La Route du Rock

Saint-Malo in February is not an August postcard. It is a corsair city in a coat, wet ramparts and a harbour that in 1991 was not yet asking for an indie festival. From 28 February to 2 March that year, Rock Tympans — the Rennes association Franck Rolland had founded in 1986 — took the Maison des Associations, the Centre Allende and a few intramuros bars. About eight hundred people, a figure reports cite with the caution of a first winter. The name was born in a day: the town hall asked for one and someone tossed out, as a joke, La Route du Rock, an echo of the Route du Rhum that leaves the same dock. Anyone arriving in search of La Nuit de l’Erdre, the Nort-sur-Erdre gathering in Loire-Atlantique, has the wrong estuary and the wrong ear. The ground here is malouin, the ear is indie and rock, and the origin is radio, not a summer meadow.

Rolland came from Radio Savane and from Canal B, the station he put on in Rennes in 1989. François Floret and Stéphane Ridard hosted Sale Temps pour les Hits. On one of those shows Floret interviewed Ludovic Renoult — sometimes written Renaud in reports — a malouin who in 1990 had brought Little Nemo to the Théâtre Bouvet. The current passed. Rennes already had Trans Musicales and full rooms; Saint-Malo had space and a town hall that wanted something. The festival was not designed in a touring office. It overflowed from a radio and a new-wave gig.

Anechoïc Chamber, The Grief, Les Tétines Noires, Little Nemo, Les Freluquets, Black Maria: those names from the first winter measure that the bill was French and from the scene, not a British cover. The following year the ear opened to the francophone world and, soon, to the Anglo-Saxon acts Rock Tympans was already testing on Ici Londres nights. Bernard Lenoir backed the project from France Inter. In 1993 a Noir Désir concert at Fort Saint-Père, a few kilometres out, gave them the site the intramuros rooms could no longer lend. Anyone who pictures La Route du Rock only as an August in a fort skips the February of 1991.

This route must not be mixed with La Nuit de l’Erdre. La Nuit de l’Erdre is the Nort-sur-Erdre festival, on a Loire-Atlantique riverbank, with another team and another summer clock. La Route du Rock is Rolland, Floret and Renoult’s, the 1991 one, Saint-Malo’s and, later, the fort’s. Confusing them because both sell a French rock weekend is a map error. One looks at the Erdre. The other looks at the ramparts and a yacht race that lent the name’s joke.

The experience is inferred from the format. In 1991 you reached the intramuros, walked from a hall to a bar, heard rock bounce off corsair stone. Later, at Fort Saint-Père, you walk a military site of grass and wall, ear on two stages and, in some editions, Bon Secours beach and La Nouvelle Vague. There is no Nantes-meadow camp. There is a train to Saint-Malo, a fort, and the duty to return to the intramuros or the car when the set dies. A malouin February is wind and salt; an August at the fort is long light and an Atlantic shower. The festival learned early that the site is not décor: it is the thesis.

From 2006 reports speak of Collection Hiver — February, Rennes and Saint-Malo — and Collection Été — mid-August at the fort. That is told as an ear that would not fit one month, not as a line of years. Floret programmes with the ear of someone who comes from radio: heart-blows, not a genre club. Slowdive, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Portishead, Nick Cave: those later names measure the span, they do not turn the winter of 1991 into a footnote.

The crowd mixes malouins, Rennais and ears that no longer fitted Canal B. That mix is the useful fact. An association festival does not hold if it only convinces the corsair city, nor if it forgets it was born in Rennes. Rock Tympans had to learn to be a trade without ceasing to be a radio table. Renoult would later return to the presidency; Floret stayed as the memory of the bill. The handover is told as continuity, not as a change of soul.

There is no need to invent a longer headliner list to explain the place. The place is explained by the Rhum joke, by Little Nemo at the Bouvet, by the eight hundred of the first winter and by a fort that Noir Désir taught them to use. The La Route du Rock crowd does not buy a national branded compound. They decide to travel to Saint-Malo where indie and rock sound with the accent of a Rennes radio. That oddity is not improvised in a Paris office.

La Route du Rock is best understood as a February that refused to stay in Rennes. Between Rolland, Floret and Renoult, between the Maison des Associations and Fort Saint-Père, between indie and rock, Saint-Malo has a festival that did not borrow the Erdre’s bank. Rock Tympans lends the ear; the corsair city lends the stone. What remains is a route that learned to be summer without ceasing to be, at bottom, a harbour joke in 1991.