.

IT'S INCREDIBLY EASY to make fun of the French, which is why so many people do. However, those who amuse themselves by deriding France's weird food, silly language, baffling cinema, interminable literature, tawdry politics and erratic military record, among other hilarious defects, rarely pause, amid their mirth, to consider a yet wider virtue of mocking the snail-chewers. Which is that deriding the French as a breed of shiftless, unhygienic, duplicitous, cheese-scoffing, white-flag-hoisting, stripy-shirted, beret-wearing, bicycling onion retailers is not merely amusing in and of itself. It is also, in a way that cannot be claimed of the ritualised insulting of any other identifiable ethnic grouping or nationality, utterly righteous.

This is because the French just don't give a c.r.a.p. They are completely, loftily, almost magnificently unupsettable-and on those rare occasions they give the impression that someone has succeeded in offending them, they're just pretending, as they know that this is even more annoying. In a truly logical world, France's national anthem would be-indisputably splendid though "La Ma.r.s.eillaise" is-Travis Tritt's "Here's A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)," perhaps arranged for the accordion. The slogan "Liberte, egalite, Fraternite" would actually translate as "Talk to the hand." The French are, to use the lovely word they surely coined just to describe themselves, insouciant. As such, they n.o.bly and generously serve as a global safety valve, a means by which all the world's chronically fractious and querulous peoples can let off steam without seriously scalding anybody. Mixed gatherings of different nationalities can be edgy affairs, everybody treading carefully around imagined or perceived sensitivities and resentments. It usually only takes one person to tell the joke about the difference between Frenchmen and toast, and before you can sing a bar of "It's a Small World After All," even the most previously tense of international soirees becomes a cacophony of hearty backslaps and insistent protestations that no, old chap, it's my round.

All of which is by way of buying time before confessing that the journey into France's revolutionary heritage recounted here, commissioned by The Face The Face on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the student revolt of 1968, stirred in your correspondent the budding of an understated, but unmistakable, Francophilic tendency. Vive, you infuriating contrarians. on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the student revolt of 1968, stirred in your correspondent the budding of an understated, but unmistakable, Francophilic tendency. Vive, you infuriating contrarians.

WERE THE POLLSTERS of Family Fortunes Family Fortunes to ask a hundred randomly selected riffraff what they most a.s.sociate with Paris, the odds are the to ask a hundred randomly selected riffraff what they most a.s.sociate with Paris, the odds are the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa to a 2CV that the greatest percentage would imagine a scene like this. In a hysterically baroque theatre near the Arc de Triomphe, a fashion show: next year's clothes hung on young women built like broomsticks, so excruciatingly thin they must have to move around in the shower to get wet, and on the brieze-block shoulders of swaggering, flawless young men with unfeasible jawlines, punchably smug. At the end of the catwalk, a battery of photographers, firing flashguns into the whites of eyes that never blink. to a 2CV that the greatest percentage would imagine a scene like this. In a hysterically baroque theatre near the Arc de Triomphe, a fashion show: next year's clothes hung on young women built like broomsticks, so excruciatingly thin they must have to move around in the shower to get wet, and on the brieze-block shoulders of swaggering, flawless young men with unfeasible jawlines, punchably smug. At the end of the catwalk, a battery of photographers, firing flashguns into the whites of eyes that never blink.

The clothes are by Jean Colonna, the occasion one of the umpteen catwalk shows of Paris Fashion Week. Colonna is not as big a name as Gaultier, and he hasn't attracted as many riot police to his opening as Armani did, nor is he as big a deal as McQueen, McCartney or any of the young British designers who have recently taken the helms at some of France's biggest labels, but he's pulled a decent enough crowd, some of whom are wearing their sungla.s.ses inside with a shamelessness sufficient to suggest that they're in some way important or famous. I wouldn't know-what I know, or care, about fashion, could be carved onto foie gras with a chisel. But I think the knee-length tartan coat is quite smart, and I'm as gratified as anyone would be to see the Paris of popular imagination made flesh, however in need of a decent feed some of that flesh looks.

Outside, in the grey chill of an early spring morning, another Paris is sleeping off another day of living up to another sort of magnificent cliche.

"Revolution is the ecstasy of history."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 AT THE BOTTOM of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, not far from my hotel, a huge digital clock is counting down the 56-and-a-half-or-so-million seconds that remain between now and the end of the millenium. It seems right that people will gather here, in the vast square over which the clock presides, to watch an era end. Six-and-a-half-or-so-billion seconds ago, people gathered here to watch an era begin, though they wouldn't have known it at the time. The storming of a prison called the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was, in itself, more than slightly quixotic, delivering the release of four forgers, two lunatics and one drunk, syphilitic, aristocratic idiot who had been locked up at the request of his own father. Louis XVI recorded the day in his diary with the terse entry "Rien," which goes to show how wrong a chap can be-as Louis himself doubtless reflected as he mounted the guillotine four years later.

