Poitiers is a long way from Paris. I know because I walked most of the distance, having failed to connect with the record company laid- On transport, for reasons that you wouldn't believe.
"Come and see Magma at a festival in France" they had said. "They", being A&M Records and Kaygee Publicity. It sounded an attractive prospect, conjuring up visions of lush green fields, balloons floating lazily in hot blue skies, French femmes fatales in cheesecloth dresses.
The reality was somewhat different. By the time I finally stumbled, road-weary, into Poitiers' imaginatively named "Hotel de France", the festival had become something less inviting than even a Roundhouse Implosion bash. As the sun beat down outside, French youth gathered together in a dark, dirty aircraft hangar of a building stuck in the middle of the Parc des Expositions.
Furthermore, due to my misplaced energies I'd missed out totally on the bottom end of the bill. But I wasn't the only journalist who failed to get to grips with Zao (a Magma spin-off), Super-sister from Holland (featuring ex-Soft Machinist Elton Dean on alto, saxello and electric piano) and Barre Phillips, the ace American contrabassist, playing a solo set.
At around 8:30, or 20h30 as the French would have it, German group Can took the stage to a round of stoned lukewarm applause. Sound balance, initially, was probably the worst I have ever heard. To a blind listener it would have appeared that Can had remained in Cologne and were attempting to relay their set by long distance telephone: hopelessly muffled and indistinct. Matters improved gradually and by the end of the set their music had been eased into focus. Can strode off, not looking especially cheerful but were brought back by an unprecedented roar of approval from the same audience that appeared to be dozing throughout their performance. Très étrange.
Still, the enthusiasm had the required effect. Organist Irmin Schmidt tore into the encore improvisation with more aggression than his smiling face revealed, and in the process whipped off positively the best keyboard solo I'd heard in years. The best since Mike Ratledge at the London School of Economics, February 14, 1970, to be precise. Dragging great squeals and screams of white noise from his equipment he propelled the group through a hair-raising fifteen minutes, which sparked off electric moments from all concerned. Superb modern music.
Chêne Noir, an apparently much lauded mime outfit, were as tedious as Can were fascinating. All dressed up with nowhere to go, they screamed and pranced and Monty Pythoned around for two hours to little effect.
After barracking and slow hand clapping and other crowd abuse, Magma finally took their positions and began a tour de force that left audience and musicians alike winded and confused. Something was happening and I, for one, didn't know what it was. But whatever it was, it was damn powerful. Having lost count of the number of times I'd seen Magma up to then, there can be no doubt that they were simply growing from strength to strength. The apparent philosophy being that if you cram every last ounce of energy into a performance, the listener is going to have to react to it. They always do.
Magma music had become so well defined that it was possible to follow the lines played by any of the instrumentalists as an individual performance, and the whole hung together by the most tenuous of links. The mighty Christian Vander faltered just once in the early moments and the music almost collapsed in ruins. But instead they built from here, turning near disaster into absolute triumph, soaring gloriously to unparalleled heights, and then cutting back to near inaudibility before piling on the heat again. Magnifique. A band to change the world.