The mob who razed the Bastille did more than burn down an old and ugly building. They inst.i.tuted a munic.i.p.al tradition of revolt that would dominate their city for the next two centuries-and counting-and which would ensure that Paris dominated the imagination of the planet. The reason that Paris is so often and so lyrically celebrated in film, theatre, fashion, music, holiday brochures and all our received wisdoms about romance is the lingering sense that in Paris, as nowhere else, the world can be turned upside down.

"Open the nurseries, the universities and all the other prisons."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 AFTER GETTING OFF the train at Gare Du Nord and dumping my bags, I get a taxi to the Sorbonne, Paris's 750-year-old university. In 1998, of all years, these tatty beige halls will get used to visitors. Thirty years ago, the Sorbonne was the epicentre of a rebellion remarkable even by the standards of 1968-a year, like 1989 or 1917 or 1871 or 1848, in which the prevailing inst.i.tutions of the world suddenly looked less like rigid structures and more like a spaghetti-western film set: facades held up by wires, hooks, pulleys and the crossed fingers of those who'd erected them. In 1968, in Vietnam, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and Great Britain, from the LSE to the elysees, things stopped making sense.

On May 2nd, 1968, following weeks of protest by students outraged both by events in Vietnam and a rule that prohibited cohabitation between male and female students-the debate over their priorities has never been entirely resolved-the university in Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris, was closed by the Ministry of the Interior, acting under the orders of President Charles de Gaulle. The evicted students, led by ginger-haired German agitator Daniel Cohn-Bendit, marched into the centre of Paris and occupied the Sorbonne. Barricades were erected. Slogans were painted. Flags were waved. Speeches were made. Fists were shaken.

Given time, the students might all have got bored and hungry and gone home, but De Gaulle didn't wait to find out. On May 3, police were dispatched to clear the Sorbonne, a task they carried out with what might tactfully be described as excessive enthusiasm. As the students took control of Paris's Latin Quarter, the public mood shifted from bemus.e.m.e.nt to anger at the heavy-handedness of the government-few things are more sacred to Parisians than the right to protest. On May 10, the "Night Of The Barricades," 100,000 students and sympathisers rioted. There were 500 arrests and 370 injuries-though it has recently emerged that a student who died two weeks later did so as a result of wounds inflicted by a police stun grenade, and that his Gaullist parents were persuaded to comply in a cover-up for fear that a martyr could have ignited full-scale revolution.

France's trade unions, under pressure from their members, and sensing an opportunity to bend the government over a barrel, took the side of the students. A general strike on May 13 brought 250,000 workers onto the streets. De Gaulle, the most colossal figure of the French twentieth century, was rattled. He embarked on a bafflingly-timed state visit to Romania-where, just over twenty-one years later, his host, Nicolae Ceausescu, would demonstrate that he'd taken on board several unhelpful lessons from the De Gaulle technique of charming a restive public.

When De Gaulle returned to his collapsing capital, he delivered an ineffectual address to the nation, sulked for a bit and then vanished. While his government wondered where he'd got to, De Gaulle was staging another eerie preview of his friend Ceausescu's demise, making a farcical flight by helicopter to a.s.sure himself of the support of his military. The differences were that De Gaulle flew to Baden-Baden in Germany, not Tirgoviste in Romania, and that De Gaulle's generals encouraged him to return to Paris and a.s.sert his authority, rather than dragging him to a barracks wall and shooting him. On May 30, half a million pro-government demonstrators marched down the Champs elysees and reclaimed Paris. The ghosts of the Paris Commune, and of the French Revolution, had been vanquished, but only just.

"Down with the spectator commodity society!"-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 THE SORBONNE TODAY does not look a hotbed of revolutionary fervour, unless you count a few dog-eared posters grouching about how hard it is for students to find accommodation or pay for public transport. The kids I hara.s.s in the hall seem resolutely unexcited about the impending anniversary of the 1968 rising, reciting more workaday concerns like pa.s.sing their exams, finding a job after pa.s.sing said exams and getting away from another foreign journalist with a "Whither 1968?" angle before he makes them any later for their lectures. The only graffiti to be seen is on the wall of a building across the road from the Sorbonne: a racist slogan daubed by some-surprisingly literate-devotee of elderly buffoon Jean-Marie Le Pen and his crypto-fascist National Front.

It is difficult to find, among memoirs of the period, a clear statement of what the rioters of 1968 were fighting for. There's not even a lot of agreement about what they were fighting against, and this is perfect. The reason that May 1968 still looms so large in the popular consciousness is precisely that it was so completely, gloriously unreasonable, a splendid and petulant revolt against everything, a delirious reaction against the comforts of a capitalist society where-as Rene Vienet puts it in his snappily-t.i.tled Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68 Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68-"we pay to consume, in boredom, commodities we produce in the weariness that makes leisure desirable."

The Athena-print ubiquity of the graffiti of the period ("I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires"; "Underneath the paving stones, the beach!") suggests that, at best, May '68 remains a resilient bridgehead of dissent with modern life and, at worst, that it was a whole lot of fun. Much of the music and images of the counter-culture prevalent at the same time in America dated quickly because they were pitched against the contemporary cause of the war in Vietnam. What happened in Paris in May 1968 continues to inspire and intrigue because it was about nothing in particular and, therefore, about anything you like. What were they rebelling against? What have you got? May '68 was rock'n'roll without the music.

Indeed, each of the preeminent British rock'n'roll bands of the three decades since '68 have subscribed rigorously to this creed of defiant, unexplained rejectionism, as if the greatest solace lies in the refusal to offer a constructive argument. The s.e.x Pistols in the 70s ("I don't know what I want but I know how to get it"), The Smiths in the 80s ("We may be hidden by rags but we have something they'll never have") and Radiohead in the 90s ("We hope your rules and wisdom choke you") were all, in this sense, French.

"We won't ask for anything. We won't demand anything.

We'll just take and occupy."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 THE IRONY IS that for as long as there has been rock'n'roll, the world has been running screaming from French attempts to make it, and generally with good reason. Listening to the French make rock music has the same morbidly compelling appeal as watching pensioners negotiate stone staircases after a frost. No government appointment since Caligula named his horse a senator has provoked as much merriment as the one the French made in the mid-90s, when they created a cabinet post with responsibility for French rock music. David Stubbs, a colleague of mine at Melody Maker Melody Maker at the time, ventured into print with the suggestion that the holder of such a portfolio would be kept about as busy as the Squadron Leader of the Royal Dutch Mountain Rescue Service, and we didn't get many letters arguing with him. at the time, ventured into print with the suggestion that the holder of such a portfolio would be kept about as busy as the Squadron Leader of the Royal Dutch Mountain Rescue Service, and we didn't get many letters arguing with him.

I put this to Emmanuel Tellier, who writes for the redoubtable Parisian rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles Les Inrockuptibles. He also plays in a band called Melville, who really aren't bad at all, and buys me lunch despite my a.s.sault on his nation's honour, which he defends with good humour.

"Our cultural interests are more diverse than Britain's," he argues over the soup. "Here, we think theatre, film, fashion and art are as important as music and football are in Britain. People here have more options for expressing themselves, so they don't care that our rock music gets laughed at in Britain. And we can get a drink after 11 o'clock."

Touche. I also drop in on DJ Dmitri from Paris, who lives off the Boulevard de Sebastopol in an apartment crammed with his immense collection of toy robots. He seems less impressed by Paris's civilised licensing laws, tells me Parisian clubs are terrible, and says he'd rather play in London or Tokyo.

"Music has never been important here," he shrugs-and it's true that May '68 didn't have a "Blowin' In The Wind" to call its own. "People here don't want to be in bands the way they do in Britain. Kids here use the music, but they don't want to live it."

Dmitri concedes that the recent international success of French electro-melancholists Air and Daft Punk might change this, but doesn't sound optimistic. "People here don't go out to hear music," he says, glumly. "They go out to talk."

At the moment, they-which is to say Paris's wide circle of self-conscious bohemians-are going out to talk in Menilmontant, a neighbourhood a few blocks north of Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the tombs are embellished by impressionable Smiths fans inscribing neatly-lettered homage to Oscar Wilde and gormless American college kids daubing fatuous dedications to Jim Morrison, arguably the most overrated person who ever lived.

As tourists and professionals have started moving into the once-hip area around Place de la Bastille, the artists and students have decamped east to Menilmontant, a hilly suburb of cement and immigrants. Rue Oberkampf, the curiously German-sounding street which runs through the area, now houses Cafe Charbon, Cafe Mercerie, Le Scherkhan, Le Meccano and any number of other quiet, dimly lit, decorously decorated and altogether agreeable places to get drunk in. Except that the stylishly disheveled Parisians in these places don't drink, at least not in that race-you-to-nausea way that people do in British pubs. Again, Paris lives up to its cliches: they really do sip at tiny cups of espresso and argue about philosophy. In fact, there are philosophy cafes, where punters are encouraged to stand up and pontificate on the eternal, and which are every bit as ghastly as they sound.

There are also people who clearly are in need of a stiff drink, like the solemn youth in Le Meccano who earnestly informs me that it's wrong for me to be writing about May '68 in a magazine that is sold for money.

So when you finish reading this, go out and burn down a bank.

"Be realistic-demand the impossible."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 IN AN EFFORT to get closer to the revolutionary soul of Paris, I spend a day revolting, myself. This isn't difficult-in an average week, Paris hosts around 200 demonstrations. One morning tabloid, La Parisien La Parisien, carries a daily map of streets likely to be blocked by protests. A short walk from Place de la Bastille, a run-down office block hosts the bases of two of Paris's uncountable pressure groups, SUD (Solidarity Unity Democracy) and CNT (some species of anarchist, judging by the red and black flags fluttering from the windows). This gloomy Sunday, the rest of France is voting in regional elections. SUD and CNT are staging what they have described to me on the phone as a "manifestation."

I speak to Pierre of SUD, who claims a national support of some 20,000 for his organisation. Pierre was fourteen years old in 1968, and remembers enjoying the time off when his teachers walked off the job. He explains that SUD wants to help the homeless and the unemployed.

"We want," he says, "to organise a movement with all who are excluded, and make a junction with the workers." Next to him, a younger man called Vincent, of a syndicate called Droits Devant, adds that "The government is making one law for the rich and one law for the poor," and then, in a whisper, "there are lots of police here," though I can't see any. He gives me a blue sticker which reads "Plan de relogement pour touts les personnes entrant dans du foyer!" I have no idea what this means, but it sounds d.a.m.n exciting.

After a bit of milling around, a crowd of maybe a hundred demonstrators and half as many media walk to the Metro station at Gare de Lyon, where we commit the first insurrectionary act of the day by swarming in through the exit gates, thus skipping the fare. We are, it seems, going to commute to the revolution. As the train proceeds to wherever it is we're going, someone explains that we're off to stage an "occupation" as part of a bid to obtain housing for twenty homeless families.

We get off the train at a Metro station somewhere south of the Seine, and are led at a jog up a street past a church, which has already been occupied by illegal immigrants who are demonstrating about something else entirely. They cheer us as we run past, and we cheer them. The few dozen police standing outside the church look bored and annoyed.

Our brisk trot ends a few blocks later, outside an apartment building in the final stages of construction. The demonstrators leading the charge remove the sheet-metal and wooden h.o.a.rdings and usher everybody in. It's dark and dusty inside, but there's a couple of people at the front with torches, so I follow them as far as the first floor landing, watch as the rest of the protestors push past me to the upper floors and onto the roof and decide to leave them to it and go back outside to take the broader view.

The paranoid whispers about police were not the delusions of self-important armchair rebels: a couple of the people who'd been running and shouting alongside us since we left the SUD/CNT offices are now barking into walkie-talkies. Their colleagues are not long in arriving: around a hundred of Paris's finest, the Compagnies Republicanes de Securite, or CRS. They trot out of three buses and seal the streets around the occupied building. The CRS are the legal response to Paris's culture of protest, a paramilitary police force equipped with shields, batons, tear-gas, sidearms, rifles and bullets both rubber and metal. Their body armour makes them look like the android bounty hunters that chased Harrison Ford through three Star Wars Star Wars films, they wear no identifying serial numbers on their uniforms and have a reputation as fearful as their appearance. From the roof, the demonstrators take up the popular May '68 chant of "CRS-SS!" films, they wear no identifying serial numbers on their uniforms and have a reputation as fearful as their appearance. From the roof, the demonstrators take up the popular May '68 chant of "CRS-SS!"

A briefly tense and interesting but eventually calm and tedious stand-off ensues. Terms are negotiated. Women and children leave the building. Threats are made. The chief cop on the spot is a young plainclothes officer who looks like he cabbed it here straight from a Paris Fashion Week show. He's immaculately dressed, in a style best thought of as Suavely Thuggish Chic, and looks like an elongated Jean-Claude Van Damme. I try, with the help of French-speaking Face Face photographer Franck, to talk to him, but he regards us as if we were stains on his crisply pressed overcoat and continues listening intently to whatever he's hearing in his earpiece. In front of the rank of CRS troops, one luxuriantly bearded protestor, dressed as a biblical shepherd and carrying a life-size toy donkey over one shoulder, waltzes back and forth with a ghetto blaster playing "If I Were A Rich Man." The CRS troops ignore him. When I try to speak to him, he ignores me. Someone else explains that he's just an itinerant fruitcake who turns up at these things, and n.o.body really knows what he's on about. photographer Franck, to talk to him, but he regards us as if we were stains on his crisply pressed overcoat and continues listening intently to whatever he's hearing in his earpiece. In front of the rank of CRS troops, one luxuriantly bearded protestor, dressed as a biblical shepherd and carrying a life-size toy donkey over one shoulder, waltzes back and forth with a ghetto blaster playing "If I Were A Rich Man." The CRS troops ignore him. When I try to speak to him, he ignores me. Someone else explains that he's just an itinerant fruitcake who turns up at these things, and n.o.body really knows what he's on about.

While we wait around to see what, if anything, is going to happen, activists for other causes wander along, distributing leaflets advertising other demonstrations. People who pa.s.s by the besieged building react with benign disinterest, apart from those trying to reach their homes on the sealed-off streets. The CRS refuse entry to a young black man who's trying to get home with his shopping. A few minutes later, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of all non-CRS parties on the ground, a frail old white couple try to pa.s.s the same way. The embarra.s.sed CRS have no real choice but to let them through, along with the young black man, who pauses to express his opinion of the CRS with a pa.s.sion that transcends any linguistic barriers.

"He said . . ." says Franck.

I got the idea.

Another woman in a car has her path blocked. She erupts in a spectacular fury of honking and swearing for some minutes, before handing over her identification card for inspection.

A few hours later, with occupiers and police having apparently decided to bore each other into submission, I follow the directions on one of the leaflets I've been given, and end up at Charonne Metro in the early evening. A crowd of terribly angry young people a.s.sembles, and the pattern established earlier is repeated: we pour into the station through the exit doors-the Parisian authorities might think about spending less on riot police and more on ticket inspectors-and are given further instructions as we travel. I talk to Germinal, a twenty-five-year-old philosophy student from the Sorbonne, who explains that we are partic.i.p.ating in another "manifestation," this time organised by AC! (Agir Contre le Chomage, or Action Against Unemployment).

"This is similar to May '68 in spirit," he tells me, "but it's more real. This time, it's about survival."

His reply when I ask him what he means by that is less concise.

We emerge alongside the silly, inside-out Pompidou Centre, and sprint a few blocks to the side door of a building, which is kicked open and entered with a great deal of joyful shouting. I walk around to the front of the place to see what they've stormed, and can't help but laugh-it's the hall in which the Green-Socialist-Communist coalition are planning to hold their post-election p.i.s.s-up. The occupiers hang from the windows a huge banner demanding a fairer shake for the homeless and unemployed. A blizzard of leaflets is tossed over the street, and a couple of doubtless deserving cases from the Greens have their bewildered gazes up at their ransacked party venue rewarded with mercilessly accurate water bombs.

When the CRS arrive, I notice that a lot of them have come from the occupation I was at earlier, which is only fair enough, as so have a lot of the protestors in the building. Inspector Suavely Thuggish is with them again, still in thrall to his earpiece. There's a bit of a scuffle when the occupiers try to admit film crews and press through the front door. A few enterprising cops pile in with them and remove several demonstrators, who are-no pun intended, really-frogmarched to a waiting paddy wagon. They paste stickers of anti-government slogans to the insides of the van windows as they are driven away.

"Humanity will be happy the day the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 BACK AT MY hotel, I call Rome to speak Angelo Quattrocchi, the Italian author whose lovely, if somewhat florid, memoir of May '68, The Beginning of the End The Beginning of the End, is being republished this year as part of the minor boom in situationist nostalgia. Quattrocchi is an excitable sort of indeterminate age ("I refuse to be quantified," he explains, like a good anarchist) and maintains that 1968 was not an isolated event, but part of a process, and thoroughly, uniquely, French.

"You follow the French revolutions," he sputters. "Liberte, egalite, fraternite . . . France is aware of what those terms mean, and tries to do something about it. The rest of Europe is becoming more and more inconclusive and consensual, but the French revolution continues."

France, it's true, has developed a culture where taking to the streets is not a last resort, but a first response. French governments, in turn, have learnt to fear the streets, and with good reason, as the spectres of many former kings and mayors would attest, if they still had heads to attest with.